Ellie shook her head and kept her silence, her embarrassment and chagrin obvious in the way she fidgeted and shifted from foot to foot. Her whole body had an attitude of self-preservation and protection; they were in deeply personal territory now, and he knew he had to tread lightly lest she make a break for the door.
“You don’t trust me,” he said softly. It wasn’t a question.
Her eyes widened in panic. “Not at all! It wasn’t you I didn’t trust.”
Sean tilted her chin so that she looked him in the eye and could not mistake his intention. “You know me. Better than damn near every other human being on the planet. Why would you think I would betray you, especially with her?”
Ellie stalked out of his light embrace and over to stare out at the growing night. “Because she had you before. Because I…” her voice trailed off on a slight sniffle. “Our friendship was shredded because of her before, and I didn’t want her to get the chance to do it again.”
He narrowed his eyes. “What does that mean?”
She rolled her lips between her teeth and turned her gaze up to the sky. She appeared to be choosing her words carefully. “Just that she is capable, very capable, of wreaking all manner of havoc, and I wasn’t in the mood to deal with her fallout.”
He had a feeling there was more to it, but he would get to that later. “I would have told you,” he whispered. She had to know that, if nothing else.
She nodded tightly. “I know. Josh and Dane saw themselves as my back up, making sure that she didn’t try anything shady.”
“And did she?” He came over to lean against the opposite side of the window. “Was that what the fight was about?”
Ellie’s lips twitched and she snorted a laugh. “No. It started off as the usual high school mean girl BS. Too poor to eat there, my dress was all wrong, whatever. It didn’t pick up in earnest until I started striking back verbally; pretty sure she wasn’t ready for that.”
He nodded, a wry smile on his lips despite the situation. His Ellie was definitely not a shrinking violet. “I bet not.”
“I started pushing her buttons, and damn she made it terribly easy. The more wound up she got, the calmer I was, which only wound her up more. I told her about us, by the way.”
He feared his eyes might roll out of his head from the shock. She’d been so vehemently opposed to that very thing; it was amazing to hear that she did it herself. He was impressed. He was pleased. He was… curious. “What changed your mind?”
“I just…” She looked away and toed the floor like a chastened child. “I hadn’t planned to, but it came out, so I owned it.”
He was pleased, surprisingly pleased, with her going public with their relationship, even though the circumstances left a lot to be desired. “And how’d she take it?”
“Badly.” Ellie turned her head to show off the scratches on her face and neck, angry red slashes in groups of three or four marring her skin.
Sean went over to her, touching her chin lightly to turn her head and inspect the damage more closely. He hissed in sympathy as he examined her wounds. “Do we need to clean those?”
Ellie’s lips danced as she fought a smirk. “Probably wouldn’t hurt. We’ll get to it in a minute.”
“How bad off is she?” He had this image of hair pulling, screaming and clawing, with music swelling in the background like a soap opera and a piteous lack of baby oil.
She shrugged and sniffed dismissively. “Eh, she’ll live. I popped her in the face with her purse. It’ll bruise, and hopefully that’ll be the last damn time she thinks about doing that.”
“You hit her in the face?” He didn’t mean to sound so surprised, but Ellie had managed to wound not just her opponent’s face, but her pride as well. And knowing Pia, it was the pride that would probably scar.
“Weren’t really a whole lot of options.” She looked at him with dark eyes glistening. He knew she wouldn’t cry if she could help it, but appeared dangerously close.
“And you just left her there?” Not that he blamed her, but since he figured he’d be getting a call whining about it, he should know.
She squared up her shoulders and looked back out the window. “In Josh and Dane’s capable hands. She’ll live.”
He ticked off on his fingers, counting times and gaps. “So if that happened right after dinner, where were you between then and when you showed up at my door?”
“Driving around. Marinating in my shame and embarrassment. The usual.” In addition to the tears she kept at bay, now her cheek jumped periodically in her effort to keep her composure. “So are we cool?” she asked in a quavering voice.
