Harlequin Superromance September 2014 - Bundle 1 of 2: This Good ManPromises Under the Peach TreeHusband by Choice

by Janice Kay Johnson

  Latoya, who had an early session in the morning that she still intended to attend, finally excused herself and went off to bed, leaving her door open as they’d all decided they would do for the next couple of nights, at least.

  “You can go, too,” Carly told Jenna. “I’ll be fine. You have that little girl to help in the morning, and then a couple of appointments here.”

  She’d told her housemates a bit about her work when she’d returned that day. Latoya had seen her come in, before she could clean herself up and put on fresh makeup, and she and Carly had both wanted to know where she’d been. In another situation their curiosity might have been considered nosiness.

  But at the Stand, it was an inherent part of their sisterhood that they watch out for each other. Victims of domestic violence couldn’t always trust themselves, and, like any kind of an addict, needed a support group. Except that it wasn’t alcohol or drugs that held them captive. It was the need to love and be loved that did it to them.

  So when Latoya had asked where she’d been, she’d told them about Yvonne and Olivia. Fellow sisters.

  “I wouldn’t sleep if I went to bed,” Jenna said, more for Carly than for herself, but knowing the words were true just the same. She wasn’t going to sleep, but she’d be okay in her room alone.

  Carly wouldn’t.

  “I just can’t believe you did that for me. That you risked your life like that.”

  “I thought it was...someone else.”

  “At my window?”

  “He could have been at the wrong window.” But she had wondered, as had Lila and the others, how Trent Compton, Carly’s dishonorably discharged marine ex-boyfriend, had known which bungalow was hers.

  As it turned out, he’d been watching them from a rooftop for the past week. And had seen Carly come and go. He must have seen her at her window at some point, too, to know which room was hers.

  Carly was shaking her head. “He used to watch my window in L.A.” Her voice was soft as she shook her head. “My folks were...I don’t know...they, neither one of them had careers, you know, but just worked as store clerks and my dad worked in a factory for a while. They were into motorcycles, smoked and drank a lot and hung out with a pretty tough crowd. My brother got into riding, too. We lived in a rough neighborhood and when they’d take off on weekend rides, I’d be home alone.

  “And there was Trent. He lived in the apartment across from ours and he promised me he’d keep a watch on me, to make sure I was safe. He had all these sight things, like for guns, but they were more like binoculars. He’d ordered them off the internet. He said he was into stars and wanted to study space travel.

  “I thought it was cool then....”

  Because girls were vulnerable sometimes when it came to their own protection. Until they learned that they were the only ones who could keep themselves safe.

  “It probably was cool, then,” Jenna said. “It was probably just over time that it got creepy.” Which was part of the problem. How could anyone predict how another person might change?

  “I just don’t get it. It’s not that Trent was a bad guy. He was into animal rescue and fighting for the underdog....”

  Steve had rescued human beings, and had put his life on the line every day to see that they were protected.

  “What happened to him?” Carly’s blue eyes filled with tears and she started to shake again.

  Jenna had an answer. An odd burst of clarity in a mind that had been foggy....

  The research she’d done over the past week, her trying to get into character...she was more prepared than she’d thought.

  “Somehow he wrapped up his own sense of value, his sense of self-worth, in his possession of you,” she said slowly. Softly. “As long as he has you he is rich. Anytime he feels like he might not have complete control of you, his prize possession, his sense of self is threatened. He goes into survival mode. Those types of people will stop at nothing to survive. He starts to feel powerless so he has to exert his power. Only when he is certain that you will do only and exactly as he directs, is he at peace.

  “You’re a living being he has to own, in order to feel safe, but you have a mind of your own and are escaping him, which makes you an enemy to his basic sense of survival.”

  Jenna’s heart started to pound as she spoke. And she knew she was on to something important. Knew that she was stumbling across the key to beating Steve.

  “He becomes filled with the anticipation of the hunt.”

  “Kind of like those guys who spend a hundred thousand dollars for a chance to go out with some big game experience guy and shoot a bear or some other poor animal that’s being held captive,” Carly said. “All so he can take the pelt home and hang it on his wall and make everyone think he shot it in the wild. Like he’s some big strong man who can take on bears and win. I saw a show on TV about it not long ago. It was disgusting. These guys killed animals who were doing nothing more than living the lives they were born to live, animals who weren’t hurting or threatening anyone. Just so these losers could feel more manly among their peers.”

  “Exactly,” Jenna agreed. “Or like the guys who spend two hundred thousand to do the same thing over in Africa. It’s like an instinctive need with some guys.”

  “It comes, I think, from the the natural instinct to kill in the wild to provide food for his family....”

  “Only completely twisted,” Jenna added.

  She was in Steve’s mind-set now. Getting him. He didn’t just want to keep her on the run so that he could keep her vulnerable to him. He wanted her on the run because he got off on the challenge of the hunt.

