Opening the door into the house, he stood aside as Rogue moved toward him slowly, her violet gaze dark with worry, her expression pensive.
The need to touch her was almost overwhelming. The need to sink inside her and forget the horrors of the past was a hunger he could barely deny himself. The need to hold her in his arms, to feel her warmth. It went beyond hunger, it was a compulsion now, an addiction. He needed her touch until he could barely function for it at times.
But under that fierce need was too much rage. It was dark and boiling inside him, demanding action. It was like a demon nipping at his soul, destroying his control.
The anger rode him too deep to allow for touch. It was too much a part of him tonight, rising from his soul until it threatened to push through the very pores of his flesh.
“What’s going on, Zeke?”
He shook his head and held his hand out to her. “Come inside; this isn’t the place to talk.”
Staying away from her would have been the best decision. If he’d had the strength. God knew, he didn’t have that strength. He’d had to fight every second for the past five years to remain aloof, to keep from taking her, until the battle had been lost.
She had come to him innocent, sweet, and pure. Her illusion of sexual experience and wild disposition was just that, an illusion. It had taken him a while to see through it, to realize certain things about his tempestuous Rogue.
She was sugar sweet on the inside; that hard outer core was so fragile that it defied understanding. She was too gentle, she was too much of everything that he didn’t deserve, should never have. And his soul had claimed her despite his best intentions.
The dark, ragged core of his being had reached out to her and been comforted by her when Zeke knew he didn’t deserve that comfort.
She licked her lips and his body clenched in longing. She took a deep breath, lifting her breasts against her T- shirt, and his hands ached to cup the firm mounds.
She was young, precious. Could she understand the man he was, the man that had been years in the making?
But she took his hand. Her fingers accepted his as they twined them through hers. Tiny, fragile, so fucking tender. Her hands were like silk and his dwarfed them.
“A lot of people have been looking for you today,” she told him softly as he drew her into the house. “I assume John found you?”
“John found me.” He nodded as he led her inside, then closed and locked the door behind them.
He set the security alarm, just to be safe. He had no fear of his son walking in on them tonight; he’d made certain Shane was safe in Louisville and that Lucinda kept him there. It wasn’t the fear of his son seeing something he shouldn’t that rode Zeke now. It was the fear of being caught off guard before he could finish what he started.
“Gene’s looking for you,” she told him then. “He was at the bar.”
“I know.” And he didn’t want to talk about Gene, not yet. They’d been through hell together as boys, and Zeke thought the bond that had developed then would see them through their adult years. He had been more wrong than he could have ever imagined.
“So you’re avoiding him?” she asked as he led her through the darkened house.
He didn’t turn on the lights as he led her through the kitchen to the basement door. It was opened, the light below was still on, lighting the stairs as he led her down them.
“I’m avoiding him,” he agreed.
“Zeke.” She paused halfway down the steps, tugging at his hand.
Zeke turned back to her. There was no fear in her eyes, but there was a hint of worry.
“The answers I have are down here,” he told her, his jaw clenching at the truth of his life, a truth he may not be able to hide for much longer.
His father had begun this legacy, and now Zeke was going to have to finish it. Finishing it would mean revealing the truth of the past, the truth of what he had nearly become and the boundaries crossed by men he had once respected.
Dayle Mackay had started this decades ago. With his brother and a few military friends they had destroyed more lives than Zeke wanted to contemplate.
Zeke had worked ten years to uncover the proof of what Dayle was, and in a few short months the Mackay cousins had managed to do what he had fought to do for a decade.
But that was okay. He’d let them do it; he had known what they were doing, and he had stood back and watched it unfold as he had been ordered to do. Homeland Security had ripped through Somerset like a plague. Men he hadn’t known were involved had been uncovered as homeland terrorists working for a future destruction of the government as the nation knew it.
He’d helped gather the evidence last year, and he’d kept his own secrets.
Until now.
“I was born in Somerset,” he told her as he led her into the basement.
Boxes upon boxes of a life he hadn’t wanted to remember were opened now, their contents spilling along the floor and the tables he had used to stack them on.
“I knew that.” Her fingers were stiff in his hold as she stared around the basement.
“I left when I was fourteen. I was twenty-seven before I came back.”
He glanced at her as she nodded slowly, her violet gaze locked on him.
“I came back, because I thought surely, with Thad Mayes’s death, it couldn’t be as bad as it was when I was a kid. And if it was, I had a plan.”
Bitterness welled inside him.
“To become sheriff,” she stated.
He nodded at that. “To become sheriff. To clean out the filth I knew lurked just below the surface of one of the most beautiful areas in the world. I’d make it safe, I thought.”
“You have made it safe, Zeke,” she ventured softly.
Zeke shook his head as he released her hand. “No, the Mackay cousins and DHS made it safe. I worked for ten years to gather the evidence I needed, and I was blocked at every turn. I couldn’t figure out how it was happening for years.”
