Tender Absolution

by Lisa Jackson

  Randy was her son. His nephew. He felt a jab of guilt. “Sure. Anytime.”

  “You mean it?”

  “Give me a call.” He reached into his wallet and drew out a business card. “I’d like to see Kevin’s boy.”

  For a second he thought she might cry. Her brown eyes glistened and she cleared her throat before taking his order and moving on to wait on the next booth.

  Tracy had never married, though, according to Nadine she’d dated several men seriously. She’d spent the past ten years taking care of her boy and trying to better herself. She was pretty, one of those kind of women who seemed to get more good-looking as the years passed.

  She returned to Ben’s table, talked with him, laughing and joking, smiling a little more than she did with the other patrons as she served him a ham sandwich, potato salad and a crisp dill pickle.

  “Don’t make yourself scarce,” she said when he’d taken the final swallow from a coffee cup she seemed determined to keep filled.

  “I won’t.” He left her a decent tip and waved as he walked out the door. A weak winter sun was trying to break through the clouds and the puddles of water, left over from the rain, shimmered in the pale light. He climbed into his pickup and drove to the veterinary clinic where he was told that the shepherd, though dehydrated and suffering from malnutrition, was on the mend. The hole in his belly was probably compliments of a fight with another dog or a wild animal and though the beast had lost a lot of blood, he would survive.

  “I’ve called around,” Dr. Vance said as he rubbed the lenses of his glasses with the tail of his lab coat. “None of the shelters or other vets have any anxious owners looking for their pets. I even checked with the police department. He’s got a collar, but no license, so there’s no way of knowin’ where he comes from.” He patted the groggy animal on the head. “But my guess is that the dog is a purebred and someone’s taken care of him. He’s been neutered and had his teeth cleaned within the last year, and look at this—” he showed him the dog’s feet

  “—his toenails have been clipped, fairly recently, so I don’t think there’s a worry of rabies, though I’d inoculate him.”

  “If I decide to keep him.”

  The round vet smiled, showing off a gold tooth that winked in the fluorescent lights dangling from the ceiling. “You’ve got yourself a hefty bill here for a dog you’re gonna turn loose on the streets.” Again he patted the shepherd and the dog yawned. “Besides, every bachelor needs a dog. Someone to come home and talk to. Believe me, a dog’s better than a wife. This here shepherd won’t talk back.”

  “I heard that,” Lorna, the doctor’s wife and assistant, called from the back room.

  “Listenin’ in again?” he yelled back at her.

  “Hard not to overhear you griping.”

  Dr. Vance rolled his eyes and mouthed, “Women!” as if that said it all.

  Ben agreed to have the dog vaccinated, then paid his bill. It took most of his patience not to be offended when the shepherd growled at him. “Okay, Attila,” he said, leading the animal outside and to his truck, “if you so much as snarl at me while I’m driving, I’m letting you off right then and there. You’re history.” The dog snorted as Ben helped him onto the sagging bench seat, but he didn’t bare his teeth, nor did he try to bite, which Ben decided, was an improvement over the day Ben had first found him.

  “Just for the record,” he said, as if the beast could understand him, “I don’t want a dog.”

  Settling behind the steering wheel, Ben thought of Dr. Vance’s words of wisdom about marriage. Vance was probably kidding; he’d been married forever.

  Ben had already decided he needed a wife—but not Carlie Surrett. Yet, just at the thought of her clear blue eyes, lustrous black hair and intelligent smile, his gut tightened.

  He wanted her. It was that simple. And though he could deny it to himself a thousand times, he had to admit the truth. “Damn it all,” he muttered, slapping on the radio. The dog let out a low growl of disapproval, which Ben ignored.

  His house, a rental, was located on the outskirts of town. Once inside, he offered the dog food and water, then left him on a blanket in the laundry room. He had to meet some of the men who were going to clean the debris from Nadine’s lot, then he had to do a little work over at the Hunter Victorian. He’d figure out what to do about the dog a little later.

  As for Carlie—God only knew what he’d do about her.

  * * *

  CARLIE WAS BONE weary. The past couple of nights she’d spent hours at the hospital with her father or talking with the doctors who attended him. Though Weldon Surrett had suffered a mild stroke, he would recover. His speech had already improved and he had partial use of his left hand and arm. He was frustrated and cranky, but if he changed his lifestyle, gave up high-cholesterol food, avoided cigarettes and kept active, the prognosis was encouraging.

  However, he was stuck with months of physical therapy. He would eventually be released from the hospital, but he wouldn’t be able to work at any kind of strenuous labor for a long, long while.

  He was too old to retrain for a desk job, and even if he were a younger man, he would never be happy cooped up inside, shuffling papers, filing and working with figures.

  It looked as if he would have to retire early, as Thomas Fitzpatrick had suggested, and hope that whatever savings he and his wife had accumulated over the years would be enough to get them through. Thelma would still work of course, and Carlie intended to help out, though her father had been adamantly against the suggestion. Eventually, he’d collect Social Security, but those checks were still a few years away.

  “We’ll manage,” he’d said from his hospital bed.