He dropped his head on a laugh and ran his fingers through his hair, and then he took her hand. Regardless of how badly this evening had unfurled for both of them, he understood where she was coming from. Two battered souls who were still finding their way together, mistakes would be made, even expected.
“Come on.” He led them back to the couch and arranged them so that he was stretched out and she was sandwiched between him and the back of the couch with her head on his shoulder. Yeah, he wasn’t the freshest peach in the drawer, but she needed—hell, he needed—some reassurance. When they were comfortable, he sighed. “It’s easier to talk this way. Your walk is distracting.”
Her quiet chuckle rumbled through the both of them. “Thank you?”
Sean kissed her head. It felt so good to have his arms around her, and he felt the tension leaving her as well. “Welcome. You can trust me, you know.”
Ellie buried her face in his chest and wrapped her arm around his waist. “I know. I do, and I’m sorry about tonight.”
“It’s not like this hasn’t been coming for a while now.” He tightened his arms around her. “It’s a journey, not a destination, right?” Another rumble of laughter, a nod and contented sigh from her. “And I trust you, too, just so you know.”
“I know.”
Chapter 8
Quiet made Ellie supremely nervous. Like passing a lovely winter’s night in the Stanley Hotel nervous. And that was how she’d described her weekend since the overblown covert op/dinner disaster: quiet, disturbingly so.
She wasn’t sure what she’d expected the blowback to be from her fight with Pia. Her scratches had faded pretty quickly, and fortunately with very little comment from her coworkers. Even Sean had taken the news of their scuffle with surprisingly good humor, once he got past Josh’s spectacularly bad plan and even worse execution.
Ellie was glad she’d decided to go to him after she left the restaurant. She was sure that his hearing the news from her, no matter how screwed-up it was, had saved her a lot of unintentional heartache and headache. No matter how hard explaining herself to him had been, she knew in her soul that it was infinitely easier than having to explain herself after Pia had finished inundating him in her crocodile tears.
The hell was she thinking? She didn’t fight over guys. Ellie knew she was beyond that. It was juvenile, ridiculous. Hysterically funny when she replayed the images in her mind, the screeching, the clawing, the lipstick flying. But that was not her. She was not the knockdown, drag out brawling type, but she’d been pushed, pursued, trapped.
Her whole life, she’d found ways around conflict, even if it meant curling up in a ball and waiting out the blows. There was no such place as against the wall, at least there hadn’t been until that night. She came out swinging, and while she wasn’t proud she’d been brought to that place, it was somewhat freeing to know she could hold her own once she arrived. She walked away once from what she wanted, and she would be damned if she did it again, even if that meant clashing now and then with her nemesis.
All of which made the quiet more nerve wracking. Pia had been bested, a fate which had most likely never befallen her before, and she’d be back. Her type always came back. Harder, stronger, meaner. And it was only a matter of time until she returned for round two. She shuddered to think what form her malice would take.
Her desk phone
ringing as soon as she sat down on Monday had her practically jumping out of her skin. Fortunately, it was easy to slide back into the rhythm of phone calls, reports, and daytime television. Josh hadn’t even called her since Thursday night, but she’d chalked that up to still being mad because she’d stuck him with the hot gooey mess that was Pia in tears.
By her lunchtime, she was tired of theft of city-owned trash cans and a litany of people who’d never emotionally progressed beyond the third grade. Stepping out on the roof to enjoy her lunch, she made her way over to the single patio table with an umbrella out there. The view of the wholesale district was lovely, straight north a few blocks was the Soldiers and Sailors Monument on the Circle, to the southwest, Lucas Oil Stadium, below her, a constant stream of people. It was peaceful and went a long way to easing her nerves. At least until her phone rang.
A blocked number, she sent it to voicemail. She didn’t even look at when it beeped, content to enjoy the warm breeze through her hair, the azure and cotton ball sky, and a chicken salad sandwich from Shapiro’s, the kosher deli just down the street. Her phone rang again as she walked inside, this time she answered happily. “Hey, sweetie. Didn’t think you were speaking to me.”
