by Sylvie Kurtz
Melinda scrambled for the dropped tools, but couldn't seem to get a solid hold on them.
If he pushed her much further, he'd lose whatever ground he'd made. He changed tack. "What do you want out of life?"
"Peace and quiet." She breathed the words like a prayer.
Grady knelt beside her, picked up the tools, and steadied her hands with his. Soft, warm, and smooth, her skin felt good against his. "Do you ever think of children and a family of your own?"
She averted her gaze, gingerly removed her hands from his grasp. Grabbing the paper bag with one hand, she gathered a handful of bulbs with the other, spilling as many as she retrieved from the ground. She was silent so long, Grady didn't think she'd answer.
"Sometimes."
Grady heard the yearning, heard the half-formed dream, heard the hope she didn't quite dare believe in. She was a set of contradictions, soft and hard, frightened and strong. What kind of life turned a beautiful woman into a practical recluse? What kind of experience had gone into building an armor, leaving so many holes for arrows to find the soft tissue?
He watched her surreptitiously wipe a tear from the corner of her eyes. Whatever Melinda had seen or done on the night of Angela Petersen's death held the key to her future as well as his.
He also learned something he didn't want to.
Her silent questioning told him she was sincere. She truly couldn't remember.
Grady righted the basket, took the bag from her shaking hands, and stuffed the bulbs inside. "You spend a lot of time and energy in this garden."
She shrugged and moved away to pick up the last bulb at the base of the pecan tree.
"It's a great place to relax." Grady walked over to her and gently took the bulb from her hand with one hand, leaving the other beneath hers, enjoying the softness of her skin, hating the invisible connection forming unequivocally between them.
She swallowed hard. "It's peaceful and quiet."
"And you need that, don't you?" She averted her gaze, but with a finger on her chin, Grady brought it back to meet his. "You need the peace and the quiet to balance out all the noise in your head."
She took in a sharp breath and held it. Without warning she ripped her hand from his and turned away, moving toward the lush greenery around the pond. As if to cleanse herself, she buried her hands in the gurgling waterfall, letting the water wash over her fingers. "A garden doesn't yell, talk back, or hit. It creates. It's beauty. It's life."
Yell? Talk back? Hit?
Her anguish tore at him. He pushed the sentimentally aside.
Finally, the break he'd been waiting for. One step closer to her monster. Who was it? The father she so obviously adored? The mother whose mere mention sent her into a state of upheaval? Or someone else altogether?
If she wasn't Ely Amery's daughter, if Jamie's betrayal wasn't still fresh in his mind, if he wasn't a police officer sworn to obey the law, he'd take her in his arms and love the pain away.
But he'd already had enough heartache to last him a lifetime, and he certainly couldn't afford this one. Not with his future at stake.
Was she guilty? He'd seen no blood on her clothes. No blood on her feet when they'd found her in the woodshed. Innocence filled her eyes. And fear. But then there were the missing memories. And the knife he'd noticed missing from the block on the pristine counter of her neat little kitchen.
And to find the knife he was sure she'd buried somewhere in this beautiful garden, he'd have to destroy the last remaining link to her feeling of security. He couldn't explain his regret at the thought of upheaving this peaceful oasis.
Guilty or innocent? Traces of both swirled in her deep, dark eyes. She'd done that to him. Planted doubts. And the good cop's instincts that had brought him so far had deserted him along with his common sense.
As if he were a wrecking ball aimed at a condemned building, every second he spent with her brought him closer to disaster. Remembering he was the hunter and she was the prey got harder and harder.
Chapter 6
"What happened between you and my father?" Wiping her wet hands on her skirt, Melinda sprang to her feet and marched toward the house. She needed tea to soothe her dry throat, her tense nerves.
Grady stopped her with a hand to her shoulder. A statement of power and control. She looked into the piercing blue of his eyes and knew she didn't have a prayer to escape. Even for tea.
