Secrets Rising

by Sally Berneathy

  Charles shrugged. "Ben knows I pass right by here on my way home. I told him I'd be glad to stop and tell you in person."

  "Well, then, thank you." She forced herself to walk toward him, to place one hand on the wooden door, indicating she was ready for him to leave, ready to close the door behind him as soon as he was gone. And she was. Even with the attic fan laboring mightily to pull in a breath of the sultry air, she'd close the door and lean against it and suffer the heat just to know it separated her from Charles.

  He ignored her action, pulled off his cap and raked an arm across his brow. "These new uniforms get awful damn hot in the summer. I sure could use a drink of cold water."

  Mary stood stock still for a long moment, her mind racing frantically to come up with some excuse, some reason to get this man out of her house, to deny him even a drink of water.

  Her husband's best friend. His partner. Without him she wouldn't have Ben. He'd be lying dead in a jungle halfway around the world.

  "Of course." She turned away and opened the refrigerator.

  Behind her she heard the wooden door close.

  She tried to ignore the uneasy feeling that crept up from the pit of her stomach and spread over her chest, making it hard to breathe. He was closing the door because he'd seen her start to do it and assumed that was what she wanted.

  To lock him outside, not inside with her!

  She took down a plastic glass and filled it with cold water from the pitcher. "Take it with you," she said, handing it to him. "You can bring it back next time you come by."

  His fingers closed over hers. "What if I forget?" His voice was strangely husky. He stood so close she could smell the cloyingly sweet cologne he always wore as well as the dark, slightly musty scent he never seemed quite able to cover up no matter how much cologne he wore.

  He was too close.

  She tugged her hand loose. "It's an old glass. I don't care." Her voice was breathless.

  Frightened.

  That was absurd. Charles might disgust her, but he would never harm her.

  He raised the water to his lips, and she turned away, again checking the roast. "Thank goodness for crock pots," she babbled. "I couldn't bear to turn on the oven in this heat."

  His hand slid under her hair, over the bare skin on her back.

  "Don't," she whispered. "Please don't."

  He lifted her hair and pressed his lips to her neck.

  She whirled on him, brandishing the fork she'd used to turn the roast. "Stay away from me!"

  Laughing, he grabbed both her wrists and pushed her against the counter. "Don't give me that. You've been taunting me ever since you married Ben, swinging that sexy ass in front of me, wearing those little tops and no bra so I can see your big nipples."

  She strained against his hold, surprised at his strength. He wasn't as tall as Ben, but he was stocky and strong.

  He pinned her to the counter, his body hard and aroused.

  "Charles, you don't want to do this." She tried to sound calm as she twisted sideways, seeking to escape the wild look in his eyes, fighting the panic that threatened to overwhelm her.

  "Oh, yes, I do. And you want me to." His mouth descended on hers and she felt bile rise in her throat.

  ***

  Mary huddled in the corner, sobbing quietly, her body and soul bruised and aching. Charles' dark, sickly sweet scent clung to her, nauseating her.

  From behind her she heard the sound of a zipper.

  "You better go clean up before your husband gets home," Charles said, his voice perfectly normal, as if they were discussing a messy accident. "I think we should keep this our little secret, don't you?"

  His hand came down, clamped on her chin and forced her to look up at him. "Don't you?"

  She jerked away from the slime of his touch.

  "If you want to keep your husband, I'd suggest you don't force him to choose between the man who saved his life, the man who's his partner and best friend, and the whore who seduced that best friend."

  She curled into a ball again with her back toward him, biting her lip to stifle the sobs, praying he'd leave, praying Ben would come home, praying she'd wake from this nightmare. No man except Ben had ever touched her. Now a monster had invaded and desecrated the private, sacred acts she and Ben alone had shared.

  She heard Charles open the door. Thank God! She had to get upstairs, take a bath, scrub every inch of her body, rid herself of his vile touch.

  She had to talk to Ben. Only Ben could ever make her feel right and clean again.

  "One word to Ben, and some evening he won't come home." His voice was quiet and hard with a cushioned quality, like the sound of a gun firing through a silencer. "I'm his partner. His life is in my hands every day, just like it was in the war. I had the power to choose whether he lived or died over there. I still have that power."

  The door closed, but the foul scent of him clung to her nostrils, her body, everywhere.

  She grabbed her torn clothes and held them against her while, with trembling fingers, she locked the kitchen door then did the same to the front. Even so, as she ran upstairs to the bathroom, her heart pounded erratically with fear that he'd return, that he'd touch her again, violate her again.

  Leaning over the toilet stool, she vomited again and again as if she could somehow purge herself of the feel of him, of the horror of what he'd done to her.

  When nothing more would come, she turned the shower on full force and stood under it, sobbing uncontrollably, her face upturned, letting the water splash over her, blending with her tears.

  It wasn't enough.

  She took the bar of soap from the dish and scrubbed every inch of her body frantically, scrubbed until her skin felt raw. But it still wasn't enough.

  She'd never be able to wash away the feel of his hands on her, of what he'd done to her. She'd never be the same.

  She sank to the floor of the shower, crying again…or still.

