Dead Again: A Romantic Thriller

by Cooper-Posey, Tracy

  She ate quickly, anxious to get to it. Jack seemed content with the silence, happy to just watch her. Even the way he watched her had changed. There had been a brooding, contained quality to his gaze before. Now she understood the quiet, steady appraisal and responded to it.

  She pushed her plate away, finished her coffee in two quick mouthfuls and got to her feet. She picked up Jack’s hand from its loose curl around the coffee mug and pulled on it, coaxing him to his feet.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “My room.”

  His eyes seemed to turn black. He knew. He nodded.

  She went back up the stairs and this time it was she who led him. In the bedroom, she shut the door and turned on the bedside lamp.

  She intended to go to him, then, to pull him toward the bed but he was already there, behind her. She was turned and backed up against the wall. He was up against her, hot, hard and hurried and she realized that the dam had already broken and the flood was loose without any catalyst she might have used.

  His mouth was covering her face and neck with hot kisses, his hands were everywhere, driving her already heated need higher. She was pushed into a mental abyss where thought deserted her and feeling, emotion and pleasure filled the void. Her hands and mouth became her language.

  Clothes were shed quickly, without finesse. The need to reach bare flesh, to remove barriers, was unspoken but they both understood it and welcomed the haste.

  The first time his hand cupped her breast, she bowed back, her whole body arching with a chord of gratification. She realized that she was falling back but Jack was there, lowering her to the bed, his head dipping to replace his hand, his hand sliding down to pull her thigh up against his hip, to bring the core of her into contact with him.

  Then they were spiralling up, driven by a decade of wanting, impatient now the moment was nearly here.

  He slid between her thighs and her breath caught. She gripped the back of his neck, encouraging him.

  “Jack…”

  “Yes,” he growled and slid into her. She arched again, hard, locked into the moment that spun endlessly, endlessly on. His hand, gripping hers, clenched in answer.

  Jack. This is Jack. He’s here. With me.

  As her climax gripped her, she already knew it was only a beginning, that this wouldn’t be enough to put paid to what had started on a ledge in Colorado ten years ago.

  How much do I need? And close on that thought, Will we be able to get what we want? Will fate leave us alone, now?

  * * * * *

  Peter knew he was drunk. Knew he was very drunk. So drunk that his own deputies, if they saw him right now, would be tempted to pour him into one of the narrow cots in the cells and leave him locked up for the night for his own good.

  But he was alone in the station, listening to the silence. The deputy on duty had climbed into a patrol car thirty minutes ago, to do a long slow cruise around the sleeping town.

  Peter emerged from his office and negotiated the alley between desks, over to Mitch’s. He fell into the swivel chair sideways and it tipped back. He grabbed the edge of the metal desk and pulled himself upright.

  The computer hadn’t been turned off properly, of course. Duggie was the only one in the station who logged out of the databases every time he finished a shift, then went through the logging on process when he turned up again. Everyone else just turned the monitor off, leaving the guts of the thing under the desk running.

  It was sloppy security but as Peter himself couldn’t be bothered frigging around with closing down windows and backing out of half a dozen programs that wouldn’t shut themselves down, he wasn’t about to jump down anyone else’s throat for it. Besides, even if a civilian did get access to the databases, there was an even bet going they wouldn’t know what to do with them if they did.

  Peter figured it was pretty slick to think of using Mitch’s computer instead of his own when he was this drunk. But the fact was, his body was drunk but his mind was in a silvered, calm place where all the circuits were working just fine. Thought came easily and clearly. The jam started when he tried to execute the thought. But for pure thought—for speculation, analysis, conclusion—the systems were all clear and at optimum strength.

  He had finally decided what to do when the bottle of J.B. had less than a half-inch at the bottom of it. He’d finished the bottle while deciding how to go about it, then staggered out here to Mitch’s desk. He looked for the monitor’s power switch, then focused on it fiercely and watched his finger waver its way over to it and depress it. He was rewarded by a small electronic “poof” and the gradually cohering images on the monitor.

  Then he took a while to absorb what the screen had on it. Mitch was still logged into the national database. Good.

  Now he was going to have to tackle the keyboard. And the mouse, damn it. With deliberate, slow steps, he let his hand fall on the mouse and pushed it until the pointer fell over the “search” button and clicked.

  Then he used a single finger to peck out “Stride, Martin.”

  He put his hand over the mouse and reconsidered his decision. He couldn’t understand why he was hesitating, that was the problem. He did searches, ordered traces, pulled people’s records every day. Why did this one matter?

  It came down to Sophie. What would she think of him if she found out? Oh, Martin had pinned that one down real well, hadn’t he? So well, Peter had struggled against the temptation to pull his records for weeks, unwilling to risk seeing disgust on her face, or condemnation.

  When had it started, this compelling need to have her? Why her? Sophie wasn’t the prettiest looking girl in town, not by a long chalk. There were others, far more freely available than her. He could have taken his pick of any of them.

