Guilty as Sin (Sinful, Montana Book 1)

by Rosalind James

  I want to do that for you, she didn’t say. I want to give you the good stuff. I want to make you sigh. I want to make you so glad it’s me. Really me. Paige. Wearing something I’m a little nervous to wear. Letting you see all of me, even the fear. I want to see the hunger in your eyes. I want to feel the tenderness in your hands.

  “Freeing for a man,” he said. “I’ll tell you that.”

  “Maybe we should advertise a husband shopping service, then. You think?”

  He smiled. “Yeah, I think. I also haven’t forgotten that I didn’t get to see you last night. I can tell you that you could run through every bit of stock you’ve got in there before I got tired of looking at it. As long as you were wearing it.”

  This wasn’t working. All she wanted was more of him. She needed to do it. To let him know, and to watch him go. She slid off the bike, taking care of her leg along the way this time, grabbed her towel and water bottle, and said, “I’m going on, because I need to stretch. Twenty minutes?”

  “No worries,” he said, a tiny frown between his eyes. “Twenty minutes. Take your time.”

  She undressed in one of the curtained-off private cubicles, as always. To hide the scars, and maybe just to hide. For a minute.

  The gym was busy, but that wasn’t it. It wasn’t even her Enemies List. Jennifer the Gym Owner and her pal Raeleigh the Motel Queen were both in the locker room now, changing for the seven-thirty Restorative Yoga class. From the looks on their faces when Paige had walked in, they needed it.

  That made three of them. She wrapped the towel around her waist, made sure her scars weren’t showing, picked up her shampoo and conditioner, and prepared to brave the room. And the rest of her evening.

  The lights went out. The music stopped.

  Silence. Blackness.

  The silence lasted a split second. The blackness continued. There was some nervous laughter, some chatter, some banging around into lockers.

  Her first thought was, But the storm’s over. Her second thought was, Find your phone. But the darkness was absolute. She literally couldn’t see her hand in front of her face. And her purse was still in her locker. Which was in the middle of a row, and was locked.

  Wait. In a minute, somebody will pull out their phone and turn on the light, and then everybody else can find theirs and start finding their way out. She groped in front of her for the curtain to her cubicle. It was farther away than she’d thought, but she had her hand on it at last. It was pulling back too easily, with a rasp of rings, like it was motorized. And then she did see a light. Flashing straight into her eyes, blinding her.

  “Hey,” she said, threw up a hand, and started to turn away.

  Something hit her hard. Grazing her head, her face, falling full on her shoulder. The light went out, she thought, but she wasn’t sure, because she was stumbling back, catching the bench with her bad leg, and going down. Her back hit the bench hard, and somebody was standing over her. She could hear them breathing. She could hear the excitement in it, the satisfaction, and then the hard weight hit her on that same upflung arm and the pain blossomed like fireworks, hot and white.

  She was crying out with it, but kicking with her good leg at the same time. Another heavy weight fell onto her thigh, but with no force behind it, and she grabbed for her assailant in the inky blackness, trying to pull them in, to pull them down. To catch them. To hold them. But there was nothing there, and she overbalanced, fell back, and hit the bench again.

  If you hurt, you’re alive. Get out. Go.

  She crawled toward voices. Toward a light. Get off the ground. Stand up and run. She staggered to her feet. The lights came on all at once, blinding her, and she ran, bounced off the door, and got it the second time.

  Get out.

  When the lights went out, Jace’s first thought was, No emergency lighting? Silly buggers. The bike stopped, too, the hum of equipment died around him, and he got carefully off the bike and waited, one hand on its seat, while the gym erupted with exclamations and the heavy clatter of weights hitting the stacks. He hoped nobody dropped a barbell on themselves in the excitement, but he didn’t have too many illusions.