  Because I dared to get down off of his wall and tell the world that he wasn’t a great hunter at all.

  “A man who can’t hunt well can’t feed his family,” Jenna said, going with the metaphor.

  “So a possessive guy who feels like he’s losing control of his possessions, acts instinctively, as though, if he can’t get the hunt right, he’ll never have a family to feed. It’s not that he needs me so much at this point as that he needs me not to be able to get away from him.”

  “Yes. Though this could be complicated by the fact that on some level he really does love you.

  “And I think it gets even more convoluted when you add in the social factor of how everyone else views him. Like the man with the bear pelt on his wall that he has to show everyone who comes to his house—Trent thinks that when people see you with him, they think he’s some great guy. If you leave him, he feels like less in the eyes of the world, like your rejection says there’s something wrong with him. Or makes him somehow less.”

  Yes! She was getting it now. Pieces floated into place as though animated and on-screen.

  Steve wasn’t just an amazing brain plotting actions that no one could hope to outsmart. He was a fallible man with an emotional need that was being threatened.

  He wasn’t acting out of logic. He was acting out of emotion.

  Which not only made him less likely to succeed and more likely to make a mistake, but made him more vulnerable, too.

  There was something he cared about more than life. More than Jenna.

  Something that controlled him.

  His own threatened sense of self-worth.

  That was her secret weapon.

  Her mind raced as she tried to figure out how to use it against him.

  * * *

  MAX ARRANGED FOR the older neighbor lady who’d babysat Caleb a couple of times in the past, to come to the house and stay with him on Saturday while he made hospital rounds just around the corner from the clinic.

  He saw patients all morning. Life had to go on. People needed him.

  Caleb needed some semblance of normal.

  But how in the hell did a guy do normal when his world was exploding around him and t
here was seemingly nothing he could do about it?

  He talked to Chantel each day, too. Lived for her calls, and at the same time was glad the other woman was on shift three hours away. The comfort she offered was too tempting to a man ruled by grief and fear.

  Until Sunday’s call.

  Saturday she’d told him that Diane had talked to someone who knew that Steve had undergone voluntary anger management counseling not once, but twice. She’d also added that he’d attended one of those times with his entire squad who’d been ordered to go as part of a continuing education LVMPD initiative that the human resources department had implemented.

  On Sunday, she didn’t even bother with hello. Or to get home from work, for that matter.

  He’d just hung up from lying to his parents—telling them that Meri was in the shower and would call later in the week—and was still treading around his bedroom barefoot, getting ready for bed, when she called.

  “Max. I just listened to a voice mail from Diane. She tracked down one of the anonymous witnesses from that dancer girl’s death. As it turns out the guy across the hall still lives in the building—on the top floor. He owns the place now. And still remembers that night. He says there’s no doubt in his mind that the girl was running from Steve when she left the apartment. She wasn’t the partying type. And took cabs if she’d ever had more than one drink. He says there’s no way she would have gotten in that car if she hadn’t thought her life was in immediate danger if she didn’t do so.”

  Suddenly wide-awake, with nerves on the edge of needing a run, Max said, “Because why would you trust a call for help, a call to the cops, when you had a cop in your apartment.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So what happens next?”

  “She’s going to try to build a case. I can’t promise that anything will come of it. Chances aren’t good that a grand jury would indict an ex-cop with an exemplary record on circumstantial evidence, but if she can build enough of a case, she might be able to get an order to have the woman’s body brought up.”

  This was not normal bedtime conversation.

  “You really think they might do that?”

  “Do you remember that case in Chicago a few years ago? The cop who was charged with killing his second or third wife, but they couldn’t find her body, so they brought up the body of his first wife who’d either committed suicide, or been ruled accidental, I can’t remember which right now, but they brought her body up. Did an autopsy. Her death was ruled murder and he was later convicted.”

  He didn’t think he’d ever heard of the case. But was glad that Chantel had.

  “Okay,” he said now, pacing his room, frustrated as hell that he didn’t have Meri with him to discuss this newest development. “Keep me posted and let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”

  If only he’d known these things years ago—if only Meri had...

  “She just needs us both to keep quiet about this for now,” Chantel told him. “That means you can’t tell anyone, Max. Not anyone. If Smith gets wind of what she’s doing before she has a chance to build a big enough case, he could make it go away just like he did before. And if not, then he’d definitely be out to get her. He’s already got the death of one woman on his slate, what’s one more if it’ll keep him looking clean?”

  He hadn’t thought of that.

  “Of course I’ll keep quiet. Who would I tell, anyway?”

  “Well, it’s just...she’s put things in motion and if, by chance, you were to talk to Meredith, or she came home, she can’t know about this, Max. We don’t know what hold Smith has on her, or what she might tell him if, for instance, he threatened you or Caleb....”

  Beads of sweat popped out on his lip. “You really think Caleb could be in danger?”

