And she managed not to look at Brady as that thought crystallized, and along with it the acknowledgment that the closest she’d ever come was when she’d been in his arms. Those moments on the patio, in that snow-secluded spot, had become a touchstone amid the chaos. She’d wanted more, so much more. She’d wanted him to kiss her, for starters, and wanted that to be just that, only the start.
But he’d pulled away. And when she protested, asking if he didn’t want what she did, he’d quietly said, “What I want doesn’t matter. What matters is I’m not taking advantage of the situation.”
And she’d known then he was indeed what she’d just called him. One of the good guys.
CHAPTER 19
“Obviously it would take more than one session, but Dr. Sebastian says she would question your situation enough to ask to see your records,” Quinn said.
Brady saw hope flare in Ashley’s eyes again and felt a gut-deep hope of his own, that they weren’t building dreams that would turn into more nightmares for her. Even as he thought it, the flare faded and her brow furrowed.
“But why would she think anything different than Dr. Andler, given my father’s history?”
“That’s just it,” Hayley said. “She didn’t know your father’s history beforehand.”
Brady went still. Said slowly, “So she didn’t go in expecting to find the same thing.”
“Exactly,” Quinn said. “That doesn’t mean it’s not there, but it’s human nature to find what you expect to find.”
“I thought that’s what all that education was supposed to beat out of you,” Brady said dryly. Ashley laughed, and he felt an odd tingle down his spine.
“Dr. Sebastian would agree, I think,” Hayley said with a smile.
“She did say,” Quinn added, “that if she had to judge based on this one session, she would greatly hesitate to put you on medication just now. She believes in spending enough time looking for the source of the problem before deciding on that.”
Ashley’s brow furrowed again. “Dr. Andler put me on meds after our first session. In fact, he had it ready there in his office, he was so certain I’d need it.”
“He dispensed it? Directly?” Quinn asked.
“Yes.”
“He can do that?” Hayley asked in turn.
“Any licensed physician in the state can, and without a pharmacy permit,” Brady said. He grimaced. “It’s a big added revenue stream for a lot of them.”
Quinn looked thoughtful. “Does he charge more than a pharmacy?”
Ashley looked embarrassed. “I don’t know. My mother takes care of the bill and often picks up the pills for me, since his office is right down from city hall.”
Now that was a thought, Brady mused. He wasn’t sure exactly what the possibility meant in relation to Ashley, but it was a blip on the radar, and he noted it. Psychiatrist as drug dealer. Pushing pills for profit. It was a refrain he’d heard before.
“Are you seeing this guy because you trust him or because your mother does?” Brady hadn’t meant it to sound like an accusation, but that’s how it came out. He was usually pretty good at questioning people, at taking the right approach, the right tone, but he seemed to have lost the knack with her.
“I…trust him,” she said, but he didn’t miss the hesitation.
“Why?”
She blinked. “What?”
“Why do you trust him? For that matter, why does your mother? He didn’t save your father.”
She drew herself up and faced him steadily despite his tone. And the part of him that wasn’t trying to figure out why he was suddenly pushing her was cheering for that.
“Sometimes there’s no saving someone. Or you’re too late. If you hadn’t arrived in time to stop me the other night, should my mother have blamed you?”
I would have. “That’s different,” he muttered.
“Why? Some would say you both failed at your job.”
“I would say that,” he snapped.
“I know.” She said it softly, quietly, but his anger, or whatever this was, drained away as surely as if she’d punctured him with the words. Somehow she had turned it all around on him.
He heard a low chuckle and looked up to see Quinn smiling. “She’s got teeth. Good to know.”
“Good to see.” He said it as quietly as she had spoken. And he meant it; it was very good to see that spirit in her, see her stand her ground. He wasn’t sure how he felt about the fact that color tinged her cheeks at his words. As if they’d pleased her.
“Now what?” she asked Quinn.
“Dr. Sebastian will be going over your father’s records. Just to see if anything strikes her beyond the obvious similarities.”
“You mean she’s going to decide if Dr. Andler is right in assuming I have the same problem?”
“She’ll give us her opinion, always limited by the fact that she’s only had this short time with you, and not in person.”
“Does that make a big difference, not being in the same room with her?” Brady asked.
“It can,” Hayley answered. “Dr. Sebastian is amazingly adept at reading people, but that’s a talent better utilized face-to-face.” Brady lowered his gaze to his hands, to where his fingers were tapping restlessly on the arm of the chair he was in. “And yes,” Hayley added quietly, “she blames herself for not reading her son in time.”
Brady grimaced. “Was I that obvious?”
“Only to be expected, given your recent…discussion,” she answered, with a glance at Ashley.
He was saved from having to answer by the ringing of his cell phone. It was on the kitchen counter, so he got up to get it while Hayley rose and went to open the door for Cutter, who had been outside.
