“We don’t know that.” He was done with her. Just like Leo. Over and out.
“Even if she is, we have no way of finding her except driving around, and you have to admit that isn’t going to work.” He’d been rehearsing that speech. Since when?
“I’m staying. You can take the bus home.” She started typing another string of names.
“Be reasonable.”
She closed her eyes. She didn’t feel reasonable. She felt gutted and skinned and laid out in the sun to dry. Yet it wasn’t his fault. She’d known he was damaged since the moment he’d freaked out when she played his CD over Easy Cheesy’s sound system. She knew it would end. She hadn’t actually expected it to begin in the first place. But good old Jami had pushed her way right in.
Give it up. Get out. Cut your losses. Don’t let him know he hurt you.
God forbid she should ever tell a man what she really felt. Pushing a man didn’t get you anywhere. Look at what happened with Leo.
“Jami?”
She realized she hadn’t typed, hadn’t said a word, hadn’t even looked at Cole in half a minute. She hadn’t pushed Leo. Not for seven years. She hated to test the status quo. She was afraid of change. She took a whole load of crap because she believed in that old saying: Out of the frying pan and into the fire. Or better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.
Yet if she drove back to Masterson without saying anything to Cole, she just might miss the man of her dreams. She needed to find her freaking courage.
Baby, I’ll find you out there.
She’d found Cole. She just needed to make him believe it was fate. “What did last night mean to you, Cole?” she asked softly and could almost hear how hard it was for him to swallow.
“I—” He stopped, drew in a breath, let it out, then started again. “I haven’t been with a woman in a long time.”
“I know.” She gave up even thinking about her Google search. “That’s why I believe it meant something. I know men aren’t good at analyzing feelings and all, but it meant something to me, and I just need to know what it meant to you.”
She waited for the moment when he slammed her down.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Cole sat on the edge of the bed while Jami clasped her hands in her lap and turned to him, her legs primly together.
“It was beautiful and I enjoyed it.” He leaned his elbows on his knees.
Why couldn’t she have been dressed and ready to go when he got back? He’d given her plenty of time. He didn’t want to hurt her. Last night was inevitable from the moment he first kissed her, but he couldn’t be with her either, no matter how good last night had been.
“I hear a but in there,” Jami said.
He gulped. “But I’m not interested in any sort of relationship.” Christ, this felt shitty.
She pursed her lips, but didn’t say anything.
He owed her more than that trite phrase. He hadn’t screwed her, he’d made love to her, and somewhere, he needed to find the guts to tell her the truth. “You want a lot of things that I can’t give you.”
“Like what?”
Shit. “Like children and a family and”—he spread his hands ineffectually—“and a life.”
She bit her lip. “I don’t need those things right away.”
She was lying to them both. She wasn’t a casual lover like Hannah had been. “I’m not going there,” he forced himself to say. “Ever.”
She swallowed, then drew in a deep breath.
After last night, he owed her the whole truth, his whole soul, as much as he hated to bare it. “I had a daughter,” he whispered.
“I know. Frank—”
He held up one finger. “I know Frank told you about her. But I need to tell you.” Frank would have couched it in all sorts of malarkey about how it wasn’t Cole’s fault.
“All right. You tell me.” She didn’t change her position one iota, hands clasped, knees together, but her bare legs, her pajama shorts, and the rumpled bed testified to her being anything but prim.
He couldn’t look at her without remembering her soft skin against him in the deep of the night. He steepled his fingers and stared at them instead. “I was working on the album. The last one.” He didn’t say the name. She knew which one, Dreaming of You, his masterpiece. “Stephanie was always a good kid, and she knew I got involved heavily when I was laying down tracks.”
There’d been so many late nights at the studio, so many broken promises. I swear I’ll be home for dinner tomorrow night, baby. He said that one too many times. Instead, she ate with the babysitter.
He hadn’t talked about this with anyone in seven years. He’d never truly confessed to Frank, not even back then.
He lost himself in remembering, almost as if Jami wasn’t there. “I promised her a trip to the hot springs, a whole weekend, if she’d promise to let me finish without any interruptions once we got back.” He laughed softly, yet it hurt his chest, his throat. “Kids are so good at guilt trips. But I’d broken my promises too many times. Anyway”—he shrugged—“we agreed. And we had a great time.” Oh Christ. What a fucking great time. “We played around. I dunked her. She tried to dunk me.” He looked up then, straight at Jami. Her eyes were stark, a deep agonizing blue. “There was this...thing,” he said, “in the water. A parasite.” The doctors had called it an amoeba. “It went up her nose when I dunked her.”
She’d come up spluttering, water streaming from her nose. That’s when she got it, a goddamn bug, infecting her through the water he’d literally forced up her nose when he dunked her. It was the moment he’d killed his little girl.
“Cole, it wasn’t your fault.”
He put one finger gently to his lips—“Shh”—and waited for Jami to shut her mouth.
She rolled her lips between her teeth, and something misty swam in her eyes.
