A vivid, painful reminder of just how badly he did not need to be thinking about this woman.
Slowly, he stood. “We can finish our business later, then.” Grabbing his briefcase, he started for the door. Law ushered Hope inside.
Remy’s heart did a rough, angry jitter inside his chest as she continued to fidget with her sleeves and before he could stop himself, he came to a halt. Right in front of her. Close … close enough that he could smell the scent of her hair, the scent of her skin. Close enough that he could see the soft green of her eyes darken as her lashes fluttered.
“You can get help, Hope. You don’t need to live with whatever has you so torn up inside.”
Help …
Hope stared at him, into those dark blue eyes, and to her surprise, she laughed. It wasn’t an amused laugh—hell, it hurt her ears, her chest—it was like she was vomiting razor blades.
And as quickly as it came on, it faded and she found herself staring at him.
She could meet his eyes, she realized. She could stare into those blue eyes without wanting to hide.
When had that changed?
When had she changed?
Being able to look a man she barely knew square in the eye?
Even this man—
No. Especially this man.
“Help. Yeah, I imagine if I had the problems you think I have, help would be exactly what I should be looking for.” Then she turned away from him. Over her shoulder, she said quietly, “You don’t know me, Mr. Jennings. You might think you do, and I’m sure you gathered your nice, neat little history on me, but you don’t know jackshit.”
Feeling the weight of his stare, she focused on the sheriff.
It was harder to look at Nielson, harder to meet his eyes. Was it the uniform? Was it because of who he was? Hope didn’t know.
Her throat tried to lock down on her and she knew she’d have to force herself to say every last word, just as she had to force herself to look at him as she settled in the straight-backed, wooden chair. It was as miserably uncomfortable as it looked. Perching on the edge, she folded her hands, pressed them together between her knees.
“Let’s get this over with,” she said, her voice gritty and rough.
She didn’t want to be here. Didn’t want to be anywhere even close to here.
Still feeling the weight of Remy Jennings’s gaze, the weight of Law’s gaze, the sheriff’s, Hope wanted to be anywhere but here.
Her knees were knocking, all but slamming together and she knew if she hadn’t been sitting down, she might have fallen down. She still wasn’t feeling completely recovered from the blood loss and right now, she felt slightly nauseated, light-headed, and more than off-balance. It hadn’t helped that she’d been too worried to eat that morning, but now, she desperately wished she’d been able to force at least something down her throat.
Panic crowded into her mind and she clenched her fists. Pain tore through her wrists and she hissed out a breath, forced herself to relax her hands.
A hand touched her shoulder. Squeezed lightly.
“Hope.”
Law’s voice cut through the chaos in her mind. She sucked in a desperate breath of air, forced herself to think through the impending panic attack. Not going there, not going there …
She wasn’t trapped in here—she was here because she wanted to be, needed to be. She could get up and walk out whenever she wanted.
Law bent down, put his mouth right next to her ear. In a quiet, soft voice, he said, “Take a deep breath. Come on, kid. You don’t want to fall apart here. Not here, for crying out loud.”
No. Not here. It was the best thing he could have said.
Opening her mouth, she gulped in a deep breath. Then another. Then, finally, she made herself take another, slower breath, and blew it out.
One …
Two …
Three …
The dark swirl of panic started to ease, started to fade.
Four…
Five …
She opened her eyes, uncurled her fists, and rested her palms on her thighs.
Six …
Seven …
Lifting her head, she made herself look at the sheriff. He pretended to be absorbed in something else, giving her some modicum of privacy.
Eight …
Nine …
Behind her, Remy Jennings was still standing there, watching her.
Ten.
Watching her. Watching as she fell apart.
For some reason, that was all it took for her to clear the rest of the panic from her mind.
You don’t know me, she thought again. Squaring her shoulders, she took one more steadying breath.
Damn it, you don’t know me.
Just then, the door behind her quietly closed.
The room suddenly felt larger … and colder. Darker.
Man, maybe she was crazy.
She should breathe easier with him gone. So why was there suddenly an ache in her chest?
Stop thinking about him. Even if you could handle any sort of relationship, the man thinks you’re a nutjob.
Besides, she was here to try to convince the sheriff she wasn’t a nutjob—might be easier to do if she didn’t keep acting like one.
Pushing Remy out of her head, she looked at the sheriff.
He had stopped pretending to work and waited patiently, with a kind smile on his face … the same sort of smile Ezra had, she thought.
And nice eyes. But they were still a cop’s eyes.
Swallowing, she made herself hold his gaze. She couldn’t keep living in terror—she couldn’t.
“Law tells me there’s a problem with the story of events we got. Like about what happened with you,” he said softly.
Hope nodded jerkily.
“Are you going to tell me about it?”
She licked her lips. Feeling Law standing at her back, she almost looked at him—needed that support, that strength. But damn it, she’d jumped all over him hovering. Now was the time to prove she could stand on her own, right?
