Chapter 39: Easygoing
The scalding water needled her skin, turning it a bright, tender pink. Beth stood under the showerhead until her lungs ached from the steam, until the last psychic chill of the Blue Cactus was boiled from her bones. She’d scrubbed the thin, scabbing line on her knuckles raw. The bar’s smell—sour beer, fried grease, fear—was gone, replaced by the astringent scent of her bergamot and sandalwood soap.
Clean on the outside.
Inside, a single, stark thought kept looping, playing over the sound of the spray.
I wanted to kill him.
It hadn’t been a fleeting rage. It was a cold, operational assessment that had flashed behind her eyes as she held that broken glass. The man was a roach. A blight. Removing him would have been a net positive for the world. The logic was impeccable. It was the ease of it that scared the shit out of her. The way her mind had instantly, calmly, mapped the sequence: the jagged edge, the angle of entry, the resultant chaos, the subsequent cleanup.
No hesitation. Just pure, streamlined purpose.
She turned off the water. The silence in the marble bathroom was sudden and heavy. Wrapping herself in a towel, she caught her reflection in the fogged mirror—a pale, blurred ghost with dark, serious eyes.
She used to watch those movies with Damien. The overproduced ones, usually late at night when the city lights bled around the blackout curtains. The fragile wife, beautifully trembling, accidentally kills an intruder. She calls her powerful, dangerous husband, her voice a shattered whisper. He comes, he holds her, he tells her it’s not her fault. He makes the body disappear. The fantasy wasn’t the violence; it was the absolution. The permission to be fragile.
But that was fiction. Last night wasn’t self-defense. It was aggression. She wasn’t fragile. She was the danger.
And the truly disturbing part? If she had followed through, she wouldn’t have needed to call anyone to clean it up. She knew where the mud wallows were, past the old oak grove. She knew the habits of the ranch’s Berkshire pigs—docile, almost friendly when she or Dove or Carlos brought slop, but omnivorous in their troughs. Efficient. By the time a person like Damien might be notified, there would be nothing but elemental traces to fret over.
The knowledge sat in her, not as a gothic horror, but as a simple, terrible fact of her inheritance.
Yet.
Yet her stomach was still a tight coil of nerves. The catharsis had burned off, leaving a fine metallic ash of dread. And the person she wanted to talk to, the only one whose voice could somehow sand the sharp edges off this feeling, was Damien Rossi.
Maybe he was still her husband, more than she’d ever admitted.
The afternoon sun was a hammer on the pale stone of the terrace. Beth sat stiffly in the shade, a laptop open but ignored before her, a forgotten iced tea sweating onto the table. She was pretending to work. She was really listening for the sound of a car on the long gravel drive.
When it finally came, the low growl of his Aston Martin was unmistakable. Her breath hitched. She forced herself to take a slow sip of tea, to keep her eyes on the screen. She would not run to the window. She would not.
She heard the front door open, his familiar, confident tread in the foyer, a murmured word to the housekeeper. Then silence. He was looking for her.
He found her on the terrace. She felt him in the doorway before she saw him—a shift in the air pressure, the faint, expensive scent of his cologne cutting through the herbal smell of the potted rosemary.
“There you are.”
She turned, aiming for casual. It missed by a mile. “You’re back.”
Damien leaned against the doorframe, a picture of relaxed arrogance in a charcoal suit, his tie loose. But his green eyes were laser-focused, missing nothing. He took in her posture, the carefully blank expression, the way her hands were clasped too tightly in her lap.
“Dove called,” he said, his voice deceptively light.
Beth’s heart sank. Of course she did. “She has a big mouth.”
“She’s your sister. She worries.” He pushed off the frame and walked toward her, moving with a predator’s grace. He didn’t sit. He stood over her, looking down. “She said you made a point last night.”
“I handled a nuisance.”
“She said you handled a broken bottle and a threat of disappearance.” He reached out, his fingers brushing the back of her injured hand. His touch was startlingly cool. “She said you were magnificent. And then you looked like you’d seen a ghost.”
Beth pulled her hand away. “I’m fine.”
