Between Love and Duty

by Janice Kay Johnson

  God. Please don’t let it have been stolen from a neighbor kid.

  Niall made the decision not to call for a crime scene tech. He’d come prepared to remove the mat, animal and knife himself, the poor damn rabbit and the mat to be disposed of, the knife to be examined for fingerprints. As carefully staged as this had been, the knife would be clean.

  Duncan grimaced, eyeing the thick, vividly red blood. Well, not clean.

  He found Jane sitting unmoving at her kitchen table, a cup of coffee in front of her and gaze fixed on some indeterminate point. It swung to Duncan as soon as he appeared, but she didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to; he saw the horror in her eyes.

  “Niall is…removing everything. I’m afraid you’ll have to buy a new doormat.”

  She sagged slightly. “Okay, this time, I’d have to say it’s a threat.”

  “You think?” he said, deeply sardonic.

  Color was seeping into her cheeks. Her eyes flashed at him, and he saw that her hand was almost steady when she lifted the mug for a swallow.

  He got the cup she’d poured for him, and they sipped in silence for some time.

  When Niall eventually appeared, it was to tell her he’d cleared the porch.

  “Knocked on a few doors, too. Lady across the street is pretty sure she heard a car stop out front and then leave again about forty minutes ago, but she didn’t think enough about it to look out the window. No one saw anything. I’ve still got to find the paperboy…”

  “Papergirl,” Jane corrected him.

  He nodded, dumping sugar into his own coffee and leaning against the counter. “I can’t imagine she wouldn’t have stopped if she’d seen.”

  “No,” Jane said dully. “Are there, um, bloodstains on the porch boards?”

  Niall shook his head. “If it helps, I don’t think the, er, deed was done there. It would have been way messier if it had been.” Bloodier was what he meant. “Too risky,” he continued. “It would have taken too long, for one thing. And the rabbit might have been…” Noisy. He didn’t finish; didn’t have to. He cleared his throat then, after a prolonged silence, said, “I’m sorry.”

  She gave a stiff dip of her head and sat staring into her coffee.

  “You didn’t hear anything earlier?” Niall asked.

  “No. I haven’t been up that long. And I took a shower first. I really hadn’t been downstairs more than a minute. I like to read the paper while I eat breakfast.”

  “Is that your habit?”

  Her face blanched at the realization that she’d likely been watched. “Yes.”

  Duncan reached across the table and took her hand. She gripped tight.

  “Do you get up about the same time every morning?”

  Her desperate gaze was fastened on Duncan’s face even as she answered his brother. “Yes.”

  “First thing I’ll do is see if I can locate Glenn Jones and his mother,” Niall said.

  Duncan looked at him.

  Niall got the message. “And Ortez.” He shrugged. “Unfortunately, this is a lousy time of day to pin down alibis.”

  Hope in her voice, Jane said, “Hector has several roommates.”

  Niall glanced significantly at the clock on the stove. “What do you want to bet he was on his way to work right about when this was deposited on your doorstep? Grandpa probably wouldn’t rat out Grandma, and Jones lives alone.” He set his empty mug in the sink. “It’ll be a miracle if any of them can prove he or she wasn’t here this morning.”

  The hope died on her face. Niall made his excuses and left with a promise to keep her in the loop. Duncan lingered.

  “Are you going to work?”

  She nodded.

  Okay. Hell. She wasn’t going to like this.

  “I want you to get a home security system.”

  To his relief, she gave a slow nod. “I’d rather spend the money on a few weeks on a Hawaiian beach, but…” Her shrug was helpless-looking enough, it kicked up his rage again. He didn’t like seeing her afraid. “Do you recommend any particular company?”

  “Yeah.” He found her phone book and circled a couple of ads. “Use my name to get quick service.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Why don’t you get ready for work?” he said gently. “I’ll follow you there. And home tonight.”

  She bit her lip and nodded again instead of arguing.

  He wanted to beg her to get mad.

  What he really wanted was to take her home with him. He knew without asking that she’d say no, though. Duncan didn’t know how he was going to drive away tonight, leaving her alone.

  “Did you get breakfast?” she asked. “There’s…oh, cereal and oatmeal, if you can help yourself while I put on makeup and stuff?”

  He looked at her more closely. She must not wear much makeup, he thought, because the lack wasn’t noticeable. She didn’t need it, with that beautiful, fine-textured skin and thick eyelashes a shade darker than her hair. He supposed she’d want to dry her hair, though, and put on earrings....

  He saw for the first time that she was wearing slippers, fuzzy and pink. Really girlie.

  Pink tutus, he reminded himself, were her business. He found her to be unexpected on a lot of levels, and this was one. A gutsy, stubborn, outspoken woman who was also unashamedly feminine.

  Suppressing the new attack of awareness/lust, he nodded toward the stairs. “I’ll have another cup of coffee, if that’s okay with you. Take your time.”

