Leather and Lace

by Jessie Evans

  Still, Mia didn’t trust that this was just a sightseeing trip. Paul was jealous and deluded, but he hadn’t completely lost his ability to reason. He had to know that if his shot had missed, then Sawyer could be calling the police right now. He had to know there was a chance that someone had heard the gunshot, and looked outside their window in time to see the truck pulling down the road toward Old Town. If he wasn’t worried about getting cornered in the ghost town with no way out, it was only because he didn’t care if he got out, so long as he had time to accomplish what he’d come here to accomplish.

  Mia knew what that was. She knew, the same way she knew that Paul wouldn’t stop coming for her until he was dead. Even if they had kept him in prison for fifty years, he still would have ended up back by her side, determined to finish what he’d started. It didn’t matter that there was nothing between them anymore. It didn’t matter that the Mia who existed in Paul’s mind bore little resemblance to the woman she was now, or even the woman she’d been when they were together.

  There was no logic in fixation, there was no reasoning with someone in the grips of an obsession, and unless something or someone interfered with Paul’s plan, Mia wouldn’t be leaving Old Town alive.

  “So where do you want to start?” she asked, fighting to keep her voice steady as her mind raced. “I can show you around the usual tourist exhibit, or we could go to the section that’s closed to everyone except family.”

  The part that is still dangerous.

  The part where a man could lose his footing, and fall through a hole in the floor.

  Aloud she added, “It can be interesting to see the things that haven’t been completely refurbished.”

  “I want to see it all,” Paul said. “But I’m not sure we’ll have time.”

  Mia nodded slowly, trying to conceal the panic his words inspired. He knew there might be people coming after them, and was prepared to step up his schedule accordingly. “Well, then I think we should start with the building that has the most meaning to my family. I’m named after the woman who ran the hotel and saloon. It might be nice to walk around there.”

  “That does sound nice.” The closer they got to the ghost town, the more relaxed Paul seemed, but he still had the gun trained on her and Mia didn’t doubt that he would shoot her if she tried anything. She was going to have to get him to drop his guard.

  “The original Amelia was only seventeen when she and her fiancé started construction on the hotel and saloon,” she said, increasing her volume to be heard over the churning gravel beneath the tires as she turned onto the narrow road leading past the working exhibit. “Rupert died not long after they broke ground, when the mining company was still living out of tents and the backs of their wagons. Most people assumed Amelia would hand over the project to one of the older men once she was widowed, but she insisted on opening the saloon alone. She supervised the building and served the first shots of whiskey herself.”

  Paul made a considering sound, and a moment later Mia felt his hand in her hair, twirling one of her curls around his finger. She suppressed her shudder, trying to remember the times when she’d found the feel of his hand teasing through her hair comforting.

  “I wish you’d told me stories about your family before,” he said, releasing her hair with a gentle tug as Mia pulled the truck over to the side of the road, parking near the gate. “I wish you’d trusted me.”

  “I trusted you.” The words came out sounding like the lie they were. She was a decent storyteller, but she was a terrible actress.

  “No you didn’t,” Paul said, his voice echoing in the silence as Mia shut off the car. The rain had stopped, and now there was only the keening of the wind outside as it whipped across the desert, bringing in more clouds from the west.

  “You lied to me,” he continued. “So many lies, Mia. It hurt me so badly to remember them, but then I realized something... Do you know what that is?”

  Mia turned to him, shaking her head slightly, unable to keep her eyes from dropping to the gun in his hand, still trained on her midsection.

  “We’re soul mates.” He smiled the crooked smile she’d once thought was adorable, a charming bit of asymmetry in a man whose features were otherwise perfectly balanced. “We might have screwed things up this time around, but we’re going to find each other again. In heaven, or hell, or our next life.” He shrugged. “I’ve never been a religious man, but I know that whatever comes next we’re going to be together. I know it, I believe in that like I’ve never believed in anything.”

