He remembered the prickling sensation he’d had just before the car lunged at him, but dismissed it as enough warning. His actions were too little, too late, and he should have been more alert, watching, realized something was coming before that.
“Then it could have been a woman?” the deputy asked.
Her shoulders slumped. “I suppose, but why would anyone want to hurt Joel—especially a woman?”
“That’s a real good question.” He looked at Joel. “Any jilted lovers or enemies who might want to hurt you?”
“No jilted lovers, and no one around here that I’ve pissed off. Not that I know of, anyway,” Joel said. “Unless you count her stalker, but you already know about him.” Joel had told the sheriff’s office about everything when he and Sage had first arrived in town, and he’d kept them up to date, just in case.
The deputy finished making notes in his palm-sized book and took down their phone numbers. “I’m going out there to look at the site. We’ll see if I can find anything. I’ll make sure everyone watches for the sedan while they’re out on rounds.”
“Let us know if you need us for anything else,” Joel said.
“Will do.” The deputy tugged on his Stetson and headed for the ER doors.
Sage leaned against Joel’s shoulder and he wrapped an arm around her, pulling her close. “You need to finish your food,” he suggested, though her fruit and milk hardly looked like a real breakfast to him, and the slice of toast she’d eaten before they worked out didn’t count for much either.
“I will,” she said as she picked over it.
He was far from convinced.
It seemed to take forever for the doctor to come back to speak to them after the x-rays had been read. “There’s good news and bad news,” the sixty-something doctor said. “There’s no crack in the bone, so you don’t need a cast, but you tore your ACL again. You’re going to need a brace and to take it easy until you can get in for surgery to fix it. And you’re going to have one heck of a bruise.”
Joel actually felt a little relief, though he was not looking forward to the surgery. A brace would slow him down, but it would be a lot more maneuverable than a bulky cast. “I’ll live. How soon can we get out of here? We both have work,” Joel asked.
“You need to go home and stay off your leg for a day or two.” The doctor frowned.
“Only if Sage hangs out with me.” He looked at her, knowing he was putting her in a tough situation, but not caring. He wasn’t having her at the resort alone after someone tried to run them over.
“As if I’m going to miss work. The next two days are going to be busy.” She ran her fingers whisper soft over his cheek where he’d scraped against the cement. The nurse had cleaned the area and put on some bandages. “But you should take the day off, at least.”
He shook his head. “That’s not the way things go, baby. You work, I work.”
Her hand slid back to his neck and brushed along the top of his spine. She looked at the doctor. “He’s insanely stubborn. You wouldn’t happen to have a shot you can give him to knock him out, would you? It might be the only way to make him take the day off.”
The doctor chuckled. “It’s not really a great idea.”
She sighed heavily. “Oh well, I would have had to call in reinforcements to get him out of the car anyway, and Vince is bound to get sick of responding to our emergencies.” She looked back at him. “I can probably take care of most everything from home today.”
Joel appreciated the concession, knowing it would snarl up her schedule at work as she was the only reflexologist on staff. “My woman, she’s all heart,” Joel said to the doctor, who smiled and gave him guidelines for the next few days, then passed the chart to a nurse to check them out of the hospital.
Joel hobbled into the parking lot a few minutes later, his mind already rushing on fast-forward. He hadn’t found any extra cameras in the spa or the hall outside it, though he’d looked closely and used top-of-the-line detector equipment. That meant for the stalker to have known what he knew, he had been in the hotel, maybe worked at the hotel. Maybe it was time to review the records of all of the male employees again.
Sage got Joel home and settled him in the lounge chair in front of the television. “Would you like a pillow under your knee?” she asked as she put up his feet. He winced, which made her feel guilty. If it weren’t for her, he wouldn’t be hurt. How many other people were going to be hurt before they figured out who was behind this?
“That would be great, thanks.”
Sage snuggled one under the braced knee and grabbed another for his head. She passed over a cold pack as well.
“You’re spoiling me,” he said, his expression half appreciative and half frustrated—he wasn’t the kind to let other do things for him.
“I’d say it was my turn, wouldn’t you?” She set her hands on his shoulders and leaned in for a soft, lingering kiss.
“I don’t spoil you,” he protested when she pulled back to look at him.
“I’ve got a bag of chocolates over there that says differently.” She squeezed his shoulder, but before she pulled away, she squeezed again and frowned. “Your muscles are hard as rocks. What have you been doing?”
A smile teased his mouth. “Chasing this pretty brunette around; and she’s keeping me from getting enough sleep at night too.”
“Poor baby.” Sage couldn’t help but smile at his teasing.
“Maybe you should give me a massage. You have picked up a trick or two while you give people foot rubs, haven’t you?”
Sage put her hands on her hips. “Calling a reflexology treatment a foot rub, is like calling a bazooka a gun.”
