“I know, and that’s why I’m sure something’s wrong,” Phyllis said, her gaze sober but kind as she stopped what she was doing to look at her friend. “We had plenty of time to talk on Saturday and you never said a word.”
Tuesday had still been three days off at that point and Martha had hoped she’d be cured by then.
Or that Ellen’s attacker would be found and she wouldn’t have to do another surveillance shift.
Or that Pastor David Marks would be transferred…
“Aren’t you hot in that outfit?” Martha asked her friend. While Martha wore a short-sleeved sweater and slacks, Phyllis had on heels, hose, a silk blouse, tailored pants and a jacket to match. She always looked the epitome of professional.
“Not in the shade,” Phyllis said, squeezing honey-mustard dressing from an oblong foil packet. “Now quit avoiding the topic.”
“Which is?” Martha squeezed her own packet of dressing.
“Why you think you’re losing your mind.”
“Can we eat first?”
After a solemn perusal of Martha’s face, Phyllis nodded. She asked about Tim’s celebration dinner on Saturday. Martha and Tim had driven into Phoenix with several members of the team for burgers, and Martha gave Phyllis a quick rundown of the highlights. Then, at Martha’s prompting, Phyllis spent the rest of the meal regaling her with the antics of Clarissa and Calvin, Phyllis’s almost-three-year-old twins. The children had been conceived by complete mistake during an afternoon of unexpected passion by two people who hardly knew and barely liked each other. They’d become the brightest lights in their parents’ lives. Matt and Phyllis had turned out to be perfect for each other, finding what Phyllis had once described as “completion” in their love. Something like that was a fluke, though.
If Martha didn’t care about her friend so much, she’d be envious. Instead, she was afraid for her, the happiness she felt. It put her at such risk. If she were to lose it…
“Okay, time’s up. Now tell me.” Phyllis dropped her plastic fork on what was left of the salad in front of her, added her napkin and closed the plastic container.
Students, other professors, walked by in the distance, but no one bothered the two women sitting there. Martha knew it was a sign of respect for faculty, acknowledging that they could be having a business lunch. But she craved an interruption even while she desperately needed advice.
“I’m not getting involved with a man again.”
“Okay.” Phyllis raised her eyebrows, cocked her head. “I don’t think you’re in a position to predict the next forty years of your life, but, for now, okay.”
“I mean it,” Martha said. “My father sure was no role model. My husband betrayed me. The preacher I grew up with betrayed us all. I just can’t trust a man anymore. It would be stupid.”
“Maybe.”
Phyllis was deeply in love with her husband. Martha understood that. And she knew Phyllis’s perception was clouded by that love. As it should be.
“My husband left me for another woman.”
“I know.”
“And you know what that does to a woman? How worthless that makes you feel?”
“Yes.”
Martha didn’t know a lot about Phyllis’s past before coming to Shelter Valley, but she’d assumed she’d never married. Phyllis never spoke about anyone she’d been involved with in Boston.
“My husband left me, too.” Phyllis’s words were soft, and filled with a pain that had apparently never gone completely away. “I was too fat, too this, too that. In reality, I was too smart. He was jealous. Intimidated.”
“But it still hurts.”
“Rejection always does.”
“Todd’s having another baby.”
“I heard.”
“My four kids aren’t good enough for him….”
“That’s about him, not about you. Or them.”
David Marks had said the same thing.
But it sure felt like it was about her.
A soft spring breeze stole through the commons, cooling Martha’s overheated skin. She hated this. Hated being out of control.
She’d kissed the preacher and he’d hardly spoken to her since.
“That last day, when Todd was leaving—” She broke off, remembering, even though she tried to push the memories away. “I was going crazy trying to make sense of it all. He’d been saying things like…like how he’d missed out on the magic most people had. He said we’d only loved each other, not been truly in love. And that we’d married more out of convenience than any burning need to spend the rest of our lives together. And while that might’ve been true, none of it seemed a good reason to throw away the entire life we’d built, to rip apart the home we’d given our children….”
Uncomfortable with how much she’d said, with her uncharacteristic rambling, Martha stopped.
“Go on.”
She stared at her friend, hoping Phyllis would know how to help her.
“I followed him around the house that last day. The kids were gone with Pastor Edwards and the church youth group on a day-long boating expedition at Canyon Lake. Todd was gathering up the last of his things and with each item he placed in the box, I got crazier. Before it was over, I was screaming. He could go, I told him. I didn’t want him there anymore. And I really didn’t. I couldn’t trust him….”
Martha closed her own salad container. Testing her feelings again, four years later, she was finding them the same. She didn’t want Todd back.
What she wanted, if anything, was the illusions she’d lived with for so many years.
“He asked me what I did want. And I told him I wanted the truth. I wanted to know what had really prompted him to walk away from comfort and security, from financial freedom and four children who adored him. I told him all I wanted from him was peace of mind. I had to understand. I told him he owed me that.”
Throat constricted, Martha looked down.
“What did he tell you?” While Phyllis’s voice was quiet, the love and support it conveyed was unmistakable.