  Mia swallowed, not knowing what to say, only knowing that she had to be ready to fight when the time came. Seeing Paul now—with the manic edge to his grin, and the delusional gleam in his eyes—it was hard to believe she’d ever looked into his handsome face and not seen the insanity lurking underneath. But there had been a time when all she’d seen was a man with high cheekbones, intense blue eyes, and a smile that spread across his face like a kid trying a new food for the first time, and discovering it was delicious.

  She’d thought she was in love with him, for a little while. For a few months, when the novelty of being one half of one of those “two halves make a whole” kind of couples had been enough to excuse a multitude of sins. But now she knew that what she’d felt was infatuation, not love. What she had with Sawyer was love, a connection so intense they could practically read each other’s thoughts, even after only a few weeks together. She wished she’d been brave enough to trust in what they’d been lucky enough to find, and to trust herself to know the difference between falling in love with love, and the real thing. If there were such a thing as soul mates, then Sawyer was hers.

  And she might never get to tell him.

  The flash of pain and regret the thought inspired was enough to help her force a smile. “Let’s not talk about heaven or hell yet, okay? Let’s just…enjoy the night. See where things lead.”

  Paul returned her smile. “I’m not stupid, Mia.”

  “I know.” Mia smiled wider, a grin that felt like a baring of her teeth, a challenge to another predator. “But maybe I’m tired of being afraid of you, Paul. Of dreading you, and waiting for your face to pop up in my nightmares. Maybe I’m ready for the end of it, however that comes.”

  Paul’s expression sobered and for a moment the look in his eyes was almost sad. “This isn’t the way I wanted it. You have to believe that, Mia. I love you. I’ve never stopped loving you.”

  Mia made her arm move, made her fingers flex and release until they were wrapped around Paul’s hand and she was touching him of her own free will for the first time since the night he’d backhanded her for lying about that stupid concert. He let it happen, with only the slightest tensing of his arm as she clasped his hand in hers.

  “Let’s go look around,” she said softly. “It’s beautiful here at night. I have a flashlight in the glove compartment. It should be enough light for us to see where we’re going.”

  “All right.” Paul released her hand, motioning her out of the truck with the gun as he reached for the flashlight. “You lead the way.”

  Mia slipped out of the driver’s side door, hope catching fire in her chest. He’d let her touch him. He’d let her get close enough that the gun’s barrel had brushed against her forearm. Now she just had to get closer, get him to drop his guard a little more, and she’d have a chance to go for the weapon. And then she would find out if she had it in her to kill someone.

  There had been a time when Mia hadn’t believed she’d be able to kill another human being, no matter what the circumstances. Now, she knew better. Now, Sawyer could be lying in an alley bleeding to death because of her. That alone—without everything else Paul had done—would have been enough to inject steel into her veins and ice into her heart.

  Please let him be okay. Please let Sawyer be alive.

  The silent prayer whispered through her thoughts as she opened the gate—discreetly turning the lock manually from the inside to keep it from closing completely behin
d her—and led Paul toward the hotel and saloon, already planning a tour that ended at the prison next door.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Sawyer placed his second call to the police as he was running for the Blue Saloon parking lot. He finished updating the dispatcher seconds before he reached his bike, and shoved his phone into his back pocket, not even bothering to end the call. He needed to get moving, to see if he could catch up with Mia and Paul. It looked like they had been headed south, toward Old Town, but he could have been wrong.

  He hoped he was wrong. The Old Town highway dead-ended at the butte. If Paul was taking Mia there, knowing he’d been spotted by at least one person, then he probably didn’t plan on either of them leaving the ghost town alive.

  Heart racing, Sawyer opened up the throttle, sending his bike hurtling along the rain slick streets. The rain itself was petering off, but his tee shirt was already soaked. He fought the urge to shiver as the wind whipped through his wet clothes. Despite the warm, muggy night, he was freezing by the time he reached the turn onto the muddy gravel road leading to the work site.

