Yashi’s smile was thin. A serial killer in Cedar Creek? And a woman, at that, one who had chosen to kill herself in spectacular fashion when her plans to kill Mila and Sam failed. Everyone had heard about it.
But she hadn’t heard that the woman wounded Ben. Just as the effectiveness of small-town gossip never failed to amaze her, neither did the effectiveness of a small town circling its wagons to protect one of its own.
“She got past the officer stationed in the lobby of the building and made it into the apartment. I’d fallen asleep on the sofa, and I woke up the next morning in the hospital.” He paused, one hand going to his rib cage to rub. “She liked knives. Knew how to use them, too.”
He straightened, seemed to realize he was touching the scar and lowered his hand. “Like I said, no big deal.”
A crazy woman had tried to kill him, and it had just been another day on the job. She should have worried more. Would worry more now.
But he was alive, and he was still well trained, cautious and taking only calculated risks. That balanced out the bad, didn’t it? Sort of?
Without waiting for a response, he went on. “I’m going over to check Lolly’s garden. You want to come?”
No, she didn’t, but she appreciated the optimism in his offer, that Lolly would be back and her garden would be waiting for her in the same shape in which she’d left it. Besides, she didn’t want to stay alone, either. She put on a smile a hundred watts brighter than she felt. “Sure, let’s go.”
Chapter 10
Ben’s mother had had a garden when he was young, one big enough to put all six kids to work in spring, summer and fall. Once, he’d pointed out to her that most home gardens only had six or maybe ten tomato plants, not thirty-five, and she’d swatted him. Gardens should provide a bounty. And have you ever seen a tomato go to waste in this house?
Lolly’s garden wasn’t as big as the Little Bears’, but it still provided a bounty. Between weeding, watering, slapping at bugs and watching for copperheads, he and Yashi filled two rubber trugs with everything that was ripe and a few tomatoes that weren’t. Yashi used to make a fried green tomato that was even better than his mom’s. Maybe he could persuade her to fix them for tomorrow night’s dinner.
To be honest, all he’d have to do was ask her. But persuading her sounded like a whole lot more fun.
And Ben Little Bear hadn’t had a lot of fun in too many years.
The sun was on the horizon, but dusk was yet to come. The crape myrtle blooms perfumed the still air and buzzed with bees, and small clouds of gnats separated as they flew past, then reformed. He batted a bee away as he waited on the porch steps with his full bucket.
“We won’t tell Lolly that I let her okra grow to magnificent heights, will we?” Yashi had two trugs, one with discard okras, some eight inches and longer. “Too bad you can only eat them when they’re stubby and short.”
Sweat dampened her face and left the hair edging it wet and flat or screwing around at odd angles. Her cheeks were red, but she’d smiled while he told Little Bear gardening stories. She was as close to relaxed as he’d seen her during this whole mess, and somehow she was still clinging to that damn hope. It was in her eyes, in her smile, in the essence of her.
He admired her for it.
She picked up a wicker basket, then sat down on the steps, too. “I thought we could leave some of this for Sweetness over by the cedar tree. Do you think she’ll get to stay in her cabin?”
He helped fill the basket from his trug. “She’s got Sam and Daniel on her side. Her son sure doesn’t want her moving in with him. If there’s a problem, I know a good lawyer who would help out, and Sweetness has already met Lolly and Theo, so meeting more family won’t stress her.”
Her gaze darted to his, away and back again, much like the insects tonight. It took her a long moment to asked, “Do you think I’m good?”
He started to chide her with the fact that she knew she was good. The DA had hired and kept her; the entire police department had respected and worked well with her. But she was scraping by now in an area of law that had never interested her, and there were a fair number of people, like the reporters Saturday, who didn’t remember the brighter, more successful cases of her career; they thought of her only as the ADA whose mistake had cost the state millions.
“You’re a good lawyer, Yashi,” he said quietly. “You’re a good person.”
