“It’s going to be okay.” The caring voice came out of nowhere, and so did the emotion in her throat. He hadn’t called her princess, but it was close enough. The sofa shifted. He sat beside her. She kept her head down to hide her watery weakness.
The owner of the deep voice wrapped an arm around her shoulders. Probably the officer on duty—Tomas, if she remembered his name. Or was it Officer Martin? Probably him, because there was a familiar ring to the voice. He even smelled nice and familiar.
She started to raise her head, but the muscled arm pulled her against him, offering a shoulder—an offer she couldn’t refuse. And it was a nice shoulder, masculine like his voice and his spicy scent. Oddly, she hadn’t given Martin’s shoulders, voice, or scent a second thought earlier. Nothing like a little panic to bring things home. She pillowed her cheek on the wall of muscle.
“You’re safe.” His arm tightened, and she felt safe.
The concerned tone, the warm touch, all made her throat ache and her sinuses sting. Her tears flowed. Knowing her nose ran like a floodgate when she cried, she inhaled a hiccupping breath and drew her face off his shirt. Any longer and he’d be wringing the garment out in her sink.
“Thank you.” She sat up, pressing her hand over her face, hoping to collect any leakage without looking totally undignified. Only then did she look at…
“No.” Could panic bring on hallucinations?
“No, what?” Dodd asked.
When she didn’t answer, he rose and went into the kitchen. He came back, sat down beside her, and held a paper towel to her nose. “Blow,” he said.
So much for looking dignified. She took the paper towel, but when she felt the moisture collect between her nose and lip, she blew.
And she really wished she hadn’t.
With one nasal cavity stopped, it made a honking noise that sounded like a mating call of a jungle bird. She wiped and wished she could slip between the sofa’s cushions and disappear like an unwanted penny.
“What happened?” Jason’s leg cozied up to hers.
“My nose is stopped. What do you think happened?”
He attempted not to smile, but humor danced in his eyes. “I mean to night.”
She leaned back into her leather sofa. “I…”
Officer Tomas and two more uniformed policemen walked inside. Sue looked at them and then back at Jason, who wore jeans and a white T-shirt. “How did…” She stared at the damp spot on his chest. Great, she’d snotted up his shirt. Maybe he wouldn’t notice.
Jason glanced at his slimed shirt. Okay, he’d noticed. But she hadn’t asked him for his shoulder.
“Do you think you could go over what happened again?” Officer Tomas asked.
Sue wadded the paper towel in her fist. Then, unable to help herself, she wiped at Jason’s damp spot. “Hitchcock woke me up.”
“Hitchcock?” One policeman, an Archie Bunker lookalike, stepped closer. Sue barely noticed him, because she was too busy noticing Dodd staring at her as she attempted to clean the snot off his shirt.
“My cat.” She decided to leave Jason’s shirt alone and looked up at the big cop. “He hit me with his paw. I think he saw the guy first. Then I saw him.”
“A guard cat?” the same officer said. “I’m glad I don’t have to write this one up.”
“Did you get a look at him?” Jason’s voice came out stern, and he stared at Archie.
Still uncertain how Jason had wound up here, she stared at him. Remembering their confrontation at Lacy’s, residual anger stirred in her chest. Then she recalled the tender way he’d held her seconds ago.
She moved away from the warmth that his jean-covered leg offered hers. “No, all I saw was a shape.”
“Big or small?” Jason ran his hand down his leg, which brought the backs of his fingers sliding against Sue’s outer thigh—an outer thigh covered only by a thin layer of cotton pj’s. His touch sent her brain into sensory overload. Nerve endings that hadn’t been awake in a long time started stretching and yawning to life.
“I…don’t remember. But I assumed it was a man, so it wasn’t that small.” She moved a couple more inches away on the couch.
“Are you sure it wasn’t just a shadow?” The larger officer snickered.
“I’m sure.” Sue’s left foot tapped nervously against the wood floor. “My backyard has a floodlight. And besides, I ran in here and then I heard him at my back door. He was turning the knob. Shadows can’t do that, can they?”
The sofa shifted beside her. Jason got up and went to her back door. He unlocked it and studied the doorknob on the outside.