Why did he have to touch her? Every time he did, a protective layer slipped away like an outgrown skin. Did he know his touch made her tremble down to her core? The headache that had faded as she worked the soil returned with a vengeance.
"Okay," Grady said. "Quid pro quo. I'll answer your question, if you answer one of mine."
She broke their connection, inching away from him. "I think I've answered enough, don't you?"
He wasn't giving her time. He was forcing her to make a decision now rather than later. She resented him for that. The invisible band around her head tightened.
"One gut-wrenching story for another." He cocked his head and flashed her his dimples, but the warmth didn't extend to his eyes. "Deal?"
She shrugged. Wariness pumped adrenaline through her body, priming her to flee like some Stone Age ancestor chased by a woolly mammoth. She'd already said too much, but Grady wouldn't give up until he had her completely eviscerated. "Why not? You go first."
"This little story isn't pretty. Are you sure you want to hear it?"
"I'm sure." She folded her arms under her chest and looked for a spot to sit.
"There once was a beautiful girl." Grady reached out and touched a strand of her hair. Melinda forced herself not to move, not to blink, but her insides trembled like Jell-O on a spoon. "Much like you. Everything about her spelled class, except where you're midnight dark, she was sunset bright."
His eyes darkened with the memory. "She had high ambitions even before her Daddy struck it rich and moved the family out of Fargate. When you look at her today, it's hard to believe she was ever a small-town girl."
His gaze refocused, sharp with implied accusation. Melinda tried to move out of range, but found her maneuver useless. Those dark-blue eyes followed her wherever she went.
"Don't look at me like that," she said. He saw too much, came too close to the mark with his guesses. "Whatever this woman did to you, I'm not like her. I'm not like anybody you've ever known."
As if he could read her heart, her soul, his gaze sliced into her. She needed to leave, but couldn't move.
"You're right about that. I've never met anyone quite like you."
He turned abruptly, and she prayed he hadn't heard her sigh of relief.
"One day, her brother was killed," Grady continued, his voice remote and clipped as if he were reciting facts for one of his police reports. "Murdered in cold blood. Like Angela Petersen. Only this murderer had used a handgun to do the deadly deed. It was a crime of passion, you see, and when the evidence started pointing in her direction, she phoned the state's most famous lawyer."
As if he expected her to fill the void, he paused expectantly.
"My father."
"Give the lady a prize." Without turning to look at her, he lifted his arm, signaling to an invisible assistant in the wings. "The great Ely Amery, champion of lost causes, accepted the case."
He swiveled to face her, eyes ablaze with potent anger. "Do you know what this brilliant attorney advised her?"
"I don't pay attention to my father's affairs."
"How interesting."
Melinda didn't know what to do with herself. She settled on resting her backside against the waist-high stone wall separating the flagstone patio from the small patch of grass and the rest of her garden.
"What did my father tell her?"
Her question set him in motion. The tightness of his movements gave life to the storm of anger brewing inside him. "He told her she needed to find somebody the jury could trust."
"She came to you."
He came to an abrupt stop in
front of her. She inched back along the brick and had to look up to meet his gaze.
"Yeah, the socialite remembered the hometown boy. The one who wouldn't back down when they tried to rip his family apart. She remembered his loyalty and the crush he'd once had on her, and decided to set her claws into both."
His finger trailed along her cheeks following the path a trail of tears might take. Her heart beat as if she'd just run a mile at top speed. Trapped. He had her trapped again. Her shoulders rounded, but she couldn't bring her legs up to hug them with him so close.
"Like you, she cried pretty tears. Like you, she swore her innocence. 'Please, Grady, you've got to help me. I can't trust anyone else,'" he mimicked.
"I still don't see how that ties in with my father."
"You will."
He crowded in on her.
"She wooed me." He stroked her hair, following the flow past her shoulders, pausing ever so slightly on the rise of her breast. Her nipples pearled under his touch. She shivered.
