There was one more minor luxury—a tiny measure of single malt scotch kept in a small plastic medicine bottle. The scotch burned the back of his throat and lay warmly in his stomach, giving him a contented glow while the meal cooked and he’d tended his hurts with the miniature but well-packed medical kit he carried.
He’d sipped coffee while he changed clothes, putting on a warm, clean shirt and jeans. The blood-stained stuff went back into the pack for the next time he had an opportunity to do laundry.
Now, back on the road, he felt almost human again. His stride along the road was close to its usual rhythm. Now his mind was crystal clear and working overtime.
He’d been run out of town. Vince wasn’t the mastermind behind the move. The men had hinted at orders from someone else. Only one person besides Ma Baker herself knew Jack could be found at the boarding house.
Gallenson.
The police chief had deliberately directed him there, so that he could be found later. Even as Gallenson had been sizing him up, he must have been planning this.
Did Sophie know what her husband was?
Jack knew she didn’t but he wouldn’t tell her. Not yet. Not over this. It might simply have been misplaced jealousy had prompted Gallenson to set Vince and his buddies on Jack and run him out of town. Maybe he had let his gaze linger too long on Sophie and Gallenson had seen something in his eyes that had given him away.
Maybe.
In the end it didn’t matter, because Jack recognized Gallenson for what he was. The type was to be found in most small towns. Sometimes they held legitimate positions of power—mayor, board member, police chief. Sometimes they didn’t. But they all held a power that was invisible and invasive because most people didn’t even know it was there. They were the quiet men who went about calmly arranging events to suit themselves, affecting and influencing people’s lives with an unseen hand.
They lived in towns that were on the surface clean, law-abiding places with tradition and family values as the mainstays of the community. Suspicion rose sluggishly there. These little towns were their preferred territory.
Jack knew without doubt that Gallenson was one of them. He’d heard it in his voice when he’d spoken to Sophie and recognized it in his face when he’d studied Jack with growing suspicion. It was in the way the features had hardened. Just for a moment the real, unforgiving core of the man had shown through.
So, now Jack was back on the road again—and heading back into town.
He wouldn’t tell Sophie that the man she had married was a corrupt, amoral viper. He only had one fragment of proof and to most people that would speak only of a husband’s jealousy. But he could stay around, keep an eye out for her and watch her back.
As he walked, he found he was back to prodding at the puzzle that had been nagging at him since he’d seen her. What had happened to her? The Sophie he had come to know—and love—had been a fighter. Independent.
Looked at in a less flattering light, she was a control freak who was incapable of letting people help her. She’d gone most of her young life pissing a lot of people off, because she looked like she didn’t need them, when the truth was she was really afraid of letting her need show.
He’d always comforted himself over the years with the knowledge that she’d go on to succeed and be happy because of her dogged determination to do it her way and get it done.
What had happened to her to make her allow someone like Gallenson into her life? What had kept that remote sadness in her eyes? He’d recognized fear too—a low-grade, permanent fear that she’d learned to live with. It had left its mark. When Gallenson had told her to get back in the car, her shoulders had hunched down, reminding Jack of a cringing animal that had been kicked and whipped by too many masters. He had to find out what had happened to her. Going back to town was a bad move—bad for more reasons than Gallenson’s second-hand threat. The reasons Jack had hit the road in the first place, the reasons he had carefully avoided Los Angeles and the whole state of Colorado, were still in force.
He’d known from the start that meeting Sophie again would risk both their lives. He had made that decision in the hospital. No, Isobel had made the decision. She’d even executed it while he was in the operating room. Sophie had been moved from the hospital, out of his reach, by the time he’d come swimming back to consciousness. Isobel had refused to tell him where she was. Once he’d calmed down enough to think rationally, he’d had to agree with her hard-headed logic.
His intellectual decision didn’t make him sleep any easier. He’d gone for months dreaming of Sophie and waking up to find himself reaching for her, before he remembered that she thought he was dead. He’d learned to live with it by reminding himself that she was alive and free to live a full, carefree life. If he hadn’t taken this course, made the hard decision, she wouldn’t have had that opportunity.
Had his decision had anything to do with the forming of the Sophie he’d seen today? It was that possibility that kept him walking back into town. If he’d screwed up her life, he had to try to put it right. He owed her that much, at least.
All his drifter’s instincts protested the decision, though. While he was in one place and halted, he could be pinned down. Cornered.
So, he compromised with his warring instincts with a promise. While he was here he had to watch out for both of them, in case the fate he had been trying to outrun for ten years finally caught up with him.
Chapter Ten
Sophie didn’t even notice him come through the door. He just slipped inside—probably when she had been trying to get her point across to Maurice that “pretty good” didn’t cut the mustard. An electrical current that had the tendency to quit just when you least expected it didn’t cut the bread, either. Every day she had one hundred and thirty two rounds of sandwiches to make before the noonday whistle went off at the factory. She only just made it today.