  Freezing, and scared.

  Mia’s truck was parked near the fence, but there was no sign of Mia, only the gate swinging back and forth in the wind.

  Sawyer vaulted off his bike and raced across the gritty road, straining for the sound of sirens, but so far the night remained quiet except for the rumble of thunder coming from the west. The next wave of the storm would be here any minute. Clouds covered the sky and the lamps that illuminated the working exhibit barely penetrated the darkness in the part of town still under restoration. Sawyer had been working on getting the electrical lines extended, but so far his teams had been using generators for powering lights and charging tools.

  Now, as he reached the gate and stepped through, he wished he’d made night lighting a priority. It was going to be dangerous making his way through the construction zone in the dark. He had a flashlight in his saddlebag, but he couldn’t risk using it. He couldn’t take the chance that Paul might notice the light and see him coming.

  Hopefully, Paul assumed Sawyer was lying on the pavement in the alley behind Mia’s shop bleeding to death. If so, Sawyer didn’t want to give him a reason to think otherwise. The element of surprise would be Sawyer’s biggest advantage. If he could sneak up on Paul, there was at least a chance he could take the other man out without putting Mia in more danger.

  Mia, in danger. Mia, wandering through the darkness with a man who had already tried to kill one person tonight.

  Sawyer picked up his pace, using the remains of the pedestrian walkway to feel his way along the street, silently praying for the miracle he hadn’t gotten the first time he’d been in a situation like this. He couldn’t lose Mia. He couldn’t be too late. He had to find out where Paul had taken her and—

  A light flickered up ahead as a fluorescent beam swung across the window inside the second floor of the old saloon. Sawyer broke into a jog as the wind whipped faster, sending soggy tumbleweeds rolling along the street. He couldn’t see them, but he could feel the debris bouncing off his jeans like the ghosts of Amelia Sherman’s wolf dogs crowding around his legs. Not for the first time, he had the sense of not being alone in this ghost town, but it wasn’t because Mia and Paul were here.

  As he entered the ground floor of the saloon, it wasn’t the footsteps pacing back and forth overhead that made Sawyer’s heart race. It wasn’t the sound of Mia’s voice lilting up and down the way it did when she was telling a story that made his skin go cold. It was the presence that tailed him across the room that made the hairs on his arms stand on end, and the back of his neck prickle.

  He definitely felt like he had company on the stairs as he climbed to the second floor, but Sawyer did his best to ignore the eerie feeling. He needed his head clear. He needed to be able to evaluate the situation and react in seconds if he was going to keep Mia from getting hurt.

  At the top of the stairs, he stepped onto the landing, keeping his weight forward, not letting the heels of his boots hit the floor as he shifted to stand with his back against the wall. Light glowed from the doorway to his right, and Mia and Paul were inside. Sawyer could hear Mia clearly now, hear the tension in her voice as she told Paul a story Sawyer hadn’t heard before.

  “She was in her sixties,” Mia said, “but Amelia still tended bar every night, and woke up to greet her boarders at breakfast every morning. This was her room. In her diary, she said she chose the room at the top of the stairs to make sure someone was always standing between her guests and danger. But on the last night of her life, she didn’t sleep here. She took her pillow and the quilt she’d brought from the old country and went down to the prison next door. The cells were empty that particular evening and none of the deputies on duty, but when the sheriff came in the next morning, he found Amelia curled on the floor in the center of the room. Her pillow was still warm, but her body was as cold as ice. He swore there were tears frozen on her cheeks, even though it was springtime and the temperature hadn’t gotten anywhere close to freezing the night before.”

  “That’s a mysterious story.” The masculine voice was smooth, cultured, the kind of voice that would suit an actor or a news announcer, and not at all what Sawyer had been expecting.

