She stole another glance out the window, formulating her next move.
It wasn’t Steve standing out there.
Shaking from the inside out, Jenna pulled back, pressing against the wall of the shed she’d helped Max build. He was in their driveway with another woman. The image of him and Chantel Harris played over and over in her mind.
She’d never met Chantel Harris, but she knew that the woman standing there with Max had to be her.
She’d seen pictures. Knew from Wayne Stanton that she’d been helping Max. And the cop uniform was a dead giveaway.
She just hadn’t realized the woman had been staying with her husband and son in their home.
But if that duffel bag slung over her shoulder was anything to go by, she had been. Jenna should have looked at the house before she’d come into the shed. She’d have seen the unfamiliar car parked in the driveway.
She wondered what had happened to her van. Did Max have it back? Parked next to his in its usual place in their garage?
She couldn’t leave. Her legs were too unsteady to carry her as quietly and quickly as she’d need to go.
And her heart wouldn’t bear the stress of a run. Not in that moment.
Her Max. With another woman.
Someone who’d had the hots for him. He’d told her how she’d come on to him the night he’d finished his residency. How she’d been there during the funeral. And how he’d left town, partially to get away from memories of Jill, and partially to avoid breaking Chantel’s heart.
Like some kind of masochist, she took one more peek and pulled back instantly.
Max was hugging her.
Where was Caleb? Already at day care?
Why wasn’t Max at work?
And how was she going to gather the strength to get herself out of there?
She didn’t blame Max. She’d left him.
But maybe she hadn’t known him as well as she’d thought she did. Maybe he hadn’t loved her as much as she thought.
Yes, he’d known Chantel a long time, before Meri even, so something could form between them quickly.
But this quickly?
And what about Caleb? Was Chantel even interested in a package deal?
Jenna slid down to the floor of the shed, falling apart in the most inappropriate space. She couldn’t afford to do this. Had to get out of there and back to the safety and privacy of her room at the Stand.
She couldn’t let Max see her. One look at him, one touch, and she’d be done. She needed him more than she needed air.
She needed to rest her head against his chest, feel his comforting heartbeat and believe, once more, that life really could be good. But this wasn’t about what she wanted or needed. Not anymore. It was about the love she felt for Max and Caleb.
She’d thought that if she took the cash they’d put away for their thirtieth wedding anniversary, he would finally get the message that he had to move on with his life. Turned out he already had.
She should be happy. She was doing this for him. Honestly and truly wanted him happy.
But her heart was going to need a few minutes to catch up with the plan.
She heard the slam of a car door. The car started, and pulled down the drive.
She held her breath. Would Max come out to the shed? She’d closed the door behind her. There’d be no way for him to know that it was unlocked.
But maybe he’d need something. Ant killer. Or...
The French doors off the kitchen opened. She heard the squeak as the latch stuck, just as it did every time the door was opened or closed. Max had offered to fix it more than once.
She’d asked him not to. She liked knowing any time a door opened or shut. The alarm in the house told her when a door opened to the outside, but it didn’t distinguish between doors.
The garage door had its own slightly echoing sound. The front door was solid. And the French door to the backyard squeaked.
It squeaked a second time as Max shut it. And she knew it was time for her to go.
No need to leave the tin for him to see. He no longer needed her message.
Sliding it into the front pocket of her pants, she took one more glance outside, and as stealthily as she’d arrived, she slipped out of the shed. Out of Max’s life, taking a small piece of him, of their dream.
She’d cherish that five hundred dollars. It had his kiss on it, and hers. A promise to each other to stay together, no matter what.
She’d made the promise even knowing, deep inside, that Steve was out there, able to prevent her from keeping any promise she made.
And now she had to pay the price.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
AS SOON AS Chantel left on Thursday, Max turned off the TV, packed his son into the van, and drove.
He wasn’t going anywhere in particular. He had juice boxes. Extra diapers. Vanilla wafers and a couple of Disney movies downloaded on the tablet. And he was driving. On every single street in Santa Raquel.
“Sha sha!” Caleb called out, kicking the back of the seat in front of him. Max had already seen his son’s favorite restaurant. He was the one who disapproved of feeding Caleb fast food.
But he knew that Meri did. Once a week.
She’d been gone more than a week now.
And before he really thought about what he was doing, Dr. Maxwell Bennet found himself in the drive-thru for the second time in fewer than seven days.
He strained to see inside the joint. Maybe Meri was there. In honor of Caleb. Clinging to pieces of the life she’d left behind.
One thing was for certain.
Meri was here someplace. At least she had been as recently as two days ago.
And he had the rest of the day off.
He couldn’t sit at home knowing that she might be out there somewhere in the same city. Even if he just had a glimpse of her—one second to see the bounce in her step, or a smile on her face—he would feel better.
Hell, just being out driving, knowing she was there somewhere, made him feel better.