  How could this have happened? How could this horrible thing have intruded into her world? Ben's love should have made her safe.

  But it hadn't.

  No more than her mother's love for her father had made him safe or her love for her mother had kept her sane or safe.

  Some evening he won't come home.

  A new terror clutched at her heart as the full implication of Charles' threats came home to her.

  She wasn't safe. Ben wasn't safe. Love couldn't keep anybody safe. She'd been wrong to think her life could be different.

  Slowly she shoved herself to her feet and turned off the water.

  Like a robot she pushed aside the plastic curtain and stepped out.

  Charles had taken something from her, but it was over. Nothing Ben could do to him would ever change things, would ever erase what Charles had done.

  She couldn't let him take anything else from her. She couldn't let him take Ben.

  Some evening he won't come home.

  Was Charles capable of that? He'd saved Ben's life once.

  But after today she no longer believed he'd saved her husband's life because it was the right thing to do. He'd seen it as an exercise in power. The power to give or take a life.

  Charles was capable of anything. He was insane. She'd seen it in his eyes.

  She took down a towel and began slowly, deliberately, to dry herself. Somehow she had to pull herself together before Ben came home.

  Somehow she had to keep Ben safe.

  Chapter 3

  Rebecca knocked on the door of room 103 at the Sleep Tite Motel in Edgewater, Texas, then clenched her hands so tightly her nails bit into her palms as she waited for Jake to answer.

  I'm in the only motel in a little town about a hundred and fifty miles southeast of Dallas called Edgewater, Texas, and I think I may have found Sharise's Shoppe.

  She'd picked up Jake's message when she'd checked her voice mail during her lunch break. Without hesitation or question, she'd asked for and received two weeks of vacation, time to come to the tow
n where her mother might have lived...might still live. Staying in Dallas and waiting patiently, trusting a stranger to do the right things with her unfolding past, had been impossible. That's what she'd unwittingly done all her life...let others have control while she passively accepted. This time she was going to have some influence on the outcome of events.

  Though the evening was decidedly warm, a shiver darted up her spine, along her neck, prickling her scalp.

  From nerves? Anticipation? Fear?

  All of the above.

  The door opened, and Jake stood squinting into the still-bright afternoon sun. Obviously he hadn't been expecting company. His shaggy hair was even more tousled than before. A day's growth of beard shadowed his angular cheeks. He wore faded jeans and nothing else. Dark hair sprang from his broad chest, tapering over a taut stomach and disappearing into the jeans.

  Which were unsnapped.

  "Rebecca?"

  His surprised exclamation brought her gaze back to his face. She swallowed hard and tried to find her voice. "I'm sorry. I didn't...I should have called first." Until that moment she hadn't thought of Jake as a real person who slept and ate and relaxed at the end of the day...who might even have a guest in his motel room. Until that moment she'd been totally, obsessively focused on her own goals, on his role in achieving those goals.

  "What are you doing here?" His tone was between irritation and confusion.

  "I got your message. I had to come."

  "Why?"

  His scowl wilted her excitement but not her determination. She straightened her shoulders. "Because you found a clue to my life, and I want to be there when you talk to the woman who owns that dress shop."

  He expelled a long sigh as he ran a hand through his hair. The muscles in his arm bulged as he raised it.

  A bare chest. An uplifted arm. Nothing she wouldn't see at a swimming pool or in a gymnasium, but somehow this bare chest and arm seemed more personal, more exposed.

  "Come on in." He stepped back, permitting her to enter.

  Although she'd driven over a hundred miles to meet with Jake Thornton, she hesitated. Going into a motel room with this virile, half-dressed male wasn't the same thing as going into an office with a private detective.

  That was ridiculous, she chided herself. Of course it was the same thing.

  She strode past him into his room. This was his temporary office. After all, she worked in a hotel every day. Business was business, and an office was an office.

  Except for a shirt tossed onto the bed, shoes lying next to it and papers strewn over the top of the small table, it was identical to the room she'd rented next door. Same nondescript picture on the wall, same flowered spread on the—she noted with relief—still made-up bed. And no one else was in the room. At least she hadn't interrupted something.

  "Have a seat." He indicated the single chair beside the table.

  "Thank you." As soon as she sat, he sank onto the bed. Well, it was the only other choice. Where did she expect him to sit?

  Nevertheless, unwelcome awareness danced along every nerve in her body, awareness of this half-naked, barefoot man slouched on the bed only a few feet away.

  He looked at her intently for a long moment, his dark gaze seeming to penetrate to her innermost secrets, then he ran a hand over his hair in a futile effort to smooth it. "There's no point in your being here. I don't have anything new to report and may not for several days. Like I told you last week, I found your original birth certificate which showed your mother's name as Jane Clark, father unknown. I spent today checking records here in Edgewater under that name and the date listed for her birth and came up with zilch."

  Rebecca nodded, biting her lip and squelching her disappointment. "I knew from the beginning the name was probably phony. Jane Clark. It's only one step up from Jane Doe."