  “Not now, I don’t, or you can bet I’d be doing something about it. But if Meredith were there with you, the stakes could escalate a bit.”

  The words quelled his fear, slightly. But they also hit home. “What you’re inadvertently saying is that she might have left to protect us from him,” he said. He’d had the thought earlier, but had never quite been able to follow the reasoning through, knowing as he did that they’d have full police protection and knowing that Meri had been fully aware of that fact, too.

  But it didn’t sound as if she’d have trusted police protection....

  Problem was, he didn’t know at this point what she thought or whom she trusted.

  And then something else occurred to him. By calling in Chantel, who was working on this privately as a personal favor, he’d put her in danger, too.

  “I want you off this case,” he said, louder than he’d intended, the words filled with absolute intent. “I will not have you hurt because of me.”

  “I’m not on the case, Max,” Chantel said with a soft chuckle that sounded as satisfied as it did amused. “Wayne is handling things in Santa Raquel. And Diane has it in Vegas. I’m just the conduit that sends news your way.”

  She was more than that. But she was right, too.

  “I have no jurisdiction in either place and no personal knowledge of him. Hurting me would do him no good at all.”

  She made sense.

  “Okay, you’ve convinced me.”

  “Good, because I’m not going anywhere, whether you’re convinced or not.”

  He told her he was glad.

  And then figured he probably shouldn’t have done so.

  But dammit, he’d been a good friend to her for years, including her in his and Jill’s life, lending her money to buy the condo she’d wanted, helping her get a car when she’d totaled hers....

  And now he needed a friend.

  More than that, Meri needed her. Max was a pediatrician, not a cop. When it came to finding Meri, without Chantel, Max was powerless.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  JENNA WAS THE talk of the Stand over the weekend, and hated every second of the notoriety. By Monday, she was actually eager to leave the place to meet with Yvonne and Olivia, and when she returned, kept her speech therapy appointments and then sought solace in the Garden of Renewal.

  Plans were underway for the pool party. It was going to be for adults only. Shelter employee Maddie Bishop, who was six months pregnant, was going to be the unknowing guest of honor. Her husband, Darin, along with his brother, Lynn’s husband, Grant, had volunteered to watch the seventeen underage residents. A group of women were planning snacks and games for the kids to keep them busy and happy.

  Jenna meandered through the Garden and smiled at the few women there, but didn’t stop to speak. The Garden was meant to be a peaceful retreat, not an area for socializing.

  She’d never spent any time there and on that afternoon she tried to open up and allow the privacy, the towering trees and the beds of glorious, sweet-smelling flowers, to heal even a tiny part of her. But it appeared she was immune to the salve.

  And so she started to pull weeds. Because there were a few, scattered about, and she’d met Grant Bishop and his mentally handicapped brother, Darin, over the weekend and knew that the men had their hands full keeping up with Grant’s landscape design business and yard maintenance at the Stand, as well. She knew only because Darin had told her.

  He’d also told her it wasn’t anything his brother, Grant would ever tell anyone.

  You had to look hard to find anything on the grounds of The Lemonade Stand that wasn’t immaculate. But when she saw some weeds growing at the base of some of the trees in the thick woods that set the Garden off from the rest of the grounds, she dropped down to pick them.

  She left them in piles as she worked, with the plan to come back and gather them in her blouse to carry them up to the trash. She worked quickly. Quietly. Undaunted by the fact that there were easily three or four acres of woods surrounding the Garden.

 
; The earth felt good beneath her hands. Dirt under her trimmed nails. Kept short in deference to the baby she’d tended, the diapers she’d changed.

  And for every weed that wanted to play tough, that gave her a hard time, she held a mental victory celebration as she hung tougher and succeeded in pulling it out by its roots.

  This was what she was going to do with the memories of Steve. Pull them up by their roots and throw them in the trash.

  When she’d rid her life of him.

  Didn’t matter if there were acres of memories. Or tough ones to excavate. Didn’t matter if she got it all done in one day, or had to repeat the effort over and over again for the rest of her life.

  She could pull them out and throw them away.

  And if they regenerated, she could pull them up again. Throw them away again.

  Her life could be as beautiful as this Garden. She just had to....

  A sound behind her had her freezing on the spot.

  Carly’s ex-boyfriend had managed to break through the security at the Stand. And while security was tighter than ever before, with added guards on duty, more cameras, and more outside patrol as well, Steve was far more skilled at knowing how to break and enter than Trent would ever be.

  Another twig snapped. Several feet behind her and off to her left. She didn’t turn around. Didn’t want him to know she was on to him.

  She had to get to her phone. Push the TLS emergency speed dial.

  Another movement. A little farther to her left.

  No one knew where she was.

  She didn’t even know how far she was from the actual Garden. She’d been pulling weeds. Mentally expostulating about life. Not paying attention to her surroundings.

  Reaching into her bra, she opened her phone and felt for the number three on her dial pad. Pushed.