  “But I can help—”

  “This is my problem, Carlie, and I’ll handle it. Now don’t you say a word to your mother or go getting her upset. We’ve made it through rough times before, we can do it again.”

  Reluctantly Carlie had dropped the argument when she’d seen the determined set of his jaw. Any further discussion would only have made him angrier and more upset and might have brought on another attack.

  Now her stomach grumbled at her as she walked through the foyer to her apartment and noticed that the baseboards had been stripped from the walls. Mrs. Hunter, Carlie’s landlady, had told her that she was going to renovate the old place in hopes of selling out. She’d even approached Carlie about buying the old Victorian house on the hill.

  At the time, Carlie hadn’t been sure she wanted to stay in Gold Creek; now, with her father ill, she’d decided to stay, at least for a while. She’d seen a lot of the world and was surprised at the feeling of coming home she’d experienced upon returning to this cozy little town, a town she’d once left without a backward glance.

  “Well, hello there!” Mrs. Hunter opened the door to her apartment to walk into the vestibule. She was dressed in a raincoat and carried a floral umbrella of purple and pink. “I thought you were my ride down to the center,” she said, peering out one of the tall leaded-glass windows that flanked the front door. “Smorgasbord tonight, you know.”

  “You’ll have a good time.”

  “I hope so. Last time the food was overcooked, you know, tasted like shoe leather, but the company’s usually good. Let’s just hope Leo Phelps doesn’t drag out his harmonica. Why they let him play after dinner, when everyone else wants to get on with cards or bingo, I’ll never know.” She pulled a plastic bonnet from her behemoth of a bag and spread it over her newly permed gray curls. “Oh, here they are now. By the way, the workmen are still here, probably just finishing up, so if you run across a handsome man in your room…” She let the sentence trail off and laughed.

  “I’ll know what to do,” Carlie teased as Mrs. Hunter walked onto the porch and closed the door behind her.

  Still smiling to herself, Carlie gathered her mail
and started up the stairs. She lived on the third floor, the “crow’s nest” Mrs. Hunter called it, and Carlie had come to love her apartment. The turret, where she kept her desk, had nearly a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view, and the old wooden floors, and hand-carved window frames held a charm that she’d found lacking in more modern apartments. Running her fingers along the time-worn rail, she hiked her way up the steep stairs and told herself that the climb would keep her in shape. There were drawbacks to living here—the heating and cooling systems were ancient, the windows rattled and she’d seen more than one mouse sharing her living quarters, but she still loved her tiny rooms tucked high in the eaves of the old house.

  On the landing, she stepped over an electrical cord strung across the hall before it snaked through her front door. “Hello?” she called, not wanting to scare the workman as she entered.

  Ben stood near one of the windows, his hip thrown out, his arms crossed over his chest.

  Her heart missed a beat and she stopped dead in her tracks.

  A tool belt was slung low over his hips and the sleeves of his work shirt were rolled over his forearms displaying tanned skin dusted with dark hair.

  “Well, Carlie,” he said with a brazen smile that touched a dark corner of her heart. “I wondered when you’d show up.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CARLIE COULDN’T BELIEVE her eyes. Ben? Ben was the contractor—the workman who was going to be walking in and out of the house, with his own set of keys, his own set of rules and his own damned swagger? She felt suddenly violated and insecure. The fact that he was in her apartment, her private sanctuary, made her blood boil. After the way he’d treated her, he was the last person she wanted prowling about her home. Let the windows rattle. Let the faucet drip. Let the damned roof leak, but for God’s sake, never let Ben Powell in here. “What’re you doing here?” she demanded as he placed a screwdriver to her window frame and played with the pulleys in the old casing.

  “What does it look like?”

  She ground her teeth in frustration. “I know about the work that has to be done, I just don’t understand why you had to do it!”

  “I got the job.” He grimaced a little as the rope slid between his fingers and the window dropped suddenly. With a grunt, he shoved the old pane up again and tightened the screw.

  “But you’re not living here, are you?” she asked, her world suddenly tilting as she remembered the empty studio apartment on the first floor that Mrs. Hunter had wanted to rent. Mrs. Hunter had mentioned that she might trade the rent for work around the house…. Oh, no! He couldn’t live here—no way, no how! This small set of rooms was her private place, her shelter! She wasn’t going to share it with the one man who had the ability to wound her.

  “I’d be moving in tomorrow if your landlady had her way.” He shoved his screwdriver back into his tool belt and his eyes glinted a bit. “However, so far I’ve resisted.”

  “She can be pretty persuasive.” Carlie tossed her purse on the couch.

  “Can she?” he asked, one corner of his mouth lifting skeptically.

  “Very.”

  “I guess I’d better avoid her.”

  “Like you do with all women,” she challenged, and his head jerked up, his smile fading quickly away.

  “Only the ones that I think will be trouble.” He reached into his open toolbox, withdrew a plane and turned back to the sill, as if he planned to fix the damned window this very night.

  “And that doesn’t take in the entire female population?” Carlie was spoiling for a fight and she couldn’t control her tongue. It had been a long week, worrying about her parents, thinking about Ben, wishing she could just start over.