  Women had always come easy to him. He’d grown up on a ranch out east, on the dry plains by Wolf Point, south of the Missouri River. Even in high school he had sensed that his looks brought him a power that was denied most men. The way even the older women had studied him, their eyes calculating, their bodies speaking another language, had deepened the knowledge. He’d learned to cultivate a certain smile that would make them pause, breathless. After that, anything he wanted could be his for the asking.

  Men saw his power too. Most of them resented it. This was the other side of the coin and he learned that lesson just as quickly, especially when the more resentful of them had explained their envy with their fists. He made moves to put himself in a position outside their reach. Straight out of college, he’d moved into law enforcement—it had been purely for self-protection but he quickly learned that it gave him the same power over men that his smile and looks did over women.

  He knew he’d found his place in the world, then. He’d spent his life so far moving around the state, moving up the ladder in different town police departments, including a two-year stint in the bigger Kalispell department, learning skills and gaining experience that the little towns hungered for. Finally he’d made chief of police here.

  And met Sophie Kingston.

  She’d been Sophie Ryerson when they’d met but Ryerson had already left town and she’d reverted back to her maiden name the same year. Peter had swung by the diner, in search of coffee that was at least drinkable, as Beany’s sludge always tasted like it had been brewing a month. He’d walked into the diner and it wasn’t like he’d taken one look at her and known instant love or even instant lust.

  The truth was, she’d grown on him. That first day she’d been pleasant, brisk and efficient. She hadn’t fallen over herself to please the chief of police like so many people seemed to do. She hadn’t been anything beyond professional and contained. Distant.

  Yet he’d watched her talking to Cal, pouring him coffee and laughing at one of his wheezy wisecracks. There had been a warmth in her face that was missing when she spoke to Peter.

  He’d gone a few days after that, not really thinking about her but found himself abruptly pulling his cruiser into her café for coffee three days later, want
ing to see her again, wanting to see if he could win for himself some of the warmth she seemed to reserve only for a select few.

  No, she wasn’t the prettiest but the obsession had bit deep anyway, hadn’t it?

  The whisky was pulling open doors he usually kept firmly shut in his mind, anaesthetizing him to the guilt lurking behind them.

  That stupid stunt with the kid. The holdup. What had he really thought he’d get out of it? He had been desperate. If he’d stopped to consider the situation for one sane, calm moment, he may have been able to predict that Sophie would look after herself somehow. God, he’d been watching the woman for four years. How could he have thought she’d just fall into his arms?

  But it hadn’t been his arms she had fallen into, had it?

  And now he was too late. Yeah, that was it. He had watched them walk out of the café, Stride’s arm around her and known he was too late.

  Well, the game wasn’t finished yet. There was overtime to play. Everyone knew games could be completely reversed during overtime.

  Completely reversed.

  The team that was down for the count just had to pull out a few extra stops, that was all. Take extra risks.

  So he clicked on the button that would send the search request across the networks and bring back to him the goods on Martin Stride. He knew with every pickled corpuscle in his body that what would come back would be enough to turn the game around.

  It would be the little bit extra he needed and it was worth the risk, now.

  * * * * *

  It was his turn to wake, confused.

  For a minute Jack lay staring into darkness that wasn’t quite dark enough, orienting himself. It was her scent on the pillow that told him where he was. That and the quiescent, satiated state of his body.

  He took a deep breath, feeling it fill his lungs easily.

  The other side of the bed was empty and the sheet was almost cool when he slid his hand over it. The tall wardrobe in the corner of the room opposite the bed stood with a door ajar and he knew it had been shut, before. More clothes?

  He slid on his jeans but couldn’t find his shirt. He went in search of her. The house was filled with pale, diffused light. The light was puzzling. It was much too early for dawn.

  He found her downstairs, in the lounge. She was wearing his shirt and nothing else, sitting on the edge of one of the loveseats, staring at something on the coffee table. There was a shoebox beside it, the lid upside down on the sofa next to her.

  That was what she’d got out of the closet.

  He glanced out the big bay window and saw the source of the odd glow permeating the house. It was snowing. Big fat flakes fell through utterly motionless air. It must have been snowing for a while because the ground was completely white. There was much more to come, because the sky was thick and low. The light radiated from the clouds and the snow blanket, then picked up, bounced, echoed and reflected endlessly until the night glowed with a dull light of its own.

  “It’s snowing,” Sophie said quietly. “Georgia will get her white Christmas.”

  He was drawn to the windows, held by the sight, unable to pull away.

  “I love watching snow fall,” she said, behind him. “The muffled silence that comes with it. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.”

  “Give it time,” he assured her. “Personally, I hate the stuff. The only time it’s nice to watch is when you’re inside.”

  “I guess you haven’t been inside too much, then.”

  He found the ingrained restriction against talking about himself hadn’t left him. He thrust it aside with sheer willpower. “It’s been too long since I was inside,” he admitted.

  “I never saw snow until I came to the mountains,” she said.

  He forced himself to turn away from the mesmerizing snow, to look back at her. She was the reason he was inside, now.

  “You came back because of me, didn’t you?” he asked. “You came back to the mountains.”

  She nodded. “I didn’t know that until the other day but yeah, I married a man who reminded me of you and convinced him we would be better off away from the city, in a little community and the one I found was here. Serenity Falls. Even this house, the back verandah…” She shook her head. “Do you realize that the mountains over the top of the trees out there look a lot like the ones across the ravine in Colorado?”

