Killing Secrets

by Docter, K. L

  It was easy to tell Jack he could live with his decision to pull Rachel’s father back into her protection—thanks to the security consultant, Larson Cook, he had the man’s phone number—but actually taking that irretrievable step was more difficult than he expected. Rachel was not going to be happy.

  After introducing himself to Dixon Grey and telling him what he wanted him to do—Grey didn’t quibble, just tersely asked if Rachel and Amanda were okay and protected until he could get the security detail back on track—Patrick carried the first aid kit upstairs to his parents’ bedroom. He considered telling Rachel her father had asked to see them, his voice tentative, unsure, but one look at her face told him to wait. With the way Rachel feels about her old man, he didn’t think she’d be receptive.

  He walked into the room and sat on the bed next to her. “Amanda’s fine,” he said before Rachel could ask. “She’s spoiling her dinner with Suze chowing down on chocolate graham crackers.”

  Rachel’s flashed a relieved smile. “Thanks for checking on her. I probably shouldn’t worry, but she’s all I have.”

  “You have every right to be protective, Rach. You’re her mother,” he said. “But, I’m here now. I’m going to help you through this, if you’ll let me.”

  Her gaze locked on his, she didn’t say anything for a long moment. He wondered what she saw when she looked at him. Did she see a man she could trust? Considering her history with men, would she truly trust any man again? He wanted, on some visceral level, for her to trust him.

  When she nodded, he smiled and drew Rachel’s injured hand to him. “Tell me about the mirror,” he murmured to distract her while he pulled mirror slivers from her skin. “You said it was your mom’s?”

  She didn’t make a sound when he pulled the larger piece from her palm. “It’s part of a brush and comb set,” she said, her voice too quiet. “It was all I had left of her.”

  Patrick glanced up, caught by her sad acceptance that her last connection to her mother was lost forever. “When did you lose her?”

  “I was twelve.”

  “I’m sorry. That had to be tough for you and your dad,” he commented.

  “It was tough for me,” she murmured. “I lost two parents the day mom died.”

  “What do you mean? This morning, you said you didn’t break with your father until you were almost eighteen.”

  Rachel pulled away. “Dear old dad was gone from my life long before he left me in that hotel room.” She started to stand.

  His hand wrapped around her wrist so that he could pull her hand back into his lap. “I’m not finished,” he said, holding her still until she subsided.

  In silence, he wiped a sterile gauze pad, laced with Betadine solution, over her fingertips to clean them. Blood welled up on her ring finger. He applied pressure on it for a full minute to stem the flow before wrapping the tip with a bandage. He worked quickly on the other two sliced fingers and then turned to the slash on her palm before asking his next question. “How did she die?”

  Rachel gasped. Because he’d hurt her hand or he’d crossed into territory he had no right to tread? He watched a myriad of expressions cross her face.

  For the longest time, she said nothing. Then, she spoke. “Her appendix burst. She said it was the flu. Most of the symptoms were flu-like. She didn’t tell us how bad the pain was until, well, the infection killed her. If dad hadn’t gone off to another rodeo in a nearby town, if she’d gotten care in time, she wouldn’t have died.”

  Patrick put the last piece of tape on the gauze he’d wrapped around her hand. “You blame your father for her death,” he observed, suddenly more wary about the phone call he’d made fifteen minutes ago.

  “It was his fault!” She stood and walked away from the bed, then back. She stopped a foot away and looked down at him. “Dad didn’t make it to the hospital until two hours after she’d died.”

  Her arms wrapped around her middle in that familiar way he was beginning to hate because it threw a wall between him, with him on the other side with all of the other men who’d hurt her. He snagged her around the waist and pulled her into his lap. When she tried to wriggle free, he wrapped his arms around her so she couldn’t escape without a struggle. He knew she wasn’t running from him, but from his questions. “He wasn’t there. How does that make him responsible?”

  “He was never there,” she said. “He knew she was sick and he didn’t love us, love her enough to put off one freakin’ ride.”

