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.
Those deeper thoughts scared her, so she turned to logistical ones. “What’s fire have to do with conning people?”
“Everything, in my old business. I’ve probably read every book there is about the physics and chemistry of it, anything and everything about friction and accelerants, explosives, how it all behaves—just for fun. Basically turned myself into an armchair fire forensics expert. When I was in Vegas, if any fire made the news that was suspected to be arson, if I could I’d try to sneak onto the scene, afterward. Study the burn patterns, all that stuff.”
“Okay . . .”
“Anyhow, that’s always been a part of me. Always the thing that got me juiced like nothing else could—” He paused, looking up, catching her expression. Worry and unease had to be written all over her face. “You all right?”
“You’re not going to confess that you went to work for the FBI, using your powers for good, are you?”
His smile was pure apology. “Sorry, honey. I liked money back then, as much as fire. And good doesn’t pay all that well.”
She nodded, and, feeling cold, she took her hand back and locked her arms around her middle.
“This is my confession, remember?” he said gently. “It was never going to be a happy surprise.”
“I know. Go on.”
“So, over time, hanging with all those card-counters and dabbling in those con jobs, I got involved with some folks who were into insurance fraud.”
Fraud. Okay, that didn’t sound too terrible, she thought, trying to quell the nausea.
“There’s this whole criminal sector,” he said, “to do with insurance. Guy takes out a big policy on his house or his boat or his business; then the place burns to the ground, he gets his fat payout.”
“On purpose. Like, he sets the fire himself.”
“Exactly. The thing is, arson’s real hard to do right. It leaves a million fingerprints—in the chemical residue, the burn patterns, loads of little tells. You can’t just splash some gasoline, light a match, then tell the investigators it must’ve been some faulty wiring. Dumb-asses try that shit all the time, and all of them get busted.”
Her heart had gone from racing to plodding at some point, and as the truth began to gel, her body went cold, cold, cold. “So you did that yourself? Bought places only to destroy them and get insurance money?”
He shook his head. “No, I contracted. People hired me to start fires for them. Then in exchange, I got a hefty cut of the settlement.”