  She gabbled a few things about getting the cereal out for him, or maybe cooking, and finally allowed herself to be persuaded that he could take care of it himself. He managed not to say, I pretty much lost my appetite, thank you. As she so clearly had.

  He called and postponed his meeting, then went out to collect her newspaper from the newly bare front porch. He had time, barely, for that second cup of coffee before Jane reappeared, all put together. Hair a shiny curtain, simple gold studs in her ears, possibly a hint of blush on her cheeks and real shoes on her feet.

  He’d liked her damp and unfinished.

  Duncan pushed his chair back and stood. He should head for the door, remind her to lock up behind him on her way to the garage—but he couldn’t seem to move that way. Or move at all. He couldn’t look away from her. This time, it wasn’t the curve of her mouth, the grace of her carriage, her glossy hair or vivid blue eyes that kept him staring and immobile. It was his painful awareness of her tension, her brittleness. A vulnerability she so rarely revealed.

  “Oh, hell, Jane.” The words exploded from him. He took a step finally, but toward her instead of away. Their bodies smacked into each other, but comfort wasn’t the goal. Getting closer was. Melding their mouths was. The voice of reason lost to primal need.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  HIS FINGERS SANK INTO her hair, the thickest, most gloriously textured silk Duncan had ever touched. His hands were shaking. Jane wound her arms around his neck and rose on tiptoe, her head tipped so that her mouth could meet his.

  He’d never kissed a woman like this. Everything he felt was in his touch: stunning physical hunger, tenderness that wrenched him inside out and fear. He was afraid for her, and—God—afraid of her. His mind never turned off. Never. But now it did. He was all feelings, sensation. The shape of her head, that hair slipping over his fingers, the shyness of her tongue and the cinnamon taste of her mouth. They were in contact, from thigh to breast. She was leaning as hard into him as he was into her. One of her hands gripped around his neck, while the other had grabbed onto his hair. She made little sounds he couldn’t even name, but they increased his desperate need of her.

  The tumult wasn’t all physical, though. The best of it—the worst—was inside, where he wasn’t himself anymore, standing alone. He was melting down, heart and lungs and soul, like hot candle wax, and who knew what shape he would end up.

  The kiss went on and on, broken by ragged gulps for air. Once he closed his teeth on her deliciously soft earlobe and the dainty earring that
decorated it. One hand left her hair to lift her hips higher against his, tighter.

  He needed to be inside her. He wanted to bear her to the floor, but a voice of reason suggested a sofa, a bed. Someplace soft. She deserved soft.

  Duncan lifted his head, looked down at her face flushed with passion, mouth swollen, eyes the deepest blue he’d ever seen, and he thought, Dear God, what am I doing?

  She stared up at him. Her pupils flickered; dilated then contracted. She began to pant, then shuddered and pushed away from him.

  “Oh, no,” she whispered.

  No? Oh, no? Was the idea of making love with him that horrifying? Stiff with affront, he let her go.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t intend…”

  “No, I was practically climbing inside your skin.” Her teeth sank momentarily into her lower lip. “It’s…it’s got to be the adrenaline.”

  She was probably right, the reasonable side of him concurred. No kiss could be the emotional conflagration that one had seemed to be.

  Back off. Think about this. Don’t do anything stupid.

  He grimaced. More stupid than you already have.

  “Are you all right?” he asked gruffly, seeing her grab one of the kitchen chairs as if for balance.

  “Yes, of course.” She swallowed. “Um…I need to find my purse. And…” Her head turned; he had the sense that she was looking blindly. “Only my purse, I guess.”

  She did find it. And then, as if nothing at all out of the ordinary had happened, Jane let him out the front door and locked it behind him. He waited in his SUV until she reversed her car out of the garage. They both watched until the garage door slid down. Then he followed her to the store, hovered in the alley while she parked beside the Dumpster and let herself in the back door.

  She gave him a small, uncertain wave and disappeared inside.

  Only then did Duncan let himself sag forward until his forehead bumped the steering wheel and his eyes squeezed closed.

  He couldn’t afford to feel like this. Because she had looked so vulnerable, her innermost self unguarded, he had sprung himself wide, too, but he couldn’t do it again. He couldn’t. It was too dangerous. He couldn’t trust anyone, not that much. The panic somersaulted sickeningly in his belly. He hadn’t felt so exposed since his mother said the terrible words: I’m leaving. You don’t need me anymore.

  Had she really believed that?

  Did it matter? What mattered was that she’d left him not only with the burden of his brothers, but with an achingly deep certainty that he never wanted to be stripped so bare again.

  He would never fail a trust. Not the way she had. Not the way his father had. But the flip side was, he would never again depend on anyone else.

  He was coming frighteningly close to letting himself do that. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  Eventually he was able to loose his hands from their death grip on the steering wheel. Fortunately, the store had no windows to the alley. No one at all had seen him wrestle with his demons.

