Devil's Oven by Laura Benedict Read Free Book Online Page A

wall and before he lost consciousness, he saw that the man’s smile looked frozen on his broad, handsome face.
    •  •  •
    He ran. Claude was slung over one shoulder. He didn’t like the heat of Claude’s body against him, and the way Claude’s head and arms flopped against his back. Something about it repelled him, but he knew he had to keep running and stay to the edges of town until he could get up the mountain. There was no map to follow; he only knew he had to keep going up, up, up. But there was something happening inside him as he ran. It wasn’t a feeling, but a vibrant memory that drove him forward. It was the memory of happiness. The memory of a job well done.
     

 CHAPTER NINE
     
    Tripp pulled the pickup around his state-issued vehicle and parked beneath the cabin’s carport. The cabin’s windows were depressingly dark. Just like every other time he returned late at night, he thought how nice it would be to have a lamp on a timer or something. A dark house looked too empty. Not frightening—he couldn’t think of a single thing that really frightened him—but soulless.
    Ten or eleven years earlier, he had even had a girl named Darla living with him. The sex was good, but she had used his money to buy so many tiny, absurd beanbag animals that the shipping boxes had crowded them out of the living room and half-filled the bedroom. But before the spring was over, she had gone back to her home in the next state, disappointed he wasn’t going to marry her and let her add on to the cabin to make room for all the toys.
    The trouble was, once he had seen Lila again after a dozen years of almost forgetting her, he couldn’t see beyond her. She still made him feel weak inside, desperate to have her look his way, embarrassed at his raw need to put his hands on her. He had bided his time, though, eased himself into her view. She had never been the kind of girl to sleep around, despite the fact that no man with a half-working dick could see her and not want her. And she loved Bud. She swore it nearly every time they were together. Tripp wasn’t a man who believed in taking another man’s wife, but all bets were off with Lila.
    Inside, he turned on the lights. Anyone who had been in the cabin before Lila started spending time there would certainly know the difference. Now there were taupe pillows on his army green couch, a couple of prints of masculine paintings of dogs, and dead game on the wall instead of the sports-car-and-beer-girl posters he’d had since college. There was also a cappuccino maker on the kitchen counter. He didn’t even like coffee.
    He set his wallet and keys beside his holstered .44. Lila gave him hell about keeping it out in the open, but he had gotten very good at changing the subject with her. Usually it entailed telling her how glad he was to have her there or just putting his mouth on hers.
    Taking himself out to dinner at the mall in the next county over had done nothing to cheer him. Lila hadn’t answered her phone or any of his texts all day long. Knowing Bud was out of town didn’t help. What the hell was she doing? Was she with another man? The thought made his body tense. It was bad enough that he had to compete with Bud, but he had learned to handle it. After all, she was married to Bud, a situation he hadn’t been able to convince her to change. If she was punishing him by screwing someone else, that was bad. She didn’t get to do that.
    After getting a beer from the refrigerator, he cued up an episode of a cop drama on the DVR and sat down in front of the television. But the show didn’t hold his interest, and he fell asleep thinking not of Lila but the dancer, Jolene, and how she had seemed out of place entering the single-wide in which she was staying, like she was some kind of princess in disguise. He wanted to forget how he had thought of her the night before, hated the part of him that had imagined her hurt and helpless on the mountain trail. He had never had