“Josh, wait…”
But he was already pushing the Down button for the elevator, fuming all the way to the first floor.
The minute he stepped outside the car, he made his way to the front door. He didn’t intend to let Michelle get inside the building. His body blocked her entrance as he stepped further outside forcing her to take a step backward.
Under overcast skies they stood facing each other on the awning-covered portico.
“You disappeared last night from the pub. I brought your raincoat. You left it. I told the others I’d see you got it.”
“That’s nice of you but…”
“You won’t even let me inside?”
“No. It’s over, Michelle. I’ve tried to tell you several times now but you refuse to listen. Every time you show up uninvited, you’re simply pissing me off.”
“That’s mean. What would Annabelle say?”
“Annabelle’s gone, Michelle. And she wouldn’t want you throwing yourself at anyone, least of all me.”
The slap she laid on the side of his face stung but just for a moment. Josh looked into her eyes and saw rage and something else, something he’d ignored up until this minute. Michelle acted more than a little unbalanced. At least the blow had been honest, possibly the first honest emotion they’d shared together in months.
“How dare you? I slept with you…now I know you just took advantage of the situation. I thought we were…”
Rubbing the side of his face, he didn’t let her finish. “You thought wrong.” When he jerked his raincoat out of her grasp, she turned on her heels and ran toward her Chevy parked on the street.
As he rounded to go back inside, he saw Skye standing three feet away, holding on to a bicycle. She’d overheard the entire exchange.
“Breakups can be so ugly sometimes,” Skye reasoned, rocking back on her heels.
“What are you doing here? Shouldn’t celebrities get to sleep in?”
“Celebrities? You’ve been watching too much TV, Ander. I’m just out getting my exercise, seeing how the other half lives on a Sunday morning. Got a cup of wake-up coffee?”
“Sure, come on up. You can leave your bike in the lobby.”
“So you trust your neighbors?”
“I don’t know. Now that I look at it they may not be able to resist a Cannondale.”
“Got a good deal on it from a woman selling off everything that belonged to her cheating bastard of a husband.”
Once in the elevator, she wanted to know, “How’s the shoulder? Following doctor’s orders?”
“You mean the hack that tried to fix me up?”
“You never even paid the hack. You got my best surgical skills for gratis.”
“As I recall, I bought her a decent cup of coffee and a muffin and she bit my head off.”
“That’s ’cause you’re a nosy bastard who couldn’t mind his own business for a lousy twelve hours.”
“I’m sorry, Skye. For all of it.”
It was the sincerity that kept her comeback light. “Oh great, so now you’re apologizing for something you had nothing to do with? That bites.”
As they stepped into his loft, he took her by the arm. “You’re the most incredible woman to have gone through so much at such an early age. To come out of it able to help others the way you do is nothing short of—incredible.”
“Yeah, sure.” Determined to downplay her part in the rescues, the ones the media were going nuts about, she pointed out, “Look, if you’re planning to make a big deal out of Erin and Hailey and Ali, think of it this way. Those girls aren’t the only ones out there suffering in that kind of environment. Besides, do you have any idea how many miles I walked, how many blind alleys I went down, how many blocks I covered, how many pairs of boots I wore out before I got lucky? That’s all it is, Josh, blind luck. I could go another couple of years before I so much as locate another kidnapped girl in distress.”
He wasn’t so sure about that but kept his opinion to himself for now. “You have a knack.”
She snickered. “My knack consists of insomnia, excess energy that borders on ADD, an innate stubbornness, and knowing I’m the reason Whitfield is walking the streets.”
“What?” Josh turned to stare. “You aren’t serious? You were a child for God’s sake. Your aunt refused to let you testify. How is that your fault?”
“What do you know about it anyway?” Frustrated, she took a deep breath in, let it slowly out. “Look, back off, okay? It’s early and this is a touchy subject for me.”
“How’d you get so stubborn?”
“It’s embedded in the gene pool. I mostly take after my dad.”
