“Did he hurt Josie, too?”
“No.” She shook her head, letting go of her collar so it could cover the marks of her husband’s abuse. “He never touched her and she doesn’t know about this.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, the—” she lifted her hand to her throat “—physical abuse was a one-time deal. He had never hit me before. Never…” She trailed off.
“Delia—”
“My ex-husband tried to kill me.” The words gushed out of her as if she’d plucked her fingers from the holes in the dam. “My daughter doesn’t know because it would devastate her and she’s already been through so much.”
He rocked back on his heels, stunned at the cosmos’s sense of humor. This. Again. Another woman trying to protect her child by keeping the truth from her.
“She’s a smart girl, she probably realizes more than you think.”
Her laugh was sad this time and again he had to clench his hands together to keep from reaching for her. “Josie believes the best of her father. She wouldn’t believe me even if I told her.”
“If you showed her those bruises—”
Her eyes again burned with rage, but this time he felt it directed toward him. “I won’t do that to my daughter. I won’t hurt her that way, put her in the middle.”
“It seems your husband did that for you,” he said, but he could tell she didn’t see reason about this. Her mind was made up, like so many women who thought protecting their child’s world was more important than protecting themselves.
“Have you at least seen a doctor?”
She nodded, zipped her coat up high on her neck. “No permanent damage.”
“What about the authorities?”
“What authorities?” She practically sneered and he nearly stepped back to avoid being scorched by her eyes.
“Police or—”
“They’ve been contacted. They know all about it.”
“And?”
“And it makes no difference.”
“You just said he tried to kill you, Delia. That’s attempted murder!” He was throwing himself out of his self-imposed cage without even looking down to see what hole he’d be falling into. He wanted to fight. He wanted to fight with her. With her ex-husband. With everyone.
“The authorities know.”
“Where?”
“Where what?”
“The authorities where? I mean, is he in jail? Is there a hearing?”
She shook her head. “Forget it, Max. I didn’t want to tell anyone about this, because I don’t need you to get involved.”
“Well, clearly I’m involved now. Everyone you’ve lied to is involved.”
“Max, stop.”
“Delia, there are laws to protect you. Police officers to protect you—”
“Police officers protect themselves,” she spit, and her anger fueled his. Cops weren’t perfect—he knew that better than anyone—but they were there for a reason.
“That’s not always true.”
“It is where I’m from.”
“You’re not there anymore,” he shouted, incredulous.
“And the world isn’t all that different here, I’m sure.”
“There are people who could help you.”
Me, he wanted to say. I can help you. I want to. The words clawed their way up his throat but he swallowed them.
“I’m doing fine.”
“Right. Clearly. You’re totally fine.”
“Max.”
She touched his arm and his mind went blank. His body utterly still. Even his blood stopped moving.
They panted, as though they’d been chasing each other. Connected by their twining breath and her hand on his arm and the never-ending desire he had to touch her.
As if she had read the desire in his eyes, or tasted it on his breath, a spark flared in her own eyes and he knew she was trying to control herself, too. Suddenly the air between them was kerosene and they both held matches.
Finally, she blinked and looked away and his brain started working again.
“Please,” she murmured. “I…I want to forget about it. About all of it. Josie and I are here for a fresh start.”
He felt the weight of her touch through the gloves and his jacket and he longed to strip her hand bare, to hold her fingers against the heat of his body. To try in some way to repair the damage that had been done to her.
The thought chilled him, threw a bucket of cold water on his hot flesh. He’d been down this road before. Disaster waited for him should he do what he wanted.
But, right now, his rational mind wasn’t in charge. His lungs burned with every breath and she didn’t move her hand and that made everything worse.
Step away, he told himself. Walk. Now. You know better than this.
But he didn’t.
“I know I haven’t been very nice.” She sighed, smiled and he nearly groaned from her beauty and courage. “But I want to say thanks. For Josie.”
Mama Bear while angry was something to behold, but Delia with a smile and sad, grateful eyes was a punch in the belly. He couldn’t breathe. He wanted to do stupid, foolish things. He wanted to lower his head, rest his mouth against hers, indulge himself in her smell and fire.
He hadn’t looked twice at a woman since the shooting. He couldn’t look at a woman and not see the mistakes he’d made. But this woman pulled him out of comfort and blissful uncaring.
“She’s a good kid,” he murmured, his whole body held motionless by her eyes. By his stupid desire to kiss her.
“Max?”
“Yes?”
They were nearly whispering, like lovers in bed on a Sunday morning. How the clearing had become so small, so intimate, so fast was a trick he’d never understand. But he wasn’t in the mood to question it. He was in the mood to whisper into this impossible woman’s ear. Let his hands—
“Where did you get the scar, really?”
The clearing cracked wide open and he leaned away from her, the heat between them going stone-cold. Good, he thought. Just what I needed to smack some sense into my head.
He shook off her arm and turned to his tools, dusting off the snow that had gathered while they talked.
“Max?” She touched his jacket and he shrugged her away.
“Don’t do this.”
“Do what?”