“Any damage?” Tomas asked.
“No, but dust it for prints.” Jason’s gaze returned to her. “Then what happened?”
“I called for help and I…” Hid, she remembered but didn’t say so.
“Prints?” the bigger cop interrupted. “You’re joking.”
Jason met the man’s gaze without flinching. “Do it, or I’ll call someone from my unit.”
“Go ahead and call,” Archie answered. “But you should talk to Martin first. This whole thing is a sham.”
“A sham?” Sue’s left foot went still.
“I think it’s more,” Jason said.
“Sham?” Sue repeated.
Archie Bunker reared back on his heels, looking as if he might tumble backward. “Martin’s just playing this up to get in her—”
“I don’t give a damn what Martin’s doing.” Jason scowled.
“Wait!” Sue held up a hand. “What’s a sham?”
The front door, left ajar, flew open. Officer Martin, wearing jeans and his unbuttoned, short-sleeved smiley shirt, rushed in. His light brown hair stuck up at an odd angle. He knelt between her knees and took her hands in his. “You okay?”
Sue glanced at their interlaced fingers, finding his affection too showy.
“Why didn’t you call me?” Martin asked.
“I did.” She tried to pull away. He held on. He leaned closer; she backed up. “Do you think this is a scam?”
Jason walked to the sofa and stared at Officer Martin crouched between her knees. Martin let go of her hands and stood. Both men’s expressions grew pinched, and Sue got an image of two roosters clawing at the dirt, ready to spar. One rooster was wearing a smiley-face shirt.
“Why are you here?” Martin voiced the question she’d been dying to ask herself.
“Sue called me,” Jason answered.
“I did not,” Sue retorted.
Jason’s pinched expression targeted her now. “You called Chase’s. I’m pet-sitting.”
“I…” Understanding dawned. “I must have misdialed. Lacy is three on my speed dial. Martin put his in as four.”
“Yeah, I did that before I left to night, didn’t I?” Martin said. There was an insinuation in his tone that Sue didn’t like.
Jason continued to scowl. “What phone were you on when you called?”
“My home phone. 911 said for me not to hang up. I called them on my cell.”
“I don’t think this is going to take two police forces,” Martin said.
Without a word, Jason walked out the door. The fact that it was the back door seemed a little odd. Odder still, Sue felt abandoned.
She looked at the four cops in her living room. If she broke down again, whom would she lean on?
No one.
She focused on Martin. “Why do they think this is a sham?”
He shuffled his feet. “It’s nothing.”
“Do you think I’m doing this for publicity?”
“No.” He flushed. The man couldn’t lie worth a diddly squat.
Sue crossed her arms and started swinging her foot. “I’m going to say this once more. My agent isn’t doing this. I’ve been getting weird phone calls and someone sent me a dead rat. It doesn’t matter that the evidence was eaten.”
Martin knelt between her legs again and grabbed her hands. “You’re upset.”
Sue slammed her knees shut, b
locking him from getting any closer, and jerked her hands from his. “When I said I didn’t want you doing more than your call of duty, what I meant was…I’m not sleeping with you!”
The back door swung open. Jason stepped inside and his gaze homed in on Martin; then it turned to Officer Tomas. “You get someone here to dust for prints or I’ll make a few calls and make it happen. And I want a detailed description of the car you saw.”
“What car?” asked Martin.
“What car?” Sue echoed.
“Wait a damn minute!” the large cop spoke up. “The last time I checked the map, Hoke’s Bluff is our jurisdiction. We call the shots here. Even if Martin is wrong, we don’t dust for fingerprints for Peeping Toms. So just take your attitude and—”
“The phone line’s been cut.” Jason’s tone could have etched glass. “Whoever was here wasn’t just planning on peeping in the windows. Get the kit out here and dust for the prints.”
Sue tried not to imagine what her stalker had intended to do to her. She wouldn’t let fear win. She could deal with this. Her gaze slid to her purse on the kitchen table. She was an adult, a gun-toting in de pen dent female. Okay, she was a gun-toting in de pen dent woman who’d forgotten all about the gun and hid in the pantry with her cat, but…she could handle this. She could handle anything.