He laughed. “How is it we’ve managed to go this long without you showing me how magical your treatments are?”
“I guess it’s past time.” She knelt by his feet and pulled off his socks.
“They might stink. It’s not like I got a shower after my workout,” he reminded her.
“No problem.” She stood to collect supplies, which included lotion, warm water, some liquid hand soap and a wash cloth. First she washed and dried his feet, then rubbed some lotion between her hands and went to work. They were nice, thin, muscular, with only a few callouses. Kind of sexy, as feet went. Not that she should be surprised. She found everything about this man sexy.
“Oh, wow.” He arched his back a little as she rubbed at a knot. “How did you learn to do this? Why did you learn?”
“You know my mom raised us with lots of holistic medicine. Traditional doctors tend to over prescribe and focus on fixing symptoms instead of finding the causes. I wanted to help people feel better, but I wanted to do it naturally. Reflexology was a natural move for me. Most of the time it just helps people relax, but sometimes I can point out organs or areas in the body that are out of balance so they can focus on fixing them.”
“We have a new rule now. Every time I buy you chocolates, you have to give me a treatment.” He moaned a little in appreciation.
“That hardly seems fair. I charge way more for a treatment than you’d pay for chocolates.”
“Hmm. What would you like instead?”
She thought it over for a moment, then studied his face, his closed eyes and the look of sheer pleasure on his face. Sage smiled when she made him moan again. “You to talk about yourself.”
Joel’s eyes popped open. “What?”
“I know almost nothing about you. I know the kind of man you are, I see it in everything you do, but you still don’t really talk about yourself, your childhood, or the things you did in the Navy. I know you can’t talk about your missions, but there are more generic things you can discuss.”
He shook his head. “My past is just that, past. I don’t want to dredge it up now.”
Hurt filled her and she released his foot. “Why won’t you let me in? I’m not asking for your deepest darkest secrets. Not yet, anyway. Just something about you.”
“What do you want to know?” His eyes were
wary.
That gave her a little ray of hope. “Everything. But how about if you start with a happy memory, something fun you did with your grandma.”
“There’s nothing very interesting about me,” he said, looking away.
“You don’t have any happy memories about your grandma?” She lifted her brows and stared at him until he looked at her again and smiled. She returned her hands to his foot, seeing she’d won.
“Fine, let me think for a minute.” He rested his head back and closed his eyes. “We never had a lot of money, but when I was about six or seven I begged Grandma to let me take swimming lessons. All of my friends would go to the pool sometimes, and she never let me go, saying I couldn’t swim and she didn’t want me there without her. But she worked constantly, so she never had time to take me. Finally she scrounged the cash and signed me up for lessons. The half hour, or however long the lesson lasted, was never enough, but I learned fast, addicted right from the start.”
“Becoming a SEAL was natural for you.”
“Yeah. I always felt at home in the water. Some summers when there wasn’t enough money for a pool membership, friends and I would cross town to a river inlet to swim. I never told Grandma about that, she would have thrown a fit, said it wasn’t safe.”
“And with your years of wisdom, would you agree now?” she asked, loving that he was talking about his past, even if it was something minor.
“In hindsight. Yeah, it was a pretty stupid thing to do. We’re lucky none of us was seriously hurt. She worked a lot though, as did most of our parents—when they weren’t drinking themselves into a stupor, so we tended to run wild. They never knew what we really got up to.”
She knew he’d often swum in the ocean in California, but wasn’t aware of him going to the pool since they had relocated. “You don’t have a decent pool handy for swimming in now, do you? Is it hard?”
“I miss the ocean,” he admitted. His face grew a little wistful. “I could probably sneak into the hotel pool at odd hours now and then, but it’s not big enough for a decent swim, and the one by the hospital is too far away. Especially now that your little fan has cropped up again.”
“It’s not that far. It’s what, twenty minutes?”
He met her gaze as she switched to working on his other foot. “That’s twenty minutes away from you, plus me not being able to take my phone close enough to respond if someone called, and time to grab my stuff and return to the car. I can’t leave you unprotected for that long.” The grim line of his mouth said recent events only strengthened his feelings on that subject.
Her heart fluttered at the intensity in his gaze. “Maybe when this is all over.”
“Yeah. Then they’ll probably get sick of seeing me.”
Sage swallowed as she thought about it. She wanted nothing more than to have the terror end, but she didn’t think she could handle it if he wanted everything to go back to normal between them, for her to return to the house next door with her sisters and for them to eventually move to different places again. As she found the crackles in his foot that told her he’d been drinking too much caffeine, she decided she would have to take such good care of him he wouldn’t be able to let her go. If she didn’t get one of them killed first.
Getting showered and ready for work the next afternoon was miserable.
