The Trouble with Temptation

by Shiloh Walker

  “Well, Chief,” Hannah drawled. “I’ve lost a great deal of my personal possessions. He trashed a lot of my clothes, cut into them and dumped bleach on what was left. He ruined the last picture I ever had taken with my mother. But it appears this sick fuck has amused you. I’m so pleased.”

  Hannah’s eyes were hot with fury when he looked into them.

  “He fucked up, Hannah,” Gideon said, turning his head and taking a good long look around her apartment. “All of this? He’s pissed off and he’s scared. I’m sorry for what he did here, but this means he’s scared. That’s a damn good thing.”

  He took another thorough look around the place as he drew out a pair of gloves, unease starting to burn inside him. One thing wasn’t adding up for him.

  It had nothing to do with the trashed apartment and everything to do with the watchful woman.

  “You heard from Brannon?”

  * * *

  When things were bad, you went home.

  As far as Brannon was concerned, they were pretty miserable.

  He stood out on the dock that faced out over the slowly rolling river and he brooded.

  He had to fix things with Hannah, but the problem was, he just didn’t know how.

  A wind kicked up, blowing his hair back from his face and the scent of rain danced in the air, but he didn’t notice.

  He was thinking about Hannah.

  Only about her.

  When the old boards of the dock creaked behind him, he didn’t bother looking back.

  Neve was in town.

  So was Moira, working.

  Not too many people would follow him when he was clearly in a temper. It took him a while to get to one, but once he did, most people steered clear.

  Ella Sue had never been one to steer clear of anything, though.

  She came to stand next to him, neat and tidy in a pair of pressed khakis and a shirt the color of roses. She was sixty-five if she was a day, but if he didn’t know her, he wouldn’t have thought she had even seen the first blush of forty. She had that ageless quality about her and a serenity that rarely failed to give him some measure of peace and comfort.

  But it failed him now.

  He jammed his hands into his pockets.

  “I fucked up, Ella Sue.”

  She lowered herself to sit on the edge of the dock, staring out into the water. “You know, my daddy used to take me fishing out here on the river. All the time. Wasn’t far from here. Your grandfather was alive then. He’d sometimes join us. I was terrible at fishing then. Didn’t know how to be quiet for anything.”

  Brannon sat down next to her, knees drawn up to his chest.

  She turned her head and looked up at him. “Out of all of the McKays I’ve known—and honey, I’ve known a lot—I’d have to say you are the most like him. Your grandfather. He was determined to protect every single person he knew. When my daddy died, he showed up on Mama’s door and offered her a job.”

  She sighed and looked up. “My mama, God love her. She didn’t want to work.” Ella Sue laughed. “Not for anybody, but definitely not for some rich white man. Do you know what she did?”

  Brannon flicked her a glance.

  Ella Sue was still staring up at the sky. “My mother, while I was in my bedroom, crying into the doll Daddy had given me for my birthday, told your grandfather that she’d be just happy to take his money. What did he have in mind? And he said that he knew they needed a typist or two at one of his businesses. You people.” She shook her head. “You already owned so much of the town. He talked about the little local airline they owned—your daddy sold it when you was just a baby, but your grandpa, he asked Mama what she’d think of being a stewardess. She said, no. She didn’t think she’d like that. Or being a typist. None of that would really work, because she had a little girl, didn’t he see? So he asked her just what she thought would work.”

  Ella Sue sighed. “She told him she’d be happy to go to bed with him. Thought maybe once a week, for a thousand dollars. Your grandma didn’t never have to know.”

  “Ella Sue.” Brannon swore and went to stand, blushing now, all the way down the collar of his shirt. This woman who was like a mother to him. He didn’t want to hear this.

  She laid a hand on his arm. “How do you think I felt? I was ten years old. He told her no. She left town three weeks later, left me with my aunt and I never saw her again. I don’t know where she went and I can’t even claim to understand why she did what she did.”