And if Steve Smith thought that Max’s being hopelessly in love meant he was weak, he had another think coming. He was going to find the bastard.
And have him put away permanently.
The guy was never going to have a chance to bother Meri again. Ever.
* * *
JENNA COULDN’T SLEEP Thursday night. And couldn’t stay cooped up in her room, either.
Caleb was young enough that he wouldn’t even remember her, wouldn’t need to be hurt by her past life, or her abandonment. If his father was providing him with a new mother, she wasn’t going to get in the way of that.
She wanted to, though. So badly that it was eating her alive. She wanted to order Chantel Harris to get away from her men. To stay away.
She wanted to go home.
Instead she quietly made her way out to the living room she’d yet to use except as a corridor from the front door to the kitchen or her bedroom.
She wasn’t going to turn on the television. Didn’t want to disturb her housemates.
But there was a library out there—a collection of fiction—as there was in every bungalow on the premises. She used to love to read.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d picked up a book. Sometime after her marriage to Steve, but when?
He hadn’t liked her reading, she remembered. He’d said that her reading made him feel lonely, had tried to distract her with butterfly kisses any time he’d seen her with a book in the early days.
Later there had been fights. He’d resented her time with her romance novels. He’d said the books were filling her head with dangerous notions about women’s roles, giving her false expectations of relationships. They were coming between them, ruining their marriage. Th
e books were changing her.
Standing in the living room, perusing shelves of novels that were unfamiliar to her, a tiny bit of anticipation started to grow within her.
She couldn’t remember making a conscious decision to give up reading. But she remembered feeling guilty for wanting the escape.
Remembered sitting in the bathroom, pretending to do her business so she could finish a book after Steve got home.
She remembered the broken wrist she’d ended up with the time she’d pulled one of her novels out of the drawer in her desk, looking for an excerpt to use as proof of an example of something she was trying to explain to him. She’d long since forgotten the conversation. It had had something to do with differences between men and women, a statement a character had made that resonated with her. But she remembered that he’d grabbed for the book, he’d said, in attempt to understand, to share it with her, and had grabbed her wrist instead.
Who grabbed a book with a grasp hard enough to break a wrist?
But she’d wanted to believe him, she guessed. Because she’d stayed. She’d been a stay-at-home wife back then and had let him take her to the emergency room, telling the doctors that he’d accidentally broken her wrist as he saved her from tumbling down the stairs.
Once again he’d come out the hero.
And now, here she was, in the middle of the night, pondering a book choice and still looking over her shoulder for Steve. She’d come full circle.
But this time she was going to make a different choice. She was going to choose a book, instead of giving them up.
Studying the spines, she pulled one out, returned it and then pulled out another. There were so many choices.
She heard something. Heart pounding, she froze, trying to ascertain just where the sound had come from.
Outside? Or did the noise come from within the house?
It had sounded like a scrape. Like metal against wood. A window jamb being jarred?
Slowly, Jenna let go of the book she’d been about to pull out and turned, looking for signs of anything amiss.
Both of her housemates’ doors were closed. She prayed the women were safe behind them.
Had Steve found her? Had he grown bold enough to breach a shelter in his quest to have her?
And then she heard it again. Definitely a scraping sound. Coming from outside. As if someone was trying to get in.
The inside grounds of The Lemonade Stand were completely secure, accessible only by personnel with individual key cards for tracking purposes. There were also security locks and alarms on all of the windows and doors.
None of which would stop a man like Steve Smith, who knew all of the devices on the market and how to manipulate them. How else did you rescue a young victim from a pedophile kidnapper?
Steve would know how to disarm the devices.
But how had he gotten inside the grounds? Even he wasn’t able to scale ten-foot high walls and become invisible to the security cameras set up all over the grounds. Those cameras were manned twenty-four hours by the police.
And there were four security guards on duty at all times, too.
As she moved toward the kitchen, the sound came again. Not from that direction, but as if it was coming from Carly’s suite. Heading quickly toward that part of the bungalow, she stopped only long enough to pull her cell phone out of her bra and send a 911 call to the Stand’s emergency broadcast line. She gave only their bungalow number before hanging up to lessen her chance of being overheard.
Then, without waiting for help, fearing that Steve would get inside and hurt Carly, she quietly opened the younger woman’s door, entering slowly.
Carly was wide-awake, frozen in her bed, staring at Jenna as she came in.
The scraping sound came again, loud, now, and was clearly coming from the window.
Dropping down to her hands and knees, Jenna made her way to the side of the bed opposite the window.
“Slide out of bed,” she whispered to Carly. “I’ll get in.”
“What?” Carly mouthed the word. “No.”
“He’s not coming for you,” she whispered as fiercely as she could without making noise. “It’s me he wants. Get out of here, now. I’ve already called for help. They’ll probably be here before he gets inside, but just in case, go to Latoya’s room and stay there with her. Quickly.” She pulled at Carly’s wrist just enough to get the girl moving.
