The Reckoning

by Jana DeLeon

  She ducked her head under the hot stream of water, rinsing the shampoo from her long tresses. If only their problems could be washed away so easily, she thought. She stepped out of the shower and dried off, twisting her damp hair into a knot at the back of her head, then donned a hotel robe and took a final look at herself in the foggy mirror.

  Considering what she’d been through that day, she didn’t look bad. A little pale, but then, that could also be from not eating. At least, that was what she would tell herself. She applied a bit of the moisturizer sample provided by the hotel to her face and pronounced herself fit for eating inside her hotel room.

  The food had already arrived and was waiting on a small table in her room next to the window. Holt was nowhere in sight. She peeked through the door to his room and saw the bathroom door closed. Before she could back away from the doorway, the bathroom door flew open and Holt stepped out, drying his hair with a towel.

  He’d put on his same jeans, but he was bare everywhere else. Alex couldn’t help but notice how much harder his body was, and she longed to run her hand across his exposed skin. She also saw the scars. Some were scratches, and at least one looked like it was a puncture wound or perhaps a bullet hole. She sucked in a breath. The boy who’d left had come back a man. A man who’d probably seen more tragedy than she could ever imagine.

  He lowered the towel and saw her standing there. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said, yanking her gaze from his body up to his face. She could feel a flush creeping up her chest and neck.

  He grinned and she knew he’d known that she was studying his body. A body she used to know every square inch of, but now was so different. For just a second, she wondered if his body would still fit with hers the way it used to—as if they’d been cast from molds intended to be separate pieces of the same item. But she dashed that thought away as soon as it appeared. Emotions were running high right now. Making decisions in such highly charged emotional states usually led to disaster.

  “I put the food on the table in your room,” he said. “It’s bigger than the one in mine.”

  “I saw and I smelled, and I can’t wait to dive in.”

  Holt nodded. “No matter the stress level, eventually the body requires fuel.” He stepped forward until he was standing directly in front of her. She could feel the heat coming off of his body, and she longed to place a single hand on his bare chest, just like she used to.

  Startled at her own lack of self-control, she stepped back and crossed the room to take a seat at the table. “Guess we better get to this before it gets cold.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Holt didn’t move from the doorway for a couple of seconds, and Alex could feel his eyes on her. But instead of looking at him, she focused on arranging the plates and adding salt to her food.

  “It looks good,” she said.

  Holt laughed and crossed the room to take a seat across from her. “You really are hungry when hotel food looks good.”

  Alex smiled, feeling a bit more relaxed now that there was a table in between them. “I suppose you’re right.” She popped a fry in her mouth and was surprised how good it tasted. “It’s hard to mess up a burger, though.”

  “Some still manage.”

  Alex nodded. “So?” she said, now that the small talk about food was out of the way.

  Holt finished his bite of burger, then took a big drink of soda. “‘So’ is the question.”

  “I don’t understand how the man who killed Bobby wasn’t in the system. I doubt he’s a rogue banker or accountant. If he was a career criminal, why no record of him?”

  “Maybe he’s very careful.”

  “But he pawned the guitar? That doesn’t sound very careful.”

  “No, but based on the conversation I overheard, the guy that got away was pulling the strings. Maybe up until now, the dead guy followed orders to a tee. Maybe he got too confident and decided he knew better than those giving the orders.”

  “But that would mean he’s part of something bigger. Something organized if he’s been at this all his adult life, unless you think he and the guy that got away are the only two working together.”

  “Could be.”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “No. It doesn’t feel right, somehow.”

  “And all of this is tied to someone in Vodoun.” Alex blew out a breath. “It doesn’t seem possible.”

  “I know.”

  “That tattoo on his hand. Does it mean anything?”

  She studied Holt’s face. She knew there was something about that tattoo that he wasn’t telling her, and she wanted to know what it was.

  He focused on his food, not answering.

  “You know something,” she pushed. “I could tell by your expression and body language when we left the pawn shop that something was eating at you. You must have seen that tattoo on the pawn shop video and realized it meant something then. Why are you keeping something from me?”

  Holt sighed. “Because everything’s not about you.”

  “If that man took Erika and you know something about the tattoo that could help us find her, then it is my concern.”

  He stared directly at her, his indecision clear, and Alex felt her pulse spike just a bit. What in the world was he hiding that had him so worried?

  “I’ve seen the tattoo before. Long before Erika was even born.”

  “Where?”

  “On the man who murdered my father.”

  The bottled water slipped from her hand and crashed to the floor. A cold chill ran over her body, and she covered her mouth with both hands.

  “No!” she said. “Oh, Holt.” She reached across the table to place her hand on his. “How did you… I didn’t know you saw…”

  “No one knows.”

  She stared. “What about the police? Surely you told them—”

  “The police didn’t want to hear the ravings of a ten-year-old boy who was scared half to death and claimed to see a strange man leaving their garage in the middle of the day, especially as I was skipping school with Max and Tanner and they figured we were making the whole thing up to get out of trouble.”