Now was the time. Now … or never.
Taking a deep breath, she pushed up the long sleeves of the T-shirt she wore, baring the healing wounds on her wrists. “I … I didn’t do this, Sheriff,” she said, her voice hitching.
“Okay. Do you remember how it happened?”
“No.” She did look at Law, then. “We’d just gotten into the house. Weren’t there any more than a few minutes. The lights were out. He’d gone down to the basement to reset the breaker. Then he came up … after that, things get blurry. I remember seeing Prather—just his face—he was on the floor in Law’s office. I only saw the man’s face, but I knew something was wrong. He was on the floor and I don’t think I thought he was dead, but I knew something wasn’t right. I was scared. Then I turned around—saw Law.”
Her voice hitched, catching in her throat as the memories started to slam into her, fear building. She paused, closed her eyes. She had to get through this—had to. Swallowing, she counted to ten and then whispered, “I saw something behind Law, a shadow. Just a shadow, somebody behind him. I, uh … I … I think I must have passed out. I was so scared. I … um, well, I don’t do fear well. And I was so scared … but I wouldn’t have done this.
“Not with him hurt.” She found herself staring at Law’s battered face. If she’d woken up, seen her best friend—her only friend—lying there, hurt and needing help; no. She knew she wasn’t very strong, but she knew she wouldn’t have decided to go and slit her wrists. “Not if Law needed help. No matter how scared I was.”
Then she looked at the sheriff, braced, prepared for him to dismiss her, to brush it off.
Instead, he nodded. “Okay. I don’t know what more we can do other than take a report, but we will do that.”
“You …” She swallowed. “You believe me?”
He sighed. “Ms. Carson, I didn’t think you had hurt Law, but somebody went to considerable trouble to make it look like you had. This? Well
, it’s not a surprise that somebody decided to try to take things even further. It’s sickening, yes. But not surprising.”
You don’t know me …
Why did those words keep ringing in his head hours later?
Scowling, Remy tried to focus on the screen, but he was having a damn hard time. He needed to be ready for a case in the morning, and the last thing he needed to be doing was thinking about Hope Carson—who was no longer any of his concern, really.
You don’t know me.
No. He didn’t, and it would be best if he kept it that way.
Pinching the bridge of his nose, he focused on the computer once more and made himself read.
For the next couple of hours, he had some level of success focusing on his job—he handled several phone calls, talked to a judge, took a call from his mom and had to promise he’d come by for lunch on Sunday.
Her heart was breaking over Brody—she’d seen the trouble with the boy for a while, but neither of them had had any luck getting Hank to see it.
Maybe they could feel guilty together, he brooded.
He also managed to instill the terror needed to get some information he should have already had.
He was on a roll, really.
And then somebody knocked on his door.
Without looking away from the paperwork he was now dealing with, he called out, “Come in.”
Nielson came in and Remy said, “If this is anything else about our current mess, it has to wait. I’ve got other shit I do need to deal with.”
“Just wanted to drop this off. You can add it to the current mess.” Nielson tossed a report down on Remy’s desk and then sauntered out.
Remy told himself to ignore it.
He looked back at his paperwork.
And then he found himself thinking about Hope’s appearance in Nielson’s office that morning.
The low, determined sound of her voice as she said, “Let’s get this over with.”
And the complete, utter terror that underlined her words.
“Shit.”
He grabbed the report.
Forty-five seconds later, he found himself seeing through a sheen of red.
That cool, logical voice in his head—the lawyer in him—had no trouble being cool and logical.
Troubled woman, remember?
That borderline personality—attention isn’t solely focused on her now and this would be one hell of a way to get attention back on her. Sympathetic attention at that.
Throwing crazy shit into the mix and she doesn’t need to have a reason.
But his gut said otherwise.
And Remy believed in listening to his instincts. He’d always been one to listen to his instincts. They didn’t tend to steer him wrong, and that was a damn good thing.
Carrington County, Kentucky, was so damn small and their resources were stretched pretty damn thin—more often than not, he ended up taking a more active role in checking things out for the cases he’d have to prosecute than he would if he’d worked in Lexington or Louisville.
His instincts had insisted there was a problem with this whole picture, and damn had they been right. From the get-go, something about this hadn’t sat right with him.
He’d tried to brush it off, tried to convince himself that she had just snowed him—born manipulators were good at that, he knew.
He tried convincing himself he was just so tied up because he had a personal attraction to her and that was doing bad things to his brain.
But it hadn’t felt right.
He should have listened to his gut—one time he hadn’t done it, and shit, had he ever been wrong.
Blood roared in his ears. His hands clenched into fists and he had to unclench them before he ripped the report apart. Slowly, carefully, Remy laid it down.
Slowly, carefully, he stood up and started to pace.
Jamming his hands into his pockets, he paced the worn carpet of his office and tried to wrap his mind around what lay on those sheets of paper. Simple, so damn simple—it shouldn’t mean so much to him.
