Good Gone Bad (The Fallen Men 3)

It was only in the car when I’d reached over to tinker with his iPod and “Short Change Hero” murmured quietly through the car that he looked at me from the corner of his eyes as he pulled out of the parking lot.

“Seventh time you’ve been in there in the last five years.”

I shrugged because it was true and I didn’t want to give him any more fuel to add to whatever fire he was working up to lay at my feet.

“The officers call you ‘the wild one,’ you know that?”

I shrugged again and brought my feet to the dash, licked my thumb to rub some dirt off my rose embroidered combat boots. “They aren’t wrong.”

“You proud of that? You’re happy to know that those officers and their family, their friends, the people of this town you call home all know you by name and reputation as the princess of The Fallen, as “the wild one” that’s predicted to wind up in juvie sooner rather than later?”

I stared at his hands as they clenched the wheel, the dusting of golden hair and the delicious map of veins running down to his strong wrists. I wanted to press a kiss to each calloused fingertip and trace those veins with my tongue in a physical plea for forgiveness.

Instead, I clenched my hands into fists and let anger overwhelm the hurt.

“You disappointed in me again, Danner?”

A muscle in his jaw jumped. “I’ll be disappointed in you until the day you pull your head out of your ass and realize there’s power in being good and kind as much as being wicked and fierce. It isn’t the thorns that make a rose.”

“It’s what protects them, though,” I argued.

“It’s the contrast, the duality of hard and soft, dangerous and beautiful that make it covetable, Rosie. Don’t know when you lost your soft, but the girl I just picked up from jail who was comfortable being there and liked what it said about her… that girl’s lost sense of herself.”

We were quiet after that, listening to the lyrics of the song, made even more poignant by Danner’s lecture.

I wanted to spit at him, rally my forces to launch a counterattack that would leave him devastated. I wanted to see him burn with shame the way I did. And I could have, I could have dug up the grave of secrets I had on him, the fact that his dad was a corrupt asshole that was slowly forcing Danner into his gravitational pull, that he was too chicken shit to even think about what he wanted let alone go after it, that he loved me in a way that was more than white knight and damsel in distress and more Clyde with his Bonnie.

I didn’t.

Because as much as his words hurt me, it would hurt me even worse to see him lacerated by the accusations. There was also the fact that I knew the day was coming when he’d have to choose, leave me behind for a life of austerity in righteousness or go bad in order to join me in sinful revelry. I didn’t want to push him to that decision now, or really ever, because as much as I wanted him to pick me, I knew he never would.

We arrived at the wooden gates to his property, a sprawling acreage that had been in the Danner family for years that his father had gifted to him, because he hated the dirt and distance from town. It was a low ranch-style house that almost resembled a barn, the two garage doors and the front door like barn doors, the wood siding painted a buttery yellow and the deep wraparound porch white with scrolled detailing. There was a red barn a hundred yards behind the house to the left where Danner kept his two horses, Chief and Beauty, and an empty swimming pool that he hadn’t gotten around to restoring.

It didn’t suit him just as much as it did.

It was a family house and despite valiant efforts by the female community of Entrance, Danner was still a bachelor and only twenty-six six, fresh from the RCMP training force and ready to make a name for himself in his hometown.

It was the house of a cowboy sheriff though, so I loved it for him.

I’d even helped him decide on a few items of furniture when he moved in right after King and I moved back home with our dad when he was twenty, and I’d been there numerous times since, especially after I’d misbehaved or got into trouble and he swooped in to save me.

He put me in the guest bedroom and closed the door before I could snark at him, or thank him. Both were bad ideas for different reasons, but his anger left me feeling hollow and wrong, as if the slightest breeze would have me caving in on myself.