  “Max and Tanner saw it, too?”

  “No. We were racing our bikes and I got there first. By the time they pulled up behind me in the bushes, the man was already gone.

  “We thought we were being so sneaky,” he continued, “climbing up the tree out back and into my bedroom window that I’d left unlocked that morning. I already had a stash of comics, chips and Coke and we spent the whole afternoon there, mostly to avoid a math test.”

  He stared at the wall behind her and blew out a breath. “And all that time, our dad was in the living room below us, bleeding out onto Mom’s ‘good’ rug. We had no idea. Even today, it still doesn’t seem right somehow.”

  “You never went downstairs,” Alex rationalized, “and besides, your dad wasn’t even living there any longer. You had no reason to think he’d be in the house, much less—”

  “I think it was one of those times he and Mom were ‘talking’ about their relationship again. Anytime he had a fight with Tanner’s mother, he came crawling back to mine.”

  Holt sighed. “He was our father. Granted, he was also a cheater, a workaholic and rarely even acknowledged that he had children, but he was still our father. He was slipping quietly from this world, not ten feet below us, and yet we didn’t sense anything.”

  For the first time in her life, and despite having years of training to deal with intense emotional situations, Alex had no words. The horror and frustration he must have felt as a young boy, knowing that he had vital information about his dad’s murder, but with no adult to give it credence. Instead, he’d carried it around, tucked deep inside of him all these years. And she’d never known. She w
as beginning to wonder how well she’d ever known Holt.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said finally. “I don’t suppose you tried telling anyone when you got older?”

  “No. The old sheriff didn’t retire until a few years ago, and even if I’d have insisted on what I saw, he still would have thought it was the frightened, confused memories of a boy who had lost his father.”

  “But now your uncle is in charge.” Alex stared at him, as a thought flashed across her mind. “You’re not filling in for your uncle to help him out, are you? You wanted access to your dad’s case files.”

  “A lot of good it did. There wasn’t any more to see than what I already knew.”

  “The sheriff didn’t investigate the murder?”

  “Oh, he investigated. He wasted a whole lot of time compiling paper after paper of useless information on mine, Max and Tanner’s mothers. Like any of them would have done this. Despite the way he treated them, they all loved him and none of them would have hurt their children that way.”

  She nodded. Despite the many shortcomings of all three women and their strange attraction to a man who wouldn’t commit to any of them for any length of time, none would have done anything to hurt their children—not intentionally, anyway. They simply never stopped to consider that allowing Walt Conroy to bounce back and forth into their lives did hurt the children.

  “I changed my last name to my mother’s maiden name because I didn’t want to be anything like him. He hurt so many people with his selfishness, and his murder was the final blow. Whatever he was mixed up in cost everyone who loved him, but I bet he didn’t think twice about his family before getting involved. That’s just the way he was.”

  Holt stared out the hotel window for a bit, and Alex could tell a million thoughts were running through his head. Finally, he turned his gaze back to her. “That’s why I left Vodoun.”

  Alex stared. “I don’t understand.”

  “I left because I didn’t want to hurt you, the way my dad hurt mine and my brothers’ mothers. The way my grandfather hurt Lorraine. I watched my mother grieve every time he changed his mind again, and it killed me. I felt every tear she shed.”

  He looked directly at her. “I figured it was better to leave then before you cared so much you wasted your entire life over it.”

  “What your dad and grandfather did was a choice. No one forced them to play with their families that way.”

  “I know, but I wasn’t ready to settle down and didn’t know that I ever would be. But you were so certain…so sure you wanted me. I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t want you to hurt the way my mom did.”

  “So you left,” Alex said, her mind spinning with Holt’s admission. “And broke my heart in two.”

  “It was the only thing I knew to do at the time. I needed space from you, from my mom and from the memories of my father. I needed to figure out what I wanted for the rest of my life, and creating responsibilities was the last thing I wanted at the time.”

  As much as it pained her to hear him speak those words, she knew she had to ask him the one question burning inside of her, even if she didn’t like the answer. “So did it work? Did you get me out of your system so that you could move on?”

  He rose from his chair. “No. And I don’t think I ever will.”

  He leaned over and lowered his lips to hers.

  She knew it was a mistake. One she would end up regretting, but at that moment she couldn’t think of one single reason to push him away, or resist when he pulled her up from the chair and pressed every inch of his body against hers.

  He caressed her lips with his, then gently pushed inside her mouth with his tongue. Her skin tingled as he slipped the robe off her shoulders and it slid to the floor. She gasped when he trailed kisses down her neck, across her chest and finally took a swollen nipple into his mouth. She thought about asking him to slow down, make it last longer, but already her body was begging for the release only Holt had ever been able to give her.

