by Tami Hoag
For a long time after the marriage had broken up she had abandoned the idea of a real home. She had concentrated all her energy into school and work, promising herself that she would get something better for herself and Trace as a result. San Antonio had offered them that bright, pretty dream again for a time—a promise of peace and home and love—but that had been snatched away from her too, and she and Trace had moved on.
In Atlanta she had never fit in with Brock’s snooty crowd, and Brock hadn’t allowed her her own set of acquaintances. He had kept her cocooned in his wealth, isolated by prestige and notoriety, never caring that the Atlanta aristocracy wouldn’t accept her as one of them. Cinderella in her glass slippers had also felt enclosed by glass walls, invisible barriers. Never quite accepted, but too rich to be spurned—until the divorce.
She had hoped things would be different here, that she and Trace could settle in and make a place for themselves. Disappointment ached through her as she looked across the yard, bright with dandelions, to the sorry old farmhouse. This was supposed to be home, but they weren’t welcome in Still Creek and they weren’t wanted. Too bad, she thought, because she was too damned stubborn and too damned tired to move on. She would make this her home or die trying.
Chapter Fourteen
JOLYNN SAT AT HER TINY KITCHEN TABLE IN HER TINY white kitchen, ostensibly going over her notes for the Jarvis case. But her mind was going over the supper she had shared with Bret Yeager. She had run into him in the church basement after the funeral. He was standing in a corner, hunched over a plate of coconut cream pie, the end of his tie lapping up cream filling like a long, synthetic tongue as his eyes scanned the crowd. Not having any desire to mingle with the Jarvis entourage, Jo had struck up a conversation with him about a paper she had read on the requirements for forensic cases. The next thing she’d known, they were sitting across from each other in a booth at the Coffee Cup, sharing French fries and talking shop.
He was a sweet guy. She liked his square, honest face, his rumpled shirts and goofy dog. He seemed amazed that she not only didn’t mind talking about things like latent fingerprints and DNA identification, she actually knew something about them. She had impressed him. The idea had pride and pleasure rising like a giddy tide inside her.
The back door swung open and she looked up, half expecting to see him standing there. But the smile died on her face as Rich walked in.
“Not tonight,” she groaned, tunneling her fingers back through her thick hair as the good feelings inside her deflated like a burst balloon. “I have a headache.”
He didn’t comment on her sarcasm, nor did he pull up a chair. He leaned back against the counter and folded his arms across his chest. Maximizing his height advantage, Jo thought. There were few things Rich liked better than being able to look down on people. He was still dressed in his funeral garb, though he had shed the jacket and loosened his tie. The starch had gone out of his white shirt, taking most of his “young congressman” image with it. It clung limply to his brawny shoulders, making him appear more like overdressed mob muscle. He had rolled the sleeves up to his elbows, revealing forearms that were tan from weekends ramming his powerboat up and down the Mississippi and liberally dusted with rusty gold hair.
“I would have thought you’d be consoling your poor grieving wife tonight,” Jolynn said dryly.
Rich took a pack of Pall Malls from his shirt pocket and shook one out. “She’s busy consoling her poor grieving mother. I’ve had about all the grieving I can stand for one day myself.” He lit up, wreathing his head in smoke, and tossed the match into the sink. “Jesus, I can’t believe the show Helen put on at the funeral.”
Jolynn shook her head and shoved her empty ice cream dish across the table at him in lieu of an ashtray. “You’re the soul of sympathy, Rich. What an advocate for the common folk you’ll make.”
“It’s just so much bullshit,” he said derisively. “Nobody feels bad that Jarrold’s dead.”
“I wouldn’t make that comment in front of the wrong people if I were you.” She gave the ice cream dish another nudge. “You know, technically, you have to be considered a suspect.”
He laughed and choked on a lungful of smoke. “By who?” he asked hoarsely. He picked a fleck of tobacco off his tongue and flicked it away. “Miz Stuart, Bitch Queen of the South?”
“Among others.” Yeager had asked her a question or two about good ol’ Rich. Whether his interest was genuine or just a cop’s way of making conversation, she wasn’t sure. She wanted to suspect the latter, not for Rich’s sake but for her own.
“Like who? You?”
“No. You were too comfortable leeching off him,” Jolynn said bluntly. “Besides, I don’t think you’ve got the balls to kill anybody.”
Rich’s eyes narrowed and hardened. He pointed at her with the filter end of his cigarette, raining ash down on the dingy linoleum. “You know, I think you’re spending too much time with that boss of yours. Your mouth is worse than usual.”
“Yeah, well, if you find me so intolerable, you know where the door is,” she snapped. “I didn’t exactly invite you in. And use the goddamn dish, will you? You’re getting ashes all over the place. Christ, you’re such a pig,” she complained, stretching out her fingers to catch the edge of the bowl.
Treating her to a wounded look, Rich grabbed it before she could fling it at him. “Jesus, you’re cold tonight. What are you, on the rag?”