“Damn it, Max! I just practically gave you my holy confession,” she said. “It seems like the least you could do is answer a few of my questions.”
He didn’t answer. Not this question. Not ever. If she hadn’t read the newspaper articles, he wasn’t about to give her the abridged notes.
“It looks like a wound.”
He started packing up his tools, slipping them into their cases and well-worn cloth sacks.
“Were you burned?”
He didn’t answer.
“Strangled? Did your brother try to kill you in your sleep?”
He didn’t answer.
“That last one was a joke,” she murmured.
“Very funny.”
“Max, you are a stranger to me and yet you’re hanging out with my daughter. I think I need to—”
“A teenage kid picked up a gun and killed his father and was about to kill his mother. I happened to be there. I happened—” He stopped and her jaw fell open. “I was there.”
It was almost as if he could hear the snow fall and land carefully on her hair. That’s how silent it was. How utterly still.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, her voice scratchy and soft. It ran over his sensitized skin like a caress.
“It’s hardly your fault.” He couldn’t look at her just now, the words he’d never said still echoing in his head like gunfire. He continued to focus on his tools, wishing she’d leave. That she’d never come here.
“Max.”
He ignored her. Needed to. Should have all along.
She touched him, and the threat of violence that had hung in the air filled his lungs and head. H
e whirled and did what he’d been longing to do all along.
He slid his hand into the silk of her hair, brushed his thumb against her lips and felt the caress of her startled breath.
She didn’t pull away.
“Go,” he said, his fingers tangled in the strands of her fiery hair. “Leave.”
She shook her head. “I’m not scared of you. You can try to frighten me, but I know bad men and you’re not a bad man.”
His hand had moved the collar of her shirt, revealing the yellowing bruise. He didn’t want to think of her hurt. Scared. He didn’t want to think of her at all.
But he pulled her closer, pressed his lips to her neck and whispered, “You don’t know me at all,” against her tender bruised skin.
“Mom!” Josie yelled, running into the clearing, carrying a brown paper bag. “Max! I got sandwiches.”
He stepped away as if he’d never touched her, as if he wasn’t made of ice, dying for her heat.
“I’ve got hot chocolate, too!” Josie said, her voice high with excitement. “Cameron was making sugar cookies but he said we couldn’t have them. Too bad, because they looked good.”
He let the little girl’s chatter wash over him until it turned to white noise, the sound of static, wind. Nothing. He forced himself to think of that frog, of Nell screaming for her son to stop, to put down the gun before someone got hurt.
Max forced himself right back in the middle of that fatal situation—with the wrong feelings for the wrong woman, bleeding to death from his own blindness.
But something prevented him from getting sucked into his own personal hell again. Something in this clearing, in the here and now, caught and held him and he couldn’t shake it.
Josie said that her father was in Texas.
Maybe it was time to ask Sheriff Joe McGinty to do some digging around the NCIC, to see what was being reported out of Texas these days.
Delia smiled and stroked her daughter’s braid. “It’s so good,” she agreed, biting into the sandwich that tasted like sawdust.
“I know. And the hot chocolate is really good, too. Better than in town.” Josie took another big sip from the thermos, leaving a chocolate mustache across her upper lip.
Delia smiled and wiped it off with her bare hand. She’d ripped off the gloves, feeling as if they were his hands on hers. His touch burning her palms.
What the hell had happened? she wondered, panicked and freaked-out and shaking inside from the push-pull in her body.
Everywhere he touched seemed to glow as if pulsing with its own electricity. Her hand. Her lips. Her neck.
You don’t scare me, she’d said, like some kind of action-movie actress. He scared the bejesus out of her.
Frantically she tried to piece together the conversation, what she might have said. But her memory was wiped clean by the look in his eyes, the feel of his arm under her hand. His lips against her neck.
What a mess.
She hadn’t said Jared was a police officer. Neither had she said that he didn’t know where they were. She’d said he’d hurt her, but not Josie. That was true. That was okay. It felt good to say that. To let that out. She felt as if she could breathe again, as if the pressure had been relieved enough so that her head stopped spinning.
Maybe it was enough and Max wouldn’t ask any more questions. Max and Alice and Gabe would let her and Josie do what they needed to do, and when she had to leave, maybe they’d simply think she was a flake.
“This is a good place, Mom,” Josie said and Delia nearly choked on her sandwich. It was a good place full of good people. But none of it mattered. Not unless Delia did something to make Jared leave them alone.
“I just wish Dad was here,” Josie said. “Then it would be perfect.”
Delia put down her sandwich, no longer interested in pretending to be hungry.
8
Iris hid all day. She was a coward—that trait had gotten her into this mess in the first place.
But as she and Sheila walked up the path to the lodge for dinner, she felt pulled, compelled and eager for this reckoning—if that was what was going to happen.
Her stomach growled and she had to admit if there was no reckoning, only food, that would be okay, too.
“So?” Sheila asked. “Have you figured out what you’re going to say?”
“I thought I’d see if they recognize me.” Iris tucked her hands into the pockets of the old down coat that had traveled to Arizona from New York and back again.
