Heart heavy, Chris left the ladies to play with the dog and talked to Davis about what they had found in the parking lot and how they could get safely anywhere.
“Someone was out there,” Davis informed Chris. “We heard him running around the corner, but he was gone across the street before we could catch him.”
“And now they’re out there watching for us to be careless. Are you willing to take some fairly aggressive measures to get us out of here safely?”
“Frankly, I’d rather have you out of here.” Davis grinned to take the sting out of his words.
Chris told him his plan. And when the next shift arrived, they put it into action.
Department SUVs went out to stop traffic in both directions. Another deputy took off in Chris’s Jeep. Then Chris, Lauren and Donna, along with Saber, piled into the back of a department vehicle, keeping below the windows, and headed in the opposite direction.
The scheme wasn’t foolproof. None were. The men after Lauren might see through the ploy. They could follow the sheriff’s department SUV instead of the Jeep provided by the nearest marshal’s office. Chris could only hope that blocking traffic for the half hour, as much as it inconvenienced people, would give him enough time to get his charges and himself to safety without the pursuers learning where this time.
They all needed sleep too much to continue as they were. Making mistakes was easy when one was fatigued. Reflexes were slow, reaction time delayed, when seconds counted to save one’s life.
Davis’s house was as good a haven as they could’ve hoped for. The fence, effective for keeping deer at bay, wouldn’t keep criminals out for long, but long enough to give fair warning. The house itself was solid and warm and possessed amenities like hot water and hot food.
“Help yourself to anything you need.” Davis indicated the guest room. “There’s a double bed in there if you ladies don’t mind sharing, and here are some blankets for the couch for you, Blackwell. There’s food in the fridge. I’m off to my aunt’s and will come home with piles of Christmas goodies. Call me if you need backup for anything.”
He was gone, his truck roaring out of the driveway, leaving his SUV if they needed transportation.
“As if I could interrupt his Christmas dinner with family after all he’s done for us already.” Chris looked at the exhausted women. “Who wants the facilities first?”
“I’m better off than you two.” Donna headed into the kitchen. “I’ll see what there is to eat.”
Chris turned to Lauren only to find her slumped on the sofa, head lolling.
“Lauren, sweetheart.” The endearment slipped out. He sat beside her. “If you fall asleep like that, you’ll get a terrible crick in your neck.”
“Mmm.” She opened her eyes. “I’m not sure I can move any farther. But I want to wash my hair.”
“I like your ponytail.” He touched the gathering of glossy strands. “It shows off your beautiful face.”
“Chris, don’t look at me like that.” She pressed her palm against his cheek as though she would turn his face away.
“Like what?”
“Like—like you still care about me for more than your duty.”
“I do.” He moved just enough to kiss the palm still against his cheek.
She caught her breath. Her lips parted. Her eyes drifted closed. “I’ve missed you.” Her declaration emerged as a mere puff of air brushing his lips.
Then her lips replaced her breath against his mouth. His hand cupped the back of her head, and he was drowning in her sweetness forever.
For the thirty seconds needed for Saber to tear across the great room and wedge herself between them.
Laughing, they broke apart, their gazes meeting, locking.
“That was probably a dumb thing to do,” Lauren said.
“Probably.” Chris grinned at her dazed expression. “Highly unprofessional of me.”
“Shockingly forward of me.”
Saber stood between them, wagging from her ears back.
“I—I should get cleaned up while Donna fixes supper. Where’s my backpack?” Lauren glanced around.
“Here.” Chris picked up the hideous orange bag.
It was heavier than something just carrying clothes and toiletries should be. Through the soft sides, he felt only a small shampoo bottle, the softness of garments—
And something that shouldn’t be there.
His guts churning, Chris held the pack with one hand and yanked back the zipper with the other.
“What are you doing?” Lauren demanded.
“What are you doing with this?” Chris pulled his service weapon from Lauren’s backpack.
* * *
Still reeling from the impact of kissing Chris for the first time in over five years, Lauren stared at the gun without comprehending its significance, nor the implication of Chris’s question. That gun did not belong in this moment of sweet remembrance, of admitting she still loved Chris, of knowing their future was no different than it had been five years ago.
“Have you had this the whole time?” Chris asked.
Reality sank in and Lauren flicked her gaze to Chris’s face, stiff and pale. She shook her head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Of course I haven’t had it the whole time we’ve been on the run. Where do you think I hid it when I had nothing but the clothes on my back?”
“I’m trying to figure that out myself. But if you didn’t have it, how did it get into your backpack?”
“I have no idea. I remember touching your gun when I was helping you out from under all that wood on my deck, but I have never seen it.”
“And it found its way from my deck to your backpack without you ever seeing it or touching it again?” Chris shoved the gun into his waistband at the small of his back. “Lauren, I think you are the smartest person I know, so you understand why I can’t believe you.”
“I do understand.”
All too well.
“I understand that this is why we have no future. You will forever doubt that I am not a criminal in some way myself because I’m loyal to my brother.”