  He counted sixty seconds, at the start of which he saw a flash of light and then saw it go out again. Another few seconds, and some cursing as people ran into each other in the dark. A beam of light swept across the floor. Somebody had reached their phone. Conversation, then, more shuffling around. And a blast of light like a sunburst as the lights came back on and all the machinery hummed to life.

  And a woman staggered out from the direction of the locker rooms. A naked woman who wasn’t covering her breasts and pubic area the way every other naked woman in the world did when she was forced out into public view. She had one hand over her thigh, the other arm hanging at her side.

  A man laughed. “Hot damn.”

  Jace was halfway there already. It was Lily. She was in major pain, and there was blood trickling from a corner of her mouth. Her breathing was harsh, sucked in through her teeth, and she didn’t seem to see him. She was headed toward the gym entrance.

  He got hold of her arm, the one on her leg, because something was wrong with the other one, and she cried out and resisted his grasp.

  “Lily,” he said, putting all his command into it. “Stop. It’s Jace. I’m here to help. Stop.”

  A crowd of people had gathered, as crowds always did, and they were as helpful as crowds generally were. Which was not at all. Jace had an arm around Lily, and now, he yanked his T-shirt over his head and got it over hers. “Lift your arm through,” he said, and she didn’t. He turned to Charlotte, who had come out from the desk and was standing and staring like everybody else. The one person who had a phone right there, and who was, of course, not using it. He said, “Call 911. Tell them we need an ambulance.”

  “No.” Lily clamped her palm more tightly over her thigh. “No. Get me out of here. I got hit. In the dark. Take me to the hospital. And call the cops.”

  Jennifer, the gym owner, made her presence felt at last. “Did you slip and fall?” she asked. “In the shower? Kelli,” she instructed, “go make sure everybody’s doing all right in the ladies’ locker room.”

  “No,” Lily said forcefully. “Somebody hit me.” She told Jace, “Go look. Go see. I was in… a place with a curtain. Changing area.” Like she couldn’t think of the word. Like she was trying to hang on, and it was getting too hard.

  “Modesty cubicle,” Jennifer said. “And absolutely not. You are not going into the women’s locker room,” she snapped at Jace, even though he hadn’t gone anywhere. He was still holding onto Lily.

  Charlotte, who’d actually, miracle of miracles, gone back to the desk and made the call, was still standing there. Jace said, “Towel,” and she brought it back to Jace without a word. He wrapped it around Lily’s waist over the T-shirt, and she finally let go of her thigh and put her uninjured arm through the sleeve. Jace asked Jennifer, “Where’s the closest hospital?”

  “Kalispell.” She gave him directions. He thought about what Lily had said, and told Jennifer, “Go clear everybody out of that locker room, and check it for anything out of place. Anything unusual, especially near the cubicle where she was. Call the police and tell them somebody attacked Lily. Find out what happened with the lights.”

  Jennifer made absolutely no move to do any of it. “She fell. Obviously she fell.”

  Lily was headed for the door again, practically dragging Jace along. “Get me out of here,” she said again.

  He handed her to Charlotte, said, “Hang onto her,” and went for his locker. He’d grab his things, and he’d call the cops on the way.

  It was half an hour to Kalispell, Paige told her fuzzy brain over and over when Jace had lifted her into his truck, tucked his jacket around her, cranked up the heat, and swung onto the highway. A half hour was fine. This wasn’t that bad. She needed the cops, that was all. Because next time, this could be Lily. It couldn’t be Lily.

  Jace was driving, talking o
n the phone, hooked into the car’s sound system. Talking to 911. “I’m bringing her into Kalispell Medical Center,” he was saying. “Have the police meet us there. She was attacked.”

  “I’ve informed the police,” came the woman’s voice. Soothing, like 911 dispatchers always were. Paige thought it, and knew the thought didn’t matter. It was an attempt to focus on now, to stay centered. She needed to keep on doing that.

  “How are you doing?” Jace asked. “Stay with me here.”

