by Janie Crouch
“I don’t want you to be afraid of me.”
She turned and began loading more books on the shelves. “Deal. Now that I know you’re not upset that I’ve moved back to town, I won’t have any concerns.”
“Annie...”
God, she couldn’t bear to hear that tone in his voice, the one that suggested he cared about her. She could forget six years ago, push down the pain that had shattered her heart when he’d left her alone, naked and bleeding—literally and figuratively.
But she couldn’t be around him. Not as casual friends. Maybe someday, but not right now.
“It’s super late. I appreciate you saving me from the bookshelf of death, but I think I’m going to head to bed,” she lied without blinking.
It at least distracted Zac from whatever he was going to say. “Yeah, I guess it is late.
“How is your head and back? Any complications?”
He studied her for a moment, then shrugged. “No. A little headache and my back is still tender. But nothing bad.”
“That’s good.” Mia had undoubtedly helped with that. “Thanks for stopping by.”
Zac walked to the door but turned back before stepping out. “Annie.”
No, not tonight. She couldn’t talk anymore about any of it. She moved to the door. “Thanks again for your help.”
She closed it softly but firmly in his face, then made a mental note.
Change locks immediately.
“Damn, Mackay. What bug up and died in your ass?”
Finn ducked under a roundhouse kick that would’ve sent the other man sprawling over the sparring mat. Zac wasn’t pulling any punches, but he didn’t need to with Finn. His friend could more than hold his own. The two of them had been sparring since their Army days. And wrestling since they were toddlers.
But it didn’t mean Finn was wrong. Zac had been pissed for the past couple days, since he’d left Mrs. P’s—damn it, Annie’s—house.
Zac brought his arms up to protect his face as Finn moved in with a series of jabs. Duchess, that damn pregnant German shepherd, lay at the side of the ring, watching them lazily. When they hadn’t been able to find her owner after the accident, they’d brought her to Linear to stay with them.
“What’s the matter?” Finn’s words burst out between blows. “Is Mia not taking care of you the way she should? Did she kick you out of her house? Because I know you didn’t let her stay at your place while you were recovering.”
Zac stepped to the side before throwing a few punches at Finn’s midsection. “I didn’t stay with Mia. Didn’t want Mia.”
Finn stepped back, holding out his hand to call for a break. Zac stopped and they both took off their protective headgear before grabbing water.
“Okay, so no Mia. Fair enough. I know you guys don’t have anything permanent.”
“We never really had anything at all.”
Finn’s eyebrow rose. “Okay. Any reason why that’s such a decisive statement today?”
“She’s just not what I want.”
If possible, his friend’s eyebrow went even higher. “That wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with Becky’s long-lost doctor bestie showing back up in town, would it?”
Everything. “Did you know Annie moved into Mrs. P’s place? I know she’s only been in town for two weeks, but she wiped every single bit of Mrs. P out of that house. No more of her furniture, all those crazy colored walls painted over.”
Finn took a sip of water. “Actually, Aiden, Dorian, and I painted it for her about a month before she passed. She said she had family who would be living in it and she wanted to make sure that person could start fresh.”
He winced. And here he’d accused Annie of erasing all presence of Mrs. P. At least this time he could remember what an asshole he’d been. “Why didn’t I know about this?”
“It was while you were out in North Carolina with Shane Westman, getting the satellite office up and running. Mrs. P didn’t want us to tell you how weak she was becoming. She just asked us to paint and rip out that hideous Little Mermaid wallpaper in the bathroom.”
Zac couldn’t stop his smile. “Becky loved that stupid wallpaper when she was a kid but hated it by the time she was in high school.”
“Ethan was there most of the day. He tried to talk her into putting up a nice Star Wars print.”
Zac didn’t doubt it. Finn’s seven-year-old son was a Star Wars and Lego fanatic.