"Kissed me." He bent toward her so swiftly, she didn't have time to dodge his kiss. A hard, vengeful, threatening kiss. A kiss that gave her fears a brand-new definition.
"I don't think this is appropriate." Melinda scooted sideways, knocking down one of the clay pots lined up on top of the wall.
"You wanted to hear the story." Grady's deep-dimpled grin held no warmth.
"I don't need the show-and-tell." She folded her hands primly on her lap. "My hearing works just fine."
"Too bad. I was looking forward to the seducing part."
Melinda edged a few inches more between them, then straightened her stance, holding her ground. His crooked grin filled with satisfaction this time, and she could have punched him for it.
"She even showed me how much she loved me. And I fell for it, promised to help her out of her bind. I knew her. I liked her. I let my guard down.
"That was my first mistake."
Grady stared out at the grazing cows in the pasture. "The murder was out of my jurisdiction, but I had friends on the Fort Worth police department. I questioned the evidence. I poked holes in their theories.
"That was my second mistake."
Arms folded across his chest, he turned back to face her. "Your father was brilliant. He took the tidbits I fed him and spat them into huge stains with borders so indistinct, the jury had no choice but to say they had reasonable doubt. I became the defense's best witness.
"That was my third mistake."
Melinda gulped. "She got off. Isn't that what you wanted?"
"Yeah, that's what I thought." He kicked at a loose piece of flagstone with the toe of his boot and sent it skittering down the small incline toward the fence. "We went out to celebrate—her, your father, and me. That's when I realized I'd been had. Your father laughed at my stupidity."
Grady crouched and snared a daisy from the flower bed. "But it wasn't until she kissed me goodnight and dumped me that I understood I'd been used."
One by one, he ripped the white petals off the daisy. "You see, she had killed her brother. Admitted as much with her last kiss."
He squashed the flower's golden heart between his thumb and index finger and shook his head. "Over an argument about money."
"I'm sorry." Melinda recognized the hurt in his voice, felt the deep emotions he couldn't quite bring himself to express, but she didn't know what to do, what to say.
He rose and stretched. "Just remember it won't work twice. Unlike an old dog, I can learn new tricks."
"Not everyone's like her." Melinda flicked her hair off her face, tilting her chin up ever so slightly in defiance.
"Your father's known to stretch the truth. What makes you think you're so different?"
"I never learned to lie. My father expects the truth from everyone around him."
Grady sneered. "Typical lawyer."
"Maybe, but he's still my father."
He gave her such a weird look, that for a second, she thought he'd understood what she'd meant. Suddenly, the tension disappeared from his body.
"Point taken." He moved one of the clay pots out of the way and sat beside her. "Now your turn. Tell me about your monster."
Panic jolted her heart. She couldn't face "it" yet.
"Sooner or later, you'll have to trust me," he said.
Trust. The idea terrified her almost as much as the horror playing hide-and-seek in her mind. No one—not even her father—knew about the monster and the terror he'd wrought over the years.
"You've already made up your mind about me." Melinda jumped up and trailed her hand along the line of cool clay pots spaced on the wall. "You've already judged me guilty."
She reached out for one of the many pots of herbs, cupping one of the fading pale pink blooms in the palm of her hand. Cool and smooth whereas Grady's skin was warm and rough. "Sap from the leaves of this plant can treat eczema, but a bite from the roots can be deadly. Does that make the plant good or bad?"
"It depends."
"My point exactly. Everyone has good and bad inside of them. Everyone lives their lives in shades of gray. Even you, Lieutenant. The difference between you and me is that you see only the black and the white."
"That's not an answer."
"What were you expecting? A murder confession?"
His cool, piercing look never wavered, rippling uneasiness through her. She put the pot down before she dropped it.
"I'm one of the good guys, Melinda." He paused, letting the silence grow between them until it crammed the space separating them like a tangible presence. She wanted to fill the silence, end the nervy edginess it caused, but she wasn't sure where or how to start.
"Tell me about the monster, Melinda."