Things were already tight enough without having to deal with shit like wiring. Maurice should have done it right in the first place. She had been so close to missing her delivery today, she’d been seriously scared. Now she was venting that fear and frustration on Maurice.
If she had any idea of how to fix the wiring herself she would never have called in the town’s handyman in the first place.
She’d believed Maurice when he said he’d fix it but he’d let her down. That sinking, legs-out-from-under-her feeling was one of the worse in the world. She would go a long way to avoid that sensation in the future. In fact, today’s scare had her seriously considering making the fifty-minute drive to Kalispell’s library to dig up a textbook on basic electrical know-how and doing it herself.
When she turned around, Jack was sitting on a stool at the end of the counter, only a couple of seats up from Cal. Sophie actually gasped with surprise. How long had he been sitting there?
“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I didn’t realize you were there. I didn’t even see you come in.” Her heart was hammering.
“Not a problem. You have your hands full.”
He looked like he’d been through a mincer. His left eye was black and swollen and the skin just below the bruising was mashed and bloody. There was another bruise emerging over the bridge of his nose. But he seemed almost cheerful.
Then she noticed the patch of pale skin under his right eye, over the most prominent part of the cheekbone. Her heart skipped again. It was a scar. That was where he’d scraped himself raw when he’d hit his head the second time.
If she’d needed any physical proof that this was really Jack sitting in front of her, she had it now. There had been moments last night when she had questioned her sanity, wondered if her imagination had got completely out of hand. He’d never once acknowledged he was Jack, she’d realized. He hadn’t confirmed anything. She’d just assumed.
Then, in the parking lot, he’d given a different name…
Sophie glanced behind her, where Maurice was muttering to himself, prodding hopefully at the power box. She turned
back to Jack. He was watching her with a patience that seemed learned—it wasn’t natural, she knew that much.
“Patience and I are business partners and that’s all,” Sophie recalled him explaining, as he sat cross-legged on their shelf of rock, coaxing the nearly dead coals of the fire back to flames. “After hours, all bets are off.”
But something or someone had beaten patience into him at some stage of his life since then.
She moved down the length of the counter so that she was standing opposite him. “What can I get you?” she asked softly. Keep it casual. Keep it cool. Wait ’til you’ve figured out what’s going on.
“Coffee, to begin,” he replied.
Sophie assessed him for a moment. Would he have changed? “Black, no sugar, not decaf,” she guessed.
One brow lifted and she caught her breath. How many times had she seen him do that, those few and precious days after the crash? The lift of the brow followed by either a puzzled look, or the one that she liked best, admiration.
“Well, I’m impressed.” The gravelly voice still had that smooth lilt and rhythm to it. The hint of a southern drawl she had heard in it last night was gone now.
After long hours tossing in her bed, running those moments through her mind over and over, she was sure now that he had been faking the accent, along with the name.
“I’m right?” Sophie asked, reaching beneath the counter for a cup and saucer.
“Are you ever wrong?” he asked.
“Not often,” she admitted, pouring the coffee. She put it in front of him. “Anything else?”
“Not right now, thank you. The coffee is just fine.”
Sophie nodded and would have moved away but found herself pinned to the spot. She had made a bargain with herself in the early hours of the morning that if she saw Jack again she would demand no explanations, would ask no questions. But now, with him seated in front of her, she found all the hurt and bewilderment of those few minutes in the parking lot last night come flooding back. The need to ask why was like a silent scream inside her.
She cleared her throat.
Jack looked up from the cup in his hands. His eyes flicked across her face, measuring, judging. “I guess you’re wondering why I’m here,” he said quietly, putting the cup down.
“Yes,” Sophie breathed, her heart suddenly beating all the more harder. Now she would find out why.
“I came to thank you for what you did for me last night. In the bar. Beany’s, isn’t it?”
Disappointment trickled through her. “Yes, Beany’s,” she said stiffly.
“It was kind of you. Not many people would have done that for a total stranger.” His eyes were locked onto hers now.
Sophie felt a wave of unreality wash over her. This was Jack. She knew it was him but at the same time his denial made a small part of her wonder if somehow she hadn’t made a ghastly mistake—that her mind hadn’t latched onto a total stranger with a passing resemblance to someone she had once known for a few short days and spun a fantasy out of fresh air as a result.
But the scar! It was there. It was real. She’d seen that wound for herself.
Confusion. Her confusion was going to give her a heart attack, with the pressure of the endless play of maybe, maybe not running around in her head.
Sophie grew aware that a response was required of her. Through stiff lips she murmured, “It was nothing. I’ve made a career out of rescuing dark-haired strangers.”
And she saw something flare briefly in his eyes, deep down. Pain. Guilt. The expressions she had grown used to seeing on his face all those times he thought she wasn’t looking at him, when he had let the good cheer slide—and later, when his hold on reality had started to slip.
