Wild Ride

by Nancy Warren

  He turned their bodies so he was leaning over her and the bedside lamplight fell on her face. “I think you are brave and amazing.” He kissed her nose. “Your eye’s almost completely healed now.”

  “Yes.” She didn’t want to talk about this. It was from another lifetime, so she tried to roll him back, but he was a solid man and when he decided he wasn’t budging, not much was going to move him.

  He traced the faded bruise with a gentle finger. “My first guess was that a drug dealer did this to you—.”

  “I told you, I fell,” but she didn’t look him in the eye when he said it.

  “I’m a pretty good law enforcement officer for a small town. I’ll never be one of those brilliant minds that get hunches and solve complex crimes in a second. I’m a little slower, methodical, and I do things by the book. Once I realized it wasn’t a stranger who did this to you, there was only one other possibility.”

  She shifted. “You’re heavy. Let me up.”

  “Did he ever hit you before?”

  “It was the goddamn door!” she yelled.

  “It was Eric!” he yelled right back.

  A sob broke from her throat and she turned her face. He let her go then and she rolled to her side.

  Tom rubbed her back, slow and gentle. “You have to stop covering for him.”

  “You don’t get it. You don’t know what he’s like. Eric told me he’d get me using again and force me into rehab. And he has the stuff to do it anytime he pleases.” Her voice was rising and her chest felt tight. “I can’t ever go back there. I don’t know if I could clean up a second time.”

  “My God. That’s evil.”

  She had to make Tom understand. “There’s something wrong with him. Something twisted. He can be so charming and sweet, but at his core I think he’s sick.”

  “Honey, I can help you, but you have to be willing to go on record—otherwise I can’t touch that bastard.”

  “I can’t take the risk. Please understand. I’m finally starting to feel like my life can be good again. He’d destroy it if I tried to get the police involved.”

  “But I’m—”

  “Please.”

  He kissed her. “In this bed I’m your lover, not a cop.”

  “And what does my lover think?”

  “That it’s time for lights out.”

  She fell asleep happier than she’d felt in years. Maybe, just maybe, her life was about to get better.

  She awoke with a smile on her face. It was early and Tom was still dead to the world.

  She was filled with energy and purpose, however. Today was the day she’d finish moving all her stuff out of the house she and Eric had shared and turn over her keys. It seemed a symbolic gesture, as well as a practical one. When Eric found out about her and Tom, he was not going to be happy. She didn’t want any of her stuff held hostage, even something as mundane as an old tube of lipstick.

  Then, once the house was sold, and the assets—such as they were—split, she’d be free of Eric. She had to believe that.

  She dressed quietly, then puttered around happily in Tom’s kitchen, feeding the dog and cat who already treated her like a well-loved servant, wondering if Tom liked a big breakfast. She shrugged and decided to get started on coffee. While that was brewing, she checked out his fridge. Pretty good for a single guy, but then Tom had been alone for enough years to have grown out of frozen dinners and takeout.

  There was fruit, fresh vegetables, eggs.

  She heard him go into the bathroom, whistling.

  Coffee was ready. She placed it, along with a pitcher of milk and his sugar pot, on the table.

  When she heard him rummaging around in the bedroom,and guessed he was dressing, she called out. “Hey, bring my bag in with you, will you?”

  “You leaving already?”

  “No. I need my artificial sweetener.”

  “That stuff will give you cancer.”

  “It keeps me thin. I’ll take the risk.”

  “Exercise will keep you thin.”

  “Just bring it.”

  “Sure,” he rumbled in a just-awakened voice. In her state of bliss she imagined hearing that voice every morning of her life. Imagined all the tiny things they’d get to know about each other.

  She was at the counter, chopping leeks to go in her omelet. She figured a single man who kept leeks in his fridge was going to take his fair share of kitchen duty, and being on the receiving end of his cooking probably wasn’t going to be a hardship.

  She felt him in the kitchen, even though she hadn’t heard him. He was soft-footed for a large man—she wondered if it was more cop training.