She blushed and ducked her head to stare into the basket. He could see that she was smiling, a sweet, delicate sort of smile, the kind she used to smile all the time but that had been rare these past few days. Balancing plum tomatoes on top of cucumbers, squash and bell peppers, she abruptly stood and headed across the grass. At the Christmas tree, she looked around, then hung the basket on a low-hanging branch next to the path.
“Sweetness!” she yelled. “Vegetables!” Then, shrugging sheepishly, she came back and retrieved her own bucket.
When they got home, annoyed meowing came from inside, the curtains swaying as Bobcat paced back and forth on the windowsill. “Oliver doesn’t seem at all perturbed, does he?” Ben asked.
The kitten sat on the wicker chair, well within Bobcat’s line of sight. He preened for a moment, then strutted to the edge of the cushion to sniff Yashi.
Inside, Bobcat yowled, turning into a prickly orange. Ben snorted, and Yashi elbowed him. “He’s not used to having other males around.”
Ben appreciated that. Given that they’d parted in serious upset—anger on his part, confusion and guilt on hers—she had been entitled to install a revolving door on her bedroom. She was free to hook up, date, sleep with anyone she wanted, none of his business. She could have fallen in love with one of them. Could have married and had kids with him.
But he was damned glad she hadn’t.
Ben gave Oliver a few rubs between his ears—the cat was so tiny that his thumb covered the territory and then some—then followed Yashi inside. On a normal night, he would shower and go to bed within the hour. Sometimes dark didn’t come soon enough for him. He was up by four or five, enjoying his coffee, reviewing his notes, planning his day.
But tonight wasn’t a normal night, and while he would definitely hit the shower, as far as everything else, all bets were off.
They took turns in the bathroom. He let her go first, knowing she would be quicker and wouldn’t use too much hot water. The fact that he would be following her, smelling her fragrances, with clear images in his mind, was just an added bonus.
Per form, she was out within ten minutes, hair damp, wearing a tank top and cotton shorts. The garments showed no more skin than the clothes she’d worn that day, but knowing she intended to sleep in them made them more...interesting.
Per his form, Ben spent double the time and also came out wearing a T-shirt and running shorts, both left over from his long-ago academy days. They’d been worn and washed so many times that the lettering was illegible. Even the colors were hard to identify.
“You want dessert?” He’d bought groceries, but his mother had sent a large bowl of banana pudding home with him. It was more than five or six people should be able to eat, but he always managed.
“Of course. Would it be too much to eat outside on the porch?”
“Not as long as you spray that.” He nodded toward the bug spray on the table next to the front door. It was a concoction of his sister’s, all natural and relatively effective if he ignored those natural smells.
By the time he’d filled two bowls, Yashi was sitting in one of the wicker chairs, her feet propped on the porch railing. Oliver was on the railing, too, studying her with head tilted to one side.
“He looks so serious,” she remarked.
“Probably wondering why someone as pretty as you hangs out with Bobcat.”
Dim light seeping from the windows barely illuminated her face. She seemed torn between accepting his compliment and defending her mut
t of a cat. She decided instead to take a bite of pudding and did an appreciative hmm-hmm thing that could make him go weak. That made his hand tremble.
“Oh my. That is—” Her tone was almost reverent, and she skipped words for another bite. When she finally spoke again, she said, “Your mother is a culinary goddess.”
“You should tell her that.” His mom liked compliments as much as the next person, and given the direction his mind kept wandering, being aware of Yashi’s awe for her cooking would certainly predispose Mary Grace to approve of her.
He set his empty dessert dish aside, then stood and turned his chair 180 degrees. When he sat again, he mimicked her position, using the windowsill for a footrest. His legs stretched out a lot farther than hers did, enough to keep him out of the light from inside. They both rested their arms on the chairs’ arms, their fingers just inches apart.
He’d missed her fingers. Her touch. Her scents.
