“Grandparents bring you presents and they almost never get mad at you,” she said. “Unless you do something dangerous that could hurt you. Then they’ll get upset, but mostly they just smile and hug you and love you...”
Even as she heard herself pouring it on thick, she knew Amy would’ve loved hearing those words.
No. Wait. Amy would love hearing them. Her next Amy story was going to be a grandparent book.
And maybe Joy could be a source of inspiration for her? Joy and Edward?
She talked about how Amy wanted to go to the beach one time, and her friend’s grandparents took them. A happy childhood memory of her own.
Amy’s book would be about the different grandparents she met in her life. And how they loved other people’s kids, too...
She was so deeply involved with Joy, the drawing and Amy’s new book that she’d forgotten they were going to have visitors until a knock sounded on the door.
She’d forgotten to worry about what was coming in Joy’s world. Worry that the child would reject the love that was awaiting her. Or be unable to access it.
And worry about seeing Hunter Rafferty again. After the night before, watching him dip that finger... She’d even dreamed about him. The man was rattling her, and that didn’t fit with her world. When Julie got rattled, she retreated. That was just the way it was.
CHAPTER TEN
“MIND IF WE come in for a second?”
Hunter could only see the back of Sara’s head as she peeked past the solid wooden door she’d just opened. Behind Lila and Edward, he was content to simply hang out, not get in the way.
But he was eager to see Julie. And her drawing therapy. Although he wasn’t quite sure what it meant, exactly, or how it worked, he was intrigued. In part, because Julie was doing it.
“Hi.” He heard her voice in response to Sara. “I don’t mind if you want to come in. Do you, Joy?”
Startled, he listened. He’d understood the little girl to be mute since the incident. She certainly hadn’t spoken last night. Had she begun speaking since then?
After a brief pause, he heard Julie’s voice again. “We’re just drawing, aren’t we, Joy?”
Hunter was in the room at that point, following Sara and the others to a spot along the side wall. He could see the easels, and Joy, but only at an angle.
“I’m working on the beach ball, but a sand castle is coming,” Julie was saying as she continued to draw as though nothing unusual was happening.
Transfixed, Hunter watched. With brief strokes she added colors, dimension, a hint of sunshine. She made it look so easy.
“We were talking about grandparents. I never knew mine,” she said. “Joy didn’t say whether or not she has any...” Chat. Pencil stroke. She didn’t miss a beat.
His heart did when Sara said, “She does.”
What the hell? There’d been no plan to out Edward yet. This was supposed to be a quick nonthreatening getting-to know-you visit. What if the girl was afraid of her grandfather? What if...
The potential for out-of-control drama was huge. He wasn’t prepared.
Edward wasn’t prepared. No way was the kid prepared.
Was Julie?
Joy gave no indication of hearing Sara’s announcement or of understanding its significance.
He’d learned from Edward that Shawn and his sister, Mary, grew up in foster care. Which left only Edward, not that Joy knew this.
A sand castle was appearing on Julie’s page. “I used to love playing in the sand when I was a kid,” she said, and it took him a second to realize this was her art therapy, not a group conversation. She talked about a time when she was little and her friend’s grandparents took them to the beach right there in Santa Raquel.
“Wow, that’s good,” Lila said, watching Julie draw. Lila looked at Sara, who nodded, and then asked, “Is it okay if we stay a few minutes and watch?”
“It’s fine with me.” Julie’s reply was easy. Calm.
Soothing.
“What about you?” she asked the girl at her side. Joy’s gaze was focused on the sand castle.
The two women took seats at the table behind the easels. Edward half sat on the table. The doctor was sweating. There was a twitch at his temple.
Hunter was here to...he didn’t know what. But his job had always been to ease the tension. He had to do something.
“Can I draw, too?” he asked.
“Sure,” Sara answered, and Julie’s voice followed, telling him to look in the cupboard for another easel. Hunter wasn’t convinced, when Sara settled his easel next to Joy’s, that she’d made the right choice. This wasn’t cookie dough. And he had no “troubled kid” training at all.
“I’m not as good at drawing as Julie is,” he said as he picked up a purple pencil and took his seat. Joy had an ice cream cone on her page, clearly not drawn by Julie. He didn’t know if Joy’s drawing was a significant breakthrough, but he noticed Sara looking at the rudimentary drawing and then at Julie, who nodded.
If they wanted the child to relax, they definitely needed some lightening up here.
He didn’t want to interrupt Julie’s art therapy. He preferred to leave it up to the professionals, who knew what they were doing. But they’d asked him to be there...
He started to draw—all in purple—doing his best to badly emulate the lines and shadows on Julie’s page. His beach ball looked drunk. One cloud, in exactly the same place as on her picture, and approximately the same size, was sticking out its tongue.
Her voice faded, and he made a “phhht” noise with his teeth against his lip. Several times.
Joy turned her head.
Julie spoke again, and he remained silent. She wasn’t looking at him. He wasn’t even sure she wanted him sitting there. But he found a kind of rhythm in the soft cadence of her voice as she described playful memories of her childhood, interspersed with his random noises during her silences.
