Chill Factor

by Sandra Brown

  Scott was hardly on fire now. The effort he was putting into the free weight warm-up was uninspired. “None of those weights have the heft of that chip on your shoulder,” Wes remarked.

  Scott looked at him in the mirrored wall behind the bench but didn’t respond.

  “What’s the matter with you tonight?”

  Scott continued doing alternating biceps curls. “Nothing.”

  “Are you mad because I made you come here and work out instead of letting you go over to your friend Gary’s house?”

  “Gary’s a jerk.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  Scott propped the weights on his shoulders and began a set of squats. “Nothing’s the matter. Everything’s wonderful.”

  “Then why are you sulking like a four-year-old?”

  “Gee, Dad, I don’t know.” He returned the weights to the rack, keeping his gaze locked with Wes’s in the mirror. “Do you think it could be a mood swing because I’m being pumped full of steroids?”

  Wes grabbed him by the arm, spun him around, and roughly pushed him backward against the mirror. He thrust his finger into Scott’s face. “You smart-talk me like that again, and I’ll whip your ass.”

  Scott only laughed. “Like I’d care.”

  “When I got finished with you, you’d care. Believe me, you’d care.” Wes glared at him angrily, then flung his arms out to his sides. “I don’t get you, Scott. I don’t get your ingratitude. You think I want to give up my evening to be here spotting you while you work out? I’m doing all this for you.”

  “Who do you think you’re kidding?” Scott shouted back. “You’re doing it for you.”

  Wes knew from experience that Scott had inherited not only Dora’s supple musculature but also her tendency to become muleheaded when pushed too far. He felt like smacking his son for talking back to him. But he reined in his temper and kept his voice at a reasonable level.

  “You’re wrong, son. Okay, sure,” he said before Scott could interrupt, “I’ll admit that it does my ego good to know that you’re the strongest, the fastest, the best, but—”

  “But you don’t give a shit about me.”

  Wes was genuinely dismayed. “How can you say that after everything I’ve done for you?”

  “You didn’t do anything for me today, did you? When those FBI agents asked why Millicent and I broke up, I was the one in the hot seat, not you. I stuttered some stupid explanation while you sat there and didn’t say a single goddamn word.”

  Speaking softly, Wes said, “Would you have rather I told them the truth?” He saw a flicker of uncertainty in his son’s eyes and took advantage of it. “We’ve never talked about it. Would it have been a good idea for us to thrash through this for the first time in front of them? In front of your mother? Wouldn’t it have embarrassed you just a little for them to learn that your girlfriend preferred me to you?”

  “She didn’t.”

  Wes chuckled. “That’s not what she said. You were there. You saw. Did it look to you like she was having just a so-so time, or like she was so into it she was about to buck me off her?”

  He saw Scott’s hands ball into fists at his sides. His face was flushed, and not because of any exertion he’d put into his warm-up. He was enraged. His breaths were shallow and quick, as if he was on the verge of erupting.

  Wes wished he would. He would have liked nothing better than for Scott to lay into him and fight with all his might to win. It would be good for the boy to vent some spleen. He wanted to see him act like a man rather than the sniveling titmouse Dora would have preferred him to be.

  But to his vast disappointment, almost disgust, he saw tears welling in his son’s eyes.

  “You set me up to see you together,” Scott accused.

  Wes didn’t deny it. “It was time someone woke you up to the fact that the girl you’d become so ga-ga over was a slut.”

  “That’s not true. You . . . you . . .”

  “I dropped a few suggestive remarks, and she recognized them for the come-ons they were. This was no innocent virgin, Scott. I didn’t force her. Hell, I didn’t even have to try hard. She knew damn well what she was getting into when she came to my office that evening. Getting into her pants was as easy as one, two, three. Truth is, she wasn’t wearing pants, and she made sure I knew it.

  “If you would stop being mad at me long enough to think about it, you’d realize what that says about her. She’d been toying with the idea of having both the son and the father before I ever touched her.”

