Threat of Danger

by Dana Marton

  All these years, he’d thought her forgiveness was all he wanted.

  He’d been stupid.

  He wanted this. Jess. And he knew in that moment that he was going to do whatever it took to get her and keep her. Eliot couldn’t have her, no matter how handsome he was, or how much they had in common, or how hot women thought it was that the guy was some grandmaster of stunts.

  Derek wasn’t going to let Eliot have Jess. He didn’t care if the guy jumped out of a burning helicopter, tied hand and foot, with a ticking bomb in his backpack, and got an Oscar nomination in every single category for the performance.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Thursday

  JESS BEGAN THURSDAY with a ten-mile run: five miles into Taylorville and five miles back. Pam went with her. The sun was out, minimal traffic on the road, the air fresh in a way people in LA couldn’t even imagine.

  “Are we there yet?” Pam asked, groaning, then fell silent.

  They’d started out talking, then turned quieter and quieter as they picked up speed, each focused on their breathing.

  “Almost.” Jess’s brain was full of turmoil, pretty much a standard state of affairs since she’d come back. She needed to talk to Derek about yesterday’s kiss. She’d always thought if something like that ever happened again, the tide of past memories would rise and drown her. Instead, it had been a tide of need. And somehow that flood of desire, and how her body had simply surrendered, was even scarier.

  She’d trembled inside. She didn’t think he’d noticed, thank God.

  She’d tried to think that he was the man who’d witnessed her bloody torture, so what they were doing had to be all wrong, couldn’t be right. But instead, her heart had said he was the one who’d helped her off that water tower, he was the one who’d freed her and carried her away from the camper that had been their prison for three endless days, and he was the one to come over and shovel the snow off the roof for her mother and Zelda in her absence.

  No. She couldn’t think that. She couldn’t, or she would fall for him all over again.

  She needed to tell him that the kiss had been a mistake, and this wasn’t what she wanted. She hadn’t come home for this. He needed to respect her boundaries.

  So . . . she needed to work up the courage to talk with Derek. Not that she had concerns about him, that he’d somehow be a jerk about it. He wasn’t like that. She was concerned that she would cave and ask him to kiss her again. She needed to put all her walls firmly in place. Maybe dig a moat around her heart.

  OK, not a moat. He was a SEAL. Water wouldn’t stop him.

  Dammit.

  “I can’t believe Eliot left so fast.” Pam gasped for oxygen. “I barely got to see him. You’re so lucky. There are so many hot men in Hollywood. Here . . .” She stopped, either trailing off into a meaningful silence or no longer able to breathe.

  “How bad can it be?” Jess glanced at Pam to make sure she was OK. “Look at all those sugar workers and lumberjacks. Have you seen those muscles?”

  “Saw them. Wept over them. Everyone’s married.” Pam grunted as they began the slight incline to the Taylor farm. “You wanna know how bad it is?” Gasp. “I joined the Versquatchers.”

  Jess laughed. “It can’t be that bad.”

  Pam shot her a dark look while gasping some more. “It’s the only place with single men left.”

  “If Chuck wasn’t president, I’d say there’s a reason for that.” Jess slowed. “But I feel like I owe him allegiance. I shouldn’t bad-mouth his club.”

  “Chuck’s a gem.” Gasp. “If he wasn’t mad about Zelda . . .”

  Jess swallowed a grin. “I see you did consider everything.”

  “I had the time.” Gasp. “Loooong Vermont winters.” Gasp. “Remember?”

  Jess tried. Back in the day, she’d spent her winters daydreaming about Derek, and riding with him to school and back. Fall, winter, and spring flew by way too fast. Summers, now those were endless. She’d barely seen him during summers. He’d usually been off at some insufferable rugby camp.

  “You have to come and visit me in LA,” she said to Pam.

  Pam threw her hands into the air and mouthed, Hallelujah. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  She slowed even further and gulped air. “Hey, do we have to kill ourselves today?” She gulped some more oxygen. “We’re down to the last mile.” She took a moment to shoot Jess a thoroughly reproachful look. “I’m too young to cough up a lung.” More breathing. “Someday I might need it.” A pause for effect. “You know, like for screaming during wild sex.”