He nodded knowingly. “The Nez Perce side of the family where the Native American look comes from. I found that on the Internet, too. But where do you get those eyes of yours?”
“Geez, Ander. You really are a piece of work.” When he continued to stare at her, she shrugged one shoulder. “My mother, okay? She had these large violet eyes, gorgeous chestnut hair, a brunette who happened to hook up with a dark Native American. Do you have that coffee or not? And just so you know, I wouldn’t turn down a stack of pancakes either.”
“Okay. There’s a café two blocks over that makes terrific light-as-air pancakes.”
“What? How about you throw together some pancake batter in your fancy gourmet kitchen? What about that?”
“Pancake batter? You mean…I’m not sure I have…” He trailed off, his gray eyes looking genuinely perplexed.
“You have flour, some Bisquick maybe?” She pushed past him on the way to the kitchen. She couldn’t believe he didn’t use this beautiful room to prepare meals. She turned in a circle. “You mean you have all this and don’t even bother to boil water here every now and then? That’s—criminal.”
Josh started opening cupboards. To him the kitchen was just another room where he could store stuff he rarely used. “I make coffee. Sometimes I get desperate and scramble an egg in the microwave.” He refused to admit how rarely that occurred. “That’s about the extent of my culinary skills.”
She shook her head. “That’s pitiful. Out of my way, Ander, this kitchen was meant to create masterpieces, not stagnate at the hands of the inept. Wait until you taste my pancakes.”
In one fluid motion, she tossed her jacket over a chair and started opening drawers and cabinets, trying to locate what she needed.
Josh stood back out of her way. And realized that just like her athletic body, she moved as if she knew her way around food prep.
“Fortunately for you I take my whipping up pancake batter very seriously. I consider the person who created waffles, pancakes, or crêpes nothing short of a virtuoso in the kitchen. Crêpes are an art form. But today, for simplicity’s sake, we’ll go with the basic pancake.”
He didn’t much care if she popped bread in the toaster. Right then he was too busy considering and admiring her art form.
Once she got down bowls and found a whisk, she went in search of ingredients. He didn’t have Bisquick but she found flour and sugar in canisters filled to the top as if they’d been sitting there waiting for someone to discover their potential. She dug out spices, baking powder, and even unearthed a bottle of pure vanilla. She located a bowl and did her best to re-create her mother’s recipe she remembered from childhood. It had been a while since she’d made them from scratch but she was confident she could come close.
She turned up bacon hiding behind eggs in the refrigerator and set it to sizzling and popping in a skillet. A second tour through the pantry gave up bottles of syrup, even honey. While the cakes browned she got down the plates and napkins and set the table.
Twenty minutes later, Josh’s eyes feasted on the bounty of food. He took a seat at the table, waited until she’d sat down, and dug in to his stack of fluffy pancakes. “Mmmm, these are fantastic. All this was in my kitchen?”
Used to cooking meals for one, it gave her belly a strange sense of pleasure to watch the man enjoy the breakfast
she’d thrown together. “I opened the pantry, the refrigerator, and miraculously it all came together on that six-burner commercial wonder called a stove. It’s known among the common folk as cooking, something we have to do at home to save money rather than spend it on eating out.”
Josh ignored the dig. “Not to be difficult but I heard the microwave ding a couple of times. I can microwave stuff.”
“Defrosting frozen pizza into a manageable glob is not cooking. I found your stash of boxes in the freezer.” She took a bite of yummy pancake. “You need to make a trip to the market. How is it you have pure vanilla but no lemons or fresh fruit? I was forced to substitute freshly squeezed lemon juice with lime that I poured from a green bottle I found buried in the back of the fridge. The contents expired two months ago.”
“Lime juice in pancake batter?” He shook his head in wonder. “The citrus must make it fluffier, right?”
“Ginger ale works, too, but you didn’t have that either and I didn’t want to use beer which you have in abundance.”
