He walked to the jamb. He reached for the door to close it, stroking her with metallic eyes. Reaching up, he grazed his knuckles across her cheek. “You’ve got dirt on your face, Freckles.”
She backed up quickly. “You said you were done. With Freckles.”
His lowered his hand and anchored it with the other by pressing his thumb into the center of the offending palm. “Sorry. I’m no good at promises.”
“You realize that’s a choice, right?” she said. “You choose to keep a promise or run from it.”
Gavin frowned. “Guru Bracken. That’s what I’m calling you from now on.”
“I’m not sure that’s any better,” she said as he shut the door. She heard the water running on the other side and showed herself out.
* * *
THE DOG BARKED at everything, even leaves skittering across pavement. He ran hell for leather after squirrels and other vermin. Gavin had even woken one morning at the sound of snuffing and howling from down below where Prometheus had wedged his large backside beneath the subfloor after he trapped the neighbor’s cat there.
It was too much to hope that the beast knew how to handle a leash. As Gavin tied his running shoes on the front step, he heard the dog panting lightly at his shoulder.
Gavin had stopped wondering if Mavis missed the brute. He’d stopped waiting for the dog to give up on him and go back to her. Prometheus had loped after him for ten days, straying outdoors only to do his business and flush trespassing critters and one skittish deliveryman off the property.
Gavin made sure both shoes were good and knotted before sitting upright. He eyed the road ahead. He eyed the dog who stared back at him companionably. Reaching out, he spread his fingers over his snout and rubbed. The connection had become unspoken, ironclad, the kind Gavin had only ever felt with another four-legged friend. A part of him had held back because of his experience with Boots. However, where he’d been avoiding Miss Zelda and Mavis, he hadn’t been able to reject the dog’s company.
“No leash,” Gavin decided. “You’re in charge. You with me?”
Prometheus pounced to all fours.
Gavin had snagged a ball cap from his duffel. He pulled it down over his head. Prometheus went down the porch steps and Gavin followed. “It’s been a while,” Gavin warned. “Go easy on me.”
Once they reached the street, Prometheus trotted across the asphalt. Gavin stopped as he sniffed a gray minivan parked on the tree-lined shoulder. Waiting for the dog to lift his leg on one of the tires and be done with it, he dug deep into a lunge. Muscles protested. He stretched them a mite farther before trying the other leg. He stretched his quads, holding each foot behind him.
He’d warmed up his calves and hamstrings when he realized Prometheus had drawn a full pacing circle around the van. Standing straight out of a groin stretch, Gavin left his hands on his hips and moved closer. “What’s up, boy?”
Prometheus lifted a paw to the van door. Gavin took a few steps down the road to view the van from the front. A shining silver sunshade veiled the windshield. He frowned as the dog continued to sniff at the seam of the closed passenger door. Then he whistled. “Come on. We can check it out later.”
Prometheus answered the summons, falling into a light trot. He looked back only once before closing the gap between him and Gavin, staying close to the narrow lane’s outer band. He stayed to Gavin’s right. Intuitive—just like his owner, who also never strayed to Gavin’s blind side.
The breeze picked up, peeling back the tight shrink-wrap cloak of humidity. The trees veiled most of the sun from street level, dappling asphalt that was cracked with age but not broken under Gavin’s feet.
He picked up the pace. He was sweating already. He was out of shape. But he wanted to push. To prove Mavis right, or to prove Mavis wrong? He wasn’t sure which.
The road inclined. Prometheus ran in time with the slap of Gavin’s shoes. Gavin’s ribs protested, but he fought it out.
Prometheus bounded ahead, giving a joyful bark that knocked Gavin off course. He saw the rose-covered mailbox out of his periphery. He gleaned the round house stacked on pilings beyond it. Slowing, he ground to a halt just before the road’s rocky edge.
Prometheus yapped up the walk to Mavis’s empty drive, all but skipping home. Gavin planted his hands on his hips as his lungs took gulps from the tepid, merciless air. Pivoting, he looked long in the direction he’d come.