  Jess cut back to a walk. “Sorry. Habit.”

  “Sure.” Pam wiped her face with the back of her hand in what looked like a careless move, but, miraculously, she didn’t smudge any of her makeup. “Brag about regularly running like a race hound. Go ahead.”

  “You should come to a training with Eliot when you visit. You could meet some of the guys on the team.”

  “Yeah. No, thanks.” Pam grunted. “I’m not at my most attractive when I’m swimming in sweat and gasping for air.” She gestured at Jess with faint accusation in her eyes. “Not all of us can run ten miles and look like a movie star the whole time.”

  As a long-ago memory bubbled up in her mind, Jess smiled. “First time Eliot made me run ten miles, I threw up on his shoes at the end.”

  “Yuck. Upchuck Charlie.” But Pam was grinning at last. “Eliot should totally throw you over for me.” She sighed. “I can absolutely guarantee that I’ve never in the past and will never in the future throw up on anyone from too much exercise.”

  “You do yoga.”

  “It’s a slow sport, in case you haven’t noticed.” Pam caught her breath now that they were walking. “And you do half of it lying down. I mean, that’s exercise I can do. I’m great flat on my back. No pun intended. But you can totally tell Eliot that.”

  Jess snorted a laugh.

  “I mean,” Pam added, “if you’re not into him that way. I got the vibe that things were cooling off. Especially toward the end.”

  “We’re friends.” Jess definitely didn’t want to lose that. “But I don’t think we’ll ever be more. There was a moment, and the moment passed without either of us grabbing it. I think he’s OK with that. He had some hang-ups about the two of us working together to start with. He came after me. The chance was there. It didn’t work. When I fly back to LA, things will be like they were before. He’s not the kind of guy who’d make it awkward.”

  As they walked around the bend, the farmhouse came into view.

  “Do you know when your mom is coming home?” Pam asked. “And, please, do say hi to her for me when you see her later.”

  “Homecoming . . . not anytime soon. Two months, at least. Physical therapy takes forever.” Jess glanced at her friend. “Did you know she has something going with Principal Crane?”

  Pam stopped dead in her tracks, her hands moving to her hips. Her eyes flared. “Shut the front door.”

  “He visits her every day.”

  “Ooh, that’s creepy.” Pam scrunched her nose. “He was our high school principal. It’s like . . . incestuous.” She let out a horrified groan, and her eyes grew even wider. “What if he tells her all the shit we did? And then Rose will tell my mother!” She shuddered. “Is twenty-eight too old to be grounded?”

  But then, before Jess could respond, Pam brightened. “Never mind. I know a secret about him.” A wicked smile bloomed on her face. “I can totally blackmail him into silence.”

  She began running again, as if the thought of having dirt on the man filled her with energy.

  Jess jogged next to her. “What secret?”

  Pam hesitated. “It’s a semi-secret, technically. I mean some people know, but it’s not common knowledge.”

  Jess bumped her with a hip. “Quit the teasing.”

  Pam stopped to give the moment weight. She cleared her throat. “Principal Crane is a low-key member of the Taylorville Sasquatch Club.”

&
nbsp; Jess gaped. “He’s a Versquatcher?”

  She couldn’t have been more surprised if the man turned out to be a part-time pole dancer at the county’s only strip joint down by the state highway. Bad thought. Yuck. Think of something else. Quick!

  “Are you sure?” she rushed to say. Then, when she thought about it for a moment, asked, “Why is it secret?”

  “He doesn’t want the parents to think that he’s kooky.”

  They began walking again.

  Jess shook her head. “Maybe now that he’s retiring, he’ll come out of the sasquatch closet.”

  Pam shrugged. “I don’t exactly advertise my membership at work either.”

  “You’re only in the club for the cute guys.”

  “Single guys,” Pam corrected in a tragic tone. “Looks are on the wish list.”

  What about Derek? He’s single. And hot. Jess thought the words, but for some reason she couldn’t say them.