“That day, Mrs. P offered to pay me to take her furniture out after she passed. Of course, I told her I wouldn’t take her money. But she paid for a rental unit for a year and had me move it there once she was gone. I know some of Becky’s stuff may still be there, so if you want to look through it, let me know. Otherwise, it’s all supposed to be donated to Goodwill.”
Zac wiped sweat off his forehead. Of course, his mother-in-law had done all that. Caring for others had been in her blood. “Did you know Mrs. P left the house to Anne?”
Finn shook his head and took another sip of water. “Dude, I could barely remember Anne. I wouldn’t have been able to pick her out of a lineup before seeing her again at the hospital. But no, I didn’t. What’s up with you and her? I mean, I know she and Becky were tight, but I don’t remember you hanging out with her much. And you definitely never mentioned her since we moved back.”
He’d hung out with Annie, of course. It was impossible not to when she was Becky’s friend. She’d been Becky’s polar opposite in every way: quiet to Becky’s loud, pale to Becky’s tan, tall and willowy to Becky’s short and curvy. She’d been afraid of her own shadow, awkward in most social situations, and just generally forgettable to most people.
But not to Zac. Never to Zac.
He sat down and leaned against one of the corner posts of the sparring ring. “Annie and I slept together.”
Finn nearly spewed his water. “Oh shit, when? Yesterday?”
“No. A long time ago.”
Finn sat down against the opposite corner post, shaking his head. “How long ago?”
“Right after Becky died. The night before my leave was over, and I flew back out to resume duty. I was drunk as shit.”
Finn leaned his head against the post. “You never drink.”
“Not after that night. Haven’t gotten drunk since. Pretty much the whole thing is a blank for me. I remember a few flashes, but nothing as a whole. I feel like shit.”
“Dude, you’re not the first guy who got drunk and looked for comfort after his wife died. Hell, anything you needed to do to survive that time could pretty much be excused. You’d just lost your family.”
Part of Zac knew that was true. The other was utterly ashamed of what he’d done. “I’ve accepted that I’m an asshole for sleeping with someone else right after Becky died. The bigger problem is that evidently, I said something to Annie that night that was...unkind. She was afraid of me, Finn. At the hospital. I could see it.”
“Are you sure? She’s always been pretty shy.”
Zac reached up to rub the tension in the back of his neck. “She pretty much said so when I saw her the other night. Said that we’d let bygones be bygones as long as I didn’t still want her to leave town.”
He’d been trying to piece together more since Annie had shut the door in his face. Had he really told her he didn’t want her to stay in town? If so, she’d evidently taken him at his word.
He would give anything to remember that night. He remembered the heat between them, the kisses in his hotel room at The Mayor’s Inn.
He remembered Annie’s hair, for once loose from her braid, fanned out around her naked body on the bed, her pretty face smiling up at him. And him smiling at her in return.
And then something had happened. For the life of him, Zac didn’t know what. They’d had sex—right? He wasn’t even sure about that. Like they’d started...and then stopped. Why?
And then a blank. He couldn’t remember anything but waking up the next day completely hungover, a knot on his head, leaning again
st the wall of his hotel room. No recollection of why Annie wasn’t there or how things had been left between them.
Evidently, not good.
He’d barely made his transport to Colorado Springs before he’d been flown back to Afghanistan. And then he’d been so disgusted with himself, with what he’d done, that he’d forced himself not to think about that night at all. Pushed it completely from his mind.
But now he couldn’t hide from the truth. “She was scared of me. In the hospital. Not just a general unease, but true fear.”
Zac jumped up, the most unbearable thought coursing through his brain. What if Annie’s fear was not because of something he’d said, but something he’d done?
Jesus, what if Annie hadn’t really wanted to have sex with him? What if she’d changed her mind, and he hadn’t understood or hadn’t had himself under enough control? He would never hurt a woman that way on purpose—God, especially not Annie.
But there was so fucking much he didn’t remember about that night.
Finn stood also. “Whatever you’re thinking right now? The answer is no. You would never hurt a woman like that, Zac. It’s not even in your DNA, for God’s sake.”