  He said it again, and she realized he was talking to her. “Sorry,” she said. “I thought you were still on the phone.” Her teeth were trying to chatter, and she pressed them more tightly together, even though it hurt. She’d cut her cheek, obviously. That didn’t matter either. Mouths healed fast.

  “How are you doing?” Jace asked again.

  “I’m OK. My shoulder’s got some damage, that’s all. My arm. My back. I don’t think anything’s broken. It hurts to move, but I can. A concussion, maybe. Not bad.”

  “What the hell do you mean, not bad?”

  “I mean not bad. But I did get hit.”

  “I know.”

  The rest of it was what you’d expect. The drive. The ER. Jace helping her out of the truck again, and she had to set her teeth again against the pain, or she’d have cried out. The lights too bright, people’s voices too loud.

  But nobody had died. This would be over, she thought when she was in a room without Jace, when the nurse pulled the shirt over her body and jostled her shoulder too much, and she did make a sound.

  It wasn’t that bad. It was just pain.

  By the time she was in a gown, under a blanket, lying on her side and breathing through her mouth after a half hour she’d rather not repeat in an MRI machine, she’d had plenty of time to revisit her insistence on Jace not waiting for the EMTs, and to be sure that she’d been right. I’m Lily. I need to be Lily. She didn’t think anybody at the gym would have noticed her scars. She’d covered the front one, and when you were naked, people didn’t tend to check your body for scars. Nobody would have seen. She hoped.

  The doctor, a good-looking guy in his early forties, came in, did some poking and testing of her shoulder and arm that also felt about as good as she’d have expected, then had her roll onto her stomach, where he repeated the process on her back.

  Short term. Over soon. Breathe it out.

  “Pain level?” he asked. “One to ten?”

  “Five.”

  “You sure about that? Your breathing feels more like an eight.”

  “I’m sure. It’s not an eight. It’s a five.”

  He had a hand on the back of her thigh. “This is recent. This was an eight, maybe. Maybe more.”

  She’d had half an hour in Jace’s truck to come up with her answer, and that was a good thing, as slow as her thought processes were right now. “Maybe.”

  “Is this incident related?” he asked. He didn’t ask, Do you have a boyfriend who’s beating you up and shooting you? Because I’d have to report that. But that was what he meant.

  “No.” She’d decided on minimal information. Simple but true, and something she could keep straight in her current state. If the doctor wasn’t treating the patient he’d thought he was, he’d have to share that with the police. “I was shot in another state. Treated there. You won’t find anything about it in my records here. It was nobody I knew. The shooter’s dead. And please don’t mention the gunshot to the cops. They’ll waste their time trying to make a connection, and next time, this could be worse.”

  She could hear the mental shrug in the doctor’s voice when he said, “Right.” Thank goodness for ER docs whose job ended when you were off the table, and who were at the end of their shift.

  The cop showed up a few minutes later, while she was still waiting, by herself this time, to get her results and get out of here so she could let go and hurt. It was her friend from the night before, with the red hair and freckles. She said, “Got you on… night shifts, huh?” She tried to remember his name. She couldn’t.

  His Adam’s apple bobbed, and he said, “Yes, ma’am. Officer Wilson.”

  “Did anybody check the locker room?” she asked. “The lights?”

  He looked confused for a moment, then fixed his expression the way they’d taught him at the academy. “That’s why I’m here. To take a report.”

  She told the story again. The doctor came back into the room like he had something to say, but before he could, Officer Wilson asked him, “Can you give me an opinion about what caused Ms. Hollander’s injuries?”

  “She was struck,” the doctor said. “With a blunt object. No sharp edges, but fairly heavy, from the amount of bruising, and multiple times. She says she remembers a first blow on the head that moved down to the left shoulder, then a second blow on that upturned arm, and that’s certainly possible. Head, shoulder, forearm. There’s another area of bruising on her left leg, but it doesn’t appear to be as severe. And a final area on her mid-back that shows a different pattern. She also has cuts in her mouth. Those are from the object striking her face, driving the skin of her cheek into her teeth.”