A wicker picnic basket appeared on her page. A purple box on his.
Joy appeared to be watching both of them. If she was aware of the people behind them, she didn’t show it. Certainly there was no sense that she felt concerned.
Which was the point. To slowly initiate Edward into her presence, without threat.
He had no idea how long art therapy lasted. He’d been drawing and making noises for a good fifteen minutes.
Julie flipped her page over, leaving a clean sheet on her easel.
He did the same.
Joy didn’t touch her page. Nor did she let go of her pencil.
“I used to imagine what my grandfather looked like,” Julie said then, and Hunter went on red alert. The woman who seemed to have some kind of crazy power over him started to draw, and he had to figure out how to ease the tension in the room.
The face she’d sketched was basic, a beginning outline. But already he could tell it was a man. With a face shaped like Edward’s.
“Aw, come on, Jules,” he said in a whiny voice. “I can’t draw thaaaat.” His up-and-down cadence could have been a tune. If he’d been a singer.
“You don’t have to draw what I draw,” she told him. “You can draw anything you like.”
When he’d seen Joy’s ice cream cone, he’d assumed the task in art therapy was to draw what the instructor drew.
Julie talked. He went back to making little noises. Drew a stick figure. Joy seemed content to sit between them, her head turning from one to the other. If he wasn’t feeling the tension from the “gallery” behind him, he wouldn’t have known anyone else was in the room.
“I can’t do it,” he finally said, with a teasing whine. “Joy, let’s see what kind of grandpa you can draw.”
She didn’t raise her pencil, but she looked up at him. Straight at him.
He
had to sneeze. At that exact, completely incredible moment, he felt the sneeze come on. And being Hunter in a potentially intense moment, he didn’t just sneeze. He did it up big. Really big. As in spewing all over the stick figure he’d drawn.
Joy laughed.
* * *
JULIE COULDN’T GET the morning out of her mind. All day Saturday, as she drove to LA to attend an afternoon rummage sale at one of the children’s homes supported by Sunshine Children’s League, she thought about Hunter Rafferty and his effect on Joy.
He was a charmer all the way and yet...he’d made an intrinsically mistrustful and frightened little girl laugh!
She could still feel the thrill of that sound. And felt tears spring to her eyes again, as she remembered the moment.
Sara had called a halt to the exercise shortly after that. Maybe for Edward’s sake. So the doctor could collect himself without alarming the child.
She was thinking about Hunter again, about his instinctive—almost gifted—way with a damaged and terrified child, when her phone rang on the drive back to Santa Raquel. It was a few minutes after five that evening. Even if he hadn’t been in her contacts with all her other business acquaintances, she would’ve recognized his number.
She pushed the button on her steering wheel—and ignored any thrill she might’ve felt at the sight of his name. Determined to decline whatever invitation he was about to offer, just as she’d done with all the others he’d issued over the past few months, she said, “Hello?”
“I have a favor to ask.”
This was a new approach. If it had been anything to do with Joy, the request would have come through Sara. Or Lila. Her connection—and work with—the child was at their request.
“What?”
“I need you to accompany me tonight. Can you be ready in an hour and a half?” She was ten minutes from home. And he had a political fund-raiser, a roast. He’d wanted her to try the desserts because the same company was serving at her gala on Thursday.
“Of course not. Hunter, I already told you—”
“I know.” He cut her off. “I’m not asking you to go so you can try the desserts, although that’ll be an added benefit and will help me make sure you’re pleased with next Thursday night’s event. The reason I need you to come is because I’m truly in over my head with this Joy thing and now that we’re all meeting again tomorrow, I just need to talk to you. Seriously, Julie. I throw parties for a living. I don’t work with troubled kids. You’re so good with her. So calm and confident. I sneeze all over a paper and eat cookie dough. I want to help Edward. I need to help him. But I’m...please, tonight’s event is the only chance I’ll have to speak with you. I’m there out of respect, not to work, unless something goes wrong, of course. So I’ll have time to talk. I do have to be there, or I’d meet you somewhere else, anywhere else.”
She couldn’t go to a political fund-raiser in Santa Raquel.
He’d have no way of knowing that.
She didn’t want him to know that.
But she couldn’t go.
Still, it was for Joy.
“Julie?”
“I’m here.”
“So...will you come? I can be at your place in an hour.”
“You said an hour and a half.”
“I can give you that, too, but then I’ll have to send a car for you.”
She wasn’t going.
“Are my brother and his wife on the guest list?” She should already know. She remembered they were going out that night; she just hadn’t paid attention to where.
“Yes. Is that a bad thing? Because I can make sure they’re seated far—”
“I can’t go, Hunter. But if I could, having Colin and Chantel there would be a good thing. I adore them both.”
Why had she told him that?
“So I’ll have them seated at our table.”