“And if they don’t?”
“Then I’ll go with the flow.”
Sheila stopped and tugged on Iris’s arm. “Did you take extra meds?”
Iris smiled and shook her head. She couldn’t actually explain this new Zen attitude, either—not after hiding all day. But she was calm and ready to walk through those doors. Like a bride going down the aisle or an inmate walking to her death—either way there was an end in sight and that filled Iris with a lovely sense of…right.
“What does Gabe look like again?” Sheila asked, tucking her arm through Iris’s.
“Well, if he still takes after his father, he’s got blue eyes. Cornflower rather than indigo. He’s blond, or used to be anyway, white-blond, like a Scandinavian baby. He was always tall for his age, I imagine he’d be a tall adult.”
Iris kept her eyes on the ground, careful of ice and Sheila’s fragile bones.
“Well then,” Sheila whispered in her ear, “see for yourself.”
Iris’s head bobbed up as if it was spring loaded. There at the top of the lodge’s staircase was her oldest son. Her firstborn.
“Hi!” he said, chafing his hands together and hopping lightly down the stairs. “You must be JoBeth and Sheila.”
It was like looking at Patrick the year she left and her heart sputtered and chugged at the image he made in his red sweater with his blond hair and blue eyes.
The twinkle in his eyes, the dimple at the corner of his mouth, even the silver at his temples. He was and had always been his father’s son.
“Yes,” she smiled, blinking back sudden tears. “And you must be Gabe.”
He nodded and tucked her hand under his arm, and she couldn’t help but squeeze the thick wool of his sweater in her fingers.
Hello, baby, she wanted to say. It’s me. It’s your mama.
“Glad to see you are feeling better,” he said with a grin toward Sheila.
“Right as rain,” Sheila said, “and starving.”
Are you still stubborn? Do you still like to have your forehead stroked when you’re tired? Do you still love carrots, and windy days and sleeping with your socks on? Are you still scared of heights and snakes and your brother when he gets mad?
“I’m glad to hear it. My pregnant wife has dictated the menu—”
“You’re going to have a baby?” Iris asked, unable to step forward or disengage her hand from the sudden grip she’d taken on his arm.
“I am,” Gabe said, looking every bit the proud father. But slowly, as she gaped at him like an idiot, that look faded back into concern. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“She’s fine,” Sheila butted in. “She’s just found out recently that she’s going to be a grandmother.”
“Well, congratulations all the way around.” Gabe laughed and opened wide the doors to the dining room.
Sheila pushed Iris into motion and she lurched, ungracefully, into the pretty, spacious dining room.
A grandmother.
The world tipped and swam and she wiped her watery eyes with the shoulder of her old coat.
I’m going to be a grandmother.
And the thought filled her with a joy so complete she stopped Gabe. “Children are a blessing,” she told him, staring right into the blue eyes that had not changed so much from when he was a baby. Her baby. “No matter what.”
“Yes.” He nodded. “They certainly are.”
“Hey!” A pregnant woman called when they arrived. “Welcome to the Riverview Inn. Please sit
down. Max. Come on. Let’s sit.”
“That’s my wife, Alice. We told her she couldn’t eat until everyone was here,” Gabe whispered in Iris’s ear. “Mostly we do it because it’s funny.”
“Where are Delia and Josie?” Alice asked.
“We’re right here.” A stunning petite redhead came out of the kitchen with a young girl in tow. They selected seats on the other end of the table from where Max sat. “Tim’s finishing dinner. He says it will be two minutes.”
“Wonderful,” Alice said, spreading her arms. “Let’s eat.”
Max stood, a twinkle in his black eyes. “I think I forgot something. If you could just wait—”
Iris smiled, her prankster son still a prankster. How perfect and bittersweet.
“Leave and I’ll stab you myself, Max,” Alice snapped, her veneer of cheer wearing thin, and everyone laughed. Except Alice, who told them all they were going to be punished for keeping a pregnant woman from eating.
“There are no guests yet, besides you,” Gabe said. “So it’s just us.”
“Your family?” Iris asked. She shrugged out of her jacket and Gabe hung it up on the hook, before taking Sheila’s coat.
He nodded, grinning. “Such as it is, yes.”
They sat at the table, Sheila next to Max and Iris next to the little girl who introduced herself as Josie.
She searched the room but there was no sign of Patrick. Relief and disappointment warred in her chest. A respite—to watch her boys.
“You and your brother,” Iris asked, turning to Gabe, watching as he kissed his wife’s neck and sat beside her. “You work here alone?”
“Nope, my father is usually with us, too,” Gabe answered.
“Where is he?” she asked.
“He’s taking care of some business downstate, but he’ll be back sometime on Saturday.”
Saturday. Tomorrow.
She forced herself to not ask when, exactly he would return and end this little charade of hers. Then the heartache would start in earnest.
The chef arrived at the door carrying a big bowl of spaghetti and meatballs. Alice clapped her hands and everyone got down to the business of eating.
Secrets of the Riverview Inn Page 10