She blinked hard. She would not cry in front of him. Not again. She had already made herself too vulnerable when she kissed him. The gesture told him she still cared more than was good for either of them.
The kiss told him he still held the power to break her heart.
“I don’t want to think that. I didn’t think it. But you have my service weapon in your backpack.” Chris’s face twisted, his eyes closing.
Suddenly, Lauren realized finding his gun in her bag hurt him as much as his accusation pierced her heart. He wanted her to be innocent, blameless.
He wanted to be free to love her.
“I can’t prove I didn’t take your gun off my deck. I can’t prove the negative.” She took a deep breath. “You have to trust I’m telling the truth.”
Trust. Not in existence between them.
“But I’m too tired to fight with you.” She snatched her bag from his hands and escaped into the guest bedroom. As she closed the door, she heard Donna call, “Supper’s ready.”
Lauren’s stomach knotted at the idea of food. A hot home-cooked meal would be good for her. Being near Chris at that moment would not.
She extracted toiletries from her bag and entered the bathroom. A hot shower and clean hair went a long way to make her feel more capable of handling Chris and his accusations. Sleep would go further. Hair still wet, she crawled into the bed with the sheets smelling of fabric softener, and was asleep in moments.
She thought she would sleep the entire night, provided someone didn’t try to kill them and drag her from the only comfortable warmth she had experienced since Ryan came racing across her yard. But she slept for no more than an hour according to her phone. Something had awakened her. A gunshot? A cry for help? Somethin
g as normal as Donna dropping the lid of a pan in the kitchen?
Whatever the cause, the house was quiet now. Not silent. Water ran through pipes, and the low murmur of voices occasionally accompanied by music suggested someone watched TV.
Lauren lay motionless, listening for more, breathing deep and slow in the hope she would fall asleep again. She felt better for all the nap had been short, her mind more alert.
Alert and racing too much for sleep.
And that was what had awakened her—her own mind. Maybe she’d dreamed something. Maybe she’d managed to think clearly in her sleep. Whatever the cause, she had an answer.
Reluctant to drag herself into the relatively chilly air of the closed room, she climbed from bed and pulled on her fresh set of clothes with the offhand thought that she should wash her other jeans and T-shirt in the sheriff’s washer. Chris would want to wash his things too. Neither of them had many possessions with them.
She had lost so much. If she dwelled on that, sadness threatened to wound her heart. Since losing Chris, possessions were all she had. The most important ones were gone now.
Ryan was out of her life, beyond the pale with his actions in apparently choosing to follow in their father’s footsteps. Chris, the most important connection of her life, was beyond even friendship if she couldn’t convince him she was telling the truth.
She brushed her hair, now mostly dry, and drew on a touch of lipstick and dab of powder for courage, then exited the bedroom.
Donna sat on the sofa knitting and watching It’s a Wonderful Life on TV, Saber sprawled on the rug at her feet. Chris sat at the dining table, thumbs flying over the screen of his phone. Sometime in the past hour, he had showered and changed and affixed a fresh bandage to the wound on his scalp. The dog jumped up to greet Lauren with a wagging tail and sloppy grin. Both humans glanced at her before returning their attention to their respective tasks.
“You look more human,” Donna said. “There’s homemade mac and cheese in the kitchen.”
“Sounds good. Thank you.” Lauren crossed the living room end of the great room and approached Chris at the table.
He stood, setting his phone on the place mat before him. “How may I help you?”
“The assault on me in the store.” She began her idea without preamble. “I don’t think they intended to kidnap me or harm me in front of all those people. It’s like chasing me out of my house and then burning it, and letting us know they knew we were at the sheriff’s office. They are trying to keep us off balance and always moving so we are too tired to be careful.”
“I agree with you on that.” Chris spoke slowly, as though cautious about agreeing with her.
“And I think there’s more to that assault in the store.” Lauren’s throat was dry. It was so important for Chris to believe her.
“And what is that?” Chris’s phone pinged and he looked at it.
She was losing his attention.
“I said they grabbed my backpack and tried to pull it off.”
“But you had knotted the straps below the buckles. Yes, I remember.” He had picked up his phone and was responding to the latest text.
Rude. Irritating. Dismissive.
Lauren snatched the phone out of his hands and returned it to the place mat with a thud. “Stop that and listen to me. This is important.”
“So are text messages from my office.”
“Especially ones about me.”
She’d read the words on the screen, visible with the response text not yet sent.
“Doing a more thorough background check on me? Looking to see if I’ve got a speeding ticket?” Her voice throbbed with indignation and sarcasm. “You’ll discover I haven’t got so much as a parking ticket in the past five years. Not in the past twenty-seven, actually. I never cheated on a test in school or plagiarized someone else’s papers in college. Since we broke up, I have gone out on exactly three dates with nice men from my church who bored me to death, and I have paid my taxes without trying to evade a single dollar required of me, even though doing so meant I ate mac and cheese, the generic boxed type, and packaged ramen noodles for weeks in the beginning. But you’ll waste resources because my word isn’t good enough.”