  She waited for him to kiss the back of her neck; the possibility seemed to shimmer. But after a minute, when his lips hadn’t fallen there, she wondered if maybe he wasn’t much of a morning neck-kisser. She could live with that.

  “Gillian,” he said, and the neck that had seconds ago quivered with anticipation, now prickled with foreboding. It was his cop voice.

  She put the knife down slowly and turned.

  “How would you explain this?” he asked, holding out a small baggie of white powder that wasn’t sugar substitute.

  Her gaze flew to his as despair filled her. This was it. The end of the line. She’d told him she was clean. He’d said he believed her.

  “You’re the detective,” she said, crossing her arms to keep the trembling from showing. “You figure it out.”

  “Gillian, I am asking you for an explanation.”

  “You’re not going to get one,” she said and walking to him, took the purse hanging off his other arm and turned on her heel and walked out of the kitchen.

  “Wait!” he yelled from behind her.

  His phone began to shrill in the sudden silence. “I’m on call. I have to take that. Don’t move.”

  She turned, crossed her arms under her breasts, and gave him her best tough-girl glare. “Are you going to arrest me?”

  “You’re pissing me off. Don’t move.”

  He picked up the phone. “Yeah.” His glance shifted from the wall to Gillian, standing in the doorway watching. “Yes, Bert. Uh-huh. Which judge? Yes, go on.”

  She turned and walked down the hall, pushed her feet into her shoes, and out the front door. She dug in her bag for her cell phone, disgusted to see her hand was shaking. Maybe she’d made a fool of herself again, but this time she wasn’t going to fall apart. She punched in the number from memory.

  “Hi, Gill,” Alex said when Gillian identified herself. “You must be psychic. I was going to call you.”

  Well, she couldn’t return the compliment about her cousin’s extrasensory powers. Alex in chitchat mode was obviously clueless about the fact that her cousin was walking up the rutted lane that led to the main road back to town center.

  “What’s up?” Gillian asked, mimicking Alex’s bright tone. The hell with it. She was tired of leaning on Alex. She’d walk into town. It wouldn’t kill her.

  “I wanted to show Duncan around the house where we grew up. Would that be okay?”

  “It’s half your house. You don’t have to ask.”

  “Well, with you staying in it, I figure you have squatter’s rights.”

  Gillian chuckled dutifully, but her stomach felt like she’d snacked on aluminum siding. Her rosy dreams of cooking breakfast and bowling into the sunset with Tom were up in smoke. This was where she’d ended up. A charity case. Squatting in her dead grandparents’ house because she didn’t have anywhere else to go. “I’ll get my own place as soon as I—”

  “Hey, don’t worry about it. There’s no hurry.”

  “Okay. I have to go. I have to clean the rest of my stuff out of our old house.”

  There was a small pause. “Do you want me to come help you?”

  “Thanks,” she said, feeling a little less alone. “But I’ll be fine.”

  And, she realized, she would.

  She heard the rumble of a male voice in the background. Alex wasn’
t alone.

  “I forgot—you called me. What did you want?”

  Well, not a ride, now she knew the sexy professor had stayed the night with her cousin. “So, Professor Sexy just dropped by for breakfast.”

  From Alex’s laugh, she knew she was blushing. On the spur of the moment, she said, “Let’s get together for dinner one day soon. There are some things I need to tell you.” It was time, as Tom had said, to stand up to trouble. For her, maybe that meant telling Alex about Eric, and trusting her to see the truth.

  “Yes. I’d like that.”

  Gillian smiled at the quick yes, though there was no one to see her but a crow staring at her greedily from a fence post, obviously hoping she was going to break out food and share. “Great,” she said. “I’ll see you later.”

  She put her cell phone back in her bag and started trudging. She had a long walk ahead of her.

  26

  The sound of a car motoring slowly behind her made Gillian grit her teeth.

  Sure enough, she recognized Tom’s dark green Jeep as it edged ahead of her. With a mechanical whir, the passenger-side window rolled down. She didn’t bother turning her head.