“She was fine for a few days after we got back. But then I swear—” He closed his eyes a moment, seeing Stephie as if it was that last week. Her bright blonde hair in rat tails, her face red as, in a tantrum, she’d pummeled his chest with flailing fists. “She just turned into a holy terror.” Cole dragged in a breath. “And I...was...pissed.”
He could still hear Stephie whining at him, remembered all the abrupt changes in her behavior, the sudden combativeness, the warning signs. It had been too late by then.
Jami swallowed and put a hand over her mouth. He could read her thoughts on her expressive face. She wanted to come to her knees in front of him and offer her sweet comfort. He couldn’t let her. The glare he shot her kept her in her seat.
Then he focused on the floor, unable to return her gaze. “I told her she was being a little bitch just like her mother.” An invisible fist clutched his chest and squeezed all the air out of his lungs. “She was dead three days later, and I know she didn’t understand when I told her I hadn’t meant it. She was past understanding.”
“Cole, please—”
“Don’t say anything. Do not make one excuse. I damn well know I couldn’t have done a thing from the moment I pushed her under the water. But don’t you see?”—He slapped his hand on his chest—“I was the dad, and there I was throwing my nine-year-old into the water, dunking her until she screamed for me to stop—” He couldn’t get the breath into his lungs. He couldn’t stop hearing Stephie laughing and screaming, while he was...killing her.
The room was so quiet, so still. Jami herself was a statue hewn from the very chair she sat in.
Cole threw himself to his feet, and paced, huge strides that ate up the floor. “Then, when she was already dying, I called her a fucking little bitch.”
“Cole, I—”
“She was already dead,” he shouted at her. “Don’t you get it?”
* * * * *
Oh God, Jami did. Finally, irrevocably. He’d built his sins against his daughter to monumental proportions. He’d held her under the water until she screamed. He’d called her a fucking bitch. Jami knew it wasn’t so. He might
very well have told her to stop being a bitch like her mom, but in his mind, he’d exaggerated the other words he used, and the tone with which he’d said them. Guilt had created a world far worse than reality.
“Sit down,” she whispered.
He didn’t. Instead he pivoted on one foot and speared her with a look that would flay flesh from bone. “Do you know what it was like?”
“No.” She couldn’t manage more than a whisper. Oh God, why had she started this? She hadn’t understood, didn’t even have a glimmer of his hell. “I can’t imagine what it was like.”
“After that terrible fight, even when I knew she wasn’t acting like herself”—he smiled, a horrible grimace that distorted the face she’d made love to into something akin to a monster—“I still went back to my goddamn studio.”
“You couldn’t have known—”
“Her babysitter took her to the hospital, when she started vomiting. She did. Not me.” He stabbed his chest. “I wasn’t even there.”
Her stomach rebelled against the sickly mocha she’d sipped on. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to do this. But she had. She’d started it.
“Fever, vomiting. They did a spinal tap thinking she had meningitis.” He shuddered and put his hands over his ears. “I can still her hear scream, it scared her so much.” He blinked and came back. “She finally went into a coma and died a day later.”
Oh God, oh God. His face, dead, still, not a flicker of emotion in his eyes. Holding her hands to her burning cheeks, she couldn’t bear to look at what she’d done to him.
Yet it all made so much sense now. The end of his music. Flipping burgers at Easy Cheesy. Working every day of the week. That way he didn’t have to remember. But eventually, his guilt would kill him. She needed to end it for him.
If anyone could.
“Cole, you have to listen to me. You can blame yourself all you want, but it wasn’t your fault. You didn’t know what was in the water. You didn’t know what it was going to do. People make mistakes.”
“That is so fucking pathetic. People make mistakes,” he mimicked. “Do you want to see my fucking mistake?”
He grabbed her arm and yanked her out of the chair, then threw himself down in front of the computer screen. The keys hummed under his fingers, the mouse clicked, flashing through screens as if he had the whole procedure memorized. As if he’d done this a million times.
Then he pointed. “See it?”
All she saw was a series of photographs, microscope slides with a swirl of little blue dots. Some big, some small, they almost seemed to move. “I see it,” she whispered.
He stabbed a finger at the screen. “That’s what they did to her. The goddamn things ate her brain.”
It was just a bunch of blue circles to Jami. She didn’t see what he saw. Yet he’d tortured himself with these images for years. How many times had he looked up this website? How many nights had he sat alone in his house staring at these microscopic things that had killed his little girl?
“I’m so sorry.” She didn’t realize she was crying until she tasted a salty tear at the corner of her mouth. “I didn’t mean it, Cole.”
He stared at that horrible images for two more beats of her heart—forever—then turned, his features wiped clean again. No expression, not anger, not sadness. Even his eyes were dull, lifeless, like clods of dirt one threw on top of a casket.
“Now you know why we can’t ever have a relationship.” He balled his fist. “I no longer have the capacity to love.”
She backed off as he rose to his full height, towering over her.
“You should get dressed,” he said, so very calm now. “Then we’ll go home.”
He walked out the door, leaving her with a screen full of images of what his dead daughter’s brain would have looked like right before she died.
There were just some things that never let a person go.
