Page 44 of His Virgin Vessel

"Damn it, Asa, why'd you have to drag her into this? The trouble Brian has with that kid anyway."

"She's a good girl," I said firmly. "I just want to make sure she's going to be all right when I'm gone."

Porter nodded. "Of course. I'll see she's taken good care of."

"Thanks."

Porter drained the last dregs of his coffee. "You want to say goodbye to her before we head down the station?"

# # #

I had no idea how I was going to say goodbye to Corinne. She was going to blame herself, of course. This had been her idea, and now she was going to beat herself up for how it had turned out. That was the last thing I wanted, but if I didn't say goodbye, then I knew both of us would regret it. How quickly that kid had wormed her way into my life and turned it upside down. I wouldn't be going to jail now if it hadn't been for her, and, yet, I found I could not regret one moment of the time we had shared. What a girl.

"Corinne?"

Corinne looked up hopefully as I walked in. "Did you ...?

"I have to go now."

"Go?" It was heart-breaking to watch her face fall.

"Porter's going to take me in."

"No!" she practically screamed.

I went to her, and she fell into my arms, hugging me tightly, as if she could not bear to let me go.

"It's all my fault," she murmured tearfully into my chest. "If I had just left you alone. If I hadn't had to hook up with the most dangerous guy in the room, if I hadn't wanted to mess with my dad, if I hadn't ..."

"Then I wouldn't have known you," I said, drawing her back to look into her tear-stained eyes. "And for the pleasure of knowing you, I'd do back-to-back life sentences, and more. I wouldn't have missed it for the world."

"But if it wasn't for me ..."

"I'd have wound up here one way or the other," I said. "At least this way I got to ..." I struggled to put what she had given me into words. But it was something that couldn't be expressed in mere words. "Look, I should never have come to see you one more time, and I should never have taken you to the waterfall. I should never have let you stay in the car at the warehouse, and I should never have carried you off from the motel yesterday. Don't blame yourself. I've done the wrong damn thing every step of the way. I've been telling myself I'm doing it to protect you, but that's just an excuse. I couldn't let you go. And, even now, even with all that's going to happen, even having said it was all wrong and all a mistake, I don't regret one second of it, and I'd do it all again in a heartbeat."

Corinne stared. Even if I had stopped short of using the 'L' word, I think she couldn't quite believe that I was finally saying all the things that she had so desperately wanted to hear me say.

"I have to go now."

She opened her mouth to speak, but I held up my hand. "Will you do one thing for me?"

"Anything," she breathed.

"Be a good girl."

# # #

Back in the kitchen, Porter sat at the table, waiting for me. "You really do care about her, don't you?"

"Were you listening in?" I asked, irritated by the intrusion.

"She's a pretty girl," Porter said. "Stunning, really. I have to admit that, at first, I thought you were with her for ... well, you know. And who could blame you? And then perhaps you stuck with her to get some revenge on Brian. That's what I thought. But that's not it, is it?"

"No," I said, honestly.

Porter drummed his fingers on the table a while. "So, how would this informant thing work then? There's usually some paperwork to fill out, but it's at the station, and I'm guessing that, for now at least, you'd rather keep the sheriff out of this. So, you might have to just take my word for it." He looked up at me. "So, what about it? Do you trust me, Asa?"

I nodded. "Oh, yes. I trust you Porter. You've had my back before, remember?"

Porter nodded. "Let's take that bastard Rassi down."

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