Hush

by Karen Robards

  A slam dunk, if she did say so herself.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?” As he spoke, Bradley dug into his pants pocket and pulled out his own phone.

  “Right afterwards, I was a little busy running for my life,” she reminded him as he punched a button on his phone with a savage jab of his thumb. “Then—well, you know what happened.”

  A moment later, presumably after somebody answered, he said into the phone, “I need you to go back to Mrs. Cowan’s apartment and look for a cell phone. It should be in the tub, in the water. Get it.” There was the briefest of pauses. He was, Riley presumed, talking to Bax. “Yeah, right now. And when you have it, call me. And get it dried out.”

  He listened for a couple of seconds longer, said, “Yeah,” again, and disconnected. Shoving the phone back into his pocket, he moved into the far right lane and took the Farm and Market Road exit before shooting another glance at her.

  “What was on that phone that would make someone try to kill you to get it?” His tone was more abrupt than any he’d used toward her thus far. Having subsided against the seat again while he was on the phone—she really wasn’t feeling well—Riley met his gaze without so much as a blink.

  “I have no idea. But if I were to guess—Jeff was looking into the deaths of those four people you mentioned earlier, the ones who were connected to his father.” They were off the expressway now, and traffic was light. Margaret’s house was maybe ten minutes away. Riley didn’t know whether to be glad about that, or sorry. She wanted in the worst way to get out of this car and away from the man driving it, but she hated that she was going to have to add to Margaret’s burden by telling her what had happened. “He was convinced they were murdered. He kept the details of his investigation on his phone.” She gave a little shrug. “I don’t know that that was what the scumbag was after, but it seems likely, doesn’t it?”

  Bradley’s reply was a grunt. “So how’d you wind up with Jeff’s phone in the first place?”

  Riley was anticipating the question. She had her answer all ready. It was even the truth, as far as it went. But for some reason the words stuck in her throat.

  All of a sudden, she could almost see those narrow masculine feet dangling in front of her eyes again. The unnatural stillness of Jeff’s body when she touched it, the horrible contortion of his face . . .

  Her stomach clenched. She shoved the memories away. Or at least, she tried: they wouldn’t go.

  “I’m the one who found Jeff’s body,” she admitted in a constricted voice. As Bradley’s brows twitched together and he slid a glinting look at her, she rushed out the rest of what she had to say. That’s how she had planned it, to blurt it all out real fast like she was in a hurry to get the confession over with, which she was, although as it turned out the plan had nothing to do with how fast she spoke. She just really, really wanted to get it over with so those terrible images of Jeff would leave her alone. “Jeff asked me to meet him at Oakwood. When I got there he was dead.” There was a sudden catch in her voice, and it had nothing to do with any kind of subterfuge. “I took his phone. Then I left, and called 911. Anonymously. I know I shouldn’t have gone into the house, that I probably committed some hideous crime because it’s been seized by the government, but—”

  Her voice broke. For real. She stopped talking because she couldn’t continue. The memory of how she had found Jeff was suddenly too fresh, too vivid.

  He must have been so scared before he died.

  She didn’t realize she’d said it aloud until Bradley answered, “It would have been quick. Twenty seconds, and he would have been unconscious.”

  Oh, wow. Good to know I’m in a car with a man who knows that kind of thing. But this time she didn’t say it, or anything at all, aloud, because her throat was too tight to allow any words to get out. The silence stretched as Riley concentrated on putting the terrible memories back where they belonged, in her mind’s locked box of things she didn’t want to think about.

  “You loved him.” Bradley slowed the car, then turned into the small subdivision where Margaret’s house was located. With the garish lights of the strip malls and fast-food restaurants that had lined the main road behind them, it felt as if they were being swallowed up by darkness.

  She felt as if she was being swallowed up by darkness.

  “Yes.”

  “You were divorced.”