“That I’m sexless.” Martha lifted her head, meeting her friend’s gaze head-on as she admitted the truth.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“THAT’S BULLSHIT!”
Such intense and spontaneous emotion was uncharacteristic for Phyllis. But while Martha appreciated her friend’s immediate defense, she shook her head.
“He was blaming you for his own weakness!” Phyllis said. “It’s so stereotypical I can’t believe you bought it. Even for a second! You’re a smart woman, Martha. You know better than that.”
Martha had to blink to keep tears from showing in her eyes. “He’s right,” she whispered.
Which was why she’d had to break away from David Marks the week before. She couldn’t bear to have him know just how sexless she was. It made no sense. She didn’t want him. Didn’t want any man. And didn’t care if the world knew she wasn’t a passionate woman.
But she didn’t want David to know.
And that was why she was losing her mind.
What the hell did it matter what the preacher knew?
“I tell my girls that sex can be wonderful, but I never was all that good in bed.” After twenty years of marriage, she revealed the stark truth. “Todd tried. He was gentle, patient, at least in the early years. I just never got all that excited. I didn’t hate it. I just didn’t need it. Most times I could take it or leave it.”
“Oh, sweetie,” Phyllis said.
Martha heard the sympathy in the other woman’s voice and wished she’d kept her secret another twenty years. At least. Her face burned with humiliation and with anger, too, that there was something about her that inspired pity.
She was strong. Capable. In control. She offered sympathy. She didn’t receive it.
“How many men had you kissed?” Phyllis asked.
“One.” She had no idea what that had to do with anything, but since her other failures were out there, her lack of dates might as well join
the queue.
“One besides Todd?”
“No, just one.”
“Him.”
“Yep.” There you had it. The life and loves—no, make that love, singular—of Martha Moore, woman extraordinaire. Mother of four. Give her a project and she would tackle it, a task and she’d complete it, a problem and she’d solve it. But have sex with her? No, thanks.
“Will you do something for me?”
“Sure.” Feeling better now that the awful news was behind her and she was still sitting there, on a beautiful campus, at a job she loved, having lunch with a trusted friend, Martha didn’t mind humoring Phyllis.
She waited while Phyllis went to toss their trash in a nearby can.
She’d already decided that she wasn’t going to ask Phyllis’s advice on the problem she’d come to discuss. She’d put herself through enough humiliation. She wasn’t bringing the preacher into it.
Wouldn’t the town have a field day with that? The woman who’d discovered her former preacher in a compromising position with one of his parishioners—caught kissing the new preacher! The man who’d been hired after she’d been instrumental in having the first one dismissed.
Never mind that both parties in the first case had been married and neither of the people in the second case were. The sense of crossing boundaries would be the same.
Or Martha chose to believe that, anyway.
“Okay.” Phyllis settled back on the bench directly across from Martha. “Play a game of make-believe with me.”
“Okay…” She wasn’t really good at those.
“Promise you’ll honestly apply yourself to it?”
Who could deny that earnest expression?
“Yes.”
“Then close your eyes…” Phyllis paused, and Martha did.
“Now, think of the best-looking man you’ve ever seen.”
Whiskey-colored eyes came to mind. Thick, dark brown hair. A long-sleeved white shirt with a multi-colored tie and slacks whose style and color and fabric weren’t as dressy as they might have been. A ready smile. Gentle demeanor. With a hidden core of steel.
Mel Gibson. Martha had always grown weak in a very feminine way whenever she saw Mel’s haunting eyes on the big screen.
“Got him?”
She nodded. Frowned. Mel didn’t have whiskey-colored eyes. And she’d never seen him wear a tie with so many colors. The hair was different, too.
“Now, keeping your eyes closed, tell me what you feel.”
“Well, he’s gentle and—”
“No,” Phyllis said softly, grabbing one of Martha’s hands across the table.
Martha opened her eyes and Phyllis, smiling slightly, shook her head. “Close your eyes again.”
As though under some kind of spell, Martha did as she was asked.
“Now, bring him back.”
It didn’t take nearly as long the second time. He was just there. The un-Mel Mel.
“Okay, now, don’t tell me about him. I want to know about you. Look at him, really look at him, and tell me how you feel.”
“I feel…” Martha didn’t know what to say.
“Look at him,” Phyllis said. “Don’t let anything else get in the way.”
Martha looked. Those eyes. They laughed at her. And sometimes, without tears, they seemed to cry for her, too. Once, they’d been half-closed, smoky….
“Tell me how you feel.”
“Like I want to have sex.”
Eyes flying open, Martha sat there, her chest tight with consternation and embarrassment. Whatever feeling might have prompted those words was long gone, leaving only confusion. She couldn’t believe she’d just said that. She didn’t talk like that.
“Yes!” Phyllis’s smile held no ridicule at all, but rather, love and acceptance. And maybe even a little pride.
“What?”
“You’re not sexless, sweetie,” she said. “You haven’t ever kissed a man who really attracts you, that’s all. It takes more than love and affection or mutual goals or even the sharing of four children and a future. It takes chemistry. You need to meet the right man. And kiss him. Just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it won’t. And when it does, you’ll know.”