  “You’re disgusting.”

  “Me? I’m disgusting? Why am I the bad guy? She was the one who did it for the novelty, for the fun of it. I did it for you.”

  “That’s . . . that’s bullshit!” Scott sputtered. “You did it to show me you could.”

  Wes tried to lay his hand on Scott’s shoulder, but when Scott threw it off, he said angrily, “Look, if I had come to you for a father-to-son heart-to-heart, and had told you that your sweetheart was a whore, you wouldn’t have believed me, would you? Well? Would you? No. In order for you to believe it, you had to see it for yourself. I knew if you saw us together, that would be the end of it.”

  “Mission accomplished.” Scott sneered.

  “Goddamn right. You were well rid of her for a lot of reasons. I did you a favor.”

  “You fucked my girlfriend as a favor to me?”

  Wes sighed. “I can’t discuss it if you’re going to twist everything I say.”

  “How many times?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t play dumb. You heard me. How many times were you with Millicent? Just that once on top of your desk? Or did I just happen to catch you at it, and now you’ve made up this swell story about doing me a favor?”

  “Scott.”

  “How many times?”

  “Several, okay?” Wes shouted back. “I didn’t keep count. It doesn’t matter. You’re refusing to—”

  Scott reached for his sweat suit jacket and shoved his arms into the sleeves, then snatched up his overcoat and headed for the exit.

  “Get back here, Scott,” Wes ordered. “We’re not finished.”

  “Oh yeah, we are.”

  “Where are you going?”

  Scott kept walking and didn’t answer.

  “If this is your way of getting even—”

  Scott stopped in his tracks and turned. Looking Wes straight in the eye, he smiled. “I already got even. With both of you.”

  CHAPTER

  25

  WHEN TIERNEY SAID IT WAS TIME FOR THEM to go to bed, he meant it literally. Leaving her to sit in front of the fire, he got up, gathered all the blankets, and heaped them on the mattress.

  He caught her watching him curiously. “I’m not going to sleep on the sofa,” he stated definitively. “I don’t fit on it. I’m battered and beat up, and I need what creature comfort I can get. You can have an extra blanket to tuck around you so there’ll be no chance of us touching, even accidentally.”

  “All right.”

  She got up and went to the bathroom. He didn’t have to caution her to hurry; it was frigid in those rooms.

  When she returned, he was piling fresh logs onto the fire. “You lie here, nearer the hearth.” She moved to where he indicated, but she didn’t lie down until he had disappeared into the bedroom. At his suggestion, she tucked a blanket around herself.

  He was back in a few minutes. She saw him hesitate and glance down at the wet legs of his jeans. She said, “Do you want to take them off?”

  “Yes, but I won’t.” He lay down on top of the blanket with which she’d covered herself and pulled the others over them both. He groaned as he settled himself onto the mattress.

  “Are you hurting?”

  “Only when I breathe. You? Are you comfortable?”

  “Fine.”

  “You haven’t coughed in over an hour.”

  “I’m much better.”

  “Sounds like it. You’re barely wheezing.”r />
  “Sometimes it’s worse at night. I hope it doesn’t keep you awake.”

  “Same goes for my snoring. If the fire burns down, just nudge me awake. I’ll get up and add more wood.”

  “Okay.”

  On their backs, nowhere close to touching, they stared at the ceiling. The firelight cast dancing shadows across the exposed beams. Ordinarily the interplay of light and darkness would have been hypnotic and sleep inducing. But she lay rigid and tense, light-years away from sleepy.

  “Do you think they’ll come tomorrow?” She wasn’t sure who she was referring to by “they.” Dutch and a local rescue team, or the FBI. Both perhaps.

  “I figure someone will set out to try,” he replied. “That is, if the forecast holds and the snowfall stops.”

  “And if Dutch got my first voice mail message. He may think I’ve been safely back in Atlanta all this time.”

  “Maybe.”

  “If he didn’t get that voice mail, he doesn’t even know you’re here with me.”