  “It was—I wasn’t in love with him. We stayed friends. Family.” Her throat ached. It felt as if her insides were being twisted into a giant pretzel. “I—knowing he died like that is really hard.”

  “Did he know anything about where George might have hidden the money? Could information like that be on his phone?”

  What? He was asking that—why? Riley’s mouth dried up. Her stomach turned inside out.

  When she didn’t answer, he looked at her. “Mrs. Cowan?”

  Breathe. Just breathe. Only she couldn’t. There wasn’t any air. She fumbled at the door to find the button that rolled down her window, pressed it. The window didn’t budge. Of course: she’d forgotten the front passenger side window was stuck.

  It’s my fault that Jeff’s dead. That was the thought she’d been avoiding since she’d found him. It slammed into her then with all the force of a speeding train.

  “Could you pull over please?” she asked, perfectly polite. “The window’s stuck, and I need some air.”

  He threw her a quick look.

  “Hang on,” he said. She didn’t know what she looked like but it must have been pretty bad, because he immediately pulled over to the side of the road.

  As soon as the car stopped, Riley opened the door and got out. The headlights speared a metal mailbox at the end of a driveway about twenty-five feet away, and then as the lights were cut the mailbox disappeared into deep shadow. The whirring of the cicadas was loud, but not any louder than the buzzing in her ears. They were on a narrow residential street lined with small houses with neat yards. Except for a few glowing windows and the uncertain light cast by the fingernail moon, it was now completely dark. No one in sight. She took a few shaky steps away from the car, into parched grass that crackled faintly beneath her feet, toward the protective shadow of a large yew tree that anchored a scruffy hedge that presumably separated one yard from the next. Keeping her back turned to the car, she closed her eyes.

  The corollary thought that she’d been doing her utmost to keep at bay hit her then with full force: I could have warned him. I should have warned him. Then he might still be alive.

  Shivering, she crossed her arms over her chest to ward off the sudden chill.

  The twenty seconds of consciousness Bradley said Jeff would have had was plenty of time to be scared. To say nothing of whatever he’d endured before the electrical cord had been wrapped around his neck.

  The thought of Jeff experiencing the kind of terror that she had felt when her attacker had tried to drown her made her fists clench. The difference was, after that he’d actually died.

  Oh, God, why?

  The world wobbled around her. Sorrow joined with fear and guilt to bring a lump to her throat. Her chest was so tight it ached. Even though she was out in the open, she couldn’t seem to draw in enough of the warm, pine-scented air to fill her lungs. Lightheaded suddenly, she dropped into a crouch, balancing herself with one hand in the prickly grass.

  You’ve got to get it together. You’ve got to keep it together.

  “Mrs. Cowan.”

  Bradley. He’d turned off the car—she only realized that she’d been able to hear the engine rumbling beneath the noise of the cicadas now that she could not—and was beside her, close enough so that it sounded like he was practically on top of her. In fact, he sounded way closer to her ear than any six-foot, three-inch man should sound to the ear of a woman who was practically huddled in a ball on the ground. Fighting for composure, trying to take another deep breath—her lungs just would not fill—she opened her eyes.

  He was crouched in front of
her, a large blurry shape in the dark.

  Blurry because she was crying.

  Damn it.

  Even as she blinked furiously, doing her best to rid herself of the tears, his hand curled around her upper arm just above her elbow. It felt warm against her chilled skin. The way he was looking at her—was surprisingly sympathetic.

  Riley realized that she was actually starving for a little sympathy right then, a self-pitying thought that made the tears flow faster.

  It’s too dark: you can’t even see his expression. You’re imagining it. Damn it! Damn it!

  “Do you feel sick?” Bradley asked. Forget sympathy. His voice was totally impersonal.

  Gritting her teeth, she shook her head.

  “You probably want to get back in the car. Your mother-in-law’s house is just a couple of minutes away.” He spoke with calm, cool detachment. “Or I can take you to the hospital.”