“Really? Hmm, well, I have a woman who comes in once a week to clean the house. For an extra twenty-five she’ll do the grocery shopping. Sometimes she gets this idea in her head that if she brings in…actual food like bacon or sausage, I might get the hint and turn on the stove.”
Just then Skye’s cell phone rang. Glancing at the readout told her it was Harry. “Hello.”
“The prints came back. It wasn’t Whitfield in that warehouse, Skye.”
“What? No, no Harry, it was him. I know it was.”
“Look, this is an ongoing investigation. You know very well my captain would have my ass if I divulge too many specifics even to you. But I can confirm Whitfield didn’t grab Erin Prescott.”
Disappointment fell across Skye’s face before she said into the phone, “Then who did?”
Harry could tell her because they had already put out an APB for the man and put feelers out from Canada to Mexico. “Sex offender named Brandon Randle Hiller, age thirty-six. Served six-and-a-half years in Clallam Bay for molesting his girlfriend’s twelve-year-old daughter. Got out almost five months ago.”
Curious now, she stared at Josh as she asked Harry, “Does he look anything like Whitfield?”
Harry lost the tether on his patience. “Skye, this fixation has got to stop.” He didn’t want to mention that Hiller and Whitfield looked enough alike to be brothers. “Right now, I have to run. The higher-ups are close to having a conniption. How about I stop by your apartment later this afternoon, if that’s okay—and we can finish this. And just so you know, the Prescotts want to meet with you again.”
“What on earth for?”
“Gratitude. It’s a powerful emotion. They have their daughter back because of you. They’d like to be able to tell you again how much they appreciate what you did.”
“They did that already, several times in fact.”
“And it may be a dozen times more. I gotta go.”
At the disconnecting click of the phone call, Skye’s shoulders sagged. She’d been so sure she’d seen Whitfield near the Catholic school. “It wasn’t Whitfield. I don’t understand that at all. I guess I must have been hallucinating. Again.”
“What?” Josh sat up straighter. “You thought you saw Whitfield? Yesterday? Near Erin’s school? That’s—probably not a coincidence.”
After blurting that out, she felt embarrassed. “My eyes must be playing tricks on me. Either that or maybe I need glasses.”
“How’d you find the Prescott girl, Skye? And the others? It wasn’t blind luck.”
“Well, that came out of nowhere.” She took a bite of pancake even though she’d lost her appetite. “Right place. Right time.”
He wasn’t buying it. The look on her face told him there was something she didn’t want to say, something she had no intentions of sharing with him. “Maybe. How’d you escape from him anyway?”
“Are you always this nosy over breakfast?”
“My point is you have excellent survival instincts, as well as reflexes. If you think you saw Whitfield yesterday I believe you did.”
Skye simply stared at him. No one, not even Harry, had ever really believed her. She leaned across the table slightly and stated, “You really want to know how I got away from the bastard that day? I got lucky. He went out to buy cigarettes and beer. The minute I heard the door close, I started trying to loosen my ropes. I’d been working on them for most of the night anyway. When I finally got my hands free, I booked. That’s it. There’s no mysterious element involved, no cryptic aspect to understand, no secret to reveal. Now, could we talk about something else?”
He smiled at her even though he knew there had to be more. “Sure. I have myself an incredible partner.”
She frowned. “Geez Ander, you’re easily impressed. And we haven’t even discussed collaborating on the other stuff.” She had to change the subject away from herself, away from Whitfield.
As if Josh understood, he decided he needed to change direction. When he opened his mouth to speak, so did she. He waved his hand for her to go first.
“How exactly did you come up with Mines of Mars anyway?”
“Everyone wants to know that. Have you ever played it?”
“You’re kidding, right? Hasn’t everyone played the most popular video game that outsold Halo?”
He grinned. “It has taken off. The whole thing was pretty much a joint effort with my best friend, Todd Graham.”
“Right, the friend from UDub.”
“Actually we go all the way back to middle school. Todd’s a little awkward around people.”
“Shy?”
“No, not that, more like socially stunted. He has Asperger’s syndrome.”
“I can relate. I know a little something about being different.”