Those last words might just have been a nail in Martha’s coffin. She’d rather be losing her mind than experience the “knowing” Phyllis had spoken about. Contrary to what her friend seemed to think, she’d felt quite content being sexless. It was only her insane objection to David Marks’s realizing it that had been bothering her. Not the fact itself.
She’d much rather be sexless. She had to be sexless. How the hell could she possibly feel a bone-deep desire for the local preacher when she’d never felt that way with the man she’d been married to for twenty years?
Besides, she didn’t want a man.
She was never going to need a man again.
She’d lost whatever capacity she’d once had to trust in a man.
David Marks believed in faith.
She had no faith. And liked it that way. Believing in things unseen induced fear, and fear was debilitating. Martha was adhering firmly to the things she could see and control.
Besides, preachers were all con men.
She was not going to allow herself to feel a bone-deep desire for a preacher.
She’d much rather be sexless.
SITTING OUTSIDE THE apartment building with Martha Moore in his Explorer on Monday night, David slipped in the audio book of a current bestseller he’d brought specifically for the occasion. Martha seemed as pleased as he felt to have something to do as they sat there staring at closed doors for two hours.
Half an hour into the thriller, he began silently reciting Bible verses. It was a trick he’d learned years ago, when he’d first been giving up his old life, his old self.
The Ten Commandments came immediately to mind.
“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife….”
Unnecessary reminder. She wasn’t anyone’s wife, anyway.
“Blessed are they that hunger…for they shall be filled.”
David thought about the starving, homeless people on street corners in Phoenix. He always gave them money. People hungering for food. Not other things.
“I may have all the faith needed to move mountains but if I have not love, they do me no good…”
Love. Not in love. He sank lower in his seat, careful to make sure he could still see the parking lot and the door across the street.
“A man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife….”
Where in the heck were these verses coming from?
“And the two shall become one flesh…”
“David! Look!”
He was looking. Sitting straight up even before Martha grabbed his arm. A large, dark-colored, new-looking car had just pulled into the parking lot. A Lincoln Continental, if he wasn’t mistaken.
It pulled slowly up to unit 14.
“Oh, my God.” Martha’s whisper seemed to echo through him.
David was already on his cellphone, dialing Greg.
“It’s David,” he said when the sheriff picked up. “We’re watching unit 14. Someone’s here.”
“I’m on my way.” Greg rang off before David could ask what the lawman wanted him and Martha to do.
Which meant they were in charge until he got there.
“Don’t let him out of your sight,” he said to Martha. Not that he’d needed to say the words. There was no way either of them was going to let this one get away.
“Oh my God, David, we’ve got him.” She grabbed his hand, held on so tight he could feel his own pulse beating. Or was it hers?
“We don’t know that it’s him,” he felt compelled to warn her. She was trembling.
A tall man dressed in a suit got out of the car, walked around to the other side and opened the door, then offered his hand to help the woman inside step out.
“It’s him.”
“Maybe.”
Th
e woman was wearing a short skirt and a jacket. And heels that were about three inches high. Her hair was down around her shoulders. With his hand at her back, the man guided—or pushed—her to the door. She looked back a couple of times.
“I’m going to kill him,” Martha whispered fiercely.
“No, you aren’t.” David pulled her hand, drawing her closer, until he could wrap an arm around her shoulders. Holding her against him, giving her strength. Keeping her in the car. “We’re going to wait for Greg and let him handle this. Ellen needs you at home, not in jail.”
“I have to do something….” Her voice shook with emotion.
“Hold on to me,” David said, suspecting that human contact was the only thing that would get through to her in that moment. She was cold. Shivering. But he could see sweat on her upper lip.
That was the moment David knew he loved this woman. Wholeheartedly. As a man loves a woman.
Not as a preacher loves a parishioner.
That was when he knew that as soon as this was over, he was going to leave Shelter Valley. And never, ever come back.
“THEY SAID THEY WERE from Phoenix,” Greg reported forty-five minutes later, standing in the parking lot with David and Martha. “Here for a midweek getaway. Apparently the man had just finished working around the clock on an important business deal and needed a couple of nights away.”
“They were planning to stay a couple of nights?”
“So they said.”
“Here?”
Greg shrugged. “They said they had no idea how bad the place was. They’d booked the room through a travel agent in Phoenix, although when I asked for paperwork, the woman said she’d done it on the Internet and left the confirmation at home. She picked up the key from the travel agent. They claimed they were already in the process of leaving when I got here.”
Greg’s deputy had arrived and was inside the room, dusting for fingerprints, just in case there was something on either of the two people who’d just left for Phoenix.
“I can’t believe you let them go.” Martha’s disappointment was obvious. “We had him, Greg, and you just let him go!” Her voice got louder with every word.
With a hand on the small of her back, David rubbed gently. “He had no reason to hold them,” he reminded her. He understood her frustration. He had a pretty good idea that Greg did, too.
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