  She scanned the farm and tried hard to come up with another excuse to avoid the house and, along with it, Derek. Because, while she needed to talk to him about that kiss—to make sure it didn’t happen again—she really didn’t want to. The day before, she’d gone into Burlington after lunch, visited her mother, talked with the doctors, then caught a couple of action thrillers to analyze the competition. The stunts had been good. She had to give credit where credit was due. She always tried to find tricks she could learn: a better angle during a jump for the cameras, whether a certain move was better performed slower or faster.

  She had to keep her brain busy so she wouldn’t keep analyzing Derek’s kiss. Like what did he mean by it? What did it mean to him?

  Probably nothing.

  Women obsessed about looks and kisses and touches. Men didn’t. Derek wouldn’t, so Jess shouldn’t either. She didn’t even tell Pam. Which seriously broke the girlfriend code, but . . . it wasn’t as if the kissing was going to repeated.

  A kiss like that . . . could simply not happen again. Jess was definitely going to tell Derek the next time she saw him. Which came sooner rather than later. Too soon, in fact, considering the circumstances.

  Jess and Pam were turning down the long driveway when they spotted the ambulance that the house had blocked earlier. The vehicle passed them, without slowing, when they were halfway to the house, the driver hitting the siren as soon as he pulled out onto the road.

  “You think someone burned themselves at the vats?” Pam gasped.

  “I hope it’s not too bad,” Jess said as they began to run faster.

  Half a dozen workers stood by the outbuildings, talking all at once. Jess caught sight of Derek jumping into his white pickup truck. Before she reached close enough to ask anyone what was going on, he pulled up next to her and reached over to shove the passenger-side door open. “Chuck collapsed. They think it might be a heart attack.”

  “I’m going to the hospital,” Jess told Pam, her heart lurching into a race.

  “Want me to come with you?”

  “You need to go to work. Nothing you could do at the hospital anyway. I’ll call you when I find out what’s going on.”

  “If you need me, I can be in Burlington before you know it.”

  As Pam stepped back, Jess jumped up into Derek’s pickup, sweaty from the run, her heart speeding up faster from the news than it had from running ten miles. Oh God. Chuck! “Where’s Zelda?”

  Derek stepped on the gas, his mouth a grim line. “In the back of the ambulance.”

  “Kaylee?”

  “I’m going to pick her up at school right now.” He sounded calm and in charge, and she was glad for it. “I already called the school office. I told them we had a family emergency. I didn’t want Kaylee to find out what happened without us being there for her. She should be waiting for us in the lobby.”

  She was. Derek ran in to sign her out. Chuck had him on the family list. Thank God for Chuck thinking ahead.

  Jess could see the moment Derek told Kaylee the news, putting his arms around the girl’s skinny shoulders. As Kaylee’s face crumpled, Jess jumped out of the pickup and went to give the girl a hug. When, a minute or two later, they finally piled into the cab, Kaylee sitting in the middle between Derek and Jess, Jess kept hold of the girl’s hand.

  “He’ll be fine,” she said as Derek pulled out of the parking lot. “He’s a tough customer.”

  Kaylee stared, wide-eyed with shock. “People have heart attacks all the time, right? Then they recover.”

  “You bet. No way he’s not coming home to finish sugaring. He couldn’t stand to miss it.”

  Kaylee wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her shirt. “He wouldn’t. He even talks about the syrup in his sleep.” She sniffed. “What happened?”

  “He collapsed,” Derek said, his tone gentle. “A couple of workers were right there. They thought he tripped. He didn’t get up. He was clutching his chest. One guy ran for the house, the other one called 911 on his cell.”

  Fat tears rolled down Kaylee’s face. “Are you sure he’s going to be OK?”

  “He was already better when they put him in the ambulance. He was talking. He was grumbling at us. Didn’t want anyone making a fuss.”

  “UVM Medical Center is the best anyone can hope for,” Jess said. “They’ll patch him up. He won’t be alone there. He’ll be visiting with my mom. Zelda will camp out. The worst that can happen is those two women will cheat him at poker.”

  A watery smile flashed onto Kaylee’s face, then disappeared. “I’m scared.”