  He sat on the coffee table, facing her. “I recognized them the first day I was here.” Then he saw what was on the table next to the box.

  It was his gun.

  Shock slithered through him, coldly dispersing all the peace and goodwill.

  “Where did you get this?” he demanded.

  “You gave it to me.”

  He reached for the memories but nothing would come. Nothing around the gun.

  “I thought it had been taken when we got to Boulder,” he said, straining to recall details that were blurred at best, or else wholesale accounts from other people, which were all he had to cover the periods when he was unconscious.

  “You don’t remember, do you?”

  “No.” He was surprised to hear his voice was hoarse.

  With no further encouragement, Sophie told him of the last days on the ledge, how he had gradually lost his grip on reality, how he had forced the gun on her and how she had used it to draw the rescue party to their place on the ledge.

  He found it ironic that it was Sophie who was doing the telling when it was he who owed the most explanations. He had been preparing himself for it, knowing it was time to tell her everything. It hadn’t occurred to him that there were chunks of his own past that she would have to give him. Those missing pieces had gone unnoticed because there was no one else in this world he cared to speak to about that time, who would be able to point to the absence.

  She gave him the details in pragmatic words, not highlighting, not dramatizing. But the unadorned words carried their own weight. Gradually, his admiration for her lifted to a new level, fed by her words. They outlined her courage, her resourcefulness despite the lack of emphasis. She didn’t speak of her grief when she had thought him dead but she didn’t need to. He had seen the shape of it that first day here, when he’d seen the mountains from her back verandah, when he’d realized that she didn’t see the parallel.

  Under normal circumstances, the chances of them meeting each other again would have been so small a statistician would have called them zero. But she had been pulled back to the mountains just as he had answered the call every October. Back to the mountains, back to the north.

  Her tale went on. The operations, the therapy. Jack looked at the long, fishbone scar on her thigh, white against the pale skin, visible even in this light. She had emerged from the therapy a different woman. “My job at the law firm had evaporated but it was a relief. I think I had been looking for a reason not to go back. L.A. was clogged, too loud and too dirty. I found a job waiting tables at a diner in Venice Beach and that was when I met Phillip. He was from Kalispell and I had to ask him where that was. Montana, he said. The mountains. I didn’t want to go out with him but he had a way of smiling, a little lift of his mouth and he never quit asking. So I said yes.”

  Jack realized she was going over this not just for him alone. She was revising it, seeing it new. “We ended up in bed that night and it was so…frantic.” She looked up at him then. He knew she was thinking of the furious speed of their own lovemaking a short while ago. “It was cathartic,” she added with a frank tone. “Afterward, I cried and the next morning Phillip proposed. He actually said ‘let me take you home. Get you away from the city,’ and I think that sold me on him more than any idea of love.”

  “What happened?” Jack asked. “Why did it end?” Although he already knew the answer, he wanted to hear it, to have it confirmed.

  She looked up at him. “Phillip wasn’t you,” she said simply. “That’s what it comes down to. At the time it was like any other marriage break up. Tears, frustrations, money problems. There may have
been adultery but I wasn’t very interested. If you were to ask Phillip he’d give you the same answer every other divorced guy in the world would give—all the myriad little problems that added up to it not working. But it really was me that was the problem. I married one guy but wanted someone else.”

  Jack nodded. He’d known, somehow, that first night in town that he’d screwed up her life. “My fault,” he told her.

  “That’s what you said on the ledge. ‘My fault’.” She frowned. “Isobel said that the plane went down because you were on it.”

  His turn. He took a breath. “Sure you’re ready for this, Sophie?”

  Her answer was gentle but shocking. “I think not knowing has done more damage, caused more problems, than whatever it is you’re going to tell me. I want it over, Jack. I want to know what I’m facing.”

  “Okay.” He took another breath but the words wouldn’t come. “I don’t know where to start,” he said at last. “I’ve never had to tell this to anyone before.”

  Her hand rested on his knee. “You were a cop, weren’t you?”

  “About a million years ago.”

  “Chicago, I think,” she said, “and something happened. The bad guys happened. The mayor with the shotgun.”

  “Yes, Chicago.” He could feel his chest tightening up.

  “Somehow, I know you weren’t uniform.”

  “No, I’d earned my gold.”

  “Tell me.” A simple request.

  He took another breath and this time it came. “There was a crime syndicate there, run by a guy called Patrick Callahan. Irish mafia, basically. Everyone wanted to bring him in but Callahan had a charmed life. No one could pin him down, though they tried.

  “I was in Freeport, just south of the Wisconsin border. I’d moved into Illinois to, well, get away from my childhood, I think. I got in with the wrong crowd and could have got into serious trouble if my dad hadn’t bailed me out. Him and one of the cops in town, who had the patience of a saint and long-term vision. He seemed to think I had potential when everyone else had given up on me. That’s how I ended up becoming a cop, because of him. But I went to Illinois to do it, because I needed to make a clean break from all the people I knew who didn’t want me to make that break.