Oliver leaped onto the chair back, then strolled down Ben’s arm to huddle on his lap, where Bobcat could see him. Ben stroked his back, his mind wandering, as always, back to his problems. An inspirational quote had hung in the restaurant’s office since it opened, so long that he’d stopped even seeing it when he was there. Life is ten percent what happens to you, according to Charles Swindoll, and ninety percent how you react to it.
Following that line of thought, the unhappiness, the losses and the loneliness of the last five years was simply relegated. What Yashi had done: ten percent. How he had reacted: ninety percent.
Once, when asked how he could forgive Natasha for jilting him just days before their wedding, Daniel’s response had been thoughtful. I had a choice. I could be righteous and unforgiving and alone, or I could have the life and the woman and the family I always wanted.
It was that simple...though the journey to get to that point hadn’t been easy for Daniel. It had taken threats to Natasha’s life and his own to reach it.
It was that simple for Yashi, too. When Ben asked her yesterday what she had thought would happen with them, her response had been so basic. I thought you loved me enough to get over it. She’d had faith, in him, in them, and she’d made a choice to trust that faith.
Ben had made a choice, too, and like Daniel, he’d been righteously unforgiving and alone.
He didn’t want to be alone anymore.
“You’re awfully quiet.” So was her voice. “Are you contemplating the mysteries of the universe?”
He waved his hand to shoo away the mosquito buzzing around Oliver, then realized the hum came from the kitten, asleep on his lap. Another show of faith, given that he wasn’t Oliver’s favorite human.
“No,” he admitted at last, giving the cat one more gentle stroke before raising his gaze to Yashi’s. “Just the mysteries of us.”
* * *
Yashi didn’t look past Ben at the night sky to find the reason for her skin prickling and the hairs on her arms standing on end. She knew there were no storm clouds hiding in the dark, no electrical charges zapping from cloud to ground. All that spark and sparkle was generated by him, by her, and it fed on the nervous energy she’d been living on since Saturday. It was sweetly familiar and strangely new, full of promise and pleasure and danger, and it caught her breath in her chest.
When the knot in her throat loosened, she cautiously said, “I miss us.”
“So do I. And... I’m sorry, too.”
Something gave way inside her, sweet and warm and overflowing with relief. It had seemed he would never let go of his anger. She hadn’t even been certain he should. But now that he’d said those two tiny, huge words, she felt a thousand cares lighter. A thousand times more hopeful.
The chair creaked when he moved, but the kitten didn’t twitch a muscle. “I knew you trusted my opinions, my evidence, and I guess I expected that, when I changed my mind, so would you. But you didn’t. You pursued the case the way you always did—hell-bent on winning—only this time, instead of persuading the jury to believe my testimony, you discredited it. With words that came straight from my mouth.
“I don’t know why I was surprised. Maybe because I was still blown away by the fact that Lloyd’s lawyers knew I had questions. I thought that was between you, me, Sam and a few select others.”
She remembered the look in his eyes the instant he’d realized the defense’s intent. Even as good as his poker face was, he couldn’t quite hide the shock. Her brain had banished her own shock and immediately begun searching for a way to sway the jury back to her side. A tad difficult when the lead detective was creating a more-than-reasonable doubt. When Ben’s earlier comment had popped into her head, she hadn’t thought twice about using it.
Hell-bent on winning was in the job description for an assistant district attorney.
It didn’t belong in a relationship.
“Anyway...” He exhaled loudly. “When you told me yesterday that you thought we would be all right, that I would get over it, I think you made my brain explode. It was the stupidest thing anyone ever said to me. Except it’s not. I never doubted that I loved you, or that you loved me. Our trust got broken, and sometimes that happens, and the options are to fix it or stop loving and move on. I haven’t had much luck at the stop loving or moving on—”
Yashi’s cell phone rang, tightening the bands around her chest. She wanted desperately to hear Ben’s next words, but instinct drove her to pat her pockets before she realized her shorts didn’t have pockets. She’d put the phone on the bathroom counter when she showered and left it there when she was done.
