“Is Ben okay?” I whispered. “Will you at least tell me that much?”

“Probably; he usually is.”

“Who is Max?”

“A dangerous guy. A…very dangerous guy.”

“You know a lot of dangerous guys.”

Something hard slipped over his face. Something…scary. And I stiffened. An old instinct braced me.

“You should go back to your room, Layla,” he said, sitting back down on the stool, rolling belly up to the bench. I was being dismissed and frankly, he was probably right. But I was pretty done with being bossed tonight.

“I’m not going to do that, Dylan. You don’t have to tell me anything about yourself, but I deserve to know what is happening at the trailer park.” My home.

He spun back out and his eyes, full of hot knowledge, touched me. My shoulders, my stomach. My bruised knees. My breasts.

For a second I thought he was trying to scare me away. With sex. Like he was threatening me. If I stayed, he’d what? Fuck the hell out of me?

Stupid man.

That was not going to scare me away.

Interest, sexual and sharp, flooded me. Warmed me, from the inside out.

“Max is a part of the same motorcycle club Ben used to be a part of,” he said.

“The Skulls.”

He nodded.

“Did you…are you in the club?”

“No, I have nothing to do with the club.” He picked up a little screwdriver and fiddled with it like he was bored or needed distraction, and I wanted to stomp across that floor and shake him. “Most of the time Ben and Max have nothing to do with each other either. I don’t know why he was there.”

“Joan, my neighbor? Do you know her?”

“The stripper?” he asked with that crooked smile. “I only know what you’ve told me.”

“She’s actually a DEA agent. Undercover. Did you know that?”

The screwdriver clattered against the bench when he dropped it and I wanted to smile at him. At his surprise. It was nice to know something he didn’t. “No. I had no idea.”

“Do you know why she’d be undercover?”

“Had to be something about the club,” he said with a shrug and then winced, reaching up to pinch the muscles at the base of his neck. I fought the urge to ask if he was all right. I fought the urge to care.

“She said I should call you. She knew about you.”

“You didn’t tell her—”

“That we were having phone sex?” I spat the words because I was pissed. I was pissed because he wasn’t mad. Because he was acting like this was no big deal. “No. I didn’t. But somehow when this Max guy showed up she knew I should call you. Why?”

The tension in his silence was razor sharp, and whatever he was going to say, I had the sense I should brace for it. Duck and cover, like when I was a kid and we practiced tornado drills at school.

“I own the trailer park,” he said.

I swayed backwards, putting a hand against the wall to catch myself before I fell over.

He jumped to his feet, like he was about catch me, and I shook my head—I couldn’t have him touch me. Not at all. And so he froze. Just froze.

“Layla?”

I flinched and turned my face away. Mortification swallowed me whole.

“Then you…you know. All about me.” That I’m lying about my name. That I showed up with bruises around my neck covered in a stupid, silly scarf. That half my trailer is paid for with manual labor in the damn field.

“I own the trailer park because of Ben. The rest of it…doesn’t matter to me.”

“You don’t know—”

“What?” he asked, stepping out of that freeze toward me.

“Nothing. Forget it.”

“Now who is lying?”

I laughed, throwing my hands up in the air. “Does it matter?”

We stared at each other, long and hard.

“I guess you’re right,” he said and turned away from me. “Go on back to your room, Layla.”

I was being sent to my room like a child. And it would have been the right thing—I should have done what he said, like a good girl, and gone silently back to that bed and stared at the ceiling until he decided to let me go.

But somehow I couldn’t.

“My name is not Layla,” I said. “I lied. All along. I lied.”

He turned back toward me.

“I know.”

“What?”

“Well, I figured you told me some lies to protect yourself. You wanted to be called Layla.” He shrugged. “It didn’t seem to be any of my business.”

None of his business. Of course. That, too, shouldn’t hurt. But it did.

It was like running into a wall at top speed. “And they worked so well, didn’t they?”

“You don’t have to protect yourself from me, Layla.”

My laugh was ripped from my stomach, nearly a sob. “You don’t know anything about what I have done to protect myself.”

“Then tell me.” He was the sharpened edge of a blade, bright and awful. Violence waiting to happen. Not to me, but on my behalf. I could set him against the world.

For a moment I could barely hold onto my secret.

I turned on shaking legs and went up the steps to the door, desperate to get out of there.

DYLAN

It shouldn’t matter. On the gigantic pile of lies the two of them had told each other, that she’d lied about her name should not matter at all. And it hadn’t up until this moment.

This moment, watching her shaking and walking away from him, it mattered.

He’d understood all along that she was doing it to keep herself safe. Because he was a stranger; because the things they were doing were so outrageous to her.

He understood better than most the desire for anonymity.

But it wasn’t just Dylan and what they did together that scared her.

Something else had her deep down scared.

He knew the look of terror, the smell of it. The way it could make your body shake like a fever.

Don’t, he told himself again. The plan had been to get her out of that park, bring her here where she was safe, but never let her see him. Never let himself see her. But he’d blown that, and the image of her was seared now into his brain. Small and thin but long-legged, white-blond hair, and eyes the color of powder-blue paint.

The smart move was to let her go.

But he couldn’t.

Keeping her here was a mistake. For her, potentially a dangerous one.

She’d lied to him. She was scared. Very scared.

And that changed everything.

ANNIE

I opened the door from the garage to the main part of the house, surprised to see that morning was being ushered in on the billowing clouds of a storm.

Thunder boomed and the air smelled like electricity. No rain, though. Mother Nature was only setting the loud and violent stage.

Margaret was in the kitchen, preparing food, and at the sound of the door to the garage opening, she turned with a tight smile that quickly vanished when she saw me.

“What are you doing in the garage?” she asked, as if I’d been snooping around the place.

“Talking to Dylan. Turns out he was here after all.”

Her face was unreadable, but everything about her gave the impression of being shocked.

“Is he in there?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

For a second a smile burst through that wall of impassivity. And then it was gone. I didn’t know what that smile meant. I didn’t know what anything meant anymore.