Zelda had mentioned that the road from her house to Mavis’s was three and a half miles. The distance was nothing to what Gavin had run regularly while in the SEAL teams or even high school. But still…
When he had his breath back, he whistled through his teeth to catch Prometheus’s attention before tearing off down the lane back to Zelda’s.
They lapped it once, and then again the following day. On the third day, Prometheus chased something off into a neighbor’s yard. Gavin let the dog catch up, keeping the pace.
He drank fresh air, as thick as it was. He sipped it deep. He reacquainted himself with the zap of blood that moved like magic through every inch of him, the music of it swimming against his inner ear.
He forgot about the gray van. So eager was he to get it on again with his Nikes, he hadn’t thought to check or help Prometheus investigate, as he’d promised previously. He was halfway to Mavis’s when he noticed it again.
His pace slowed. This time, Prometheus gave the van a wide berth. Gavin, however, stared, trying to identify it as the same one from three days ago. As he and Prometheus ran on, he saw that the sunshade was gone. He thought he could make out a round face behind the wheel.
Something rumbled in the distance, bringing Gavin’s attention skyward. Also something he’d forgotten? To check the forecast. The overcast glint hadn’t seemed threatening when they struck out from Zelda’s. But he could smell rain as the wind dredged off the river, bringing its fishy perfume to crescendo. Prometheus pulled ahead. Gavin hurried to catch up as thunder knelled.
Prometheus bolted, his sleek back curving as he lunged up the incline.
Gavin waved when the dog tossed a look back over his shoulder. “You’re all right. Keep going.” Feeling like an old man, he lengthened his strides.
It wasn’t until Prometheus let out a frantic set of barks that Gavin thought to look around again. He nearly tripped over his feet when he saw what was creeping some fifteen yards behind him.
The van. Gavin stopped. The tires grabbed pavement and the vehicle came to a standstill.
Followed.
The skin on the back of Gavin’s neck tautened. Wariness sank in. The anger, too, and frustration. Goddamn. Not this again.
It’d been years since he’d been tailed. As long as a decade. But he knew what happened when he strayed to Fairhope and stayed there long enough for the news of his return to travel upriver.
Still? he wondered wildly. He was in his midthirties and she was still having him followed?
Anger quickly morphed into rage. Gavin couldn’t see the driver, no matter how hard he squinted. That didn’t stop him from following the towering impulse to approach the bastard in gaping steps. He raised his arms and his voice. “You and me. We got business, asswipe?”
The engine revved. Gavin kept approaching. The driver swung wide, but Gavin managed to grab hold of the passenger mirror anyway. He held on for two seconds, feet tapping fast on the asphalt to keep up. Six seconds. The van clipped a mailbox. Prometheus shrieked. The van was level with him now. The dog lunged for Gavin’s feet.
Gavin could see him going under the back tire. Boots entered his mind and he let go, instantly. He twisted to catch Prometheus’s black blur, going down on his arm and latching onto the dog’s studded collar with the other.
The van’s tires screeched to a halt, sideways across the road. Gavin glowered at the back window. His pulse came down as he waited for the driver to get out or drive off.
The reverse lights on the van made Gavin come to his feet quickly. “Off the road,” he ordered Prometheus, watching the vehicle carefully.
The van crept back. It reversed slowly until Gavin could see through the driver’s window, whirring mechanically so he was face-to-face with the driver.
The man had donned a pair of sunglasses and a hat, pulled low over his forehead. “You all right, buddy?”
Gavin stared for a moment as Prometheus whined behind him, pacing a restless circle on the sandy shoulder. “Yeah.” He spat onto the asphalt. There was blood in his mouth. Hostile, he added, “You could’ve hit my dog.”
“Sorry,” the man said. He was younger than Gavin expected. Younger than Gavin, and by a stretch. “I got jumpy when you came at me like that. Didn’t know what to do.”
This guy knew who Gavin was and knew what he’d done overseas. He knew because she’d told him. “New on the job, are you?”