  But it didn’t matter if Paul sounded like a reasonable person, he was out of his mind, and probably had a gun trained on Mia right now. Sawyer had to get closer, and figure out where each of them was standing in relationship to the door. He edged toward the entrance to the room, chest aching when Mia began to speak again.

  He really didn’t want this to be the last time he heard her tell a story.

  “It is, and no one knows for sure what she was so upset about. But her son, who ran the mercantile, told the sheriff Amelia had come to visit him earlier the day before. She’d said she had something she needed to get off her chest.”

  Light footsteps sounded on the boards, and when Mia spoke again, her voice was closer to the door. “They were supposed to go riding together the next day, and talk, but Amelia didn’t live to unburden herself. In later years, her grandson would tell patrons of the saloon that he sometimes heard his grandmother’s ghost singing in the night, or felt her hand on his arm as he started up to bed. He maintained that her spirit wasn’t at rest, and wouldn’t be until her secret was discovered.”

  Mia took a breath, so close now that Sawyer could hear the air rush from between her lips. “Would you like to see the place where they found her body? It’s right next door.”

  Sawyer’s muscles tensed, ready to grab Mia and shove her behind him if she was the first one into the hallway.

  “There’s symmetry in that,” Paul said. “But I’ll warn you, I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  But they believe in you. The thought whispered through Sawyer’s head, but it didn’t feel like his own. It was as if it had originated with someone else, and the air on the landing suddenly went so cold he couldn’t help but shiver.

  A moment later, Mia stepped through the door and he launched into action, forgetting the chill until later, when he would think back and wonder who was really responsible for everything that happened next—the living, or the dead.

  ***

  Hands shot out of the darkness, grabbing Mia by the shoulders, but she didn’t cry out or struggle. The moment those fingers wrapped around her arms, she knew who the hands belonged to.

  Sawyer!

  Thank God! He was alive, and here, and now they were going to get out of this together.

  The world spun as Sawyer shifted her behind him, but Mia kept her balance and turned around in time to see him tackle Paul, and both of them fall backward through the doorway. Seconds later, there was a clatter and the flashlight Paul had been holding winked out, plunging the second floor of the hotel into blackness.

  “Sawyer, he’s got a gun!” Mia cried, feeling her way along the wall to the doorway, heart slamming in her chest as she heard what sounded like a fist connecting with flesh.
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  “Get out of here, Mia,” Sawyer said, his voice strained. “Get to the truck, the police are on their way.”

  “She’s not going anywhere!” The rage in Paul’s words scraped against Mia’s ears like claws, making her shudder. “She’s mine. She’s always been mine!”

  Mia dropped to her knees inside the door and began crawling toward the far side of the room, patting at the floorboards, searching for the flashlight. There was no way she was leaving Sawyer alone in here to fight it out with Paul. Sawyer was bigger and stronger, but Paul was insane, and had nothing left to lose. He would gnaw his own arm off to get to her, and she wasn’t going anywhere until she knew he was tied up waiting for the police to arrive.

  Seconds seemed to stretch on for hours as she crawled across the floor, the sounds of Sawyer and Paul fighting making her pulse race so fast she felt dizzied by the blood rushing through her veins. But finally, just as Paul howled in pain, and Sawyer called her name in a panicked voice, Mia’s fingers brushed against hard plastic.

  “I’m okay!” She snatched up the flashlight, fumbling for the on button, sending the bulb flickering to life in time to see Paul go flying across the room. Mia opened her mouth to scream, but her cry was drowned out by the crash of shattering glass as Paul’s body went through the window.

  She didn’t know if it was the horror of the moment playing tricks on her perception, or the way her flashlight cut through the night that made Paul seem to hang in midair for longer than gravity should have allowed. Mia only knew that she had time to see the terror on Paul’s face, to see the way his hands clawed at his own neck, as if trying to free himself from a noose, so clearly it would be forever imprinted on her brain. Surely she was mistaken, but she was certain she had time to take two full steps toward the window before Paul plummeted toward the ground and out of sight.