The Naughty Nine: Where Danger and Passion Collide

by Nina Bruhns

  He paused to think over her words, put two and two together and came up with, “We’ve been set up.”

  “I don’t need protection,” she said. “Keith and I had a fight. It was my fault. I was upset, and Sophie misunderstood.”

  Familiar words, denial and defense of the abuser. Not unusual from victims of long-term abuse. Joe looked at her more closely, noted the wariness in her eyes that he’d missed before because he’d been too busy staring at her kissable mouth and long legs. “What did you fight about?”

  She pressed her lips together and took a step back. “I would like full custody of Justin, and I pushed too hard. Keith had a rough day at work. We’ll work it out. You really don’t need to be here. I don’t even need to be here. I should go back to the apartment.”

  Every time he stepped forward, she stepped back, keeping a safe distance between them. He didn’t think she even noticed she did it, just acted on reflex. For some reason, that small, ingrained defensive habit of hers pissed him off. How in hell hadn’t he caught it before?

  Of course, they hadn’t spent all that much time together. And he’d been distracted by other things.

  “I’ll just hang around for a while. In case you need me.”

  Her body stiffened. “I don’t need you. You’re confusing me with your other women. Won’t they go into mourning if you disappear suddenly? I wouldn’t want to be responsible for all the wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth in Broslin.” She offered a syrupy smile. “Seriously. Thanks, but no thanks.”

  She was stonewalling him. He’d been a cop long enough to recognize victim behavior. It made him incredibly sad for Wendy, and beyond pissed at the jerk who would do this to her.

  Sugarcoating wasn’t going to help her. “Do you think your loser ex is capable of hurting you?”

  “He didn’t mean it—”

  “I’m moving in.” After the night and morning he’d had, Joe didn’t have the energy to go through the whole song and dance. He looked around. “Give me your cell phone.”

  She folded her arms in front of her as she did her best to stare him down.

  He spotted the phone on the sofa table and grabbed it. He’d picked up a new phone on his way over. He entered his new number, then put her phone back down. “I’m going to stick as close to you as possible for the next couple of days, but if I’m not right there and something happens, I want you to call me.”

  “I’m not sleeping with you again,” she said between her teeth.

  That she thought that was why he’d come, that he was the kind of guy who would take advantage of her problems, ticked him off another notch.

  He raised an eyebrow, then let his lips stretch into a lazy smile. “Rocked your world, huh?” He shook his head. “I’m not here for a repeat. Sorry. I’m planning on sleeping downstairs. The couch will do.”

  Then he strolled out to the kitchen, leaving her staring daggers after him.

  Sophie’s kitchen was smaller than his but homier, had the woman’s touch—houseplants and flea-market art, little sayings like YES, YOU CAN painted on signs she had hanging all over the place. Sophie was big on positive thinking.

  Joe’s gaze settled on the kid at the table who was making what might have been lunch, absorbed completely in the task.

  “Hey, buddy.”

  “Hi,” Justin said without looking up. He was spreading jelly everywhere but the slice of bread in front of him, sticking his tongue out in concentration.

  “I’m Joe. Do you remember me? I’m a friend of Sophie’s and your mom’s.”

  Justin spared a glance, shook his head, went back to spreading. A glob of purple jelly glistened on his ear, dripping on the green T-Rex on the front of his shirt.

  “I’m going to hang out here for a while. Um…a dinosaur sat on my house.”

  Justin’s attention snapped to him, eyes wide now and staring. Then he focused on Joe’s face and pointed. “You have a boo-boo.”

  “He smacked me with his tail by accident.”

  The kid’s eyes went even wider. “Does it hurt?”

  “Nah,” Joe said. “Piece of cake. I’m a tough guy. I can take care of myself.”

  “Did he make a mess?”

  Joe gave an exaggerated eye roll. “You wouldn’t believe it. The dishes are in the bathtub. The chairs are hanging from the ceiling.”

  Justin giggled.