  Patrick knew he’d pushed as far as he dared. Still, he thought she was too close to the problem to see that a twelve-year-old’s perceptions might not be right on target. “I don’t see how the man couldn’t love you,” he murmured before leaning down to kiss the corner of her mouth.

  He knew it was a mistake before he did it, but it didn’t matter. His lips touched hers, and his brain short-circuited. His touch was gentle at first, but too soon it wasn’t enough. His tongue traced the seam of her mouth until she opened to him with a sigh. Their tongues met, retreated, and then pushed deeper. He crushed her lips beneath his, his next kiss neither tender nor tentative. He feasted on her taste, her moan of acceptance. He wanted more. Too much more.

  Beneath Rachel’s curved bottom, he grew hard. When she wiggled in his lap, he thought he’d burst from his jeans. Slow down. Too difficult. He didn’t want slow. He wanted to take her hard and fast, and more than once. For days, this woman had been driving him out of his mind. He longed to lay her down on the bed and caress her from head to toe. He wanted to see if all of her skin smelled like lilacs or just the sensitive zones at the base of her neck and wrists and, if he was lucky, behind her knees.

  His fingers twitched with the urge to strip off her clothing, one piece at a time until she was naked and writhing beneath him. He would—

  Through a blur of lust, Patrick heard a man clear his throat. “I didn’t know kissing was on the regularly prescribed list of treatments for bullet wounds.”

  Patrick tore away from Rachel and looked over her head at his brother, Sam, standing in the open doorway, six-foot-three inches of weary doctor still wearing scrubs and a wild haired look that spoke of a tough day in the ER.

  “Of course,” Sam drawled, “I’m so far behind on my medical journal reading, I could have missed that one.” He studied the woman in Patrick’s arms. “Hi, Rachel.”

  His acknowledgement must have broken her immobility because she cried out and scrambled off Patrick’s lap, leaving his hardened condition exposed to his brother’s observant gaze. Patrick ignored his raised eyebrow to examine Rachel’s flaming cheeks, to the arms that wrapped around her waist. “Your timing is impeccable, Sam,” he said tightly.

  Sam shrugged. “Joe said you need stitches. I’m just off a thirty-six hour shift, so here I am. I can come back, but it might be ten hours before I surface again.”

  “No!” Rachel walked toward the doorway. “You don’t have to leave. I’m going.” She bolted from the room.

  Patrick listened to her footsteps pause outside her trashed bedroom where she said something to Buckwheat, but she didn’t linger. The next thing he heard was her running down the stairs, then the sound of voices that told him she’d joined the others in the kitchen.

  “You should work on your technique, Patrick. I think you scared her off.”

  The humor in Sam’s voice pissed Patrick off. “Screw you, Sam.” He shot a pointed look at the medical bag in his brother’s hand. “Do me a favor. Give me some anesthetic before your next quip.”

  His brother grinned. “I only brought enough for the stitches so you’ll just have to bite your tongue.”

  He entered the room and ordered Patrick to take off his shirt. His smile disappeared when he saw the bloody bandage the paramedics had applied to his wound at Southgate. He peeled it off, none too gently. “Jack was right,” he muttered, bending to his task. “I should just put you in a medically induced coma so you’ll stop doing stupid things that can get you killed.”

  He
had a feeling his brothers were talking about more than his gunshot wound. Getting involved with Rachel James was proving just as dangerous. “I love you, too, bro,” Patrick gritted out before he bit his tongue against the sting of the local.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The next three days passed in a sort of haze for Rachel. Objectively, in the back of her mind, she recognized the weird disassociation between herself and the real world. Early in her marriage to Greg, whenever she became overwhelmed by his control, his demands, by the very fact that her “perfect” marriage was a suffocating sham she had to maintain to protect Amanda, she’d found a way to push it all away. She moved. She talked. Her life went on as normal. Anything that threatened her equanimity was shunted aside. She relaxed her guard only when she was alone with Amanda.