  “I know.” Jess put an arm around her and squeezed. “You’ll stay at the house with me for as long as he’s at the hospital, all right?”

  “Can’t I camp out at the hospital too?” Kaylee mumbled into Jess’s shoulder.

  “We’ll see. He’ll probably tell you to go to school. You know how he is.”

  Chuck, a high school dropout, was a firm believer in education. He tried to make up for his misspent youth by listening to NPR every chance he got. Even back when Jess had been in high school, if she needed help with a school paper on a subject, she’d go to Chuck. And, invariably, he’d say, Oh, they were just talking about that on the radio the other day. He might have been uneducated, but he wasn’t ignorant. And he had great plans for his granddaughter’s future.

  Kaylee groaned at the mention of school. “He’ll probably make me go back to my afternoon classes.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” Derek said. “You definitely deserve a free pass today. He owes you for giving us all a scare.”

  He focused on the road, driving fast but safely, Jess noticed for the first time. He must have had some type of defensive-driving training during his spec-ops days. He would have made a good stunt driver.

  On the way into the hospital, Jess took Kaylee’s hand again. Derek, on the girl’s other side, took the other hand. They walked like that, linked, ready to face together whatever news waited for them.

  Jess didn’t even let Kaylee go while she texted Zelda to see where they needed to go. Zelda texted right back. They found her outside Surgery.

  She was dabbing at her eyes as she sat in a white plastic chair. Her normally pristine hair tumbled all out of order, her laughing eyes as bleak as Jess had ever seen them. Her voice was weak with worry. “Heart attack. They wheeled him right in.”

  Only one other family was waiting outside the double doors, some distance away, isolated in their own world of worry.

  Kaylee collapsed into Zelda’s arms. Zelda had always been her de facto grandmother. Jess’s heart twisted as the two cried together.

  Derek tugged Jess into his arms, and she didn’t even attempt to pull away. Chuck had been around for as long as she could remember. Chuck helped out her father with all the various jobs needed on the farm. He was like a beloved uncle to Jess.

  God, if anything happened to him . . .

  Why hadn’t she come back sooner? Staying away this long had been a mistake. The thought hit her with the force of a speeding car. Except, with a speed
ing car, she knew how to roll off the hood. But there was no escaping her guilt.

  She peeked over Derek’s shoulder. Kaylee had been mostly calm in the truck, but now she cried with the true panic of a child whose world was falling apart. Zelda’s face reflected shock and guilt. As if, like Jess, she felt guilty for the time wasted.

  Their eyes met. Jess hoped hers said, It’s not too late.

  “He’s going to pull through,” she promised.

  Zelda nodded.

  Kaylee gave a heaving sob.

  Jess pulled away from Derek at last, only to put her hand on the girl’s trembling shoulder.

  Derek looked like he wanted to scoop them all up into his arms. But he stayed where he was, his lips flat with frustration that he couldn’t be of more help. “Anybody want a drink?”

  Jess said, “A bottle of water, please?”

  “Whiskey. Neat,” came from Zelda.

  “Me too,” came from Kaylee.

  “Three bottles of water, coming up.” Derek’s boots echoed on the white tile of the hallway as he strode away.

  “Chuck is only sixty-five,” Zelda said as if to reassure herself, or maybe all of them. “He’s so young. He’ll pull through.”

  Jess sank into the chair next to her and laid her head on her shoulder, threading her arm through Zelda’s. Kaylee draped Zelda on the other side.

  “Let’s pray,” Zelda said from the middle, swallowed in hugs, and they linked hands.

  In ten minutes or so, Derek returned with four water bottles. He stayed with them, standing a little to the side, as if standing guard.

  An hour passed before a nurse—a slim young woman—came out with an update. She knew they needed reassurance and wore an encouraging smile as she walked toward the small group. “The surgeon is still working on him. He’s doing well.”

  They threw a million questions at her, but she told them, with all possible kindness, that they had to wait for the doctor for more information.

  Another hour passed. Jess texted Pam with an update. Derek brought them snacks, but nobody could eat. He went back and brought a round of coffee. Everybody took that, even Zelda.