Sophie bit her lip, fighting for control. Jack sat across from her, silent, his eyes missing nothing of the battle going on inside her. And for that moment Sophie’s doubt fell away. This was Jack. This was the man who had haunted her life, the dark man from her past.
Only he was not so distant right now. And he looked very human with the cuts and bruises on his face. She lifted a hand to touch the cut on his cheekbone. The other one. The left side. “What happened to you?” she murmured.
And he jerked his head back away from her touch, as if she were poison to him.
Sophie stepped back, letting her hand drop and tears stung her eyes. What had she been thinking of?
She could feel Cal’s curious eyes watching every move she made and there was the group of women in the booth against the wall—they’d paused their gossiping to look toward the counter, intuition warning them of drama happening in their midst.
Jack sat there, his face the wary, astonished one of a stranger.
Sophie couldn’t stand it. “Excuse me,” she murmured and whirled away, walking almost blindly back to where Maurice was working.
* * * * *
Jack saw the glitter of sudden tears in her eyes as she spun away and while he stared at the pristine counter top, his face studiously blank, he swore silently and continuously at himself.
He’d known coming in here was bound to hurt her in some way. Why had he done it?
Because of what he’d learned today.
He’d dutifully reported to Val Beaumont for work this morning and while he’d been busy proving to Val that he could handle the work—which had proved difficult with the aches and pains he was already carrying from last night—Val had been busy filling in Jack on the latest gossip of Serenity Falls.
It hadn’t taken much to steer Val onto the subject of Sophie. In snatched moments in between the demands of the shift, Val had been garrulous and frank. What Jack had learned had made his decision to stay in Serenity even more crucial.
Peter Gallenson wasn’t Sophie’s husband. He wasn’t even a boyfriend in the formal sense. Val had been puzzled about the relationship but it had been painfully clear from Val’s hints that there was a relationship there. Because it was Gallenson sniffing around her, most men in town considered Sophie as strictly off-limits.
She’d come to Serenity about nine years ago—about the same time he’d been hitting the road, never realizing he’d be tracing the white line for so many years. She’d been the bride of a man called Phillip Ryerson. They’d had two children. After four years, they’d separated and a year or so later, divorced.
There was been no public scandal. No one was really sure what went wrong. Ryerson left town and shortly after that Sophie went into business for herself. She had been seen in the company of Gallenson once or twice and he frequented her café on a regular basis. It was acknowledged that she seemed to encourage his company.
Those were the facts that Val had handed out. From putting together hints and clues from Val’s conversation, Jack had been able to piece together even more about Sophie’s life.
She was lonely. She had no close friends except for a woman named Jinni, who helped her take care of her children and who shared the Victorian house, which Sophie had bought and was slowly doing up. Her business was in trouble. Cash was tight.
Which was why she was dealing with a handyman who looked like he wouldn’t recognize a circuit resistor if it bit him on the nose. Ignorance came cheap.
Jack studied her out of the corner of his eye, aware that the old man sitting two stools down from him kept shooting curious glances at him.
She was dressed in jeans and a dark sweater in some fine material that seemed to cling to her softly and made Jack’s palm twitch to run his hand over the fabric, over the curves beneath. She’d matured. The curves were all woman and oh-so-sexy in a discreet, classy way.
And her hair! She’d grown it out. On the ledge it had been stylish, cut in one of those short, sassy, professional styles that went with power business suits. Now the red-gold swung down nearly to her waist, thick and wavy. He just knew it would be heavy and would slide over the back of his hand like warm silk.
Jack thought of Gallenson running his hands over her. Instantly his breath shortened and he let his eyes c
lose against the images. Now he knew Gallenson was not her husband, the images had become a form of torture and the drive to act, to do something to change the situation, was growing steadily more difficult to ignore.
Why had he come to the café?
He settled for the truth this time. Now that he knew some of the facts of her life, he wanted to see her again, to look at her through this new perspective.
So, now he’d seen her, he should just drink up his coffee and go. He had to find somewhere to stay tonight too—Ma Baker’s was out of the question, even though she owed him a night’s accommodation.
But his gaze kept straying back to Sophie, as she stood arguing the toss with the handyman. Before he knew he was going to say anything, he opened his mouth and the words spilled out, “You know, the fault is probably in the meter box.”
* * * * *
Sophie turned to look at Jack. “Pardon?” she asked, unsure she had heard correctly.
“You’ve got a shop front tacked onto a house, here. The meter box is probably an old one, put in place when the original house was built. It’s not designed for commercial current. If you check the meter box, I think you’ll find that’s where the problem is.”
Sophie turned to look Maurice accusingly. He pushed his toothpick to the other side of his mouth. “What would he know? Is this guy a qualified inspector or something?”
Sophie looked back at Jack. She knew he wasn’t qualified.
His smile was rueful. “I’ve got credits you wouldn’t believe but no qualifications that I can boast about.” He stood up. “Thanks for the coffee, Sophie. How much—”
Dead Again: A Romantic Thriller Page 12