by Sandra Brown
“It’s winter. Wouldn’t bears be hibernating?”
“In theory,” Knight said, flashing a smile. Then, “Does your wife carry a pistol?”
“Lord, no. Nothing else you named either. Not to my knowledge anyway.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. And I have the license to carry it.” He extracted his wallet from his hip pocket and showed them the issue from the State of Georgia. “I’m happy to show you the pistol. It’s in the glove compartment of my car.”
“Okay. Later.” Knight glanced at Grange before coming back to Jeff. “You said she left Friday, but you didn’t come see us till last night. That’s what, around forty-eight hours?”
“Which was bad judgment, terrible judgment, on my part. I realize that now.”
“Why’d you wait?” Grange asked. The name Buddy didn’t suit him. He was younger, leaner, sharper than Knight. Not as folksy.
“Emory had remarked to me how grueling it might be to run this trail. She mentioned the altitude as a factor. She also suffered a stress fracture in her right foot last year. She was worried about it.
“For all those reasons, she knew it was going to be strenuous and told me she might not want to drive home on Saturday, that she might stay over an extra night and rest. When I didn’t hear from her, I figured that’s what she’d decided to do.”
Grange asked, “Would you describe your wife as conscientious?”
“He called her responsible,” Knight supplied.
“She is,” Jeff said. “Very conscientious and responsible.”
Grange frowned. “Then it seems to me you would have been worried when she didn’t call to let you know she wouldn’t be coming home Saturday night.”
“I was worried.”
“But you waited another twenty-four hours before making the trip up here to look for her.”
“I’ve acknowledged the delinquency as poor judgment. But I told him,” he said, pointing to Knight, “last night, that I feared something had happened to Emory. He dismissed my worry. If you and this…” He looked around the squad room, his gaze pausing on the lady with the collapsed barn who was now weeping over a dead horse. “If this mismanaged department sat on her unexplained disappearance for another twelve hours, the fault is yours, not mine.”
With maddening composure, Knight said, “Nobody’s blaming you, Mr. Surrey.”
“That’s not what it sounded like to me. What he said sounded like an insinuation.”
Grange, unfazed, asked, “What did I insinuate?”
“Negligence on my part. Indifference. Neither of which is true or accurate.”
Knight leaned forward again and gave him that folksy smile. “Detective Grange wasn’t insinuating anything, Mr. Surrey.”
Jeff eyed them both coldly but didn’t say anything.
“Only…the thing is…” Knight shifted in his chair and winced as though he’d inflamed a hemorrhoid. “That one-tenth of one percent of missing people I mentioned earlier? Usually the person who reports them missing is the very person who knows where they’re at.”
Chapter 10
Any trust he’d won vanished the instant she saw that damned rock and drew the logical conclusion.
Her freak-out had lasted several minutes, during which she had fought like a wildcat. He’d tried to restrain her without injuring her, but she continued to claw, kick, and beat at him. One of her fists connected with the scratch she’d inflicted yesterday. It reopened and started bleeding. She hadn’t stopped flailing at him until sheer exhaustion overcame her. Otherwise she wouldn’t be even as docile as she was now.
Docile, maybe, but wound as tight as a harp string. He had deposited her on the edge of the sofa where she sat hugging her elbows, literally holding herself together. He went over and extended her a glass of whiskey. “Here. Drink this.”
“Like hell.” She pushed the glass away, sloshing the bourbon on him.
“Waste of good liquor.” He sucked it off the back of his hand.
“You’d like me to get drunk, wouldn’t you? Make me more manageable?”
“I didn’t pour enough to make you drunk, just enough to take the edge off.”
“I don’t want to take the edge off, thank you.” She threw her head back and glared up at him. “Why didn’t the rock work?”
“It did. It knocked you out.”
“And then you dragged me here.”
“Actually I carried you to my truck. You rode here slumped over in the passenger seat. Seat belt kept you from falling onto the floor of the cab.”
“Why did you bring me here?” She studied him with what seemed to be as much bafflement as fear. “If you wanted to kill me, why haven’t you just smothered me in my sleep?”
“No sport in that.”
She gestured toward the ceiling. “Can I expect to be strung up on that bar and gutted like a deer?”
He looked up at the bar and frowned. “Too much sport. Lots of heave-ho-ing. Big mess to clean up after. Instead, why don’t you just drink the poison-laced whiskey?” He extended the glass toward her again, and when she didn’t move, he said, “No? Okay then.”
He shot the drink. She might not want the edge taken off, but he sure as hell did. Setting the glass on the end table, he said, “That was all bullshit, you know, meant to be a joke.”
In no joking mood, she continued to hug herself, rocking back and forth, obviously distraught. “I was beginning to believe…”
“What?”
“That you didn’t mean to harm me.”
“I don’t.”
She gave a short laugh and glanced toward the incriminating sack sitting on the dining table. “Despite evidence to the contrary.”
Huddled there, she looked small, helpless, frightened. He admired the grit it took for her not to cry when her eyes shimmered with tears. Her evident fear affected him much more than her flailing and kicking ever could.