  Brannon stared at her hand on his arm, watched as she patted it and then she stood. “My mama died a couple of years later. She wrote me, you know. A letter, every week. But she never sent them. She was embarrassed. After she’d died, when my aunt had to go and identify her body, she was given the letters and she brought them back. I was twenty before she gave them to me. I’d been angry at your grandfather for a long while.”

  “At…” Brannon stopped, scowled.

  “Oh, baby.” She brushed his hair back from his face. “I didn’t understand what I overhead that night. I just heard this rich white man telling my mama he’d help her, and then he said he wouldn’t. A few weeks later, she left me. I was alone. I spent a lot of time angry over the wrong things. Then I read the letters. If she’d sent them…” Ella Sue stopped. “But she didn’t. She was too embarrassed over the mistake she’d made. Over her fuck up.”

  Brannon felt his shoulders tightening.

  Shrewd eyes bore into his and she lifted a brow. “Now … why don’t you tell me about whatever it is that has so you sad, boy? And don’t you be lying to me. Whatever it is, you can fix it. But not if you run from it. Not if you stay down here at the river and hide.”

  “Fix it.” Brannon tipped his head back and stared up at the leafy green canopy overhead. “How do I fix it? She’s loved me most of her life, she told me.”

  “Boy, I know that.” Ella Sue gave him a look like she was talking to an idiot. Then her face softened and she reached up, cupped his cheek the way she had when he was a child. “She loved you and she waited. Because I think some part of her knew just what I’ve always known—that you loved her, too.”

  Brannon shook his head. “No. I—”

  “Don’t you give me that. You were too old for her, the first time you really noticed her.” She arched a brow at him when he would have interrupted. “You’re my boy—maybe I didn’t give birth to you, but you’re my son all the same and I see exactly what a mother is going to see. She’d been coming here for years, but then you started to really see her. She was too young, so you did the only thing a good man could. You stayed the hell away. But she hasn’t been a girl for a long time, Brannon. She’s not seventeen anymore. Although sometimes, I think you just might be. You are still running away.” She moved away, huffing out a sigh. “You run away from your feelings because it’s easier for you to not feel anything. Both you and Moira—the two of you decided it was just easier to never feel anything. And Neve, she couldn’t stop herself from feeling everything.”

  Brannon snapped his jaw shut.

  Ella Sue’s eyes narrowed as she turned back to face him. “You want to argue? You want to tell me one time when you didn’t push somebody away? Everybody?” One hand went to her hip while she gestured grandly with the other. “If you have a for-instance, Brannon, I’m listening.”

  Because he didn’t, he stayed quiet. Arms crossed over his chest, he glared at her.

  “Now … just what is going on, Brannon?”

  “I…” lied. He hesitated. This soul-baring shit sucked. Only Ella Sue could pull it out of him, too.

  She arched her brows. “You what? Did she tell you about the baby and you freaked?”

  “Hell, no! I didn’t know about the baby until after the accident.” He wasn’t that much of an asshole. Turning away from her incisive stare, he started to pace. He couldn’t stand there and look in her eyes and not talk. She was like a living, breathing lie detector.

  He paced to the end of the dock where it gave way
to the path. The cool wind kicked up and he slid his eyes upward, peering through the branches to find the skies dark and leaden. A storm was rolling in again, another soaker, bringing with it the bite of cold air and the promise of thunder. Even as he thought it, the distant rumble of it echoed off in the distance.

  “We should head back,” he murmured.

  “Ain’t like I’ve never been rained on before. You get back to the house and you’re going to dodge me again.”

  He flicked a glance back at her and then looked back toward the skies. “I lied to her, Ella Sue. We—no—she had decided she was done. She realized I was more trouble than I was worth.”

  “Smart girl,” Ella Sue muttered, moving to stand beside him. But she wasn’t looking at him.

  She was studying the sky.

  He glared at her.

  “She told me how she felt—said she’d loved me. Then she said she’d do her best to stop loving me,” he said, and a familiar ache settled in his chest. It was an ache he knew well. It came back every time he thought of that day. “That was in the afternoon. That night … she had the car wreck.”