Her first rule of phone use was the person in front of her took precedence over the one on the phone, especially when the person in front of her was Ben. But anxiety was entwined with the anticipation inside her, reminding her that these weren’t the usual circumstances. Most likely, the call was from a friend or a wrong number. But it could be Brit or the hospital. Something could have happened to Theo.
It could be the kidnapper, finally making another move.
Ben’s mouth curved in a rueful smile, and his bare feet hit the floor without a sound. “Go get it. If it’s important, they’ll leave a message or call right back.”
Gratefully, she squeezed his hand as she bounded from the chair and rushed inside. The phone fell silent as she crossed the living room, then rang again as she turned into the bathroom door. With a glance at the screen—blocked number—she made sure the phone was recording, then lifted it to her ear. “Hello?”
“Hello, Yashi.” The voice was male, void of accent and inflection, one she didn’t know, and it sent shivers dancing across her skin.
She slowly returned to the living room, her free hand pressed to her stomach to control the queasiness there, but her voice stayed steady. “So you finally called. You know, you could have contacted me directly in the first place and left my family out of this.”
“I could have, but what would have been the fun of that? Besides, I wanted you to understand how very serious I am.”
Ben came inside, moving as silently as a butterfly, stopping in front of her, brows raised. She nodded. Yes, it’s him. “I would understand better if I knew who you are.”
Ben laid his hand over hers, tilting the phone so he could hear, too. She watched him peripherally, his dark eyes all concentration. “When I’m ready. I like this setup. I can yank your chain whenever I want and control the entire rest of your day. You aren’t working, you aren’t sleeping, you’re focused on me all the time. You’re living your life on the edge, and that will never change as long as I have your family. Of course, you’ve still got the kids. You love them, but Will—he’s the big deal, isn’t he? He’s the only person in the world who remembers your childhood. Who remembers your mother and father. Without him, it’s like they didn’t exist. Without him, your memories don’t exist. They’re just the dreams of a kid with nobody in the world who loved her.”
Physical
pain washed over her, leaving her trembling and nauseated, swaying on her feet. It was true. Will was her only connection to her parents and his, to her life when it was happy and normal. Yes, she loved the kids and Lolly, but Will... Who was she and where did she come from without Will?
At the other end of the call, there was a shout, a thud, then a shriek that broke off midscream. Heartsick, Yashi clutched the phone tighter. The shout had been Will, the shriek Lolly. She found comfort in hearing their voices—thank God, they were alive—though that thud was surely Will’s punishment for interrupting.
She forced a breath, sharpening the pain. “Okay, I know you’re serious. Let’s make the trade. I’ll come right now. Just tell me where.”
The man’s voice increased in volume, but there was still no emotion. No anger, no derision. That coldness ramped her anxiety to new levels. “You are such a bitch, always trying to be in control. You have no control here, Yashi. You do what I tell you when I tell you. If you don’t, your family will pay the price. Do you understand?”
“I do, I do. I swear. I’m sorry. Whatever you want. Just tell me.”
There was a long silence, painful and awkward for her, but she sensed in the emptiness glee and excitement for the kidnapper. Of course he was dragging this out. He was enjoying it.
He finally replied. “I want you to suffer.”
Yashi knew he’d disconnected after that, but she couldn’t lower the phone, couldn’t stop the recording, couldn’t do a damn thing but stand there in a fog, hearing echoes of Will’s shout, of Lolly’s scream, of the man’s menace. She was only vaguely aware of Ben taking the phone, pushing her into the nearest chair, crouching in front of her. He rested his hands on her thighs, his palms warm against her chilled skin. She stared at his strong, bronzed fingers a long time before dragging her gaze up to his face. “Was it Lloyd Wind?”
“I don’t know. I think... There was something odd about the voice. Like he was using some kind of device to alter it.”
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