He held the dish away from himself and made a great show of tapping his cigarette as he leaned over the table to snoop at her notes.
Jolynn swept the papers into a heap with her arm and bent across them the way a schoolgirl guards her test paper from the class cheat. Utter disgust squeezed her face into a sour knot. “You know, I’m not sure when I hate you more—when you’re being your true obnoxious self or when you’re playing the obsequious, ass-kissing politician. I am not ‘on the rag,’ as you so tactlessly put it. Maybe I’m tired, Rich. Since you’ve never done a full or honest day’s work in your life, I’m sure the concept is foreign to you, but I’ve been putting in some long hours.”
“For what?” he sneered.
“For the truth. For an ideal.” She ground her teeth and clamped her hands on top of her head as if to keep her brain from exploding. “God, I might as well be speaking French.”
He shuffled up to her chair and traced a finger down the side of her throat, his gaze capturing hers. A cocky smile tipped up one corner of his mustache. “You can speak French to me if you want,” he said, his voice rumbling low as heat rose in his eyes. “In bed.”
His hand trailed down to massage her shoulder, and Jo shrugged him off. Three days ago she had gone to bed with him without a word. Tonight the idea of letting him touch her made her angry. Maybe it had something to do with watching him play the dutiful husband all afternoon. Or maybe Elizabeth had gotten to her with one of her little speeches about independence. Or maybe it was the novel idea that she could have a nice time with a man without having him use her. Whatever the reason, she was in no mood for Rich’s antics. She scraped her chair back from the table and went into the living room to put a record on the stereo. With a flick of a switch blues drifted out of the speakers like smoke.
The living room was no better than any other room in the little house. Cramped and cluttered, it was in need of paint and more imagination than Jolynn cared to devote to the task of decorating. A single lamp cast a dim, dusky glow around the room as night tried to creep in through a gap in the drapes. The couch and chairs were the same brown tweed set she had shared with Rich once upon a time, but the upholstery had gone nubby and the cushions were shot. The shelves that held television, stereo, and haphazard piles of books were standard lumberyard issue she had never gotten around to staining. The one spot of life and color in the room was a silk screen print by a New Mexico artist, a cactus flowering in the desert. It hung above a table that held an array of dead and dying potted plants.
Rich propped himself in the doorway
between the two rooms and watched her as she stood with her head down, pretending to read the album notes. She could feel his gaze on her, cool and speculative.
“So why don’t you believe Fox killed Jarrold?” he asked casually.
She shot him a glance askance. “I didn’t say I didn’t believe it.”
“Your boss has some cock-and-bull idea about some book of Jarrold’s.”
Jo shrugged. “If he kept names in it, it stands to reason someone might not have been happy about it. Maybe he was blackmailing someone. He certainly had leverage over a few people who owed him money. What’s so fantastic about the idea that one of them wasted him?”
“It’s stupid, that’s all,” he scoffed. “Have you found this famous book?”
She answered him with another shrug.
He rolled his eyes and waved off her theory. “Fox killed him. He’s a piece of shit.”
“So are you, but that doesn’t make you a murderer.”
He sauntered across the room with his hands in the pockets of his charcoal trousers. He looked relaxed, but Jo caught the predatory gleam in his eye. She sidled away as he lifted a hand to touch her hair.
“I mean it, Rich. I’m not in the mood.”
“Come on, Jolynn,” he cajoled, backing her toward the couch. “You’re always in the mood.”
“Not tonight.”
She started to make a break around a coffee table that was heaped with magazines and dust. He cut her off, catching her by one wrist and pulling her up against him. Her shin hit the table, sending a month’s worth of Newsweek sliding to the floor. Her breath caught in her throat and she looked up at him, not quite certain whether she should let anger or fear take control. Rich stared down at her, heat in his eyes and a hint of cruelty curling the corners of his mouth.
“We both know I can make you want it, Jolynn,” he threatened softly.
She started to deny the charge, but the words wouldn’t come because they weren’t the truth. The truth was, he could. He had. Time and again. And she’d let him. She let him use her. She let him degrade her. That was the truth. It churned in her belly, sour and acidic. It was old news, but for some reason it struck her anew as they stood there in her shabby living room with Colin James in the background asking the musical question— “Why’d You Lie?” It struck like a revelation, like a horrible epiphany, knocking down what self-esteem she had. What did she think she was doing, fantasizing about a nice guy like Bret Yeager when she was nothing but Rich Cannon’s whore?
All the fight drained out of her, washed away by a tide of despair and inadequacy. She stood there like a zombie, numb, staring at Rich’s power tie as he lowered his head and kissed the side of her neck. Jolynn shuddered. The response was shame, not desire, but Rich didn’t seem to care.
“You always want it, Jolynn,” he murmured, bringing up his free hand to open the top three buttons of her blouse. He pushed aside the cup of her bra and filled his hand with her breast, kneading it, squeezing it, rubbing his thumb across her nipple. “You’re always hot for me. You always will be.”