A familiar dog bark sounded outside. Sue amended her last thought. She could handle anything as long as it didn’t involve her mother. Sue sent up a serious, silent prayer. Please, don’t let it involve my mother.
“Susie!” Peggy Finley scrambled inside, doing her best Scarlett O’Hara entrance without the staircase. She threw herself on the couch and hugged Sue against her low-cut grape-colored blouse. “Are you okay? Oh, God, why aren’t you talking?”
“Because you’re smothering me!” Sue pried herself free, frustrated until she saw the concern in her mother’s eyes. “I’m fine.” Sue held up hands and feet. “Got all my fingers and toes. No sore throat, either.”
“She’s not hurt, Mrs. Finley,” Officer Martin said in an annoyingly in-charge tone. The man was not in charge. He didn’t believe her, and he hadn’t even arrived in time for her to leak snot on. No, she’d had the pleasure of doing that to the man who didn’t like her tonsils.
“Oh, sweetie,” her mother cried. “Bill and I were…playing checkers. We heard your address called out on his police radio that he listens to for entertainment. Tell me they caught the doctor.”
Bill? Was this the fruit salesman? Glancing at her mom’s disheveled clothing and mussed hair, Sue questioned the checkers story. Suddenly it all seemed too real—and she didn’t mean that someone had tried to break in. She meant her mother. Her mom was having sex. A vision of her father flashed in Sue’s mind.
Her mom straightened her blouse. “I hope they throw that foot doctor in jail for years.”
“It’s not Paul. But who’s Bill?” Sue managed to say.
“Who’s Paul?” Officer Martin asked.
Sue watched all two hundred pounds of Goliath lumber into her entranceway. Hitchcock zipped out of the room. Behind the dog, a middle-aged man with jet black hair appeared. Wearing tight leather pants and a silk shirt, he looked…familiar.
Recognition dawned.
“Get this beast away from me,” Sue heard someone say, but she continued to glare at the leather pants–wearing man in blue suede shoes.
Great. Her mom was sleeping with a fruit-selling Elvis impersonator. Her father had hated Elvis. He hadn’t been too keen on fruit, either.
“That’s Bill,” her mother said.
Sue opened her mouth but didn’t have a clue what to say to a man who was, moments earlier, bumping uglies with her mother.
Before Sue could say anything, a masculine outcry arose. She turned her head just as Goliath jammed his nose into Archie Bunker’s crotch and growled. The cop jerked out his gun. “You bite me there, you son of a bitch, and you’re a dead dog!”
“No!” Her mother, a grape-colored streak, vaulted over the coffee table and latched her arms around her English Mastiff. Goliath, not used to being lunged at, jumped. All two hundred pounds of canine slammed into Archie Bunker. The cop tumbled backward. His hands, with one gun attached, flew up in the air. As he went down, the gun pointed in Sue’s direction and exploded.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sue pressed her hand over the bullet hole.
“It’s not fatal.” Jason walked closer, his expression softening.
She remembered him unleashing his anger on the officer who’d fired the gun. “I can’t believe he shot my couch.”
“It could’ve been worse.” He looked at her, his blue eyes serious. “But if it makes you feel better, he’ll be doing paperwork for hours. Explaining a misfired weapon is a bitch. And I’m sure you’ll get a new sofa out of the deal, too.”
“Yeah, it could have been worse,” Sue repeated. “They could have arrested my mom. I don’t think prison uniforms come in fruity colors.”
The warmth of his smile worked its way into her chest. She returned the gesture, suddenly finding his presence a lot easier. Her gaze flickered over him—his wide chest, lean hips…It didn’t feel so easy anymore.
Still smiling, he pulled a piece of red-wrapped hard candy from his pocket. “Want one?”
Sue’s gaze shifted to the back door. The events of the last few days felt more like fiction than her life. Sure, she wrote about crazy things and murder, but she didn’t want to live it. All that talk about grist for the mill was just talk. She could imagine all the grist she needed, thank you.
“I personally liked Elvis,” Jason said. “But if that dog put his nose in my crotch one more time, I might have taken a shot at him, too.”