“Bullshit.” The word was soft, final. He crouched down in front of her chair, putting them at eye level. He searched her face. “Talk to me, Beth.”
The directness undid her. The wall of control she’d been maintaining since dawn cracked. She looked away, out over the sun-blasted hills. “I wanted to kill him, Damien.” The confession left her lips flat, toneless. “It wasn’t a thought. It was a… blueprint. It just appeared. Fully formed. And it felt… natural.”
He didn’t flinch. He didn’t look horrified or give her platitudes. He just listened, his gaze steady.
“I used to watch those stupid movies and think the fantasy was being saved,” she continued, the words coming faster now. “But it’s not. It’s being understood. Not being looked at like you’re a monster for knowing exactly how to end a problem.” She finally looked back at him. “Do you know what I mean?”
A slow, complex emotion moved through his eyes. Recognition. A grim kind of pride. “Yeah,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “I know.”
“And it terrified me.”
“Good.”
She blinked. “Good?”
“It should. It means you’ve still got a line you’re afraid to cross. That’s what makes you you, Beth. Not the impulse. The conscience that judges it.” He nodded toward the distant fields. “You could have solved your problem last night. You didn’t. You chose the threat. You chose the spectacle. That’s control. That’s power. That’s you.”
His words were a balm and a poison. They absolved her by acknowledging the darkness, not by denying it. They framed her violence as a choice, a wielded tool, rather than a loss of control. It was the only kind of reassurance that could possibly work on her.
The tight coil in her stomach began to loosen.
“He’s gone, by the way,” Damien said casually, standing up. He adjusted his cufflinks, looking out at the view. “Took his wife and left town before sunrise. Word travels fast around here. Especially when a Montgomery makes a public statement.”
She stared at his profile. “Did you… facilitate that?”
He smirked, a flash of the old, dangerous charm. “I didn’t have to. Your performance was motivation enough. I just made sure the road was clear.”
He held out his hand to her. After a heartbeat, she took it. His fingers closed around hers, warm and sure, and he pulled her to her feet. He didn’t let go.
“The feeling,” he said, his voice dropping, intimate. “That cold, clear calculus. It never goes away. But it gets easier to carry. Especially when you’re not carrying it alone.”
He was so close. She could see the faint stubble along his jaw, the tiny scar near his eyebrow from a long-ago fight. The need she’d been stifling—for comfort, for absolution, for him—crested like a wave.
She rose onto her toes and kissed him.
It wasn’t gentle. It was a collision, a claiming. A release of all the coiled tension, the fear, the ugly pride. He responded instantly, one hand tangling in her damp hair, the other splaying against the small of her back, pulling her into him. The kiss tasted like desperation and iron will and a shared, terrible understanding.
When they broke apart, they were both breathing hard.
He rested his forehead against hers. “I’ve missed you,” he murmured, and it wasn’t just a lover’s line. It was an acknowledgement of missing the part of her that matched the part of him.
For a second, she let herself lean into him, let his strength hold her up. The monster inside her didn’t feel so alone. It felt… recognized. Partnered.
Then, with a force of will that cracked like a whip, she stepped back. The moment shattered. The socialite’s mask, slightly cracked, slid back into place.
“Don’t let it go to your head, Rossi,” she said, her voice only slightly unsteady. She smoothed her shirt. “I was emotionally compromised.”
He smiled, a real, slow smile that reached his eyes. “Noted.” He watched her for another long moment. “You’re sure you’re okay?”
“I will be.” She meant it.
He nodded, accepting it. “Then I’m going to go unpack. And maybe charm your sister out of the good whiskey she’s hiding.”
He turned and walked back into the house, leaving her on the terrace. The sun was lower now, painting the grassland in long, golden shadows. She looked at her hand, at the thin red line across her knuckles.
He hadn’t told her it was okay. He’d told her she was in control. He’d mirrored her own darkness back at her and called it strength.
A deeper chill settled into her bones, one the hot shower couldn’t touch. The relief was real. So was the terrifying realization: Damien Rossi didn’t just calm her nerves. He validated the very parts of herself she feared the most. And that made him the most dangerous anchor imaginable.