  “No.”

  But intuitively Lilly felt that Dutch did know, and the strain in Tierney’s voice indicated he thought so too. “If the weather clears,” she said, “we’ll have cell phone service again.”

  “When we do, who will you call, Lilly? The FBI or Dutch?”

  “I haven’t thought about it.”

  “You’ll call Dutch.”

  They were quiet for a moment, listening to the pop of the burning logs, then, turning onto her side to face the fireplace and stacking her hands beneath her cheek, she said, “Good night, Tierney.”

  “Good night.”

  There would be no nudging him awake because he didn’t fall asleep. She knew this because she didn’t fall asleep either. There were several reasons for her insomnia. The long nap that afternoon. The firelight flickering on her closed eyelids. The uncomfortable bulkiness of her clothes and the weight of the blankets. The recollections of her terror during those last minutes of the asthma attack.

  But the primary reason for her wakefulness was Tierney, lying an arm’s length away. After telling her good night, he hadn’t uttered a sound, he hadn’t moved, and yet she knew that he was as alert and as aware of her nearness as she was of his.

  When he turned onto his side to face the fire, as she was doing, she lay in agonizing expectation of a touch that never came. Impossibly, though neither moved a muscle or made a sound, the tension between them wound tighter with each passing second.

  Easily an hour after they’d exchanged their awkward good nights, he spoke. He didn’t ask first in a whisper if she was asleep. Even though she was facing away from him, he knew she was still awake, just as she’d known he was. His soft, low voice came as no surprise. However, what he said staggered her.

  “He hit you, didn’t he? Dutch. He hit you.”

  She swallowed but remained otherwise motionless. “Where did you hear that?”

  “Nowhere. It’s just that I’ve observed him enough, it’s reasonable to assume. To some cops violence becomes commonplace. It starts to seem the normal solution to every problem. Especially to a man who’s emotionally fractured and drinking too much.”

  She said nothing.

  “And,” he added in an even lower pitch, “I don’t think you would have given up on your marriage for any lesser reason.”

  She’d never told anyone, not her friends and business associates who had recognized her emotional turmoil for what it was and urged her to confide in them, not even her grief counselor, to whom she had laid bare every other aspect of herself. It felt right to confide it to Tierney simply because he’d been the only person perceptive enough to figure it out.

  “It only happened once,” she said quietly. “He’d raised his fists before, as though he wanted to strike me. I warned him that if he ever did, our life together would be over. That’s what I told him. No, that’s what I promised him.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. Even now it was difficult to think back on that terrible night. “Either he didn’t listen, or he didn’t believe me, or he was too drunk to remember my warning. He came home very late. He was belligerent, defensive before I even accused him of anything. Spoiling for a fight.

  “Because I’d had a lengthy budget meeting that day, I was exhausted. Rather than engage in one of our famous rows, I tried to avoid him, but he wouldn’t let me. He wanted a fight and wasn’t going to be satisfied until he got one.

  “He cornered me in the bedroom. Literally backed me into a corner and wouldn’t let me go past him. He accused me of causing Amy’s death. It was my fault we’d lost our daughter, he said. Her brain tumor was God’s way of punishing me for going back to work after my pregnancy leave, rather than staying at home with her.”

  “That’s insane.”

  She gave a mirthless laugh. “That’s what I said. In those exact words. Dutch didn’t take it well. He hit me in the face with his fist, hard enough to force me into the wall. I banged my head against it so hard, it almost knocked me unconscious. I slumped to the floor and covered my head with my arms.

  “And all the while, I was thinking, This cannot be happening. Not to me. I, Lilly Martin, cannot be cowering in a corner of my own bedroom trying to protect myself from my husband.

  “This happens to people you read about in the newspaper, I thought. Poor or ignorant or otherwise disadvantaged people who grew up in violent homes and continue the cycle. My father never even paddled me, much less raised his hand to my mother. It would’ve been unthinkable.”