  “Get in the car.”

  She stuck her nose in the air and kept walking.

  “Gillian, will you please get in the car?”

  Hysterical barking made her turn her head and there was Lester, sandy red head stuck out the window, pink tongue hanging out, doing his best to encourage her. If she weren’t so mad she would have smiled. What kind of cop brought an overgrown mutt to an arrest? But she was mad. Angrier than she’d been in a long time. “No.”

  “Don’t make me get out the cuffs.”

  “I’m resisting arrest,” she told him. If he wanted to make her life more of a hell than it already was, he was going to have to work harder at it.

  She expected more yelling back and forth through the open car window, but she should have remembered his training. The vehicle’s nose jutted in front of her, about six feet from where she stood, blocking her path down the gravel shoulder. He cut the engine and was rounding the back of the SUV before she’d recovered her wits enough to start stalking to the other side of the road. She wasn’t going to run; she wouldn’t give

  him so much satisfaction. But she wasn’t going to stand here waiting for him to arrest her, either.

  He caught up to her before she made what would be the middle line if this road were important enough for middle-line paint. He spun her around and, to her surprise and shock, pulled her into his arms and kissed her fiercely. Her squeak of surprise was swallowed by his mouth, but this wasn’t a tender, sweet kiss like she was used to with him—it was full of burning anger.

  She had plenty of her own burning anger, however, and it didn’t manifest itself in kissing. She wanted to hurt him.

  Since she was trying very hard to cope with her emotions in a more mature way, she restrained the knee that was itching to thump him in the balls and contented herself with putting her palms on his shoulders and shoving.

  Tom was about seventeen times stronger than she was, but he let her go as she pushed away from him. With their faces a couple of feet apart, his green eyes still furious and his lips wet from the kiss he’d forced on her, she felt like weeping. Why couldn’t he be the man she wanted him to be?

  He crossed his arms, making him appear even tougher and more unapproachable. “Are you going to spend your whole life running away from me every time I make you mad? What kind of future is that?” he bellowed.

  Had she stumbled down the lane and into some alternate universe? “You said you’d believe me and you never—”

  “I did believe you.” His face was grim, the jaw close to cracking from the tension he was holding there. “I do believe you.”

  “But you said—”

  “I asked you to explain what a bag of cocaine was doing in your purse. I think you know.”

  She blinked. “You don’t think I bought coke for my own personal use?” She had to be absolutely certain about what she was hearing before the bird of hope lodged in her chest took flight.

  “I know you don’t do drugs anymore.” His voice gentled and hearing his faith made her knees wobble.

  “Then why did you get so mad when you found that stuff in my purse?”

  “Because somebody’s setting you up. Possibly both of us. I don’t like it and I want to know why.”

  It hadn’t occurred to her that Tom was a possible target as well, but of course it made sense. She swallowed. “Oh, Tom, I’m sorry. I never thought he could hurt you as well.”

  “Eric?”

  She swallowed, dropped her gaze to the ground, and nodded. “It must be him. I told you he threatened to get me using again. Sneaking that stuff into my purse is his way of letting me know how easily he can get to me.”

  Tom put his arm around her and led her back to his vehicle. “He’s got to get through me first.” Lester was so happy to see her, she could have been gone for a week. She hugged the dog, accepting the drool along with the happy, wriggling, hairy body.

  She didn’t ask where they were going and was only vaguely surprised when he turned around and took her back to his place.

  “We never did get those eggs,” he reminded her. She knew he wanted the whole story of Eric and his drug problem and, with a pang of regret, she knew she was going to give it to him.

  Maybe Eric counted too much on her loyalty. Or, hoped to discredit her so thoroughly no one would believe the truth.

  She shook her head sadly as she poured more coffee once they were back in Tom’s kitchen. Lester flopped under the table, his big body leaving so little room that she slipped off her shoes and rested them on the warm, soft back. It was comforting to get that warmth in her feet and the press of a loving dog’s coat while she told her unpleasant story.