  “My socks are in the toilet.”

  The little boy squealed with laughter.

  “My pillows blew away when he sneezed.”

  The kid laughed even harder.

  “What are you making?” Joe asked as he stepped closer.

  “PBJ,” the little boy said proudly.

  Joe took in the table. Beat him why Wendy would let the kid make his own food. The mess was insane. It didn’t seem possible that anything was left in the jars. Half the table was frosted with a mix of sticky brownish-purple substances.

  He glanced at Wendy. “He’s thorough. Definitely goes above and beyond. Not to mention sideways.”

  The tension slipped off her face, replaced by an indulgent smile as she looked at the boy. “I keep telling myself that’ll be a good thing when he grows up.”

  She stepped over to her son. “Let me help for a second.” She fixed up the PBJ, cut it into wedges, then cleaned up within seconds, telling her son how much she loved him.

  The warmth of the scene seeped into Joe. Yet another side of Wendy he liked, the mother side. She wasn’t afraid of a little dirt, clearly, even if she was a city girl. She was probably afraid of the woods. And cows too, Joe decided. No sense in mooning over a fancy city girl and being a total sap for her.

  While Wendy joked and chatted with her son in the kitchen, Joe went to check on the house. He found the security in top shape, all the windows and doors secured, the front door brand-new with a new lock and dead bolt. When Sophie had had a break-in a couple of months ago, Bing had fortified the place.

  Justin was still eating when Joe strode back into the kitchen.

  Wendy was washing dishes, so he picked up a kitchen towel to help with drying.

  She shifted a foot to the side.

  He noted the distance she put between them and stayed where he was. She could keep her comfort zone, her private space. “Your parents live around here?”

  “Florida.”

  “Siblings?”

  “None. Only child.”

  Isolated. Exactly how abusers liked their victims.

  She handed him a dripping plate, moving efficiently but gracefully, focused on her work.

  He caught himself. He was here to protect her, not to speculate on how many kisses a determined man could line up between her collarbone and the small hollow behind her ear, how the creamy white skin of her neck would taste.

  The first two times they’d met, she’d managed to distract him. That wasn’t going to happen again.

  “I’ll just hang around. You can go on with your day as you would normally. If you have to go out, I’ll follow you in my own vehicle. But when we’re out, I need to keep you in my line of sight. You need to keep that in mind.”

  Her shoulders tensed. “I’m sure that won’t be an intrusion into our lives whatsoever.”

  He liked it when her snarky side came out, preferred it to the fear that had been in her eyes when she’d talked about Keith.

  * * *

  Joe got under her skin.

  Keith rarely gave her a choice in anything. Sophie had pretty much blackmailed her into coming out to Broslin. Now Joe was laying down the law about playing bodyguard. Everyone was moving her around as if she was some doll. She was sick of it. She wanted to take back control of her life. She wanted people to respect her wishes.

  It all came tumbling out.

  “I do work, you know. Taking care of Justin is work. And so is modeling. It’s not empty-headed prancing up and down some stupid runway. I spent the morning settling us in here, and I updated my digital portfolio, I paid the bills online. This is a disru
ption. I don’t sit around all day and think about pretty clothes. Believe it or not, I actually have a schedule. Tonight I still have to upload close to a hundred images to one of the online stock photo sites.”

  She took in his rumpled civilian clothes as frustration coursed through her. “What have you done with your morning? Spent it in bed with a cheerleader?”

  Then she caught herself and stepped back, swallowed hard as she waited for the blowback. If she’d said half this much to Keith, he would have thrown her across the kitchen. Oh Jesus, was she stupid? When was she going to learn not to provoke men?

  But Joe just looked at her, his dark eyes tired. He put the kitchen towel down. Still, she stayed as she was, on the balls of her feet, poised to run.

  “I was out at the murder scene of a friend,” he said quietly. “Then I had to go notify his widow.” He shook his head, looking past her, off at nothing in particular. “She took it badly. I stayed with her until her parents could come over, or I would have been here sooner.”