He sat down beside her, ignoring that she recoiled to keep their shoulders from touching. “I never wanted you to see the rock.”
“Then you should have had a better hiding place.”
“Temporary. In the meantime, I never thought you’d go digging around in the wood box.”
“One would never expect such a gruesome find at the bottom of it.”
“Gruesome, yes. With your blood and hair on it. I knew seeing it would upset you.”
“You’re damn right it did,” she said with heat. “I actually believed you when you said I fell.”
“I didn’t say that, you surmised it. I said I found you lying unconscious.”
“Because you clouted me in the head with that rock!”
“No, Doc. I didn’t.”
“Did you keep it as a trophy?”
He didn’t honor that with a reply.
She moaned. “I wish you’d just get it over with.”
“What?”
“Whatever it is you’re going to do to me. I wouldn’t have to go on dreading it, fearing it. The suspense is killing me. Is that part of the torture?”
Her hands were on her knees, clenched into fists so tight that all the blood had been wrung out of them. They were bone white and cold to the touch when he placed his hand over them.
When she tried to pull them from beneath his palm, he held on. “Look at me.”
She turned her head and looked directly into his eyes. Hers were hazel, more green than brown. The orange specks in them, which he’d first thought were a trick of the light, were real. This close, he could have counted them.
“I didn’t hurt you. I won’t hurt you. How many times do I have to say it before you believe it?”
“I’ll believe it when you let me contact—”
“Not yet.”
“When?”
“When I can deliver you safely.”
“But in the meantime, people are worried about me.”
“I’m sure they are. But they don’t need to be. And you don’t need to be afraid of me. Why would you be?”
“You can ask that when you won’t even tell me your name, or anything about you?”
“All right. If I tell you one thing, will you stop fighting me and trying to get away?”
She nodded.
He knew she was making a false promise, but maybe it would calm her down if he told her something that revealed nothing. “I lost both my parents, too.”
“You loved them?”
“Yes.”
“Did they die before or after…whatever it was you did?”
“Before. For which I’m glad.”
“What did you do?”
“Don’t ask again, Doc. I won’t tell you.” He looked down to where his hand still covered hers and realized that his thumb was reflexively stroking the back of it. His mind began to spin with erotic images of other patches of her skin that he’d like to caress. “If I told you, you truly would be afraid of me.”
Moving quickly, before he invalidated every promise he’d made her, he lifted his hand off hers and stood up. Keeping his back to her, he retrieved the sack from the table and tucked it beneath his arm. Then he went to the door and took his coat, scarf, and cap off the peg. “During your fit, you reopened the cut on your scalp. There’s fresh blood in your hair. You might want to rethink that shower.”
He closed the door soundly behind himself and stayed on the porch until he’d put on his outerwear. The wind was strong enough to bend treetops. It blew snow and ice pellets into his eyes as he crossed the yard toward the storage shed.
He placed the sack on a high shelf and pulled a spool of wire in front of it. He then dragged a wooden pallet from the shed out to the stout chopping block on the far side of the structure. Loading recently split logs onto the pallet was mindless work, so he could do it without thinking.
Which left his mind free to concentrate on Emory Charbonneau.
It bothered him that her instinctual distrust was so strong.
It bothered him even more that it was valid.
Nothing else, no one else, had ever distracted him from his resolve. She did. His preoccupation with her was foolhardy, potentially dangerous, and could be ruinous. He struggled with it, but he felt himself losing ground each time he looked at her…and each time she looked back.
He made three trips between the woodpile and the cords of firewood stacked against the exterior south wall of the cabin where they were semiprotected from the elements. When done, he returned the pallet to the shed.
Pausing there inside, sheltered from the weather, his breath ghosting in the cold air, he removed his glove and took from his jeans pocket the silver trinket.
Emory hadn’t noticed it was missing, and he hoped she wouldn’t and ask for it back. Rubbing it between his thumb and finger, he acknowledged how juvenile and foolishly sentimental he’d been to secretly collect a token from her. In his life, he’d never kept something to remember a woman by, not even if she’d given him the souvenir herself. Especially if she’d given him the souvenir herself.
He wasn’t a romantic. Never had been. When he’d failed to order flowers for his prom date, Rebecca had been incensed.
“Who cares about crap like that?” he’d grumbled.
In a temper, she’d said, “I do! I care about being the sister of a complete and total asshole,” and had ordered the flowers for his date herself.
He would never hear the last of it if she knew…
But she would never know about Emory Charbonneau. No one would. Her time with him would be a secret he would take to his grave. He had to let her go. He would let her go. But at least he’d have this trinket as a keepsake.
He put it back in his pocket and pulled on his glove. Before leaving the shed, he looked up at the shelf where he’d stored the sack to make certain it was well hidden this time, then went out and latched the door behind him. On the porch of the cabin, he stamped his feet to shake loose the snow and sleet that had stuck to his boots, then pushed open the door.