  Riley shook her head again. Forcing speech out of her constricted throat was hard. She did it anyway. “I’m fine.”

  Her voice sounded like it had been dragged through sand­paper.

  “Sure?” he asked, and she nodded.

  Still holding on to her arm, he stood up, drawing her up with him. It took every bit of willpower Riley possessed to get to her feet, but she managed. Once again she tried sucking in air with limited success. Her knees felt shaky, but she locked them. The ground threatened to tilt, but she knew that if she refused to give in to it the dizziness would soon settle down. Bradley was so close that she automatically used him for support, grabbing on to a handy lapel.

  He gripped her wrist, to steady her, she thought.

  “You’re not going to faint on me, are you?”

  Whoa, there was actually an inflection in his voice. Like he was a little worried she might.

  “No.” Her response came out husky, scratchy. Her chin was tilted up so that she could look at him, but she still couldn’t read his expression: the pale slip of a moon was behind him, which meant that all she could see of his face was the faint gleam of his eyes.

  He was looking down at her. Belatedly, she realized that if the moonlight was behind him, it was falling full on her face.

  His eyes narrowed. His breath eased out through his teeth with a sound like a hiss.

  Riley realized he was seeing the tears that were sliding down her cheeks.

  — CHAPTER —

  NINE

  “What? It’s been a bad day,” Riley managed to get out despite the tightness in her throat. As she spoke, she swiped belligerently at the wet tracks on her face with her free hand. Nothing she could do about the streaming tears other than keep wiping them away. She only wished she could have kept him—or anyone—from seeing them. “You try—”

  She was going to say something along the lines of “going to your ex-husband’s funeral and then almost getting murdered in the same day,” but her voice caught on a sob at the thought of Jeff’s funeral and she couldn’t, could not for the life of her, get any more words out.

  “Hey,” Bradley said, and there was that damned am-­I-imagining-it sympathy again, in his voice. Then her knees quivered and she kind of tilted toward him and he caught her and kept her upright. She thought he sighed. His arms came around her and tightened until she lay fully against him. “It’s okay.”

  He felt as solid as a concrete pillar, and something about that, about having someone she could lean on after a lifetime of being the pillar that supported everyone else, got to her. All the pent-up emotion inside her came bursting out. She buried her face in his wide chest, slid her arms beneath his jacket to wrap them around his waist, burrowed into his warmth like a lost child, and cried like she hadn’t had a chance to do since Jeff had died.

  She didn’t do it prettily, either. She sobbed and gasped and sniffled. By the time she was done, his shirt front was damp and he was smoothing loose tendrils of hair out of her face with one hand.

  If she could have kept her eyes closed and her face pressed against his chest forever, she would have done it. The fear and grief and guilt had eased; the physical act of crying seemed to have washed away the hard knot that had formed in her chest. But with her tears spent, she was suddenly aware of the man—the absolute stranger—in whose arms she rested. The sheer size of him should have been intimidating. So, too, should the shoulder holster that she could just glimpse against his white shirt because her arms were inside his jacket lifting it a little away from his body. To say nothing of the knowledge that he was an FBI agent whose primary purpose for being in her company was to ferret out all her (guilty) secrets. Instead, she felt protected. Safe. And for that brief time while she had been weak, feeling protected and safe was precisely what she’d needed. But that time was at an end: she was ready to be strong again.

  She had to be strong again.

  Even so, she stayed where she was for a moment longer, regrouping, gathering herself, savoring the unaccustomed luxury of relying on someone else for support. She could feel the heat of his body through the shirt she’d cried all over, feel the rise and fall of his chest, hear the steady beat of his heart beneath her ear, smell the subtle scent of his skin. His legs were long and hard with muscle against hers. The arms around her felt hard with muscle, too, and his chest was as unyielding as a wall.

  She didn’t know precisely what his job entailed, but he clearly wasn’t a desk jockey: he had the body of an athlete. Or a soldier.