* * * * *
Christ, he’d been melodramatic. He was surprised Jami hadn’t called the police when he started yelling at her like a crazy person.
He’d only wanted to give her a rational explanation for why he wasn’t the man for her. Instead, he’d gone ape shit. Even five minutes after, the three other occupants of the elevator, two women and a man, crowded together on the other side as if he might suddenly leap for their throats.
He probably looked like a wild man, with a feral glint in his eye.
They stared at him wide-eyed. The way Jami had as he’d stomped from the room. His chest still ached, and it wasn’t merely from pounding the keyboard on her computer.
He had gone a little nuts, but he didn’t want to review in miniscule detail every horrific thing he’d done to traumatize her. It was over. They were done. It was the best way, the only way.
The elevator halted with a slight bounce, and the doors opened. His ride mates couldn’t get out fast enough. He negotiated the crowded lobby, stepping between briefcases, roller bags, and business travelers. The wind hit him in the face as the outside doors parted, and the clean, sharp tang of sea air filled his head, then the acrid aroma from the group huddled around the nearby ashtray. He stepped out into the sun to warm himself, though the wind still howled through his open jacket.
He’d give Jami time to get herself together, shower, pack her little bag, put away her computer. She’d steer clear of him now. He’d scared the crap out of her, exposed his freak side, but he’d also experienced one thing he’d never expected. For the first time in seven years, he hadn’t woken to nightmares of Stephie. With Jami in his arms, he’d awoken hard and wanting her again. He hadn’t made love to her, leaping out of bed and taking a cold shower instead.
It was an even bigger reason to make sure she left him alone. He couldn’t start depending on her to keep guilt and nightmares at bay.
* * * * *
“Petrov and Angel.” As if pouring all her concentration into Cole and his daughter had freed up her subconscious, the two names simply came to Jami. It wasn’t devil, but the opposite of it. She wanted to smack her forehead.
Working on finding Andrea was almost a relief. She’d go insane sitting here thinking...just as Cole had driven himself insane.
She fiddled about a bit in her search, but eventually came up with T. L. Petrov and Nick Angel. He was somewhere up close to Redding, but—her heart leapt—T. L. Petrov’s studio was in San Francisco. He was definitely the first choice to check out. If that didn’t work, Redding was only a couple of hundred miles or so.
She mapped Petrov’s San Francisco address, wrote down the directions and the phone number.
Cole wasn’t back by the time she finished her shower. On the side table, her cell phone beeped. A missed call while she was in the bathroom with the fan running to clear the steam off the mirror. Damn how her heart leaped thinking it was Cole.
Then it just as quickly plummeted two stories when she saw the caller ID. Leo. First he’d e-mailed her, then he’d called. What did he want? To gloat? Apologize? Explain? She turned off the ringer. “I will not call him or listen to his message or read his e-mail.” She glared at the phone. “I don’t care what you have to say, Leo.”
The same went for Cole. When in doubt about what to say, just get mad. She felt his pain, she wanted to help him, but he could destroy her. She couldn’t deal with what he’d gone through, with how it had shattered him. It would all be so much worse than anything she’d endured with Leo. Because she would never be able to save him. Instead of calling Cole, she wrote a note saying she’d be back later. Of course, he’d call her as soon as he found it, afraid she’d left town without him, forcing him to take the bus back to Masterson.
She grabbed the car key, room key, and shoved her cell phone in her purse. When the elevator took too long, she headed down the stairs. Or maybe she was hoping to miss Cole if he was on the way up. She didn’t want him shooting down her idea.
The scent of bacon wafted from the open restaurant doors as she passed through the lobby. She’d forgotten her mocha back
in the room. The bell captain saluted her, and two men in business suits gave her a look as she breezed through the entryway. She paused, where had they parked the car last night?
“Going somewhere without me?”
She smelled his fresh-from-the-shower male scent despite the nearby smokers.
“You weren’t around,” she said flippantly, but her heart turned over at the sight of him. With his leather jacket, he was a bad boy in his prime. His shades shuttered his eyes. What could she possibly have thought she could do to help him?
“I was politely giving you some personal space,” he said.
He was shutting her out. She knew they weren’t going to talk about what happened upstairs. They weren’t going to talk about last night. She couldn’t have broached the subject anyway. He’d said his piece and made his point. They were done. And really, that was the only way. She understood that now.
“I got another lead on Andrea,” she told him. “In San Francisco.”
His lips flattened. If she could have X-rayed him through his dark lenses, she was sure she’d find him rolling his eyes.
“I don’t suppose I’ll be able to convince you it’s another wild goose chase,” he said.
“It wouldn’t matter even if you could because I’m still going to check it out.”
He held out his hand.
She wanted to take it. “What?”
“Give me the keys, I’ll drive.”
Dropping the remote alarm in his palm, she didn’t try to talk him out of it. “You might be driving, but we’re going where I say. Right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good. Then I want to run back upstairs and get my mocha.”
“I’ll buy you another.”
“That’s wasteful.”
“It’ll be cold.”
“I don’t mind.”
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