“I found my service weapon in your backpack.”
“That’s right. You did. Because when that person grabbed it in the store, he wasn’t trying to take my backpack. He was putting your gun into it.”
Chris’s eyes widened. “It’s possible. I didn’t think—” He broke off. “Have a seat and let me get you some supper.”
“I’ll get it myself when we’ve resolved this.”
“Please. You look like you need a good meal.” He pulled out a chair adjacent to his.
All at once understanding that Chris needed a few minutes to think and the routine of heating up food in a microwave would help the thought process, Lauren acquiesced and sat.
Chris ducked into the kitchen. The refrigerator door opened and closed with a thud. Cabinet doors banged. The microwave hummed. From the far end of the great room, Lauren watched the images on the TV. The movie always made her sad, emphasized her isolation on holidays. Self-imposed isolation for a good reason, but lonely just the same.
She needed to change that, build a network of friends now that she didn’t have to devote quite so much time to building her company.
Having a family of friends would help her get over Chris once again.
He exited the kitchen with a plate in one hand and a glass of something that looked like cider or apple juice in the other. The plate he set before her held a square of mac and cheese, oozing with tangy cheese, and a salad. Something healthy and something that was total comfort food.
“It’s cider.” Chris placed the glass beside her plate. “But I can get you iced tea if you prefer.”
“Cider is great.” Lauren picked up her fork, hoping eating would calm her knotted stomach.
The first bite of pasta and cheese melted on her tongue with a burst of flavor and creamy goodness. She sighed with pleasure. “Donna, you’re a good cook.”
“A good thing your dad could afford a cook, since your mother couldn’t boil water” came Donna’s response.
He’d hired a cook until he went to prison, but her mother left then too.
“You’d think you would be glad you weren’t married to him anymore,” Chris said.
Donna’s needles stopped clacking. “I am.”
“Then why do you care so much about Lauren’s mother?” Chris asked.
Donna sat in silence for so long Lauren thought she wouldn’t respond. Lauren didn’t want to eat her salad in the stillness, beyond the lame jingle of a commercial, for fear the crunching lettuce would sound like an army tramping over crusted snow.
Then Donna picked up her needles and resumed knitting what appeared to be the tube of a giant sock. “Nearly thirty years of habit.” With that pronouncement, she turned up the volume on the television.
Across the corner of the table between them, Lauren met Chris’s eyes and they both laughed. They laughed together with a glance as they had often done in the past.
How can we not be meant to be together? Lauren’s heart cried.
“So, do you believe me?” she asked.
“I’m willing to believe it’s a distinct possibility.” He stretched his hand across the table and touched her fingers as she reached for the glass of cider. “I believe it’s a far better solution than the one I leaped to.”
“And why did you leap to that conclusion, Chris?”
He looked away. “I think you know.”
She did know, and the pasta in her mouth turned to paste. Tasteless and sticky, refusing to go down her throat in anything but a painful lump.
She speared her fork into the salad greens. She should at least eat some more vegetables. “This will end soon, more than lik
ely, and we can go our separate ways again.”
“I had hoped we could find our way to being friends,” Chris said.
“Friends trust one another.” Lauren rose with her plate in hand and stalked into the kitchen.
She found some plastic wrap and covered her plate. Too many lean years had taught her not to waste food. She might be hungry later and want the once-delicious mac and cheese. She might be hungry again when this disastrous Christmas ended.
Oh, Ryan, what were you thinking?
Being in the kitchen as far as she could run away at the moment, though she wished she were anywhere but in northern Michigan on Christmas Eve, Lauren found minor cleaning that needed to be done—a speck of cheese on the counter, putting cleaned cups away, washing the coffee carafe. In the great room, the movie played with some yelling, suggesting the climax. A cell phone rang, and Chris spoke in a voice too quiet for Lauren to catch the words above James Stewart calling out for his wife.
Lauren rubbed the carafe with the dish towel, set it on its hot plate and considered making a pot of coffee. She wanted something hot to drink, and Davis didn’t seem to have any tea bags in the house nor hot chocolate.
She reached for the bag of coffee.
“Lauren.” Chris stood in the doorway, his phone in hand. “The call is for you.”
“On your cell?” Her heart began to pound in a slow, sickening pulse.
“He didn’t have your new number.” Chris held out his phone. “It’s Ryan.”
THIRTEEN
Her hand shaking, Lauren took the phone from Chris. “Ryan, where are you? What do you think you’re doing, running like this? Why—”
“Be quiet and listen.” Though weak and strained, Ryan’s voice cut through Lauren’s barrage of questions like a shout. “I don’t have much time. We don’t have much time.”
“I saw the list. I know about—”
“I need to talk to you.” He coughed. “You and Blackwell.”
“I’m listening.” Lauren managed to control her urge to question or lecture or both. “I can put you on speaker to talk to both of us.” She tilted the phone just enough so Chris could bend his head close to hers and listen.
Perilous Christmas Reunion Page 16