A glance at the screen told him it was the detective lieutenant. And for the first time in his career, he hesitated in answering a call from a superior. Because usually vacation days were inviolate, unless the interruption involved an active case. And while it could be any of a number of things, the most likely one was sitting across the room from him right now.
He closed his eyes for a moment as he let it ring, his jaw tight as he fought the instincts and training of ten years on the job. The ringing stopped as it went over to voice mail. He tried to tell himself he’d listen immediately, but that didn’t ease the knot in his gut.
Quinn came up beside him. “I once ignored a call from an area commander because I knew it would be a kill order on a guy we’d captured. A guy I was sure we could get more info out of.”
“Did you?”
“Yes. And it saved lives. Sometimes you just have to go with your gut.”
Brady let out a long breath. “And what did it cost you?”
“I took some heat. Worth it.” Quinn shrugged. “Helped that coms were sketchy in the area. Kind of like cell reception in some spots here in the mountains.”
Brady knew it was the perfect out, but it still took him a moment to quash the guilt. But it helped that Quinn clearly understood how he was feeling. Sometimes you had to make tough decisions.
And take the heat afterward.
Of course, if he was wrong about this, and the county spent a lot of man-hours searching for Ashley when he’d known where she was all along, it would be more than heat. And it hit him anew that he was risking the only job he’d ever wanted, the only thing he’d ever wanted to do in his life.
When the chime signaling a new voice mail sounded, he picked up the phone. A moment later he was listening to Lieutenant Becker’s voice. Which, thankfully, didn’t sound angry.
“Hey, Crenshaw, sorry to bother you on a v-day since you never freaking take them, but word is you’ve had some prior contact with an outstanding missing person. Ashley Jordan. Since she’s the mayor’s daughter, you can imagine the heat. She’s leaning on the boss now, so we’re covering every base. If anything about wh
ere she might go comes to mind from your contact with her, let me know ASAP.”
Quinn didn’t ask, but now that he knew what it said, Brady played it back on Speaker.
He heard a low, distressed sound and turned to see Ashley with her hands over her face. That muffled her words, but they were still clear enough. “She must be so worried. I should just go home.”
The only one that beat him to her side was Cutter. The dog leaned in and put his head on her knee as Brady sat beside her. She lowered her hands, but unlike before, she didn’t reach to pet the dog, and he could see tears glistening in those green eyes. It reminded him of how she’d looked before, which emphasized the contrast of how she’d been these last couple of days. It also sparked in him a powerful urge to push back this tide that seemed to threaten to swamp her all over again.
Pushed by an instinct he didn’t question, he took one of her hands in his own and gently tugged the other over to rest on the dog’s head. He wasn’t about to question the animal’s knack for comfort just now. In fact he was fairly convinced it was much greater than his own.
“We’ll do whatever you want, Ashley,” he said. “But there’s something off about this. All of it. Let us figure it out.”
Her expression was anxious as she looked at him. “But won’t you be in trouble if they find out you’ve known where I am all along?”
That she’d even thought of that made him feel…he wasn’t sure what. “Not your problem.”
“You’re doing this for me, so yes, it is.”
He gave her a crooked smile. “As someone recently said to me, some pretty strong ethics there.”
He got a half smile back for that, and it was enough.
CHAPTER 20
Brady felt the tingle at the back of his neck that told him someone was there. His fingers tightened around his cell phone reflexively.
He didn’t need to look. The quickening of his pulse told him who it was. Her voice, that voice that did crazy things to the nerves along his spine, whispered over him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude on your call.”
“It’s all right.” He tapped the icon that ended the call. “We were done.” He turned around and managed a smile and a gesture toward the snow still surrounding the patio. “It’s weird, sitting here amid this, talking to someone who’s in Arizona in eighty degrees.”
“Some would say they’re wiser.”
“My mother among them,” he said, gesturing with the phone before he slid it back into his pocket.
“You’re close, you and your mother?”
He nodded. “Oh, we had our moments when I was growing up, but since I hit the age where I realized I didn’t know nearly as much as I thought I did, and she knew a lot more, we’ve done great. Especially since my dad died.”
“That part still sucks,” she said.
“Yours was worse,” he answered quietly.
“Because he left me by his own choice? Maybe. The end result is the same, though.”
“I had mine a lot longer, too. I was an adult when he died. You were only a child.”
“Even more pitiful, huh?” she said with a grimace.
“You’re a lot of things, Ashley Jordan, but you’re not pitiful.”
She smiled, although it looked like an effort. “So did you tell your mother you’re harboring a fugitive?” That caught him off guard, and he looked away. “I’ll take that as a no.”
“If this blows up, I don’t want it to touch her.”
He looked back when he heard her gasp. “I didn’t think of that,” she said, her eyes wide. “Could it? It’s bad enough for you, but—”
He held up a hand to stop her. “Don’t start worrying about that on top of everything else. She’ll find out eventually, but she’ll be fine.”