He wanted to believe that was true. With everything inside him, he wanted to. But he damn sure wasn’t going to take his own hole-riddled memory’s word for it. He was going to talk to Annie right damn now and understand exactly what had happened that night.
But then Sheriff Nelson walked in the door of the barn Linear had outfitted for all sorts of martial arts and boxing training. “Aiden told me you guys were in here beating the tar out of each other.”
“Sorry, Sheriff.” Finn walked over to shake the man’s hand. “If you’d gotten here ten minutes sooner, you could’ve seen Zac crying for his mommy.”
The old man didn’t break into one of his normally easy-going smiles. “Well, I’m glad you’re done, because I need your help.”
“What’s up?” Zac asked.
“Another attack. This one out in Lincoln County. A woman’s car broke down, so she decided to walk into work and was dragged behind the abandoned bottling factory and raped. The Lincoln sheriff asked if you guys might be willing to do some tracking around the scene.”
Damn it. Doubly not what Zac wanted to deal with right now, given where his thoughts about Annie had been. But if he and the guys could help stop a rapist, Zac’s personal baggage would have to wait. “Do they think it’s the same guy as last week?”
“Looks that way. I don’t have any jurisdiction over there, I’m just helping Landon Rogers out in a completely unofficial capacity. But now there’s been two very similar attacks in one week in counties surrounding Oak Creek. So, I can’t help but take that pretty damn seriously.”
“Dorian would be best for this, of course. But he’s out of pocket,” Finn said, then gave Zac a nod.
Dorian sometimes spent days at a time out in the woods alone. The man suffered from severe PTSD and often couldn’t bear to be around other people for extended amounts of time. He was the best survival specialist they had—the man was damn near MacGyver out in nature—but when he had to get away, he had to get away.
Dorian was currently away.
“I’ll help you, Sheriff.” Zac began cleaning up the sparring ring. “I need to get out of here anyway.”
“Yes, please take Gargamel here with you. Then maybe I won’t have to keep kicking his ass to get him out of his mood.” Finn ducked as Zac sent a sparring glove at his head.
Forty-five minutes later, Zac pulled up to the crime scene behind Sheriff Nelson. Just south of Oak Creek in neighboring Lincoln County, the scene itself already had a half dozen law enforcement personnel looking for any sort of trace evidence the rapist might’ve left behind. They didn’t need another person in the mix further contaminating the scene.
That was okay, because ground zero wasn’t why Zac was here. He needed to find out where the perp had gone after fleeing the scene or, barring that, perhaps where he’d been before the rape had occurred. As Zac had learned to do in the Army when trying to find an unknown enemy combatant, he walked in a circle, looking outward.
Where would he go if he were the rapist? Were these spur-of-the-moment attacks? Were the women chosen because of a certain feature, like hair color, height, or how they walked? Did they know their attacker, or did he take them by surprise? Zac didn’t have a lot of details, and hell, even if he did, he wasn’t some FBI profiler.
The area wasn’t wilderness, so there were no shoe prints or anything truly trackable. It was a cluster of buildings and warehouses on the outskirts of the small town of Hillsdale. Most were abandoned, but even the ones that weren’t didn’t have enough people coming in and out to help someone in trouble.
Zac continued walking around, trying to think like someone preparing for an attack. “The fact that it’s the building closest to the road could suggest it was a crime of opportunity.”
The sheriff nodded. “I agree. But in both cases the guy was wearing a mask.”
Zac grimaced. “So, the victims might have known their attacker.”
“Could be the same guy or some sort of copycat.”
Zac walked a little farther to a sign that was partially overgrown by bushes. It was about twenty yards from the warehouse door and only ten feet from the street.
If Zac were planning an ambush, this was where he would do it from. He stepped in for a closer look and within a few moments had his confirmation.
“Somebody was definitely here.” He pointed out branches on the shrubs. “The broken pieces are still green on the ground, so it was recent. And it looks like he got a little bored.” He pointed to a tiny stack of rocks an inch or two high.