“Job?” the man said, feigning ignorance.
Gavin shook his hand. He looked around. The street was still. The rain was coming, the breath of it blowing sand across his legs. Prometheus’s whining heightened at the signs of the encroaching storm. His loyalty to Gavin kept him posted at his side. “You’re a PI. Right? Private investigator?”
“How do you figure that?”
“Because you aren’t the first,” Gavin volunteered. “Or the brightest. You boys are usually either a PI, a lover or both.”
The kid had the decency to bluster. “I—I don’t know what you’re talking abo—”
“I’m talking about Tiffany Howard,” Gavin snapped, “and how she hired you to shadow me. Don’t play dumb, Junior. You know what I am.”
The kid licked his lips, looking around once. Checking for witnesses. “She said you were a SEAL, but not to worry about it because you’re retired. You can’t see.”
“I can see plain enough!” Gavin lobbed the words in the kid’s face. When he twitched, Gavin fought the urge to draw circles with his feet, like Prometheus. Lightning tossed white light from a distance, setting Prometheus off with a fit of barking. Gavin tried to calm his anger.
It didn’t help that she’d thrown this greenhorn at him. She’d sent a sacrificial lamb on the hunt for an operative. Gavin could all but hear her…
He’s wounded. Just don’t make any loud noises. He won’t see you…
The hell with her, Gavin fumed silently. The storm clouds were closing in, making the world dark. “Where is she?”
The kid didn’t think to challenge the graveled question. “Panama City Beach.”
Gavin waited a beat. Prometheus’s head bumped against the back of his thigh, almost a shove. Gavin nodded. “Don’t let me catch you here again,” he told the man behind the wheel.
The guy didn’t hesitate to put the van in gear. He mumbled something about “thank you” and “goodbye” and was gone.
Gavin ground his teeth when he failed to read the license plate. He watched until the taillights disappeared around the corner. “Damn,” he said, scowling.
Did she think he was still a kid? Did she think there was anything left that she could say anymore to hurt him? Threaten him? Scare him off?
Tiffany Howard—the woman Gavin had once thought of as Mom—had left him well enough alone after Gavin had told her to stop talking to him, stop interfering. As a teenager, he’d learned to see the behavior for what it was, something he hadn’t been able to see as a child—psychological abuse. When he was a child, it’d been easy for her to love him. Tiffany only loved those she could manipulate.
That child had disappointed her, however. Because he’d grown into a man. Gavin was the picture of his father, Cole—Tiffany’s ex-husband. Bitterness had forested over the fertile ground of disappointment when he made it clear he knew his father was the better parent and that he wanted to live with him and Briar on a permanent basis.
There were times, like now, when he could remember how his face had stung. Being slapped was something he’d earned on and off as a mouthy boy.
Mommy won’t do it again. Promise.
He’d believed. Until she’d taught him something different about promises.
Tiffany had never been happy and she punished those around her who thought they could be. Even when that person was her own flesh and blood. Her offspring.
Prometheus brought Gavin back to the present, lapping his fingertips with his tongue. “All right, all right,” Gavin said, brushing him off. “It’s all right.”
Thunder rattled. Prometheus’s whine reached fever pitch. He hopped back and forth, then took off. Gavin joined him. His elbow burned. He’d jarred his right knee. More bleeding, he saw as he twisted his arm around to view the damage. Cursing raggedly, he picked up the pace. Zelda’s was farther behind than Mavis’s was ahead.
At Mavis’s drive, Prometheus made a quick turn off the road. The hiss of rain, a wall of it, chased him from the street and under the eaves of the odd round house.
Gavin came to stand in the mist blowing sideways under the covering. Soaking it in, he closed his eyes and listened. The patter of rain on water was near and seductive. God but he’d always loved the water, whatever body of it he could find.