A political event. In Santa Raquel. Her worst nightmare. The perpetrator wouldn’t be there. David Smyth Jr. was in jail for many, many years. But his parents might be present. Now that the ex-police commissioner had left town, David Smyth Sr., his former best friend, had started showing himself around town again. He’d made amends. Made his son take a plea agreement that sent him away for a long time. Delivered a load of mea culpas.
But his money was still powerful.
“I need your help, Julie. I swear, I’ll let the whole room know that it’s not a date if you’ll agree to sit with me for half an hour. Just long enough to tell me what’s going on in your mind when you work with Joy.”
“You could ask Sara.”
“I’ve already spoken with her. Edward and I had a meeting with her over lunch today. She suggested I speak with you.”
Sara had sent him to her? An extra weight on her shoulders.
“Is Leslie Morrison on the guest list tonight?” Leslie had been Julie’s mother’s best friend, a woman who’d also been a victim of Julie’s rapist, although no one had known that—including Leslie’s husband—until Chantel had come bursting into her and Colin’s lives, an undercover cop, and figured out that a woman she’d thought was being abused by her husband had issues horrifyingly similar to Julie’s. Her refusal to back down on her investigation had nearly cost Chantel her life. Her job, too. But she’d persevered and exposed the commissioner, who’d taken money to protect his best friend’s son.
“The Morrisons sent a refusal.”
She wasn’t surprised. Like Julie, Leslie was living with years’ worth of self-flagellation. In some ways, the effects on Leslie were even worse because, while Julie had been a teenager when she was raped by one of the town’s richest sons, Leslie had been an adult, unable to protect herself against the child of one of her husband’s peers.
She’d been shamed and bullied into saying nothing. Smyth had threatened to say that the sex was not only consensual, but that Leslie had come on to him. He’d threatened to claim statutory rape.
At least Julie and Colin had tried to expose the creep. Until the evidence, her hospital rape kit, had mysteriously disappeared and her doctor had moved out of state.
She was almost home. Saw Chantel’s car in the drive. And remembered how her sister-in-law had put herself in the fiend’s hands, literally, in order to trap him into confessing—for Julie’s sake.
Joy needed her. Julie wondered if she could handle attending this evening’s event—for Joy’s sake.
“What do you say? Can I pick you up?”
Colin would make a big deal of it.
“If you can arrange a seat for me at my brother’s table, I’ll ride with him and Chantel.”
She couldn’t go out with Hunter Rafferty.
She couldn’t attend a political event with him.
But for Joy she could ride to a venue with her brother. And have his car as an escape hatch when she needed it. Because she would.
Julie had absolutely no doubt about that.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
IT TOOK A LITTLE last-minute scrambling, but Hunter got himself and Julie seated at a round table for eight that included Colin and Chantel Fairbanks. Edward had elected not to join him that evening. Hunter, in his newest black tux, was waiting near their table, admittedly watching for his guest’s arrival, when Julie entered the room with her brother and sister-in-law. He had a couple seated on either side of Colin and Chantel—couples who’d already been assigned to their table—which left him and Julie across the table from them. On their own.
In a long black gown, stunning in its simplicity, Julie moved slowly, but with her usual quiet confidence, as she crossed toward them. With his own movements perfectly timed, Hunter stepped forward just as they reached the table, pointing out her brother and sister-in-law’s seats before leaning toward Julie. He’d intended to take her hand, to lead her around to their chairs.
/> And somehow, once again, he missed. He was beginning to realize that his inability to touch her was no accident, but before he could react, Chantel had grabbed Julie’s attention, telling her to come and sit beside her. With glossy nails, the detective scooped up name placards and moved the new police commissioner and his wife into the seats reserved for Hunter and Julie. She didn’t ask if he minded. Julie didn’t look at him, either.
What the heck?
Hunter recovered almost immediately—not that anyone was paying enough attention to him to notice—and walked around to stand behind his seat. He held Julie’s chair for her, breathing in a scent of flowers and femininity that made him horny. Yeah, that was the word for it. He asked if everyone was comfortable, took drink orders himself and went to the bar. His palms were sweating. Getting through dinner was going to require a bourbon.
* * *
JULIE MADE IT through the first course. The one glass of white wine she’d allowed herself had helped. She’d been out in the evening on a few occasions since her first foray into the adult nighttime social scene a year and a half before. That had been a fund-raiser for the new library in town. And the night she’d faced her fears enough to help Chantel capture the man who’d raped her.
The night he’d finally been forced to start paying for his years of sexual predation.
But being seated among the town’s elite—with everyone wearing their public faces and some pretending to be things they weren’t—made her tense. Uncomfortable. She didn’t like it. And she didn’t have to do anything she didn’t like anymore. Not unless she chose to. She’d chosen to be there. For Joy.
Sitting there, between her sister-in-law and Hunter, she almost relaxed. Until Hunter laughed at something the police commissioner had said and she felt herself warming in the way a woman warmed toward a man she was dating. Hunter was charming—which was what made him good at his job, she reminded herself.
And it also made him dangerous to her.
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