  “Oh, honey.” She turned, the storm forgotten.

  He backed up before she could touch him. “Don’t,” he said gruffly, catching her hands. “I lied, Ella Sue. When she woke up, I had every chance to tell her the truth, every chance to apologize and tell her that I’d figured out what a fool I was. But I didn’t. I told her we’d fought … but that day, I went to her because…”

  Ella Sue filled in the blanks on her own and the look she gave him was one of pity and aggravation. “Boy, you did fuck up.”

  Before she could say anything else, a voice rang out through the woods. Somebody was calling them.

  Hers—then his.

  Neve’s voice, clear and loud, carried easier on the wind.

  But it was Ian who got there first, his legs longer, more powerful.

  He gave Brannon a dark look. “You bloody arse. We’ve been looking for ya all day!”

  “I’ve only been here a couple hours,” he said.

  “Well, a couple hours then.” His face was ruddy from the run, his accent thick. “You left your fuckin’ phone. We been tryin’ to call. Somebody broke into Hannah’s place. It’s been trashed.”

  Brannon stared at him for one second as the words came together.

  Then he lunged.

  Ian caught him, huge, powerful arms stopping him from tearing off down the path.

  “Hold up, hold up, man!”

  “Let me go, you son of a bitch!”

  “She’s not there!” Neve shouted.

  Slowly, Brannon relaxed but Ian didn’t let him go, not right away. While Brannon stared at his sister, Ian strained to hold him. “You going to listen there, mate?” he asked softly. “For a minute, yeah?”

  “A minute.” His blood was roaring. His heart felt like it had lodged in his throat—or maybe down near his ankles. He wasn’t sure. “You’ve got one minute.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Hannah braced her elbow against the car door.

  The wind raced in, blowing her hair back and chilling her flesh.

  She was shivering, but she needed the air, both to calm her nerves and to keep the cop next to her from trying to talk to her.

  She’d been given two choices.

  Well, three, really, but one of them hadn’t really been a choice. She was exhausted and there was no way she was going to try to curl up in the hallway while the cops went over her apartment with a fine-toothed comb. That was the non-choice.

  The other choice, another non-choice as far as she was concerned, had been to let one of the uniformed officers take her to the police department and sit on her—as Gideon had phrased it—so she could rest there.

  She’d told him to go fuck himself.

  So he’d suggested Brannon’s.

  She’d flipped the chief of police off and he shrugged. “Those are your choices. He’s got a security system, and if I tell him to lock you down, he will.”

  “Fine.” She’d bared her teeth at him and told him to call Brannon. Once he got there, she could punch him in the teeth and then fine, he could lock her down and she’d brood and steam until she figured out another option besides staying with a man who’d lied to her.

  Except Brannon wasn’t answering his phone.

  Gideon had gotten more and more frustrated, she’d gotten more and more tired, so Beau had volunteered to drive her out to the sprawling house where Brannon lived. He’d stay there with her, too.

  Gideon had grunted his assent, but as they left, he was already putting in another call—this one to McKay’s Ferry. Moira, Neve, or Ella Sue would be able to track Brannon down. She knew it without a doubt and glumly, she had to acknowledge that she’d be dealing with the bastard sooner than she’d wanted—she’d been planning on not dealing with him period.

  She shivered as another gust of wind blew in and the windows went up—not all the way. Wrapping her arms around herself, she rubbed at her arms and sighed.

  “Thanks.”

  “If you were cold, you just had to ask,” Beau said amicably.

  She smiled weakly. Not like she was about to tell him she’d rather freeze just so they didn’t have to talk, now was she?

  They sped on in silence a few more miles and she breathed out a sigh of relief.

  But she breathed easy way too soon.

  “You’re mad at Brannon.”

  Frustrated, she closed her eyes. “Anybody ever tell you it’s dangerous to piss off a pregnant woman?”

  Beau chuckled. “Well, I’m an officer of the law. I think I’m safe.”

  She made a face.