Prometheus whined some more. Gavin touched the dog’s head, inviting him against the side of his leg. A summer storm had been the only thing to stir Prometheus before sunrise, cracking enough lightning for a club strobe and shaking the walls of the old house with the din of the righteous. Gavin had found a hundred-pound animal planted firmly in his lap, squealing like a lost piglet. He’d responded as any man should, by wrapping his arms around the beast, laying his head down close on the pillow next to his and rubbing his ear until the chaos ended.
It had been two nights since Gavin had dreamed of Benji—storm or no storm.
Maybe Mavis was right.
He knew she was right. Therapy dogs weren’t a joke. Trained or adopted from shelters, they comforted veterans with PTSD. Gavin had never thought of getting one of his own, but the potential had planted itself as much as Prometheus had on his right side.
The dog fit.
Unless Gavin left. The PI had been here for days. The news that Gavin was back in Fairhope, trying to make a stab at civilian life for the first time as an adult, had reached Tiffany, clearly. He’d see her at some point or another, he was sure. And he had little doubt she’d try to tell him what his itchy feet had told him at the inn…
Run. This is no place for you.
To hell with her, he thought again, with such vehemence his temples rang with it. He didn’t want to think about the headache that was Tiffany. He didn’t want to contemplate the mess that was his future with or without her telling him all the things he’d heard before. Not when, for a second, he’d learned to stretch inside the bounds of his own mind again—stretch and, just maybe, breathe.
“Stay,” he told Prometheus before ducking under the spray of the rain. Prometheus gave a protesting yap and the sky remonstrated. Nonetheless, Gavin went toward the promise of the river.
The grassy yard started to yield, softening to the water’s edge. He found the shape of a dock. The planks were stable, he noted as he walked to the end until the sound of water spread around him in a triumphant 360. Lightning flickered, not far off judging by the deafening boom that flattened over the top of him. Gavin didn’t move. He closed his eyes against the gray cast of the sky and the fast fall of fat raindrops and let his other senses open to the deluge.
“What are you doing, muttonhead?”
From overhead, the voice sounded teeny. Gavin followed it around and up in the direction of the first floor of the house. He shook water from his face, peering blindly. “Frexy?” he called.
“Get up here!” she called to him.
It wasn’t a question.
Through the rain, Gavin couldn’t see much except the dark flash of Prometheus as
he scrammed to a set of stairs. Gavin found them, too. They led him to an open balcony. Gavin nearly grinned when he saw Mavis’s form leaning out of the open glass door to the interior.
“Wait,” she said, holding up a hand at his approach. “Jesus. Let me get a mop.”
Gavin glanced down. Rain sluiced off him, as freely as it peeled off the heavy bottom of the clouds. He ran his hand over his face, then over the top of his head. His hair was starting to grow, thick and black. It was about time for another fade. “I’m all right,” he called after her.
“You’re going to get struck by lightning,” she admonished from within. “I’m bringing you a towel!”
He waited several seconds before she came back. “Inside,” she instructed, handing him the towel as he crossed the threshold. “Prometheus, sit on the rug. You’re both drenched.”
Gavin dried his chest, then his neck, before rubbing the terry cloth over his face and head. It smelled like her. As he moved the towel down the length of his arm, he peered at the dim surroundings. “Athames?” he wondered, only half teasing.
“I’d be more worried about the poison broth,” she informed him. “Full moon brings it to totality.”
He cracked a smile and finished drying off. Still he dripped on her rug. Terry cloth was no match for sopping running shorts. “I forgot how quick these things pop up in the summertime,” he admitted, squinting through the glass of the door.
“You’re running,” she said in surprise.
“As if the info chain that runs hot between here and Zelda’s hasn’t already brought you in on that fact.” When she only stared at him, he forced the truth out. “You were right.”
“It feels good,” she surmised.
“Feels great,” he said. He sensed her silent mental probe. “Slept okay the last few nights. Don’t know if it’s something Miss Zelda slipped in the vegan entrées or…”
“At least you’re eating,” she said. “That helps, too. How’re the headaches?”
He lifted a restless shoulder. His good eye was slowly adjusting to the darkness. “Your power’s out.”
Harlequin Superromance May 2018 Box Set Page 8