  “Not quite.” He glared pointedly at her and she blushed. He seemed so much more real today. The last time she’d seen him at Nadine’s wedding, he’d worn his military uniform and he’d seemed untouchable and remote. Distant. A soldier on a three-day pass. But today, dressed in faded jeans with worn knees and thin fabric over his buttocks, a tool belt and work shirt with the sleeves rolled over his forearms, he was decidedly more human and, therefore, more dangerous.

  “You obviously don’t want me here,” he said as he shaved off some of the casing. Sawdust and wood curls fell to the floor.

  “You got that right.”

  “Look, it’s just a job, okay?” He scowled, as if he felt uncomfortable.

  “A job in my house.”

  “Live with it, lady.” He uncinched his belt and it fell to the floor with a thud that echoed in her heart. She averted her eyes for a second; she couldn’t even stand to watch him remove one article of clothing without thinking back to a time when she would have liked nothing more than to lie naked with him in a field of summer wildflowers.

  But she couldn’t afford to feel this way; the strain on her already stretched emotions would be too much. She couldn’t be around him until they’d dealt with the past, cleared the air and started fresh. She wasn’t in the mood to pick up the old pieces of her life and start fitting them together, but she didn’t have much of a choice. Not if she was being forced to see Ben on a daily basis.

  “This job going to take long?”

  “Are you asking if I’m gonna be underfoot for the next couple of weeks?” He frowned, then ran his fingers over the newly smoothed wood. “That’s a distinct possibility.”

  “I’m not crazy about the idea.”

  “Neither am I.” He glanced up at her, and when their gazes touched, the breath seemed knocked from her throat. Damn the man, he had no right to look so sexy. “Couldn’t one of your men—”

  “So far I am my men.” He set the plane back in the toolbox. “Does it bother you so much—that I’m here in your apartment?”

  “It makes me uncomfortable.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” She rested one hip against the back of the couch. “I guess there’re about a million reasons,” she admitted.

  “Name one.”

  “You’re an arrogant bastard.”

  He grinned. “Name two.”

  “You’ve tried your best to do nothing but insult me from the minute you stepped into town.” Crossing her arms over her chest, she added, “I can read all sorts of accusations in your eyes, Ben, but I don’t understand them.”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything.”

  “Like hell! Every time we’re together you insinuate that I’m some kind of…of criminal or something—that I did something terrible and wrong and God only knows what else.” She took in a long breath and asked the question that had haunted her for so many years. “Just what was it I did to hurt you so badly?”

  “You didn’t hurt me.”

  “I damned well did something. You took off out of town like a dog with his tail tucked between his legs.”

  “My brother was dead, damn it!” He kicked the tool belt across the floor, sending it crashing into an ottoman. “Dead! And you…you…”

  “I what?” she demanded, her lungs constricting, old memories burning through her mind.

  “You didn’t care.”

  “Oh, Ben—”

  He held up a hand, to cut off further conversation. “Forget it, Carlie. Let’s just start back at square one. You didn’t do anything. Okay? Not a damned thing!” But a tic jumped near his left eye and the muscles in the back of his neck grew rigid.

  “Wrong.” She shook her head and thought hard, rolling back the years, allowing the blinding pain of the past to surface. For over a decade she’d kept it bottled up, tucked away in a dark corner of her mind, collecting cobwebs, but now she let all of her suspicions surface. “It was because of Kevin,” she said quietly, finally saying the words that she’d denied so long. “Somehow you blame me for what happened to him.”

  Ben didn’t say a word, just stared at her as if she wer
e Eve in the Garden of Eden, offering him forbidden fruit, trying to open his eyes to things better left unseen, forcing him to face the truth.

  Shoving away from the couch, she picked up his heavy belt and walked the short distance that separated them, her footsteps muffled on the worn Oriental carpet. He never stopped staring at her and she only quit moving when the toe of her shoe nudged the tip of his worn sneakers. She dropped the belt at his feet. “You’ve blamed me, though I don’t know why. There was nothing I could do. Nothing either of us could do. We couldn’t have stopped Kevin from driving into that garage and letting the engine run.”

  The air grew thick with cold. Rain pelted the windows and dripped down the sill into the house. Ben’s eyes narrowed a fraction and a deep anguish shadowed his eyes.

  “Whether it was an accident or suicide, we weren’t to blame,” she said, wishing she could touch him and erase the pain that still lingered in his gaze.

  “You don’t know that.”

  Her heart ached for all the years they’d let the past keep them apart, for all the misunderstandings, the hatred and mistrust. “What could either of us have done?”

  “I could have been there for him. I knew he was having problems,” Ben said gruffly. His throat worked and he stared at her with a venom so intense, she shuddered.

  “Did you think he’d take his life?”

  “No.”

  “Neither did I.”

  Ben snorted. “But I suspected he was in love with you and I didn’t care. Nadine even warned me, but I still took you out, bragged about it, even told him I thought I might marry you,” Ben said. His face was filled with self-loathing.

  “Marry me?” she whispered, her heart aching.

  “I’d thought about it. He’d tried to talk me out of it, claimed that you weren’t the marrying type—too interested in seeing the world.” He slammed the window shut and the room seemed suddenly still.