  A few more moments of silence and then he asked, “Want to talk about it?”

  “Don’t you have enough problems going on, Beau?” she asked tiredly.

  “There is that.” He blew out a breath. “I got problems all the way up my ass. Excuse my language, Hannah. I just…”

  She slid him a look. “Why do you stay?”

  “Love makes fools of us all.” He shrugged as though that explained everything. Then he glanced over at her. It was a quick look then he went back to focusing on the road in the driving rain. “So what happened between you and Brannon? Seemed it was going rather well.”

  “Yeah.” She curled her lip. “Then I went and remembered a few details.”

  From the corner of her eye, she saw how Beau’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. It was only for a moment. But his grip was so intense, his knuckles stood out in stark relief against his skin. “Your memory is coming back.”

  Hannah pushed a hand through her hair and looked down.

  The thick, dense strands fell to shield her face, giving her a veil of sorts. It wasn’t perfect, but it let her see somewhat, without letting him see her.

  He’d relaxed his grip on the steering wheel. And he seemed to be looking outside.

  “Not everything,” she said, struggling to keep her voice casual. “Just a few more bits and pieces. About him, is all.”

  “Has to be frustrating.” Beau sighed. “I can’t imagine missing a week of your life, Hannah.”

  “Yeah.”

  He lowered a hand, drumming out a beat on his leg.

  Hannah lowered hers, too, casually resting hers on her thigh. The pocket a few inches away held her utility scissors. They had a blunt edge but could cut through just about anything. A hell of a tool. Not much of a weapon.

  “You don’t need to be so nervous.”

  She looked up at Beau.

  He was still staring at the road.

  “We’ll take care of you, Hannah. That’s a promise.”

  Slowly, she shifted her attention to the bend in the road, watching, waiting. The car was slowing down.

  Thunder boomed overhead.

  Lightning split the sky, casting its brilliant, searing light for a fraction of a second and blinding her.

  The car came around the curve, Brannon’s massive home wa
s visible for just a moment as another jagged spear of lightning bloomed.

  “Won’t be long now.”

  Another hair pin curve. She said, “I need air, Beau.”

  He sighed and put the window down. It wasn’t all the way down but it would work.

  Please, God. Don’t let me hurt my baby.

  She glanced at Beau. “Hey, Beau?”

  When he looked at her, she grabbed the wheel.

  And wrenched.

  * * *

  “You sent her…” Brannon shoved the heel of his hand against his eye socket and then swore. “I’m not at my place.”

  Across the line, Gideon muttered under his breath.

  Brannon thought he heard something along the lines of Stupid, asinine, idiot McKays. He was almost certain most of it was directed at him—and maybe Moira. Gideon adored Neve. The kid could do no wrong in Gideon’s eyes. Just then, Brannon was inclined to agree, because both he and Moira were idiots lately.

  And none of it mattered.

  “Maybe,” Gideon said slowly. “You could get to your place. It’s not like it’s far from Ferry.”

  Then he disconnected the phone.

  Brannon lowered his cell, stared at it, then jammed it into his pocket. He was already almost back to the house, but soaked to the bone now, thanks to the deluge that had started less than five minutes ago. While Neve started asking questions, he cut into the house and pulled open the cabinet that held keys to the cars out in the garage. He studied them, then selected a set for the Jeep.

  “I’m heading out to my place,” he said.

  “I’ll come.”

  He shot Ian a look and shook his head. “No.”

  “I’m coming wi’ you,” Ian said flatly.

  “No.” Brannon jerked his head toward Ella Sue and Neve. “Something’s not right. Hell, something’s been messed up since the day Hannah wrecked. Yeah, so William’s gone, but somebody broke into Hannah’s apartment, and not just today, either. I want somebody here with Neve and Ella Sue.”

  He turned to go out the door and then stopped, looked back at Ian. “And call that prick, Charles. Tell him to hang around Moira until she gets here.”

  Ian’s mouth twisted in a grimace. “I’d rather shove my hand in a meat grinder.”