  She knew the anxiety and trauma of this past week was at fault for her ennui. Add in an irresistible craving for a man she shouldn’t trust and the loss of her last connection with her dead mother, and she’d fallen back into that protective bubble she hated.

  Greg had never noticed, or maybe he was simply happier with her living as an automaton. Patrick, however, did notice. She’d caught his frowning gaze on her time and again this morning as they ate breakfast before going to Southgate. It might have been Sunday, but the site was bustling as everyone worked to meet deadlines. Patrick came by the trailer almost hourly on one excuse or another, finally asking if everything was all right when he brought lunch for her and the girls. Her turkey-and-avocado sandwich settled like cement in her stomach, but she assured him everything was fine.

  Everything wasn’t fine though. She felt colder, more disconnected, as the day progressed. A feat considering the outside temperature reached into the triple digits by noon. The moment they got home from Southgate and ate dinner, she threw herself into Amanda’s bedtime schedule. She read several books to her, gave her a long bath and tucked her into bed. When she went downstairs to take Amanda’s empty milk cup to the kitchen, she’d put off Patrick’s request “to talk” and ran upstairs into her own shower.

  She closed her eyes, allowing the sting of hot water to pour over her head. She wanted to crawl into bed and sleep for twelve hours straight. She hadn’t done anything more strenuous than sit in the trailer finalizing the schematics on the first landscaping job she’d emailed to Katy this afternoon. Her sleepless nights were catching up with her.

  With a sigh, she leaned on the shower wall. She’d been running flat out on nerves and adrenaline since learning Greg’s release from jail was imminent. Forced to abandon Katy and the new life she was building for Amanda, she’d run away to Denver, only to be found again. She’d discovered her dad, missing for more than ten years, was not only alive, but inserting himself into her life for reasons she didn’t want to guess. She’d been shot at, her rental car and belongings destroyed, and she was falling for a man she had no business wanting.

  It was the last thought that had niggled at her most since she confronted the gunman on Patrick’s behalf on Friday. He’d been right to accuse her of not thinking about Amanda. Rachel hadn’t done anything that stupid since she was thirteen and jumped into the arena between her dad and a raging bull bearing down on him after he’d been thrown. Her only thought then was to save her dad. She hadn’t thought twice about saving Patrick either.

  No. She wasn’t falling for the man. She’d fallen. Hard. It was the only explanation for her actions.

  Her response to Patrick’s kiss was the clearest evidence of her fall from grace. She not only hadn’t pushed him away, she’d thrown herself into the experience. The trauma of the day escaped her mind when his lips descended over hers. Demanding a response. Coaxing her to open to him. Tasting her as she’d longed for in her darkened room at night ever since she’d first spotted him in the moonlight.

  If Sam hadn’t arrived…her eyes snapped open and stopped the erotic images before they could form in her mind. She grabbed the washcloth and scrubbed soap all over her body. When the action didn’t eradicate the longing zipping through her bloodstream, she reached out and turned down the water temperature until goose bumps raced across her skin.

  The truth is she’d had little experience with the kind of sexual attraction she felt for Patrick. Besides Greg, her only sexual encounters were with the boy—that was the only thing to call him since he was barely nineteen, too, at the time—she’d lost her virginity to their freshman year in college. Their relationship was a fumbling two week affair that quickly lost its luster. When all was said and done, she didn’t understand what all the fuss was about sex.

  It was two years before she’d bothered to look at another man. When Greg came along, a junior with confidence to spare, she’d been ripe for the picking. Looking back, she’d been more attracted to Greg’s self-assurance than his lovemaking. After a year of marriage, she’d started to believe she was as frigid as Greg accused her of being, that what she’d read in novels was pure fantasy.

  What she felt for Patrick was new, and a little frightening. She became another woman in his arms. Her instincts told her to trust him, for once take something for herself, but could she take one night and then walk away without losing control of her life to another man? She hadn’t completely escaped the one she’d married!