“Your ADD?”
She nodded. “I don’t think I had it as a child, it sort of evolved once I had to go live with Ginny and Bob. I’m pretty sure it was the culture shock thing along with the loneliness. I didn’t make friends once I got there. It seems no one wanted anything to do with the likes of me.” She met his eyes, shook her head. “There’s no explaining some people’s small-mindedness. But that wasn’t the only reason. Most people had a tendency to give my aunt and uncle a wide berth. It seems even among religious devotees they stood out for their bizarre beliefs.”
“Like what? That’s a lot of lonely years from thirteen to eighteen.” And his heart went out to the outcast she’d been. His own middle school years hadn’t been all that different as a nerdy gameplayer. But then he hadn’t been forced to go live with a weird aunt and uncle.
“For one thing, I wasn’t allowed to listen to music, any music. And I loved music. When my parents were alive they took me to concerts in the park. We’d dance like fools in the living room to old Stones songs or to Springsteen. That all ended with everything else. Ginny and Bob thought music was the work of the devil. So was makeup, and short skirts, for that matter. I had to wear outfits Ginny had hand-sewn. They dressed me in stuff right out of the fifties.” She shook her head. “You know what’s weird though?”
“What?”
“Those four years Whitfield spent in prison, he probably had more freedom than I had. Ginny and Bob watched me like a hawk. I got to go to school five days a week wearing those ugly dresses, then to church Sunday mornings. Wednesdays and Fridays were for fellowship but still church-oriented stuff filled with prayer. I’m pretty sure Ronny Wayne had it better in jail than I did.”
He reached out, covered her hand.
“That’s why I couldn’t wait to get out of there once I got that high school diploma in my hand. The day after I graduated, I packed up my stuff and hitchhiked the hundred and fifty miles into Seattle, got a job at the Country Kitchen. By this time my dad’s best friend had bought the place. Travis needed a line cook, third shift, and I could flip burgers, fry potatoes.”
She shrugged. “It worked for both of us. A couple of months later, this lawye
r friend of my parents named Doug Jenkins walks into the place, sits down at the counter, tells me that since turning eighteen I’m entitled to my inheritance. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. He had to convince me.”
“You didn’t know about it?”
“No one had ever mentioned my parents had life insurance or a little money put aside. Turns out, the money was a little investment account my mom and dad started and had been sitting in the bank for five years collecting interest. And thanks to this honest lawyer, I could have access to my trust, such as it was. By that time, I’d rented a room at Lena Bower’s house, a woman I’d met through one of the waitresses. About three months later, I got my own place. It’s nothing like this.” She waved her arms at the size of the room. “But it’s all mine and I can listen to music anytime I want. And dance around the room in my underwear if I want.”
He’d have to remember to take her dancing and to concerts. “I wouldn’t mind seeing the underwear.”
“I believe you’ve made that abundantly clear.” Her stomach jumped with nerves at the idea of that. To break the flow of the conversation, she got up to refill her coffee cup. “I want your kitchen. And maybe this fancy coffee machine. Sheesh, I have a Mr. Coffee I bought at a garage sale for five bucks. Has to be fifteen years old if it’s a day.” She laughed as she generously poured more half-and-half into her brew. “And it still works like a top. Well, except for the weird noises it makes.”
“Anytime you want to come here fix a meal, be my guest. Since you made breakfast the least I can do is cleanup.” He got up to rinse off their plates before loading the dishwasher.
“The least? Good thing you can find the appliance. Who was the cute little blonde-haired beauty you broke up with earlier?”
“Ah, that was…a friend of my late wife’s. We umm…I didn’t exactly...we were never really—”
“I get the picture, although I’m pretty sure the blonde thought she’d ventured into a long term scenario, maybe hit the lottery all the way to the love department, while you were thinking more along the lines of fuck-buddy. She’s smitten. Am I right?” She took a sip of coffee and looked at him over the rim.
Skye Cree Boxed Set Books 1 - 3 Page 9