  “The thing on my back is where I fell back and hit the bench,” Paige said.

  “No chance,” Officer Wilson asked the doctor, ignoring Paige, “that she fell in the dark onto her shoulder and face, got up, and fell again on her back?”

  Paige couldn’t blame him, not really. The memory was an unreliable thing. Especially after you’d hit your head.

  “No chance at all, I’d say,” the doctor said. “Not with that injury pattern. Something hit her.”

  “Right.” Officer Wilson was writing again. “We’ll check into it. We’ll get back to you, ma’am,” he told Paige. “We have your number.”

  Paige thought about saying that she hoped it got a higher priority than her broken window had, but she was tired. And she hurt. And she was scared.

  Lily, she thought, closing her eyes against the light, I think we have a problem.

  Jace was quiet as he helped her into the truck again. She’d been able to give his T-shirt back, at least, though she was still wearing his jacket, because he’d insisted. She was still barefoot, too, in a pair of borrowed green scrubs she’d promised to return, and holding a bag of sample meds she wasn’t planning to use.

  Jace stayed quiet as he pulled onto the highway and headed for Sinful, and she was glad.

  Twenty minutes, and she could lie down. Twenty minutes, and she could rest her spinning head. Twenty minutes, and she could cry.

  The dark road unspooled on and on, climbing to the mountains, curving around the bases of hills. She stared at the hypnotic white sweep that was his headlights, closed her eyes against the too-bright invasion of oncoming traffic, and wished she could call Lily. She wanted her sister. She wanted her clothes. They were still in her locker at the health club with everything else.

  Oh, no.

  It had been ten minutes, or had it been fifteen? And Jace still wasn’t talking. His silence felt weird. She thought about leaning the seat back, but she had to say this first. “Thanks for driving me. Thanks for paying. I’ll pay you back as soon as I get my checkbook. But…”

  “How bad off are you?” he asked. Interrupting her. That was weird, too. Wasn’t it?

  “What I said. Not that bad. Minor concussion. A few days of headaches. Bone bruise on my shoulder. Some others.” She adjusted the sling on her left wrist and ignored the deep, hot jab of pain. “And I’m sorry, but my keys are in my purse, my purse is in my locker, and the gym’s closed. So I need to ask for your help again.”

  A long pause. “No hidden key?” Which wasn’t the answer she’d expected, which meant she had to think again. Which was hard.

  “No,” she said. “Hidden keys are a bad idea. Every burglar knows where people hide them.”

  “Right,” he said. “I’ll take you home with me. You can sleep in my bed. Tomorrow morning, we’ll get your things from the gym. Just answer one question first
.”

  “What’s that?” She didn’t want to answer a question. She wanted to go home. She wanted to stop.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  His shock and anger had been warring with his concern for her since all the way back in the gym, when he’d pulled his T-shirt over her head, had seen the first scar, and everything had fallen into place. Now, the anger was winning.

  “Why do you think…” she began, then stopped like she couldn’t figure out how to tell this next lie.

  He was slowing for the outskirts of Sinful, and his hands were gripping the steering wheel too tightly. “Let’s see,” he said. “Let’s count them off. That you have two gunshot wounds in your thigh, and they can’t be more than a couple months old max? That the pain in your leg wasn’t any paragliding accident? That you know how to clear a room and you know how to make an ops plan? That you analyze instead of panicking? That you take pain and fear like they’re part of the job? That absolutely nothing that’s happened has fazed you the way it should? But what I want to know is…” He was headed up the mountain now, the way he’d been the night before to help her board up her window. The way he’d been this morning, after he’d dropped her off at the shop. “Was pulling me in just part of the camouflage?”

  She was breathing hard. He felt a stab of self-loathing, sick and deep. “And I don’t know,” he said, “if I’m more of a bastard because I can’t wait any longer to say it, or if you’re more of a bitch for doing it.”