She could hear the freeway whooshing by in Josh’s background. “It occurred to me,” he admitted in a tone that suggested he had actually considered it. “Then I realized I’d have no one to watch Revenge and House of Cards with me, and thought better of it.”
“Nice to know I’m good for something,” she said on a giggle.
“Not much. Leaving us with that wailing banshee. What the hell is wrong with you?” He sounded almost as put out now as he did that night.
She shrugged even though he couldn’t see her and dragged her fingers through her hair to pull out the windblown tangles her curls seemed to attract. “I had to get out of there. I just couldn’t think beyond that.” She hadn’t been in a fight before, at least one where she’d fought back, and with that impulse satisfied, the only other one she could process was flight.
“You know Pia’s going to retaliate, right? She is many things, but forgiving is not one.”
The fact that his thoughts so eerily mirrored her own did nothing to allay her sense of foreboding. “Yeah, somehow I don’t see her going gentle into that good night, either.”
Josh snickered. “It’s a little early in my day for drunken Welshmen.” His background noise died down and she could tell he was no longer on the interstate and was most likely close to roll call. “Tell me you got to Sean before she did.”
“Yeah, I drove around for a bit and ended up at his place. I figured it would be easier to dig a grave than to try and dig out of one, so I told him what happened.”
The engine cut out, and she could hear him banging around in the background. “Your analogy is a little upsetting, but I’m glad you two were able to—wait, everything?”
Ellie cringed as she wedged the phone between her shoulder and chin, grabbing her trash from lunch. “It’s not like I had a whole lot of choice, Josh, he’s not a stupid man. What I didn’t tell him up front he worked out on his own.”
She heard him swallow hard as he contemplated her words. “So should I be hiring a food taster, someone to start my car, what?”
“He was surprisingly understanding. Not happy, but understanding. Any beef between the two of you, I trust can be worked out without excessive bloodshed.”
“Not comforting, sweetie.” The car door slammed and the ambient noise filled with other male voices. “I gotta head in. We’ll pick this convo back up in a bit, okay?”
They said their goodbyes and she hung up the phone as she walked back into the building. By the time she’d gotten back to her desk, she’d had two more voicemails, though she couldn’t deal with them since the fax machine chose the moment she walked in the door to choke on some piece of incoming information and die in a spurt of toner. She put her stuff down on the desk and dove into the fray, trying to salvage the machine and her sergeant’s frazzled nerves in one shot, all to the sound of her phone buzzing with another call. Whoever it was could wait.
* * *
Sean frowned at his phone as it clicked over to Ellie’s voicemail. He wasn’t calling with anything important, just missed her. She’d managed to spirit out of his bed before he woke up, and he presumed she was at work. They’d have to work on that, if they were spending the night at each other’s places, it seemed reasonable that they might have to combine things, at least a little bit. His loud sigh echoed around the empty office.
Everyone was out, doing their own investigations, having lunch, so he had peace, at least in the room, a rarity he welcomed. It was good, really, because he was up to his elbows in photo evidence, recordings, public records, and other places as he worked up his search warrant affidavit. Important stuff, and really the denouement to a case that had been consuming a good deal of his work time for several weeks. Peace was good, and in surprisingly short supply in the rest of his life recently.
Damn his weekend. Once Pia had left him, he’d settled into a very sedate rhythm of running, martial arts, eBay, and Guinness. His weekends weren’t exciting and after Hurricane Pia, he craved it. He’d never been highly social, so the quiet was a trusted friend.
Ellie was an influx of activity for which he was wholly unprepared. Suddenly beer and pizza with the dog was going out, long conversations, and a strange feeling of contentment with it all. It was unnerving as hell. Not to mention the sudden reappearance of his runaway bride. Ellie and Pia had more in common than their differences, but the dynamic nature of their differences made them both volatile when exposed to one another.