  Oh.

  Her heels came down. Okay, she was a total bitch. She’d been scared and confused and frustrated, and she’d ripped into someone who didn’t deserve it. She barely knew who she was anymore, but she wasn’t this. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right.” He watched her. “Your life has been majorly disrupted. You’re entitled to feel off-kilter.” He paused. “Listen, you’re both alive and well. Let’s do everything to keep it that way. I’ll do my best to stay out of your way.”

  She nodded after a moment. “I was going to run out for groceries. That way, Justin will be half-asleep by the time we get home, so I can put him down for his nap.”

  Exhaustion bracketing his eyes, Joe looked like he could have used a nap himself. “All right. Let’s do it.”

  He followed them in his own car, went into the store with them, and picked up a few things for himself: eggs, bread, mayo, tuna, and some cold cuts.

  “I can take care of the meals,” she offered.

  But he shook his head. “I’m here to protect you, not to give you extra work. I do know that you do a lot. My sister, Amber, is a single mom. It’s damn hard work.”

  In the checkout line, he dropped a green plastic dinosaur into his cart; then, after they both paid, he gave it to Justin with a wink.

  She ruffled her son’s hair. “What do we say?”

  “Thank you!” Justin beamed.

  And she looked away for a moment to get a grip on herself. Because for Justin’s entire life, his own father had never given him a gift, not a single toy. Seeing Joe do it now so naturally, without even any thought, made her realize how much Justin was missing. Not gifts, that was the least of it. But fatherly care and love.

  She swallowed and put a smile on her face before turning back to Joe. “Thanks.”

  He shrugged. “No big deal.” And it was clear that for him, it wasn’t.

  On their way home, Joe stayed right behind them. She kept looking around too, but if anyone else was following her, she didn’t catch anything suspicious.

  When Joe pulled up next to her at a red light, Justin waved the plastic dinosaur at him with a grin. Joe put on a startled face, as if he’d gone wide-eyed with fear. Justin dissolved into peals of laughter.

  When Keith was around, Justin usually stayed quiet. Kids had good instincts.

  She glanced at her son in the rearview mirror. “Do you like Joe?”

  “Joe!” Justin shook the dinosaur against the window and laughed.

  Maybe having Joe around for a bit wasn’t going to be as bad as she’d thought it would be. For the past couple of hours, he’d managed to keep her mind off being scared of Keith, and that was something.

  Wendy focused back on traffic, pretty sparse compared to city standards. Broslin had a calming effect on her. The town was warm and welcoming, peaceful. Couples strolled down the sidewalk arm in arm; kids rode three-wheelers. The shops were all prettied up, everything clean and cared for, no garbage blowing on the side of the road, no graffiti on the buildings.

  The quintessential all-American town surrounded by farmland, cows, and horses. The mushroom capital of the country, complete with signs for fresh-picked mushrooms everywhere. She briefly stared at the mushroom hats in a boutique window. There wasn’t enough money in the world to make her wear that. The mushroom soup and mushroom pie advertised in the diner’s windows, on the other hand, had potential.

  She found the mushroom craze amusing. She’d never thought of fungi as something people would get excited about to this degree, but the town even had a mushroom festival. Sophie had invited her last year. She couldn’t come. Keith had dropped by to see her and had simply refused to let her leave.

  That wasn’t going to happen again, she promised herself as she pulled up the driveway. She couldn’t, wouldn’t go back to living that way. Things were going to change.

  Joe helped her haul in the groceries. She put Justin down for his nap, then edited and uploaded her hundred new photos to the stock photo site where she was building a sizable inventory of everyday images. By the time she was done with that, Justin was up.

  She played catch with him outside for a while. Fresh air was important for kids, and movement too. She didn’t want her son to grow up in front of the TV.

  Joe made a dozen calls and worked on his laptop, tracking down leads for a case. She figured it had to do with his friend’s death and stayed out of his way.