  The kind of hard, honed body that belonged to a man of action.

  Tempting as the prospect was, she couldn’t stay in his arms all night.

  The real world was still there, still sucked eggs, still had to be dealt with.

  Much as she hated to face it, she’d made a complete and utter fool of herself by breaking down like she had.

  The only thing to do was own it, and move on.

  Taking a deep breath, relieved to discover that she was finally able to do so, she unlocked her arms from around his waist and straightened her spine. God, he was big. In her flat shoes, the top of her head didn’t reach his chin. His shoulders were broad enough to block her view of everything behind him.

  At this change in the status quo, his hand that was smoothing her hair stilled, dropped away. The arm around her loosened fractionally. As her hands finished sliding around his muscled rib cage to flatten on his chest and push a little so that she wasn’t just plastered against him any longer, Riley faced the inevitable and looked up and met his eyes.

  His face was still in shadow. She couldn’t see his expression, let alone read it.

  It was disconcerting to discover that her heart was beating faster than it should have been.

  “Better?” he asked.

  “Yes.” She could have stepped away from him at that point, but she didn’t. A sniffle caught her by surprise. She was more surprised when he produced a wad of tissues from a pocket and handed it to her.

  “You carry tissues?” she asked on a note of incredulity in between a hiccup and another sniffle. She made good use of them, drying her eyes, wiping her nose, resting comfortably against him all the while.

  “They’re napkins. Clean ones, don’t worry. Courtesy of today’s lunch at Burger King.”

  “Thanks.” Finishing with the napkins, she stuffed them in the pocket of her jeans, to be disposed of later. She still felt a little shaky—but that wasn’t the reason she didn’t go ahead and move out of the circle of his arms. The sad truth was, having a man to lean on felt good. She flicked another look up at him. “I have to confess, I’m embarrassed.”

  “No need to be.”

  “I don’t usually cry all over people.”

  “I don’t usually get cried all over, so I guess that makes us even.” Was that a hint of humor in his voice?

  “That answer did not make me feel better,” she informed him.

  “Sorry.”

  “I don’t usually cry at all.”

  “Like you said, you’ve had a bad day.”

  At the reminder, Riley’
s stomach started to tighten. “I think me being so weepy has something to do with the concussion. Or maybe the meds.”

  “Probably.”

  “Are you laughing at me?” she asked suspiciously. Because the light had shifted enough to allow her to see his face. It was still heavily shadowed, but not so much that she couldn’t see that slight uptick at the corner of his mouth that she’d decided earlier passed for his smile.

  “God forbid.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “You are. I can tell.”

  The uptick was gone. “Nope.”

  She was feeling better, stronger. Standing so close to him, being in his arms like this, was starting to feel unexpectedly intimate. Nestled right up against him as she was, she was suddenly, acutely aware of him as a man, in a way that she absolutely didn’t want to be. His size, all those muscles, the very smell of him, was overwhelmingly masculine, and it touched something deeply feminine in herself. To her horror, she found herself speculating about what he would be like in bed, and instantly banished the thought.

  Straightening in his hold, she pushed off against his chest.

  His arms dropped away, her knees held steady, she took a step back followed by another, and there she was, standing on her own with a couple feet of space separating them.

  She wasn’t prepared to acknowledge even to herself what she’d felt between them at just about the time she’d started wondering about him and sex: he’d had an erection the size of a log.

  Just thinking about it disconcerted her. It also made her pulse quicken, and her blood heat.

  He had to know she’d felt it.

  “Ready to go?” he asked, as impassive as always.

  So he was going to ignore it. Good. Riley found that she wasn’t able to meet his eyes. Thanking God for the darkness that made it difficult for him to read her face, she nodded, said, “Yes,” and started walking toward the car. She half expected, half wanted to feel his hand on her arm again, but she didn’t. Instead he walked silently beside her, opened her door for her, waited until she was seated, and closed it again.