Shaking her head, she turned from him. "I can't, I just can't."
When he rose, the material of his pants brushed against brick. His soft whisper warmed her ear. "I'm right here. I won't let anything happen to you."
Like a comforting blanket, his fingers molded themselves to her shoulders, oozing warmth into her shivery body. She closed her eyes, shutting out the safety of her garden. "Don't make promises you can't keep. Those are always the one that hurt the most."
"Tell me...." His whispers enticed. Because she needed him to leave, because his voice drifted over her like a shower of downy feathers, because part of her needed closure, she let him convince her to lower the drawbridge in her mind that kept the monster prisoner. He wrapped his arms around her, and the embrace felt strong and secure—solid. "Tell me, Melinda...."
Fuzzy flashes penetrated the black behind her closed lids. Her memory tumbled faded images like old photographs drained of color, with blurry edges. She gasped and opened her eyes wide.
"You're fine." Grady's voice….
Her heart pounded against her ribs in a wild rhythm. Sweat formed along her hairline, prickling her scalp. Air refused to flow through her tightened chest. Her hands grasped at her shirt, trying to keep her heart in, willing her lungs to function. The yard swirled with muted colors, getting brighter by the second.
An explosion charged her mind, sending her reeling down a steep spiral. Her body tensed against the imagined fall. She vaguely felt the bolstering arms keeping her solidly in place. Bits and pieces of a jumbled puzzle came to her like a slide show stuck in Fast Forward.
Black, red, green, yellow.
The colors flashed by too fast to comprehend.
And noises. Lindy. Swish. Poof.
And heat. Piercing heat. Terrible heat, burning deep inside her like a funeral pyre.
As the colors, sounds, and sensations formed into a vortex settling over her, the stench of blood and sulfur permeated her senses, overwhelming them.
"No!" Like a spectator to some horrible play, she heard her own muffled scream.
Melinda prided herself on her intelligence, her self-control, and hated the effect this almost forgotten nightmare had on her. Hated herself for reacting to it. Hated the way it left her feeling empty and overcome with sadness. Tears roll
ed down her cheek.
"It's all right." Grady's steady voice penetrated the whirling cloud, dispersing it. His strong arms shawled her, creating a living boundary between her and her mutating monster. She sought his contact the way someone lost in a dark cave sought light. All pride fell aside.
"I can't." She couldn't stop the sob. Turning in his arms, she sought his solidity.
"Shh, it's all right." He touched his lips softly to hers. Starved for reality after her brief encounter with hell, she responded sliding her arms around his waist. Her breasts flattened against his chest. Her hips pressed against his. As if he breathed life into her, she deepened the kiss, reveling in their physical connection, in his strength, in his warmth. She wanted him to touch her everywhere, to bring her back to life. He smelled like Ivory soap. He tasted like black coffee and breath mints. He felt like... heaven.
Then panic set in.
What was wrong with her? She was acting like some desperate woman. And maybe she was. Desperate for the fear and the nightmares to go away. Desperate for the life of a normal woman—with nothing more complicated in it than her family and her job.
Her brain pulsed inside her cranium, bringing pain and nausea. Remembering propriety, she stumbled away from him. She didn't dare look at him. She was too close to tears to find regret in his eyes.
"I'm sorry." She pressed her fingers against both her temples. "I have to lie down before my head explodes. I trust you can find your way out."
As Melinda moved forward, she wobbled. Grady's hand slipped under her elbow to steady her. He guided her inside her house to her bedroom and helped her beneath the cool lavender sheets. She rolled on her stomach, burying her head in the soft feather pillow. The mattress sagged beside her with Grady's weight.
"Go away," she said, her voice muffled by the pillow.
His fingers massaged the tense muscles of her neck and shoulders. The pain eased. Ah-h-h. His touch felt so good, so warm after the numbing cold of reliving her nightmare. She didn't want him to stop. She needed him to leave before the tears came again. "Go away."
"Can I get you anything?"