Tears rose in her eyes and spilled over to roll down her cheeks. He was right. She had always been hot for him. Always willing. She’d never given him reason to think things would ever change. She had told Elizabeth she enjoyed sex with him. She had told herself it was habit. Maybe it was more a matter of addiction. Or desperation. Either way, it was pathetic. She was pathetic.
“Come on, Jolynn,” he whispered, his voice as darkly seductive and as smoky as the music that created the undercurrent for it. “You want it.”
He didn’t seem to notice she wasn’t enjoying the proceedings. But then, he had never cared about anything but himself—his pleasure, his satisfaction, his comfort. She was just a convenient means of achieving those ends. His own private toy to use and discard when he was finished.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go to your room. I don’t like doing it on your floor, you never vacuum.”
“No,” she said softly. Whether he didn’t hear her or simply chose to ignore her, he took her by the wrist again and started toward the hall. Jo jerked back her hand and dug down inside for a scrap of courage. “I said no.”
Rich’s eyes narrowed and gleamed with feral light. His upper lip curled into a snarl. “Don’t be such a bitch, Jolynn,” he growled. “I’ve got a hard-on.”
“If you’re limber enough, I have a suggestion as to what you can do with it,” she said. “Go fuck yourself, Rich. That would have to be the ultimate treat for you.”
Color slashed across his cheeks like war paint, and his nostrils flared as he took an aggressive step toward her. His hand snaked out and he caught her wrist in a bone-crunching grip. Jolynn bit her lip to keep from crying out. That she wasn’t sure whether he would force her or not frightened her. She’d known him for years and she suddenly wasn’t certain what he might be capable of if she made him angry enough.
“You want to have the title ‘Rapist’ precede your name as you step out onto the campaign trail?” she asked, warding off the pain in her wrist with sarcasm.
The look he gave her was utterly contemptuous. “Who’d believe you?” he sneered, looming over her, slowly twisting her arm.
She bit back a moan, glaring up at him through her tears. “What difference would it make if anyone believed me or not? This is Minnesota. The slightest breath of scandal and you’re political road kill.”
He swore viciously as he thrust her away from him. She stumbled back against the coffee table, toppling another mountain of magazines. Pulling her injured wrist against her, she rubbed it absently as she watched Rich pace off his frustration.
“You wouldn’t do that to me.” He stated it as a fact. His eyes were cold and hard as he glared at her.
Jolynn laughed, incredulous. “Why not?”
“There’s too much between us.”
“Don’t make me gag. The only thing that’s been between us in the last five years is your penis.”
“Jesus, Jolynn.” Rich decided to play incredulous too. The wounded lover. The friend betrayed. “This is my career we’re talking about! This is my life we’re talking about!”
She arched a brow in amazement. “And what am I—an inanimate object? I have a life too, Rich.”
He shook his head and laughed to himself. “You’re nobody, Jolynn,” he said cruelly, both his gaze and his words cutting her to the quick. “You and your bitch queen boss and your stupid little piss-ant newspaper. You’re nothing.” He tapped a fist to his chest. “I’m going to be somebody, Jolynn. Don’t even think of getting in my way.”
She watched him storm out the back, wincing as the glass rattled in the door. Tears came for her aching wrist and for the ache inside her. A jumble of emotions left over from the confrontation knotted in her chest, and she cried a little, at a loss as to what to do with them. She felt alone and unsettled, as if the earth were shifting beneath her and reality was altering around her.
She wasn’t Rich Cannon’s wife anymore. She wasn’t Rich Cannon’s mistress anymore. She didn’t want to think that she had ever defined herself that way, but she had. Now she stood in her living room, looking at what was left of her now that she’d scraped away the layer of dirt. She looked at her reflection in the glass of the cactus print and saw herself. Wide-eyed and uncertain. Overweight and in need of a new hairdo. She felt raw and weak . . . and clean. Clean, she marveled. Fresh. Ready to start over. She smiled a little and shed a tear for herself, for happiness, for a new beginning.
The doorbell jolted her from her trance. She went to answer it, trying to straighten her clothes and wipe her tears away with her good hand. She had to look like hell, but she didn’t really give a damn. It wasn’t likely to be anyone but the paper boy coming to collect.
Yeager was standing on the doorstep in rumpled chinos and worn-out purple knit shirt, a strand of sandy hair sticking up in front like an antenna. Yeager and his dog, side by side. The dog cocked his head and gave her a quizzical look
that confirmed Jolynn’s worst fears about her appearance. Yeager’s lazy smile faltered.
“Am I here at a bad time?” he asked softly, concern lighting his dark eyes.
Jolynn shook her head. “No,” she said, a secretive smile blossoming on her rosebud mouth and in her heart. “The bad time is over.”
“I brought that book over.” He lifted a thick, hardbound tome as evidence. “Arnaut’s Science of Blood Spattering.”
Jolynn accepted the offering with a misty smile. She stroked her hand over the cover. “How sweet.”