Sue grinned. “He flunked obedience training four times.”
A smile chased away the awkwardness again. How could Jason Dodd make her feel comfortable and then so uncomfortable in the next second?
“The dog or Elvis?” He stepped closer.
The humor helped, but reality crowded her mind. “Do you think they’ll get a name from the fingerprint?”
“It was only a partial.” He sat down in the chair across from her. Everyone else had left. Sue had insisted Mr. De-laney, a.k.a. Elvis, take her mother home before she finished off the bottle of wine.
Officer Tomas had gone back to the precinct and gotten the equipment to dust for prints, while Jason had taped the phone line back together.
Officer Martin had hung around long enough to ask her to go home with him. When she refused, he walked out in a huff. After Officer Tomas and Archie left, it was only her and Jason. And Hitchcock.
The cat jumped up in her lap. Sue stroked the feline and stared at the dancing penguins on her pajama bottoms. Her knees were still trembling.
“You okay?” Jason asked, bringing her gaze up.
“You can go, you know.” She hoped she sounded more convincing than she felt. What if whoever had tried to break in came back? “I didn’t mean to call you to night, and I’m sorry about…your shirt.”
“I haven’t complained.” He glanced at the door. Then they stared at each other for several suspended seconds before he stood up.
Thinking he meant to leave, she bit down on her lip to keep from asking him to stay. But instead of heading for the door, he moved to her DVDs shelf.
“You know, I haven’t seen this movie in years.” He held out the Lonesome Dove case. “Do you mind if I hang out a while?”
When she shook her head, he put the disc in, and because the only place to see the television was on her wounded sofa, he sat down beside her, keeping a good ten inches between them. The distance showed that he didn’t intend to take advantage of her.
Of course he didn’t. If he’d been interested in her, he’d have called four months ago. She petted Hitchcock and reminded herself that Jason Dodd wasn’t her pair of jeans.
But, the smell of his cinnamon candy teased her senses. She knew Jason didn’t want to see a movie. He obviously sensed she
didn’t want to be alone. But why did he care? The man didn’t like her. She knew he didn’t like her tonsils.
She looked back at the clock. When Lonesome Dove ended, it would be daylight. No reason to be afraid. Yup, tomorrow morning, she’d send Jason Dodd off with a big “Thank you” and a fond farewell. Tomorrow, she’d be fine.
She looked back at him. “I appreciate what you’re doing. But after the movie, you should go.”
Jason winked in response, but he didn’t agree to anything, especially the leaving part. Thirty minutes later, Sue was out like a blown bulb. Her cheek rested against his arm, her mouth sagging open. Her breathing sounded heavy—not quite snoring, but serious rattling, as if her sinuses were still clogged. Not that they should be clogged. He’d never seen so much fluid come out of a woman. He smiled, recalling the look on her face when she’d seen his shirt.
Popping another piece of candy into his mouth, he watched her take even breaths and recalled another look on her face, the look when she’d thought he was about to leave. Sue Finley needed him. He could no more have left Sue than he could have left Maggie fourteen years ago.
Leaning his head back, he wasn’t certain why that memory surged forward, but it did. He’d heard shouting as he let himself in the front door. Maggie sat in a ball in the corner of her kitchen, her eyes wet and swollen, her lip bleeding.
Jason had intended to walk into the house that night—two hours after the curfew Maggie had set for him, the curfew he never kept—grab his things, and leave for good. At sixteen, he figured the foster system was as tired of him as he was it. But one look at Maggie that night and everything changed. Maggie needed him.
Sue’s gray cat moved to his lap, ending his reverie. He wasn’t a cat person, but damn if cats didn’t realize that. The animal looked up at him, then back at Sue. Jason ran his hand over the feline’s back and followed the cat’s gaze.
“Pretty, isn’t she?” he asked. Swallowing a wave of desire, he told himself there was nothing sexy about a woman wearing loose, penguin-printed pajamas buttoned up to her neck—a woman with a stopped-up nose. But tell that to the hardness growing between his legs.
Divorced, Desperate And Dating Page 6