  When dinnertime came, she made chicken and rice and invited Joe to join them.

  “I meant what I said about not giving you extra work.”

  She shook her head. “I have to cook no matter what. It’s no extra effort to put another plate on the table.”

  She’d worked hard at improving her cooking skills and enjoyed creating a healthy meal for herself and her son. The kitchen at Keith’s penthouse had been for show. He ate out every night, liked to network, liked to show off his model girlfriend. Starting to cook was another way to assert her independence and make her own choices.

  “All right.” Joe sat by the table. “But then we’ll take turns at cooking.”

  She wasn’t going to hold her breath on that. He was a nice guy, but he was still a jock and had probably been surrounded by women most of his life. She doubted he’d done much work in the kitchen.

  But he did help her clean up after dinner, then played ball with her son until she took Justin upstairs to give him a bath. She read him a picture book, then he “read it” back to her, more or less. He knew the words by heart. He was so proud of himself.

  Then, of course, as his reward, she had to sing the sheep song, complete with the bleating. She sincerely hoped Joe couldn’t hear that.

  Once Justin was asleep, she went back downstairs to settle down in front of the computer.

  Joe was watching the local news. He glanced over to her. “Checking out colleges for Justin already?”

  She turned the screen from him on reflex. She didn’t want him to mock her for trying to take some college classes. But since he’d caught the college logo already, she had to say something.

  “It’s an online class.” She swallowed. “For me. Digital photography. Manipulating digital images.”

  He raised a questioning eyebrow. “Want to know what it’d be like on the other end of the camera?”

  She rubbed her palm over her knee. “Do you think it’s stupid? Modeling is not exactly a steady, long-term occupation. Photography isn’t much better, is it? There’s a reason for the expression starving artist.”

  But he didn’t rush to say that she better rethink it. Instead, he said, “If you’re looking to branch out, you could check the Broslin Tourist Board’s website. They have a photo contest each year with some pretty good prize money. And if you win, you might get some commissions for flyers from local businesses. Weather’s supposed to be nice this week. I’ll show you and Justin around. You could snap some pictures. We have art shows twice a year at the high school. You could put up photos there and sel
l some, maybe.”

  Okay, that completely overwhelmed her. “Why do you want to help me?”

  “Why wouldn’t I? Not everybody has an agenda, Wendy.”

  She nodded uncertainly.

  He relaxed back in his seat. “How did you get into modeling?”

  God, that seemed like a lifetime ago. “I was discovered in a shopping mall in Upstate New York when I was sixteen. It felt like winning the lottery. I had to move to New York City, everything arranged by the agency.”

  “Your parents must have been worried.”

  “Oh God. My mother cried her eyes out. But I was living in a dream and talked them into letting me go. What sixteen-year-old doesn’t think that she’s ready for anything?” She flashed a half smile. “They simply didn’t have the energy to fight me. My mother was forty-five when I was born, my father fifty-five. By the time I was a teen, they were planning retirement.”

  He nodded. “Mine passed on last year. Dad had colon cancer. Mom died of a broken heart three months later. Her heart just stopped.” His brows furrowed. “She wasn’t even sick.”

  Oh. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  He looked toward the window, silent for a moment before turning back to her. “Was modeling as glamorous as you thought it would be?”

  And he waited for the response, as if really interested in her, not just being polite about it.

  “As glamorous as expected,” she told him, “but more cruel. I was never tall enough, definitely not skinny enough. If a picture doesn’t come out right, it’s always the model’s fault. You’re assumed to be empty-headed and superficial, and definitely easy. Some of the clients routinely came around to ask for dates. Models who declined were struck from the roster with one excuse or the other.”

  She shrugged. “What I remember most of the early years was the hunger. I was expected to lose weight. Endlessly. If a model has to drink, do drugs, smoke, or throw up on a regular basis, she’s expected to do it and keep her mouth shut about it. In the world of high fashion, appearance is everything.”