  "I found no Clarks here at all, though that's not necessarily bad. If Jane Clark came from this town and was trying to hide her identity, she would logically have taken a name that didn't belong to anybody she knew."

  "I see." If it wasn't bad, neither was it good. "But you found the dress shop. That's definitely progress."

  "Yes, I found the dress shop, or at least where the dress shop used to be. I think you may be expecting too much too soon. An elderly lady named Doris Jordan owned that store for twenty-five years, and it's been closed for ten. The odds of her remembering somebody who bought one blue dress almost thirty years ago are pretty slim. We're not even positive that this is the same Sharise's Shoppe."

  "I know all that." She laced her fingers, glanced down at them, then unlaced them. "I know all that," she repeated. "And I know this whole thing is just a job as far as you're concerned, but it's a little more than that to me. Do you have any idea what it's like to suddenly lose your identity? My whole life has been a lie, and the people I loved and trusted most were the ones who created that lie."

  He folded his arms across the dark hair on his chest. "So now you don't trust anybody, and you had to come help me do the job you hired me to do."

  She wanted to deny his accusation. Even though it was true, it sounded brutal the way he put it.

  "It's not that. Not completely, anyway. It's just that I feel like everything's spinning out of control. People have been making decisions for me all my life, and I didn't even know it. My birth mother gave me away. Mom and Dad adopted me but never told me the truth, never gave me any choices. Then they died, and I had no more power to stop that than I've had to manage my own life. I just couldn't stay in the comfortable world where I used to live when I had an identity. When I thought I had an identity. I couldn't sit and wait for someone else to provide me with answers."

  Jake's left eyebrow quirked upward in a gesture of incomprehension. Of course he didn't understand. How could he? Two months ago she wouldn't have.

  Jake Thornton possessed an air of supreme confidence. He was a man who knew exactly who he was and where he was going...much like the person she'd been before the death of her parents.

  She bit her lower lip and amended her thoughts. No, she'd never been as completely confident as Jake was. Underneath she'd always felt a hint of shakiness, as if somehow she'd known that she had no real foundation on which to base her life.

  "Then why did you hire me?" Jake asked quietly, his tone cool and impersonal with only a hint of the irritation she knew he felt at her intrusion.

  "I hired you because I need you," she replied.

  The muscles in his chiseled jawline tightened almost imperceptibly, but before he could respond, a knock sounded at the door.

  Rebecca released a breath, welcoming the interruption to a conversation that wasn't going well.

  Jake shot her an accusatory glance as though this new intruder was somehow related to her presence, then went to answer the door.

  "Jake Thornton?" The masculine voice had a scratchy quality, as if the speaker had smoked for many years and the inside of his throat resembled sandpaper.

  "Yeah, I'm Jake Thornton. What can I do for you?"

  "I'm Charles Morton, Mayor of this little town. Mind if I come in?"

  "Why not? You might as well join the party."

  Jake swung the door wide and an older man in a business suit came in. He was tall, though not as tall as Jake, and big without being fat. His white hair was immaculately cut and styled, and his starched white shirt, tucked rigidly into the pants of his suit, betrayed no hint of a bulging stomach.

  The man stopped when he saw her, and his pale blue eyes narrowed, focusing on her with a probing intensity. "I didn't know you had company." His words were addressed to Jake, but his unsettling gaze remained on her.

  "Rebecca Patterson, Charles Morton. Mayor Charles Morton. Sorry I can't offer you a seat, Mayor. This room isn't set up for entertaining."

  "No problem. I just came by to welcome you to our town and see if there's anything I can do to help you."

  Jake moved over to the dresser and angled one hip on it in a half-sitting stance. "That's real nice
of you, Mayor. I'll keep your offer in mind if I run into any problems."

  Morton shifted his gaze to Jake, and Rebecca sagged in her chair as a captured butterfly suddenly released from its impaling pin.

  "This the young lady who's trying to find her mother?"

  If Jake was surprised at the mayor's knowledge, he didn't show it. "This is Rebecca Patterson," he said smoothly, noncommittally.

  Again Morton's gaze raked over her. "Doris Jordan's in her seventies. Hasn't been the same since her son died a long time ago. When her husband passed away seven years back, she completely lost it. She's pretty senile, probably not going to be able to tell you much."

  "Probably not," Jake drawled. "So where would you suggest I start looking?"

  "I'm afraid I can't help you there. Wish I could. But you know, more than likely the poor girl who bought that dress was just passing through on her way to the big city."

  "Just passing through," Jake repeated. "Could be. But maybe not. You're twenty miles off the main highway."

  Morton smiled thinly. "You'd be surprised at the number of vagrants we get through here. What year were you born, Rebecca?"

  Rebecca flinched at the sudden focus of Morton's attention on her, his gaze a sharp pin that once again impaled her to the chair. She didn't want to tell him when she was born...or anything else about herself.

  And that made no sense. If she expected to find her mother, people would have to know when she was born. This was the mayor, a city official, offering to help, and she didn't want to tell him something as innocuous as her date of birth. That made no sense.

  He probably already knew, anyway. He seemed to know everything else.

  She forced herself to reveal her birth date to this man she had no reason to dislike.