“What is that?”
“It seems as if he wasn’t mentally disciplined enough not to get bored while waiting for the victim to show up.”
“But he was definitely waiting?”
Zac looked around. “Yes. And it doesn’t make much sense to just wait and see if some woman would randomly walk by here. I’m sure when Rogers’s men take a closer look at the victim’s car, they’ll see whatever caused her ‘breakdown’ was deliberate.”
Nelson let out a curse. They spent the next hour searching but couldn’t find anything.
“Got time to run by the county clinic?” Sheriff Nelson asked. “Rogers is there. He might have a couple questions.”
Zac once again followed the sheriff in his car, then spent the next thirty minutes at the clinic providing what insight he could to Sheriffs Rogers and Nelson, glad to see this wasn’t any sort of turf war.
When the door to one of the examination rooms opened with a quiet click, and both law enforcement officers stopped talking, Zac knew the victim was in there.
“I guess they’re almost finished,” Nelson said. “I’ve got to give Dr. Griffin a ride back to Oak Creek anyway.”
Zac turned to look at him. “Annie is here? Why?”
“Both doctors who work at this clinic are male, and the victim was pretty upset. I was at the hospital when I got the call from Landon, and Dr. Griffin offered to help, even though I think she’d just gotten off a thirty-six-hour shift or something.”
Annie appeared in the room’s doorway then, stopping to talk to who looked to be the victim’s parents. The mother rushed past her after a moment, but the father seemed rooted in place, his world completely shaken. Annie stopped and spoke to him in low, deliberate tones, her voice not carrying even in the smallish room. She touched him on the arm—his distress obvious—offering whatever medical advice or comfort she could. The man hung on her words, on Annie’s gentle, calming presence. His face was grim as he straightened his shoulders, nodded at her, and entered the room.
Annie wiped a hand over her face, her shoulders slumping with exhaustion before she, too, gathered her strength and moved forward toward the sheriffs, evidence bags in hand.
She faltered when she saw Zac, but then straightened once more, wariness now warring with exhaustion, eye
s darting to the door like she might need to make a quick getaway.
Multiple reactions warred inside him. He needed answers for what had happened all those years ago, needed to know if he’d hurt her in ways he’d never imagined.
But more than that was the urge to help her now. To pull her into his arms and just let her rest, let her release the weight bearing down on her. To feed her and put her to bed and make sure she got uninterrupted sleep for the next ten hours or however long it took to erase that exhaustion from her eyes.
It wasn’t something he was used to, and not something he would’ve thought he’d ever feel toward her. He wasn’t sure how to make it go away.
Or even if he wanted it to.
Anne loved her job, she really did. From her first anatomy class in high school, she’d known she wanted to be a doctor.
But sometimes being one completely sucked. Like having to run a rape kit on a terrified nineteen-year-old girl who couldn’t stop crying. Kimmy had kept apologizing no matter how many times Anne had assured her it was all right.
God, Anne was angry. Kimmy was just a teenager who’d walked in for her evening shift as a waitress at one of the town’s restaurants, thinking she was safe in the town she’d lived most of her life. Yet, she’d been brutalized. And Anne was so pissed for having to explain to Kimmy’s father that right now he had to put his own fury aside and concentrate on whatever his daughter needed.
And Anne was tired. She’d been exhausted before she’d offered to help Sheriff Nelson. Now, she was beyond weary. She needed to give this evidence to Sheriff Rogers, then she wanted nothing more than to just go home. Hopefully, there would be something in the rape kit that would be useful in the case. The rapist had at least worn a condom. Although that wasn’t good in terms of evidence, it was much better for Kimmy.
Eyes burning and blurring—she really needed to get these contacts out—she turned toward the main counter of the clinic, relieved when she saw Sheriff Rogers already there. That ease ran screaming out the door when she noticed Zac a second later. She had to force the rest of her body not to do the same.