He moved away from her then. “It took an old man’s careless comment to remind me of a few things, and then it fell into place.”
He turned back to her and breathed out harshly.
“I’m not leaving town,” she said then. “I can see it in your face, Zeke. You’re going to ask me to leave again.”
He shook his head to that. “It’s too late for any of us to escape this fucking mess.”
He turned and faced the contents of the boxes he’d emptied.
“Mom was like a pack rat.” He sighed. “She had so much junk she had to rent a storage unit for it. When she died and the house burned around her, I just packed all these boxes away after I retrieved them, thinking I’d go through them someday. See what she had kept. I didn’t expect she had everything I had ever searched for. Once I found some of it, it wasn’t that hard to know where to look for the rest of it.”
There were pictures, there were journals he’d never known his mother kept. Dozens of journals, each day of her life from the day she married Thad Mayes recorded. She had never told him about the journals and he had never known she kept one. After the divorce she never took pictures, so Zeke hadn’t remembered the camera she had carried with her during her marriage to Thad Mayes.
He’d forgotten most of his life as a child, because remembering always brought him back to the scent of blood in the air, and the betrayal of a father he had adored.
“What were you looking for?” she asked.
“Proof,” he answered, turning back to her. “Proof that Dayle Mackay, Nadine Grace, and several of Kentucky’s highest ranking political figures were involved in treason. I knew.” He shook his head as he moved to the pictures. “I’ve always known, I just couldn’t prove it.”
“Dayle and Nadine are gone,” she whispered. “They’re dead, Zeke.”
“They’re dead, but their legacy lives on.”
“Zeke, you’re scaring me.”
There was a hint of fear in her voice, in her gaze as he turned back to her, and he knew that the time for the truth was now or never.
“Thirty years ago, there were three friends,” he told her. “They were as close as brothers.”
He laid out the three individual pictures. Thad Mayes, Gene’s father, James Maynard, and Danny Jones.
“These friends hunted together, they partied together, and like the Mackays did for a time, they fucked together.” His lips quirked bitterly at the little gasp that fell from her lips.
“Then, along came a woman.” He pulled another picture free, that of Nadine Grace, then Nadine Mackay.
There was a series of pictures then. Depraved, sexual acts the three men were involved in with the woman that had been photographed. He glanced at Rogue’s face and saw in her eyes the same disgust he felt each time he had looked at those pictures after finding them. He had no idea who had taken them, or why. But they were the reason his mother had died.
“Then, Nadine Mackay set her eyes on another man.” He drew a picture of a young John Calvin Walker free.
He looked like his son, John. This picture showed Cal Walker in front of the Bar, a bright smile on his face as he shook Danny Jones’s hand.
“Now, he and Danny ‘Jonesy’ Jones were good friends. But I don’t think he knew what Jonesy was involved in with his other friends. Until this woman showed up.”
Rogue’s mother, Brianna Evansworth.
“Zeke,” she whispered. “Don’t destroy me.”
He turned back to her and saw the fear and desperation in her face.
Zeke shook his head. “Your father loved her the moment he saw her.” He turned back to the pictures. “Do you know why your father left Somerset?”
She shook her head slowly, her eyes filling with tears.
“Because Dayle Mackay wanted her,” he stated. “Dayle wanted the Evansworth money that backed her, and he asked his three friends, Thad, James, and Jonesy, to help him.”
It was all recorded in his mother’s journal. Years of sexual excess and photos that Dayle Mackay had sent to Thad Mayes when he’d tried to deny the other man anything that he wanted.
“Jonesy refused. That’s why his leg is messed up. Not from that motorcycle wreck, though that didn’t help it. He was shot in the leg by his good friend Thad Mayes when it was learned he had warned Cal Walker that Dayle Mackay was going to try to take the woman he loved. Dayle thought a woman could be trained like a dog. Chain it up, starve it, abuse it, and it will come to heel.”
Sickness welled inside him.
“Cal and Brianna left for Boston,” he said. “Jonesy stayed, his friendship with Thad and James supposedly severed. But Somerset was his home. He eventually married and had a daughter. Thad divorced and his wife and son moved away, and James’s son, Gene, slowly separated himself from his father. They weren’t happy times for that little group, were they?” He glanced back at her.
“Except for my father.”
“Except for your father,” he agreed.
“We flash to the present now,” he said. “Joe and Jaime. They were in love with a girl.”
He turned to her, his chest heavy as she stared back at him. “A very young girl, and they were going to share her. And this is where things get dicey. This is where the sins of the father come back to haunt them.”
He ran his hands over his face wearily. “This is where the sons have to pay the price for their fathers’ crimes maybe.”
“You know the woman they were seeing?”
He nodded. “I think I know who she was. And I know why the boys and their grandmother died.”
He slid a picture free. Gene, when he was younger, a teenager. It came from a stack of pictures that showed his friend throughout his life, until Thad Mayes’s death actually.
Because Thad believed in insurance. He had sent his ex-wife pictures for years.