  She paused and took a breath. “Dutch came to his senses. Immediately, he began apologizing, weeping, justifying what he’d done. He blamed it on the pressure he was under at work and his heartache over Amy. I could have argued that I also was under pressure at work, that I had experienced a heartache as deep as his. But I knew further argument would be pointless. We were long past quarreling. And at that point, I was beyond forgiving.

  “Without a word, I pulled myself off the floor, left the house, and checked into a hotel for the night. I contacted a lawyer and filed for divorce the following day. For me, there was no going back.”

  “How bad did he hurt you?”

  “I was bruised, but not broken.”

  “Did you file charges?”

  “My attorney urged me to, but I opted against it. I just wanted out, Tierney. Dutch was sinking into despair as though he had an anvil strapped to his ankle. I didn’t want to be dragged down with him. A legal involvement would have postponed my getting free from him. Can you understand?”

  “Yes. I don’t agree. He belonged in jail. But I do understand why you decided against it.”

  “I told my staff I had the flu and sequestered myself in the hotel. I stayed until the bruises and swelling went away. When I checked out, it was a symbolic moment. As of then, my new life without Dutch Burton commenced.”

  “Not completely without.”

  It was a mumbled remark. She wasn’t sure she was supposed to hear it. In any case, she didn’t acknowledge it.

  After a brief silence he said, “I’m sorry it happened to you.”

  “I’m sorry, too, but more for Dutch than for me. I recovered. Dutch won’t. My bruises disappeared. His will remain on his soul forever. He’ll never be free of the guilt.”

  “Don’t expect me to feel sorry for the bastard. In fact I’d love to give him ten times over what he gave you.”

  “Please don’t. Not that you actually would.”

  “The hell I wouldn’t. I’d welcome the chance.”

  “Please, Tierney. Say you won’t.”

  After a short silence, he said softly, “Okay, I won’t. Anyway, after tomorrow, I won’t be in a position to challenge anybody, will I?”

  She didn’t reply to that. “One more thing?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t tell anyone about it.”

  “Why should I protect him?”

  “Not him, me. For my sake, don’t tell anyone. Please.”


  “All right.”

  “Promise?”

  “You asked me not to tell, Lilly. I won’t tell.”

  She believed that. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” A few moments lapsed, then he said, “Now sleep.”

  She settled herself more comfortably and pulled the blankets up to her chin. But her eyes refused to close. She watched the fire eat away at a log until a charred piece of it broke off and fell into the embers. She continued to stare at it. She watched it take on heat and begin to glow hotly, turning red as it smoldered; then suddenly it rekindled and burst into flame.

  She turned, bringing herself face-to-face with Tierney.

  His eyes were open and watching her.

  She whispered, “I don’t want to sleep.”

  • • •

  Scott depressed the doorbell out of habit before remembering that the electricity was off. He knocked hard several times and heard footsteps approaching. The door was pulled open. “Hello, Miss Ritt.”

  “Scott,” Marilee exclaimed, evidently surprised to see him there. “Did I forget a tutoring session?”

  “I came to see Mr. Ritt.”

  She glanced over her shoulder toward the kitchen, where Scott could see William seated at the candlelit dining table. “We’re just finishing our dinner.”

  “I can come back later.”

  “No, no, come in.” She moved aside and waved him in. He stamped snow off his boots before stepping into the tiled entryway. As she closed the door behind him, she looked toward the curb. Seeing no car, she said, “You walked over?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Who is it, Marilee?” William called from the kitchen.

  “Scott Hamer.”

  William came from the kitchen, his napkin still tucked into his collar, lying like a bib over his narrow chest. “Good Lord, Scott, what’s brought you out tonight of all nights? Is your mother having another migraine?”

  “No.” Scott darted a look toward Marilee, then said to William, “I need to talk to you in private.”

  William studied him for a moment, clearly as puzzled by the unannounced visit as his sister was. “Of course.” He motioned Scott toward the living room, where a fire was blazing in the neat, brick fireplace. “Please excuse us, Marilee.”