Sloth (Sinful Secrets 1)

I go over to the door, behind which I dumped my bags, and find them propped on luggage racks. Kellan played fabulously until January 2011, and that’s where his story takes a dark turn. Around four-thirty in the morning on a Saturday night, he got into an awful fight at a bar in downtown Los Angeles.

He and the guy—who turned out to be a fellow Trojan: a lineman named Joshua Franks—got thrown out of the club, but the fight continued in a parking garage. By the time someone called the cops, Franks had a fractured cheek, a concussion, and so many punches to one side of his head, he later went deaf in that ear.

Franks was shit-faced, and had allegedly been the one to start the fight. Kellan wasn’t drunk at all, and at the end of the night, he didn’t have a scratch on him.

I try to see it all inside my head as I poke through my duffel, searching for my favorite sleeveless, purple nightgown. I can’t see Kellan being violent. Beating someone so... repeatedly? I can’t see him doing that. I pull the nightgown over my head and try to decide why. I think it’s because he seems so measured now. So in control of things. So in control of me...

My gaze careens around the room, trying to reconcile this drug lord’s palace—and its prince—with a dark-haired college football quarterback, beating a teammate in a fit of rage in L.A.

Kellan is a bad guy.

That’s how it seems.

If I told Lora everything I know about him, she would tell me to leave his house and stay away.

Instead I put on my night gown, followed by my fluffy, hot pink bathrobe, which has been taking up approximately thirty percent of the space inside my duffel. I take a moment to relish the familiar feel of my clothes.

Then I look around the room for what I had on last night, because I want to launder it. It’s nowhere in sight, and I notice while I search for it that the ceiling looks normal again. The ropes and pulleys must be tucked behind the indention at the center of the ceiling.

Kellan Walsh... who the hell are you?

My mind spins like the wheel of a bike, fast at first, then settling into a slow coast as I step into the bathroom, where I find my clothes in a brown wicker hamper. I brush and floss my teeth, smooth my hair down, and go back into the bedroom, squinting a little at the brilliant sunlight. I’m thinking of heading downstairs when I spot my Thomas on the wall over the bookshelf across the room.

What the hell?

I turn slowly around the room and notice “Grans” on an easel in the corner by the wing-backed chair.

I let my breath out. The third painting, one I kept under my bed until I left the house, is called Olive, and it’s nowhere to be found. But these two...

I walk over to Grans and marvel at the easel it’s on. Kellan just had an easel hanging around? This one is the one he asked about in my room, the one with lines from “Tintern Abbey”—which so happens to be one of my grandmother’s favorite poems.

I walk over to the bookshelf with my eyes fixed on Thomas. My dad’s name was Thomas, and this painting truly is for him. Under the paint are slivers of a card he wrote to me, a love note he wrote my mother when they meet in high school, and a button from one of his shirts. Sprinkled over the paint, so sparsely it’s not noticeable, are the soft, soft hairs I got from his beard trimmer and hid in an oval locket that I stole from Grans after he died.

I was only seven, but I had a sense that I should keep every fragment of my dad that I could find. When my mother decided to have him cremated, I stole some of the ashes, too. I stirred them into the paint for Thomas, and I don’t care who thinks it’s weird or gross. This is probably my favorite painting. I did it in high school. It was the first piece of art that ever really meant something to me.

Kellan hung it on the wall for me while I slept.

I’m still thinking about this as I pad downstairs in my pink robe.

The living area is radiant with sunlight, drifting in from the skylights in the ceiling and flooding through the wall of windows that faces the river. Before my foot touches down on the dark hardwood, I hear the frenzied click of dogs’ nails, and Truman bounds across the rug, tail wagging, ears flouncing.

“Hi, boy.” I crouch down and tug one of his ears into my hand. “What soft ears you have. How are you?”

On a whim, I wrap my arms around him: thick and warm and soft and panting. I love dogs because they warm the soul without the baggage of another human.

“C’mon boy... where’s your daddy?”

I find Kellan in the kitchen, making pancakes. At first I can’t see much of him because he’s standing behind an island, so I step around it. I find he’s dressed more casually than I’ve ever seen him, in a pair of loose, charcoal longue pants and a white undershirt that emphasizes his beautiful body—and his gold-blond hair.

I smile a little, and he arches a brow at me. “Daddy?”

I laugh. “You are kind of his dad. Unless you’re his brother?”

He scowls. “No.”

He pushes a plate of bacon at me as I walk back around the island and take a seat at the bar.

His hair looks messy, and there’s some delicious scruff on his jaw. I can’t help noticing his eyes look tired. I feel a pang of guilt for not asking how his night went, although it’s not as if I actually could have. I was already in the harness when he woke me up.