He took a deep breath, let it out slow, and laced his fingers between his knees. When he turned, she did the same.

What precisely was charging those blue eyes, she wondered? Something beyond nerves. Waiting as he assembled his thoughts was torture, the longest half a minute in her life. “Casey?”

He huffed a heavy breath.

“I messed up last night. You told me you were starting to feel something, starting to wonder if we might be something serious, maybe, someday. And I let you think I didn’t want that.”

“Oh.” Her chest felt funny and she resisted an urge to rub at her heart.

“I got scared, and that was lame.”

“Scared of what?”

“Of coming clean, partly. About my past. And scared of what it all meant—commitment, stepping up. Like, all the fucking way up, when a part of me is terrified if I tried, I’d only find out I was just like my dad. Like I’d let you guys down in the end. Like I’d realize I couldn’t cut it, and run out on you and the baby, and on my family and on Duncan.”

“I can’t imagine you doing that.”

“Well, you haven’t known me all that long. I’m a better man now, since I’ve come home, a better man than I have been for a long, long time. Maybe ever.”

She could say the same about herself, she realized. It had taken Mercy for her to get her act together. Now a year clean, she could look back and realize that the reason she’d gotten addicted to heroin was that she’d woken up each morning and felt nothing. She’d had no reason to get up, nothing in her life worth being awake for. The chemical blank had felt better than all those waking hours of pointlessness. But Mercy had changed all that. There was a focus to her life, a reason to do better, to be better.

“You remember when you asked me what it is I want most?” Casey murmured. “And how I said I didn’t really know yet? Well, I still don’t, but I’m starting to. And it’s because of everything that’s come into my life these past few months. All the responsibilities, even the ones that scare me. It’s feeling like I’m finally becoming a man, and you guys are no small part of that. I want whatever this feeling is that it’s been giving me. Worthiness, maybe.”

“I know exactly what you mean.”

“I want to be worthy of people’s respect, and faith, and love, maybe. That’s what I want most now.”

“Those are wonderful things to want.”

“Way fucking better than money—that’s for sure . . . I don’t have everything all figured out,” he said softly, his breath finally coming smooth and even. “And I’m still scared. Fucking petrified. But I knew the second I shut your door behind me last night, I’d made a mistake. I’m so scared of becoming my dad, but that’s exactly what I did. I left the second you asked something of me that I was afraid I couldn’t give. But I want to take that back, if you’ll let me.”

And would she? She nearly could, but not yet. “There’s a lot I don’t know about you, and plenty you don’t know about me, either.” The former no longer frightened her, but what he might make of her own past still did.

“Of course. And I don’t know if I can be what you need. If I can be something for you that I’ve never been able to be for anyone before, and even though I don’t know if it’s enough . . . I know I’m thirty-three so maybe this sounds really pathetic, but I feel like a man, for the first time,” he said, speaking to her hands or her knees. “Like a grown-ass man who can protect somebody, and take care of them, and cheer them up and crap like that. No woman’s ever made me feel like that. Like you look at me sometimes and suddenly I’m eight feet tall, and that you think I can do anything.” He paused just long enough to take her hand in his. “It makes me want to be better. And to do good. Makes me feel about a thousand things, all stuffed inside my chest, and in my head, and hell, in my dick probably, too. Like, everything, everywhere. I can’t promise forever, or even that I won’t fuck everything up, but I’d like a chance to try. If you wanted to give me one, that is. If you’re ready to swap some skeletons.”

She was already crying, and she stole her hand back to wipe at her cheeks.

Her entire life, she was coming to realize, she’d only ever wanted to be wanted. She’d wanted a father’s love and a mother’s protection, and in the end she’d run off in search of those things in all the wrong places. And now she wanted Casey, so bad it nearly hurt. So, so much rode on how he took her confession.

Casey had never been into her because he’d thought she was some innocent—the whole knocked-up-by-a-felon thing ruled that out. At the end of the day, this man had surely made his share of reckless, dumb decisions. Drug addiction and a sex scandal . . . He could handle that, couldn’t he? He’d heard and maybe seen worse in his life.

Abilene steeled herself, took his hand again, and committed anew to face up to the thing she’d been running from for years now. The truth. The truth about who she was, and how she’d come to be here, now, with this particular man holding her hand.

“I’ll go first,” he offered.

She nodded. “I’m ready. I want to hear.” And I’m ready to talk.

“Guess I’ll start at the beginning.” He kept his gaze on their linked fingers. “I was pretty much a normal kid, growing up around here. I shoplifted, and probably drank too much in high school, but nothing that your average small-town punk kid doesn’t get up to. It wasn’t until I moved away that I went a bit more rotten.”

“Rotten?” Something about that word filled her with sharp misgiving. But he said already, he wasn’t violent. He never hurt anybody. She prayed for the best, forcing deep and steady breaths as he went on.

“You know I was a card counter,” he said. “That’s no secret. And I did some grifting shit, too, during that time. Con jobs with some of the people I counted with—tricking people into parting with a few thousand bucks here and there.”

“What sorts of people? Not, like, the elderly or . . . ?”

He shook his head, and her heart unwound by a measure. “No, nothing like that. We made decent money, and the cons were strictly for sport. We targeted the most obnoxious blowhards we met at the blackjack tables, typically.”

“Okay.” While not admirable, it certainly beat preying on the desperate.

“I never loved those cons the way I did the counting. Like I said the other night, I’ve always been good at math. I like numbers; I like science. The conning was a rush, but it never clicked for me the way the counting had. Not until I found a way to make it about what excites me.”

“And what excites you, then?”

His smile was shy, or maybe guilty, and his gaze moved to the far horizon. “Fire.”

She frowned, confused. “Fire?”

“Yeah. I was a borderline pyro when I was a kid. I know lots of boys are, but that shit just fascinated me. Always has. Most kids, they grow out of it by puberty, but for me, the romance never stopped.”

The romance. She knew what he meant, as he said it. His eyes changed when he stared at the hearth at night, transfixed, sometimes, the way somebody on drugs could fixate on a pattern or texture or a dripping tap for minutes and minutes and minutes. She shivered.

She’d thought she could handle this, but all at once, she wasn’t so sure. She’d thought that as long as he hadn’t hurt anybody, physically, she could forgive him. Hell, she’d forgiven James. Then again, the woman she was now, with a daughter in her life, a future to consider, would never take up with James Ware. She’d changed so much from that girl he’d met in that trailer last Christmas, she was unrecognizable. Literally, and in every other way. And she felt colder with every word that came out of Casey’s mouth, her blood growing icy with dread and worry.

Conning people. Not hurting them physically, but still hurting them. And on purpose. Sitting down and thinking up ways to hurt strangers. Abilene had hurt her fair share of people over the years, good ones and bad ones, but never on purpose. Never without regret. And she didn’t hear regret in Casey’s voice.