  Her hand grazed the scars on her stomach. Greg had set his stamp of possession on her the night he whipped her. He didn’t respect the divorce decree she’d tucked in her bag before leaving Dallas. She couldn’t misinterpret the message he’d sent when he’d scrawled on the mirror and ripped into her belongings. If he had his way, she’d never be free of him so how could she consider a relationship—even a fleeting one—with Patrick?

  She blew off her agitation and turned off the shower. It was time to stop this nonsense, take control of her chaotic feelings. A towel draped around her traitorous body, she wiped the steam off the bathroom mirror and glared at her expression. “You’re leaving Denver the moment Greg’s behind bars,” she reminded her mirror image sternly. “You have no business starting anything with Patrick.”

  No matter how “un-frigid” he makes you feel.

  Toweling dry, she readied herself for bed. She patted her favorite lilac talc all over her skin and put on the football jersey Patrick found for her to replace the nightshirt Greg had shredded. She tugged on the hem in a vain attempt to make it longer, but knew it was no use. The moment she raised her arms, she felt the material creep up her behind. Her naked behind.

  She made a face at her damp panties hung on the towel rack where she’d put them after rinsing them. Damn Greg for leaving her only the one pair she’d been wearing. She had to ask Jane to pick up a few things for her tomorrow. She couldn’t ask Patrick to take her shopping. He’d already done so much. He dealt with the police, cleaned up the disaster Greg made of her bedroom, and sorted their belongings so she didn’t have to face the mess again. Thankfully, most of Amanda’s clothes had escaped unscathed. Only Rachel was left practically naked.

  Giving the shirt hem another jerk, she left the bathroom. She traversed the long hallway toward the bedroom at the front of the house, grateful when she didn’t run into Patrick. She could hear the ten o’clock news on the television downstairs, the anchor reporting the horrible news that another coed had disappeared during the night. Rachel sympathized with the poor girl’s parents. She’d die if she knew that monster, the Angel Killer, had her little girl!

  Though she could hear Amanda breathing on the baby monitor she carried, she pushed faster toward her destination. Thanks to Greg’s destruction, she and Amanda were forced to change rooms. Amanda picked a small room attached to the Thorne’s master bedroom. It was decorated for a young child, with a fluffy, leaf green bedspread and kittens gamboling after butterflies on the walls. Rachel had to admit the room felt cozy and safe—it could only be accessed through the master—so she’d tucked her little girl into the double bed soon after her bath.

  Walking through the main bedroom, she looked in on Amanda. She frowned when she sa
w the baby doll, Becca, stare back at her from the jumble of covers like some evil toy from a horror movie. She hadn’t noticed the girls traded dolls again until she tucked Amanda into bed. She wished the vile thing would just disappear forever.

  It was ridiculous to be so unnerved by a toy, but Greg gave it to his daughter and the doll had a knowing look glittering in her blue eyes, a self-satisfied smirk on her porcelain mouth, like she was Greg’s partner in crime and carried secrets that could harm Amanda. Too bad the children hadn’t traded back a day earlier so Greg could have trashed it along with the rest of their belongings.

  Maybe it would still get crushed beneath the weight of the two-hundred thirty pound dog stretched the full length of the bed alongside Amanda, the spot Buckwheat had commandeered his first night home before Rachel could stop him. He shifted so the doll’s head disappeared under his massive torso. “Good dog,” Rachel whispered.

  Buckwheat lifted his head to stare at her. He huffed when Amanda whimpered in her sleep, then put his head down and nuzzled her hand until she buried her fingers in the folds of his furry neck and settled back to sleep with a gentle sigh.

  “I’m sorry,” Patrick said in a low voice behind Rachel. “I confined him to the kitchen when I took out the trash. But he’d nosed the swinging door open and disappeared by the time I got back.”

  “He’s certainly claimed his spot,” she said, too aware of Patrick’s proximity, the wisp of air that warmed the curve of her ear when he spoke.

  His chuckle ran pleasantly up and down her spine. “Actually, it is his spot. This is the room Mom and Dad set aside for the little ones they still occasionally take on while they’re waiting for permanent foster care. Buckwheat seems to understand when kids are hurting.”