Personally.
This was just a job, after all.
Right?
According to that report, Hope Carson hadn’t been the one to take the knife to her wrists.
Which meant … they had yet another victim.
And while that should infuriate him as a civil servant—and it did—while it should bother him on a personal level, just for the sheer wrongness of it—and it did—it shouldn’t leave him shaking, feeling shattered, like he somehow had to put himself back together.
Shouldn’t leave him fuming and raging … or worse, all but thirsting for blood.
But there he was.
He was shaken … on a level he couldn’t quite understand.
He was shattered … because he hadn’t seen this.
He was enraged to the point that he wanted to tear something apart.
It wasn’t supposed to affect him personally? Screw that.
From the second he’d laid eyes on that woman, she’d affected him on a personal level and he’d be damned if he could completely understand it, but there was no denying it.
His gut knotted. He knew what had happened that night, all too well.
If Ezra and Nielson hadn’t decided to go out and check on Law’s place, she would have bled to death.
Not because she’d chosen to, either.
Son of a bitch.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
“CAN I ASK WHY YOU WANT MORE INFORMATION about my wife?” Detective Joseph Carson stared out the window.
“Ms. Carson is no longer your wife,” Remington Jennings said, his voice easy and relaxed.
He had that slow, laid-back Southern drawl, rich and smooth. Joey didn’t really like hearing the man say his wife’s name. At all.
“We may be estranged, but I have hopes that Hope and I will eventually work things out.”
“The divorce has been final for two years. That’s a bit more than an estrangement,” Jennings said.
“Our personal affairs don’t really concern you. And I’m still trying to understand why a Kentucky lawyer is trying to get even more personal background information on my wife. Her history is private—you have no need to know any more than I’ve already shared.”
“Well, there’s been some interesting updates, some light shed on recent events—it turns out there was an attack on Ms. Carson and I’m just looking for anything that may shed light on it.”
Joey echoed. “An attack—I thought she’d tried to kill herself.”
“As I said—there was some light shed on recent events,” Jennings said.
“Hmm. Regardless of whatever light you think you saw, that attack was likely self-inflicted. I’ve already told you. Hope is troubled. I love her, but she’s deeply, deeply troubled.”
“I question whether she really is all that troubled,” Jennings said in that neutral tone lawyers managed so well.
The one that managed to sound like it was saying fuck you, but it said it so smoothly, so politely. He wanted to reach through the phone and strangle the bastard.
“She spent months in a mental institution. She overdosed on liquor, anti-anxiety pills, and antidepressants. She had to have her stomach pumped. She tells terrible, terrible lies and lives in a delusional world of her own making, one where she’s happier to paint herself as a victim. She is a chronic liar, a user, and a manipulator. Mr. Jennings, yes, she really is that troubled.”
There was a brief pause, followed by, “Well, if she has that many flaws, I have to ask myself, why would you want her back?”
“Because she’s mine,” Joey said simply.
“Yours? I thought the days of owning our wives ended quite some time ago.”
Joey gripped the phone, squeezed it until the plastic cracked. But he kept his voice cool and level as he responded, “You misunderstand me, Mr. Jennings. I love her. There is no logic in matters of love. For all her flaws, for all her problems, I love Hope and I
want her back. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I do have to get back to work.”
He hung up the phone and continued to stare outside.
This, he decided, had gone on quite long enough.
Hope Carson really did need to come home.
Remy hung up the phone.
In the past day, he hadn’t had any luck getting solid information on Hope’s past.
Not that he’d expected he would.
Patient confidentiality was blocking him, as he’d expected.
And her obnoxious ass of an ex-husband wasn’t helping much.
He’d tried tracking down some friends from her hometown, but … well, there weren’t any. At least not since high school.
No work history that he could find—he suspected she’d been working under the table for the past two years. It was the only way he could figure she’d been supporting herself.
No volunteer work. Throughout her marriage, the only person who had any regular contact with her was her husband. Already that was painting an image that left a bad, bad feeling in Remy’s gut.
Coupled with her skittishness around people, particularly men …
Anger started to pound and pulse inside him, but he tucked it away, pushed it aside so he could think, function. He couldn’t make any decisions based on his assumptions, couldn’t go forward based on what he thought might have happened … and even if he could, right now there wasn’t anything he could do, not as far as his job went.
It was late Friday and he had spent much of that day in court. What hadn’t been spent in court, he’d spent on the phone, trying to learn more about Hope. Not that he really had to have that information—there was nothing he really needed to do about the report Nielson had given him.
Once they had a suspect, yes.
But until then?
Assuming that even happened.
Turn it off. Go home, he told himself.
Yeah, that was what he needed to do. The past few weeks had been hell on wheels in his small county, dumping far more shit on his plate than he normally had to handle. He ought to go home, collapse on the couch, order a pizza, and zone out with a beer and a movie.
If You See Her Page 9