  The ten-minute drive to the Sheriff’s Department where the meeting was to be held gave him time to lock himself down.

  THAT HAD TO BE THE WORST start to a day ever. A personal best.

  Find a beheaded rabbit on your doorstep. Dissolve into a puddle of terror. Oh, and then channel all your angst by throwing yourself at a man who is absolutely, one-hundred-percent wrong for you.

  Not that the throwing part had been all one-sided. In her immediate, postkiss shock, she hadn’t let herself remember quite how not-one-sided it had been, but as the day went on and she opened herself to remembering, Jane could say with absolute assurance that Duncan had kissed her with equal enthusiasm.

  So—why had she felt such a huge rush of shame when he’d ended the kiss? Why had she been so sure she’d made a fool out of herself? Or…was that it at all?

  She didn’t know. Probably because she wasn’t thinking rationally. About anything.

  Thoughts pinged around in her head like the ball in that pinball machine. She’d believe she was settling to some kind of conclusion and…whack! She was off again. Replaying every minute, in brief, jerky segments. Showering—she tried to rewind time and strain her ears for any unusual noise at all. Right before she turned on the water, had she heard…? And then, oh, God, there was the moment of opening the front door, lifting her foot to step out and seeing…that. Her pulse had zoomed, zero to sixty, in the one shocking second. Foot yanked back, door slammed, locked, her trembling on the inside for that paralyzed moment. Calling Duncan, that awful moment when she’d had the dry heaves after he said, “Fresh.” Falling against him the second he arrived, needing his strength, his heartbeat. Him.

  She settled the best when she thought about Duncan. As if, even at this distance, he made her feel safe.

  Why him? She didn’t know, only that from the first time she saw his picture in the newspaper, she’d felt unexpected things.

  That’s only lust.

  But it wasn’t. It never had been, not entirely. He wasn’t even handsome, not really. She thought it was the guarded way he’d looked at the camera, as if he’d rather its eye had never found him. She’d felt a kind of recognition. Except it wasn’t only that, either, because his brother had something of that same look, and she didn’t want to throw herself at him.

  But then, he didn’t look at her the way Duncan did. Maybe, feelings like this had to be mutual.

  He was as reluctant as she was, though. Maybe more so. He’d kissed her as if he was starving, not for any woman but for her. Only then his expression had gone almost entirely blank. She’d all but heard the steel reverberating when the barrier came down.

  That might have been her fault, because she’d been so shocked at herself. Except it was just as well, wasn’t it?

  Whack. Her brain bounced another way entirely.

  How I dread having to go home.

  And yes, Duncan would probably walk through her house again. She felt quite sure he wouldn’t kiss her again, though. And then he’d leave, and she’d be alone.

  Growing up, what she’d wanted most was to live alone, to be subject to no one’s authority. Sometimes, still, she put on her leotard and danced in the middle of the night because she could. She had pizza for breakfast or ice cream for dinner or turned the music really, offensively loud. When she wore a dress that clung to her curves or bared a whole lot of skin, she smiled at herself in the mirror and thought, Up yours, Dad. Not healthy to still be rebelling at her age, but she had a lot of years to make up for. She was her own woman now; that’s what counted. She answered only to herself.

  And now she had to fear going home to her own house, to her own solitary self.

  She called the home security company Duncan had mentioned first, and the man agreed to meet her at home at five-thirty. If she was lucky, Duncan would stay to consult with him.

  But, of course, there was no way any alarm system would be installed tonight, or probably even tomorrow or the next day.

  She had friends with whom she could stay temporarily. But knowing he likely had followed her from work, first to McDonald’s and then home, reminded her that he could follow her again. It would be horrible if she brought her troubles with her and visited them on someone she cared about.

  She could brace a chair under her bedroom doorknob. Sleep with a fireplace poker clutched in her hand.

  Beg Duncan to stay?

  That’s what she was afraid she would do. So afraid, Jane knew she wouldn’t.

  Couldn’t.

  NIALL SLAPPED HIS HAND on the table and roared, “For God’s sake, sit down!”

  Duncan jerked, pulled out a chair then changed his mind. He didn’t even know what he was doing here, at his brother’s place. Place, not house, unless you were talking about a fairy-tale gingerbread house, or a child’s playhouse. Tucked neatly in behind a modest, 1940s-era bungalow, the cottage was small enough to give Duncan claustrophobia. He told himself that’s why he was pacing.

  “I don�
��t plan to stay,” he said.

  In complete exasperation, Niall said, “Tell me again why you’re here?”

  Yeah, why are you?

  “To light a fire under your ass, why else?” Except that wasn’t really why he was here and he knew it.

  Because I need you to tell me what to do?

  Niall growled. “Go home. Go for a run. Call that kid you like so much. He’d probably let you beat the crap out of him on the basketball court.”