As he stepped inside, he was greeted by the familiar scents of his bar soap and shampoo. Emory was standing in front of the fireplace, draping wet clothes over the back of one of the dining chairs that she’d situated near the hearth. Her hair was damp. In place of her running clothes, she was wearing another of his flannel shirts and a pair of his socks.
And that appeared to be all.
Between the hem of the shirt, which struck her midthigh, and the socks bunched around her ankles, was nothing except smooth legs. They were a runner’s legs, lean and long, calves and quads well delineated under taut skin.
She finished placing her running tights over the top rung of the chair back, straightening the garment to her satisfaction, and scooting the chair a mite closer to the fire screen before turning to him.
“I took you up on the offer of your shower.” She motioned down toward the socks, then ran her hand over the placket of the shirt where only a few of the buttons had been done up. “I hope you don’t mind that I borrowed these.”
With difficulty, he pulled his gaze up from the hem of the shirt. In reply, he shook his head no.
“It feels wonderful to be clean.”
He gave a nod.
“I washed out my clothes, too.”
He looked at the articles of wet clothing, but didn’t comment on them.
“My scalp stopped bleeding.”
He mumbled a gravelly sounding, “Good.”
He took off his coat, cap, and scarf, turned around to hang them on the peg, then kept his hands there, his fingers sunk deep in the yarn of his scarf, holding on to it as though for dear life, because all the blood in his system seemed to have collected in one critical place, and the concentration of it was so thick, it was painful.
He went into the kitchen area, took the bottle of whiskey from the cabinet, and poured another shot. Halfway to his mouth, he halted and glanced at her from over his shoulder. “Change your mind about this, too?”
“No. Thank you.”
He tossed the drink back. It burned on the way down and fizzed like a cherry bomb in his belly, but it gave him something else to think about instead of clean, smooth skin and how soft and warm it would feel under old flannel. Under him. Moving under him.
“You said you’d been watching me through binoculars.”
“What?”
“That morning when you…when I fell. You said you’d been watching me.”
“When you were—” Stretching. Arching. Bending. “There by your car. Before you set out.”
“What were you doing out there?”
“Hiking.”
“Nothing else?”
“No.” He gripped the edge of the counter and continued to stare out the window above the sink. He didn’t trust himself to face her.
“What caused you to notice me?”
Your legs in those black tights. Your ass. God, your ass. “I was just, you know, sweeping the area with the binocs, taking in the view. Saw motion, I guess.”
“Why didn’t you call out a hello?”
“Too far away. But I was curious.”
“Why curious? Didn’t I look like somebody just out for a run?”
“Yeah, but I wondered why you were alone. Most people, whatever they’re doing in rugged country, are doing it with somebody else.”
“You weren’t. You were alone.”
“But I’m used to it.”
The faucet had a drip. For a while, those ka-plunks, coming at fifteen-second intervals, were the only sound in the room. In the world.
Then she said, “That’s the one thing we didn’t talk about.”
He twisted the taps to see if he could stop the drip. “Sorry?”
“This morning I asked you how you could bear the silence, the boredom, and the loneliness. We talked about the other two, but not the loneliness.”
The faucet stopped dripping, but he kept a tight grip on both taps as though he would pull them out of their moorings.
“Don’t you get lonely?”
Was it his imag
ination or had her voice dropped in volume and pitch? “Sometimes.”
“What do you do about it?”
No, it wasn’t his imagination. Her voice vibrated with an intimate undertone. It was gruff, as though she had drunk the whiskey after all, and it had seared her throat. He pried his hands from the water taps and slowly turned around. She’d come only as close as the dining table, where she stood as though poised for a signal from him of what she should do next.
“I don’t think you’re referring to loneliness in general, are you, Doc?”
She made a rolling motion with her shoulders that could have meant anything.
“Are you asking if I get lonely for a woman?”
“Do you?”
“Often.”
“What do you do?”
“I go get one.”
His blunt answer had the effect he’d meant it to. It shocked the hell out of her.
“Like you got me?”
“No. You were different. You were a lucky find.”
She hovered there indecisively for easily half a minute, her eyes darting to this and that but staying off him. He could tell the instant she decided to soldier on, because her eyes stopped that restless search for…what? Courage, maybe. Anyway, they returned to him.
She asked, “Did you mean it?”
“What?”
“When you said you wouldn’t hurt me.”
“Yes.”
She waited, as though expecting him to recant, then said, “Thank you for taking such good care of me.”
“You’ve already thanked me.”
“Yes, but those other times don’t count.”
“Why not?”
“Because I was only trying to placate you.”
“Placate me?”
“Because I’ve been very afraid.”
“Past tense? You’re not afraid of me anymore?”
“I don’t want to be.”
She took a step toward him, then another, and kept coming until she was within touching distance. She stuck out her right hand. “Friends?”
He looked down at her hand but didn’t take it. Instead he placed his hands on her shoulders and pulled her to him. She bowed her head, so as not to look him in the eye, but she didn’t throw off his hands, or back away, or flinch as she’d been doing any time he got too close.