Within seconds, Carly was out of the room, closing the door behind her, and Jenna, in the nightgown she’d borrowed from the clothing room, was lying beneath the sheet and comforter on Carly’s bed.
Waiting.
I should be afraid, she thought.
But she wasn’t.
* * *
CHANTEL WAS WORKING second shift on Thursday, Friday and Saturday and then would have three days off before going back on days for two weeks. Las Sendas police schedules changed on a regular basis to keep officers from seeing the same people on the same streets at the same time every day—an attempt to prevent complacency.
The changing schedule had once ruled Max’s life, as he never knew when to expect his wife to be home. When to plan dinners with his folks. Or a night out with fellow residents from the hospital.
Jill had never seemed to mind the unknown when it came to her working hours. She lived to work. Any time she was on was fine with her. It was the off time that she seemed to find more challenging.
But then, her family was all in upstate New York. Max had only met her immediate family once before the funeral—when they’d flown out for their wedding. He’d never met the myriad aunts and uncles and cousins she’d left behind at eighteen when she moved to California. And her only friends, other than Max, whom she’d met while on a call in a hospital emergency room, had been work associates.
Waiting up for Chantel’s call Thursday night brought back memories of other nights he’d waited up for Jill to be off duty and safe.
His full day of appointments on Friday loomed just as they’d done back then.
He was lying in bed when his cell phone, set on vibrate so as not to disturb the sleeping toddler in the next room, started to buzz.
He greeted Chantel, hand over his eyes, as though he could somehow hide his desperate wish that it was Meri’s call he’d been awaiting. “How was your day?” he asked. Because it was the decent thing to do.
And for the same reason, he listened as she gave him a briefing on the meth lab she and her partner had stumbled upon that afternoon. She’d taken an attempted rape call, too, near the college campus.
“Did you hear from Diane?” he asked as soon as Chantel fell silent.
“No, but don’t get discouraged, Max. You heard her say it could take a few days.”
How could he not be discouraged, every single night that he slept alone, wondering where Meri was sleeping—and with whom?
Wondering if, while he lay in the big soft bed he and Meri had purchased together, on sheets she’d washed and put there, she lay somewhere frightened for her life.
And wished for the thousandth time in a week that he’d made her talk more about her years with Steve Smith. Wished he’d been able to listen to the horrors without getting upset for her, and thus shutting her down.
“How are you holding up?” Chantel’s tone had softened. Become more intimate than friendly.
“Fine.”
“What did you do with the rest of your day?”
It was a Meri question. A wife question. “Drove every street in this city looking for my wife,” he answered honestly. Because he needed both of them to remember that Meri was the light of his life.
And if she was gone, his heart would be in permanent darkness.
He wasn’t going to be in the market for another woman. Though he was starting to strongly suspect that Chantel was
in the market for him.
“She’s safe, Max.” The tone of voice didn’t change. And he didn’t want to like it.
“She was two nights ago.”
“She’s safe tonight. Wayne’s...in touch. He called earlier this evening to let me know that she’s in for the night.”
“He’s got a watch on her?”
“Not exactly.”
“But she’s keeping in touch with him?”
“No.”
“Then...”
“Don’t, Max. Don’t ask. Please. Just trust me and know that you can get some rest. Meredith is where she chose to be and she’s sleeping in a nice bed in a nice place.”
Nice place. Okay. That ruled out some of the horrors he’d been imagining.
And where she chose to be. Which was not with him.
“You’re a good friend,” he told the woman who was giving him so much of her time when he hadn’t tried once to see her in more than four years.
“You’re a good man, Maxwell Bennet,” she said in return.
And he worried that they’d just turned onto a road he didn’t want to travel.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
IT WASN’T STEVE at the window. Jenna was still reeling from the news.
“You’re going to be fine, now,” she said softly, sitting on the sofa in the bungalow with a still-shaking Carly.
They were close, curled up with cups of green tea laced with just a hint of brandy, given to them by Lynn Bishop. Their feet were touching.
Latoya was there, too, in a chair next to them, sipping on the same brew.
“They got him, girl. I saw them haul him away.”
Carly nodded. “I know. Lila told me.”
Lila, Lynn, TLS security, the Santa Raquel police had all been there. Sara, too. And they were all gone now. Because the three women had assured them they’d be fine.
As fine as any of the three of them were ever going to be.
They talked for another hour. Reliving the horrifying experience of having one of their abusers invade their safe place. Carly’s ex-boyfriend. He was being held not only for trespassing, breaking and entering with intent to harm, and attempted kidnapping but for stabbing a security guard and knocking out another, as well as tampering with security devices. Jenna wasn’t the only one with an ex who’d had special training. Carly’s had been a marine.
Harlequin Superromance September 2014 - Bundle 1 of 2: This Good ManPromises Under the Peach TreeHusband by Choice Page 68