  Lucy stalked in and jumped up on Gillian’s lap. The warm comfort of the animals was exactly what she needed. Tom finished cooking the omelet and she was shaken up enough that she let him. “I’m sorry you got stuck finishing my breakfast.”

  “You can cook next time.” It was so matter-of-fact that she had to restrain the urge to fly out of her chair, scooping the cat along with her, and hug him. He still wanted her, still believed her. She hadn’t been wrong. Tom Perkins was a man who’d stand by a woman. He was solid and steady enough to lean on, but somehow in the last few months she felt much less inclined to lean. She was going to make it on her own, but a big granite boulder of a man who believed in her was going to make the standing on her own that much easier.

  So she told him. “Eric’s a high-functioning cocaine addict,” she explained to him, quoting the term she’d read in her research.

  “How much is he using?”

  “I don’t know.” It wasn’t much of a lie. Since they’d stopped living together, she really didn’t know how much he used. “A hell of a lot, though, and it’s been taking most of our money.”

  “Is that why you left him?”

  She blinked. “The story I heard is that he left me.”

  “Because you’re a hopeless drug addict. I warned you I’m slow, but I’m not stupid.”

  “Tom Perkins, I love you.”

  That earned her one of his sweet smiles. “Back at you. Now get on with your story.” But he stretched his hand across the table and she grasped it.

  “I left him because he was seeing another woman.”

  “Who?”

  “I never found out. I don’t even want to know. She lives in L.A. That’s all I know. I found a pair of panties that weren’t mine in our bedroom. Then I started looking. He hadn’t even tried to hide the affair. There were credit card receipts for dinners, a bill for lingerie I never got. You know.”

  Tom nodded.

  “On top of his drug abuse and — the way he treated me — his affair was the last straw. I told him to leave.”

  “Must have shocked the hell out of him.”

  “Out of both of us. I’ve never been any good
on my own, but suddenly I thought, I’m almost thirty—one. Is this what the rest of my life is going to be? So I told him to leave.” She glanced across the table. “Do you really love me?”

  “Till death do us part. Did he try to get you back?”

  “Briefly. When he came to tell me we had to sell the house and I was going to have to move, I got mad. I knew he’d spent all the money on drugs and I lost it. Which was stupid, because I could see he was high and he had a crazy look in his eyes. Anyhow, he hit me. It was the first time he ever did that. When I tried to run, he came after me and pushed me out of the house so I fell down the cement stairs.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It made me realize my sorry excuse for a marriage was completely over.”

  Tom placed her omelet in front of her, and one at his own place, then sat. On her plate was an omelet approximately the size of a space ship. His was even bigger. She dug in, thinking she was going to have to remember he had a big appetite.

  “What do you know about his supplier?”

  Her fork jabbed into the eggs. “Nothing. There was a guy who called at the house a couple of times.”

  “Would you recognize a photograph of this man?” Tom posed the question casually, but she wasn’t stupid. She’d kept up with the media on the recent murder.

  She put down her fork. “You think Eric had something to do with that man’s murder?”

  “It makes sense. The guy’s got drugs. Eric needs them but doesn’t have the money. They argue. A gun gets involved. The dealer winds up dead. Eric has the keys to city hall.”

  She felt as though the eggs were crawling back up her throat. “Why would Eric implicate himself by putting the body near city hall?”

  “Who knows?” Tom shrugged powerful shoulders. His omelet, she noticed with a certain detached awe, was half gone. “Maybe he was so whacked he didn’t know what he was doing.”

  She tried again. “Eric wouldn’t kill anyone.”

  “They said that about Ted Bundy. I think maybe I should have a little talk with Eric when he gets back from his business trip.”

  She heard the cheerful tick of the kitchen clock. Beneath her feet, Lester’s flank rose and fell in a contented sigh, almost drowned out by Lucy’s purring. She didn’t want to say the next words, but she had to. “Eric couldn’t have killed that man. He was with me that night.”