“Maybe. In any case, I’ve already warned you.”
“Warned me.” To be careful of the signals she sent him, he meant. She shook her head and laughed. “To a man who’s been in prison for so long I probably look pretty good. But don’t let that confuse you. Any woman would look good.”
“Quit acting as if I can’t tell the difference between you and someone else, as if I have no taste, no ability to discriminate. I’ve had other opportunities. Once I established who and what I was, the only person who ever came on to me in prison was a woman. She would’ve spread her legs at the snap of my fingers.”
Peyton pushed her chair back. “How’s that, if you were housed in a male prison?”
He shoved his hands into his pockets. “She wasn’t a prisoner.”
“So it was a staff member?”
“A C.O.”
“Did you take what she offered?”
“Hell, no. She got off on passing herself around to as many men as she could, mostly prison scum. Who knew what diseases she carried? I could never be desperate enough to sleep with her.”
It wasn’t difficult to imagine a female C.O. taking an interest in a man like Virgil Skinner. He’d caught her eye, hadn’t he? “Who was she?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Staff having sex with inmates, that’s against the law.”
He shrugged. “Don’t look at me to rat her out.”
“Why not? It doesn’t sound as if you’re too impressed with her.”
“No, but I live and let live, unless I don’t have any other choice.”
Prison rules. What remained of the values, for lack of a better word, he’d developed on the inside. Peyton recognized it easily. “So, if you don’t need me, why are you running?”
As he chuckled under his breath, his eyes ranged over her. “What do you care if I leave? Aren’t there enough other men to admire you in Crescent City?”
“Stop it. I’m not trying to— Never mind.” Getting up, she scooped her car keys off the table. “If you’d rather go back to the motel and eat alone, fine. I’ll take you.” She made a move to stalk past him, but he caught her by the arm, and when she looked up, into his face, she realized he wasn’t nearly as unimpassioned as he’d implied.
“You know what I want from you,” he said. “If you want it, too, you don’t have to make me dinner. You don’t have to view me as an equal. Hell, you don’t have to do anything at all. Just ask.”
He was determined to maintain the upper hand, at least when it came to any personal interaction between them. But what he didn’t understand was that she couldn’t justify such a shallow encounter. She’d never had one before; no way was she starting now. She wasn’t angling for a thrill, although there was that aspect. For some reason, she craved a real encounter with this man, something as honest as meeting him had been unexpected. “I’m not interested in a quick tumble.”
“Who said it had to be quick?” He sent her a lazy grin. “We’ve got all weekend. And despite my past, I’m clean, if that’s what you’re worried about. They tested me before my release.”
“Good to know, but I can’t accept your terms. Although not for the reasons you think.”
Two grooves formed between his eyebrows. “Then what do you want from me?”
His close proximity made her feel…odd, breathless, aroused. “Does it have to be so complicated? I want you to stay for dinner. That’s what I invited you to do, isn’t it?”
When his eyes lowered to her chest, she knew he was anything but unaffected. “If I stay, it won’t be for dinner.”
Their eyes met again and she saw what she hadn’t been able to see before—vulnerability, maybe even confusion, beneath a shield of male pride. That he hated feeling as needy as he did made her want to touch him and be touched by him all the more, if only to provide him with some comfort after what he’d been through. But she couldn’t respond to the emotions he evoked in her. She barely knew him. And even though the CDCR hadn’t officially hired him, she was working with him. As a woman trying to be successful in a man’s world, a woman who already had the odds stacked against her, she’d always been careful to maintain her professionalism. So why, out of nowhere, was she tempted to indulge herself? With him?
“Then I’m taking you home,” she said.
“That’s what I thought.” He responded with a careless smile, but that didn’t fool her. He was disappointed.
And so was she.
6
“They also use a pendulum,” Peyton said as she drove. She was trying to get her mind back on business, back on the reason they’d gotten together in the first place, and stem the rush of hormones.
Virgil glanced over at her. “What are you talking about?”
He hadn’t spoken since they’d left. Gripping the steering wheel tighter, she drew a deep breath. “The Hells Fury. You asked me about their symbols. I didn’t mention the pendulum, but they use that symbol, too. I’m guessing it represents the passage of time, the steady march toward death.”
“Like in ‘The Pit and the Pendulum.’”
“You’re familiar with it?”
Leaning his head back on the seat, he closed his eyes. “‘I was sick—sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me. The sentence—the dread sentence of death—was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears.’”
“I’ll take that as a yes.” The fact that he’d memorized the opening suggested he’d identified with the story in some way, but that came as no surprise, considering his situation. She turned down the radio. “That must’ve been uplifting material to read in prison.”
“I read it in high school, too.”
“So…you graduated?”
“I would have if my murder trial hadn’t interfered,” he said dryly. “I was in my senior year when they carted me off.”
Because it’d grown dark, Peyton had less fear that they might be spotted by someone who would later point a finger at “Simeon” and blow his cover. His glasses sat in his hat on the console between them. She was glad he could relax, but the quiet of the countryside they passed on their way into town made her feel as if they were just as isolated as they’d been at her house. “Did you get your G.E.D.?”
“Not for several years. I was too busy trying to get myself D.O.A.”
“D.O.A. is dead on arrival.”
“I know.”
She slowed for a traffic light. “You were suicidal?”
“Not in the classic sense. Just self-destructive, fatalistic. I was looking for trouble, and I expected the trouble I found to be the kind that would put me out of my misery for good.”
“It wouldn’t be easy to deal with being falsely imprisoned.”
“I was consumed by rage.” His hand curled into a fist. Obviously the rage hadn’t left him. But if his mother and uncle had betrayed him as badly as it appeared, he had every right to feel angry. Peyton couldn’t think of anything that would cut a child more deeply. “Is that when you joined The Crew?”
“Yes.”
The light turned green, so she gave her SUV some gas. “Why’d you pick them and not some other gang, like the Aryan Brotherhood?”
He stared out the window, toward the whitecaps of the sea. “The Crew is an offshoot of the AB. My first cellie was a member.”
“Thanks to the Hells Fury, The Crew doesn’t have much of a presence at Pelican Bay.”
“I know. You’re lucky. They’re worse than all the other gangs.”
“I doubt any gang could be worse than the Hells Fury. They live for violence. But I’ll take your word for it.” Peyton found herself less than eager to reach the motel. “So did your cellie actively recruit you?”