A fight in a goddamn five-star restaurant, who in the hell does that? He believed Ellie when she said that she didn’t start it. He had a hard time picturing her voluntarily instigating any sort of conflict. Maybe that was because he knew her past, at least some of it, but still, he couldn’t see her taking the first swing. By the same token, though, he couldn’t see Pia bothering to strike out. It wasn’t her style; she never did something herself that she could pay to have done by someone else. Balling up a fist was too plebian for her, blue collar and crass, so far beneath her, she’d only seen it in movies. Surprisingly, the expected call from her, replete with hysterical tears and other histrionics never came.
As his mind churned over the conflicting stories, he began cutting and pasting his affidavit from his template. It was repetitive, mind numbing, and let his brain wander even farther afield. Was he even ready for a relationship? He had to admit he and El had gone from a kiss on the couch to a full-time thing almost immediately. It was kind of a natural extension of the relationship they’d had before the marriage, and he couldn’t help but wonder if they’d been moving toward that at the time, too.
Making up for lost time, though, seemed like a bit of leap for him. He’d been happily single, but from the moment he saw her, it was magnetic. Electric. So beyond just wanting a piece of ass because he felt horny and lonely. Call it unfinished business, call it kismet or serendipity, bottom line was it was her. Only Ellie, and as much as it pained him to admit it, as soon as he saw her, the expiration date on his single life flashed before is eyes. Even his dog was at peace with it. Hell.
Shoving his bangs out of his face in agitation, Sean clicked the icon for the streaming college radio station out of Bloomington. The quiet combined with his thoughts was becoming oppressive. He continued cutting and pasting until he needed to write the narrative portion of the warrant, and began typing.
He just didn’t do change well, and wasn’t ashamed of that fact. His childhood had been nothing but change, countries, bases, schools, friends. He’d embraced stability as soon as he was able, and in his own way, was always seeking more. Something about the idea of having a life rooted somewhere and making a difference appealed to him on a visceral level. And maybe that was what drew him to Ellie. She got it, didn’t need an explanation. And maybe that was enough.
“That music is
far too depressing to make you smile like that.” The fact a man Dubs’ size managed to move with the stealth of a ninja always gave Sean pause. He dropped a white plastic bag that smelled suspiciously like fresh torta adobada by his elbow.
“You can’t help but bitch, can you? It’s like a compulsion for you.” Though he groused at his partner, he eagerly dug into the food, holding up his sandwich in thanks.
Dubs snorted and fired up his computer. “Maybe if your music wore less black than you, then maybe I could.” He opened his bag and unwrapped a burrito the size of Sean’s forearm. “So what’s the smile about?”
Sean waved off the question and reread the narrative he’d been typing while he’d pondered his life. It wasn’t bad, but there were parts that clearly showed he’d been distracted. Half completed thoughts, awkward transitions, shaking his head, he decided to finish his food before tackling the warrant again. This time with greater peace of mind. Ellie was a tempting distraction, but not one he wanted to discuss right now. He glanced over at his partner, who was elbow deep in a burrito the size of Rhode Island. “Maybe I’m just in a good mood.”
Dubs shook his head and picked up his drink to take a sip. “Will wonders never cease.”
He was only one taco in when their lunch was cut short by their sergeant coming in to alert them to a possible marijuana grow operation in a barn on the far northwest side of town. Dubs beat him out the door, and they were in the Challenger headed to the scene without comment, just another day at the office.
They made small talk on the long ride from the east side of town, both grumbling about the fact that they were so close to getting off duty and yet now the night stretched out interminably. They were as far north and west in the county as they could get, and the address they were headed to sat on a massive spread right on the county line.
It wasn’t likely this was a false alarm, a thought that became reality as they pulled up to half the fleet of Northwest District parked surrounding a large red metal cattle barn halfway back into the property past the rustic cabin cum locally owned/operated/supplied restaurant.
The Ex File (Behind the Blue Line Series Book 1) Page 11