“Will she be angry with you when she does find out? Will it damage your relationship with her?”
He gave her a crooked smile. “They couldn’t accuse me of anything big enough to make her turn on me.”
Ashley smiled back, but it was a sad smile. “That’s how I used to feel with my dad. He told me once I could never disappoint him.”
He felt one of those clicks in his mind. “Why?”
“What?”
“What brought on him saying that?”
“Oh.” Her mouth twisted wryly. “I got into a fight with a girl at school. My mother was furiously upset because I made a scene, but my dad just said he’d have been angry if I hadn’t stood up for myself.”
“Was your mother always…critical?”
“Kind of,” she said, although she sounded uncomfortable. “Back then, anyway. But like you and your mom, after my father died, we did much better.”
He wasn’t sure he liked the analogy. He and his mother had bonded together because they were all they had left. But he wondered, given the way she’d said her parents often argued, if her mother hadn’t been glad. But that didn’t seem quite fair, either. If her father had already been well into his mental decline, he couldn’t imagine what her mother had endured—maybe she had the right to be relieved when it was finally over, even in that ugliest of ways.
Cutter suddenly appeared at the edge of the patio and sat in the snow, looking at them rather assessingly.
“Ready to go back in?” Brady asked the dog, then laughed inwardly at himself for having picked up the habit of talking to the animal as if he understood. Cutter merely tilted his head, watching them intently. And never moved. Which Brady supposed was, in effect, an answer.
“He’s so funny,” Ashley said.
Brady chuckled, then looked back at Cutter. “You’re going to give new meaning to the phrase freeze your ass off, dog,” he said wryly.
Ashley laughed, then looked back over her shoulder as someone else came out. “He’s just sitting there, watching us,” she said to Hayley.
“What he’s doing,” the other woman said with a grin, “is gauging whether he can lure either of you into a snow fight.”
Brady drew back slightly. “Okay, if you’re going to tell me that on top of everything else, he can make snowballs and toss them, I’m going to have to jump off this train.”
Quinn had stepped outside in time to hear that and laughed. “No. The snowballs are your bailiwick. He catches and eats them. And when it’s his turn, he just digs up snow in a big spray at you.”
Ashley laughed again, and for a moment it was as if they were simply a gathering of four people and a clever dog who seemed like a person, a group that liked each other and were content to just spend time together. Friends. And he was startled at the sudden tightness in his chest as he sat there stupidly and wished it was true.
* * *
Ashley paused in the entryway to the great room. Brady was on the couch, his long legs stretched out with his sock-clad feet on the coffee table—his boots were on the floor next to him—and what looked like Quinn’s computer on his lap. She stood there for a moment, just looking at him. Which, she thought with a wry inward smile, she could happily do for a very long time.
Cutter, who had been stationed outside the bathroom when she came out—and probably would have been inside if she hadn’t laughingly shut the door on him—nudged her as if to prod her forward. She stroked his head, marveling anew at the comfort the simple gesture gave.
“Did I hear a car leave?” She thought she’d heard the sound of tires crunching on snow.
Brady looked up and smiled. She had the crazy thought she should freeze that image in her mind so she could hang on to it in more desperate moments. It was the best smile she’d ever seen.
He put his feet down and set the computer on the end table at his elbow. “The snowplow finally made it up here, so Quinn and Hayley decided to see if they could get to town. And if they can, then I can try to make it to my place up the road here. I’d like to see how it did in the snow.”
; She blinked. “You live up here?”
He nodded. “About a half a mile farther up.”
“I…didn’t realize.”
The smile again, a little crooked this time. “Believe me, my place is nothing so grand as this. Alex Galanis pulled out all the stops.”
She walked toward him, paused and looked around at the great room. “So you know the guy who owns this?”
“I do. He’s half the reason I trusted the Foxworths, because I knew what they did for him.”
“What did they do?”
“His son ran afoul of some terrorist cabal down in Mexico. They held him for ransom. The government was ‘negotiating’ when he got a finger sent to him, with threats that they’d take his other two kids. Foxworth got his son out and kept the other two safe even though they were in college two thousand miles apart.”
She knew she was probably gaping at him. “I… Wow.”
“Yes.” He gave her a wry smile. “Amazing what you can do when you’re not crippled by regulations.”
And she had these people on her side?
Cutter came up behind her, between the couch and the coffee table. The dog apparently misjudged the distance, because he bumped her rather hard behind the knees, and she half sat, half fell onto the couch. Beside Brady.
But not too close. Not as close as she’d like to be.
“What’s with you?” she asked the dog. “Cranky because they didn’t take you with them?”
“I gather that was his decision,” Brady said, his tone amused. “They asked if he wanted to go, and his answer was to go lie down outside the door of the bathroom where you were.”
Harlequin Romantic Suspense December 2020 Box Set Page 61