  Her skin warmed as he started a fire in her center that spread through every inch of her body, and she longed to have her hands on him again. She unfastened his jeans and pushed them over his narrow hips. Trailing her hands down his chest, she marveled at how familiar, yet different, his body felt. It was a thickened, firmer body of a man rather than the boy who’d left.

  He moaned when she took the length of him into her palm, and whispered, “Protection?”

  Alex stepped away long enough to retrieve her purse from the nightstand and pull out a condom. “I’m a doctor. I’m always prepared,” she said.

  Holt lifted her up in his arms and placed her gently on the bed. “Thank God for that,” he said and lowered himself on top of her, kissing her deeply, with a hunger she’d longed for over a decade.

  Her hips moved upward, inviting his body into hers, yearning for the union that she’d missed for so long. When he entered her, she felt her body contract around him and the first wave of pleasure washed over her. Slowly he moved deeper inside of her and she clutched his back, unable to hold back the fire building inside her again.

  Minutes later, he sent them both over the edge.

  His body was heavy on hers as it pulsed with pleasure. At that moment, it felt as if they’d never been apart, and she couldn’t help but wish that the moment would never end.

  * * *

  HOLT AWAKENED BEFORE SUNRISE, Alex nestled against him, still in a deep slumber. He knew last night had been a mistake, but also knew that given an opportunity to redo the entire thing, he still would have made the same decision.

  Even though it wasn’t fair to Alex.

  He’d known from the first moment he’d seen her again that his feelings were real. That time had only made them stronger, not diminished them as he’d figured would happen. But his return into her life was at the worst possible time. Even a woman as strong as Alex couldn’t make a good decision under this much stress.

  The appropriate thing to do was to back off and give her some room. When the crisis was over, and if she still felt the same, then they could talk. But for now, he needed to focus on one single objective—finding Erika.

  He eased out of bed and pulled on his jeans, then grabbed his T-shirt and tennis shoes from the other room—the room they hadn’t really needed. He cast one last glance at her before slipping out of the room and into the hallway.

  The mechanic at the garage had assured Holt he’d be in the shop when the rental car company next door opened at six a.m. He needed to speak to the mechanic about the repairs to his truck and rent a car to get them back to Vodoun. With any luck, he’d be back before Alex noticed he was gone.

  * * *

  ALEX ROLLED OVER IN BED and reached out with her arm, but all she found in her reach was cold sheets. She opened her eyes and glanced around the room, but there was no sign of Holt. A quick look at the alarm clock on the nightstand told her it was barely seven a.m.

  She rose from the bed and pulled on the hotel robe. There was no sign of Holt in the other room but his clothes were gone.

  She plopped back down on the edge of the bed, trying to control her disappointment. Even though she knew there was probably a completely necessary and logical explanation for his absence, she couldn’t help but feel as if the distance was back between them—physically and emotionally.

  Last night had been incredible. All her memories of how it felt to be in Holt’s arms didn’t even do justice to the real thing. After all these years without him, he drew her right back in, body and soul.

  Surely, he’d felt it, too.

  She lifted the phone from the nightstand and ordered coffee and some croissants from room service, then pulled on her clothes from the day before, wishing she had a clean set. She’d just finished tying her tennis shoes when she heard the door latch click and Holt walked in.

  “I thought
you’d still be asleep,” he said.

  “I’m not much of a late sleeper, especially in a strange bed.”

  Holt nodded. “The mechanic says it will take a few days to fix my truck. I rented us a car to get back to Vodoun.”

  Alex watched him closely as he gave her the information. He stood just inside the door, not making a move to close the distance between them. His delivery contained no more emotion than it would if he were delivering just the facts to anyone.

  He regrets it.

  The thought ripped through her mind unbidden and she felt a blush begin at her chest and creep up her neck. How could she be so stupid? Thinking Holt Chamberlain had changed? Thinking he cared about anyone else but himself?

  At least, given the situation with Sarah and Erika, she had an excuse for her lapse in judgment. Holt didn’t have a single one. He’d known exactly what he was doing last night. Known exactly how she would respond.

  Damn him.

  Well, if he thought that she was going to waste her time trying to convince him to care about her, he had another think coming. Two could play the calm-and-cool game.

  “I ordered breakfast. Just coffee and croissants. I figured you’d want to get on the road as soon as possible.”

  “Yeah. You know, with everything that’s happened, we’re going to have to tell Sarah about Bobby. If not, she’s going to hear it from someone else. Too many people are talking now.”

  “I know. I’ll give my friend a call on the way to Vodoun and see how Sarah’s doing. That way I can formulate a plan for telling her. I assume you don’t have a problem with my delivering that information?”

  He looked a bit surprised but shook his head. “No, not at all. I can be there, though—”

  “That’s not necessary. I can handle it.”

  “Whatever you think,” he said, but she could tell that he was a bit put off and confused over her dismissal.