Joel found Mick lazing in his chair when he arrived in his office. “What are you doing in here?”
Mick jumped up in surprised and started to babble. “Mr. Bahlmann is on-site manager this weekend. He said you weren’t coming in and called me to fill in. I didn’t think you’d be here today, I mean—”
Joel waved his hand to make the man shut up. “Fine.” He was about to tell Mick he could go home, when he realized he wasn’t exactly going to be up to investigating any problems today. He didn’t want to leave Sage exposed. She had stayed home with him that morning, but had a couple of afternoon treatments she couldn’t cancel. “Go do rounds. Make sure you keep an eye out for anything suspicious.”
“All right, sir. I’ll do that.” Mick moved his bulk around the door and down the hallway before Joel could change his mind.
Sitting at his desk, Joel worked on the never-ending reports that seemed to come with his job, and monitored things in the spa through video feed. When he caught himself listening in on Sage’s staff meeting, he turned the video to the front desk. What was he doing, trying to take over for the stalker now? Sometimes he wondered if he wasn’t as obsessed as that man was—whomever it was. Even after having her in his house, and in his bed for most of the week, he still couldn’t get her out of his mind.
She definitely wasn’t like the other women he’d known.
He pushed away thoughts of Sage and focused on work. And he checked the clock all afternoon, waiting for when he could get her alone again.
“You look beat.” Sage found Joel stretched out on the sofa in his office a few hours later, his bad leg elevated with a bag of ice on his knee. From the look on his face, he hadn’t taken the prescription pain meds that morning, relying on something weaker that kept him more alert instead.
“Beat, or beaten?” He grabbed the ice pack and shifted to stand. “What are you doing up here in the middle of the afternoon?” Joel grabbed her hand, giving it a squeeze. “Just couldn’t handle going all day without talking to me?”
“We talked when I brought you lunch,” she reminded him.
“I remember, but I usually stop in to check on things around three, and look, it’s three-thirty.” He slid a hand onto her waist and drew her near. “Since I couldn’t come to you, you decided to come to me?” He sounded like the idea appealed.
“Actually, I came to take you home.” She accepted the soft, teasing kiss he bestowed on her and melted into him. She still couldn’t believe he’d finally stepped across his self-imposed line.
“Take me home? But you still have a couple hours of work.”
“My four-thirty canceled, and I decided to take off for the rest of the day.” She looked at how gray his skin had turned and saw the pain lines around his eyes. “Come on, sir. You need a little TLC and your bed.” It pained her to see him like this. Once they got to his place, he’d be able to really relax, maybe take something strong enough to dull the pain adequately.
“Oh? You want me in bed?” his voice was lined with innuendo.
“Right, because you’re insanely sexy when you look like death warmed over.” She led him toward the front of the building while he made a quick radio call to Mick to say he was leaving for the day.
“Can I be less than man of steel for a moment?” Joel asked when they were seated in his Range Rover a few minutes later. His head lolled back against the headrest and he closed his eyes.
“Of course. Your secret is safe with me.” She stroked his cheek. She knew he must hate being so weak. The fact that he was willing to show that weakness with her was a great concession. She wasn’t going to take the compliment lightly.
“Then I’m glad you want to go home. I do need a break.” He tipped his head to see could see her, then reached over and wound a lock of her curls around his finger. “Does that make me a wuss?”
She grinned. “Oh yeah, you’re a total wuss. I’m not sure why I’m even willing to be seen with you in public.”
The corners of his lips twitched. “Sarcasm noted.”
Dinner was over and Sage had cleared away the dishes when Joel asked her to give him another foot rub. “Please, it really made me feel better last time,” he said.
She considered calling him a wuss, though it was patently untrue, but decided that their agreement that he had to talk about himself while she rubbed was well worth it. She got her supplies and removed his shoes and socks. “Tell me about your other girlfriends.”
“What?” His eyes widened, showing his surprise at the out-of-the-blue question.
“You know, women you dated before. You don’t have to give me nitty-gritties, but it would be good to know something. Have you
ever been serious about someone? What happened to break things up? You know, the basics.” She brought over a basin of soapy warm water to wash his feet.
He chuckled nervously. “There’s not that much to say. I only dated one person seriously—or what someone might consider seriously. We went out for a few months, anyway.”
“How old were you?” Sage asked. If she had to pull it out of him, she would. She had to understand more about him, and from the clipped way he’d talked about his family, she thought a less-direct route might be more effective.
“Um, nineteen. Her name was Winter. She worked at a little café just off the base where I was stationed. She was nice, we got along great, but she wasn’t ready to get serious, said I wasn’t the settling-down type and she didn’t want to deal with a long-distance relationship that wasn’t going anywhere. When I shipped out, she said goodbye. The end.” He shrugged.
Sage watched Joel’s face as she patted his feet dry and wondered if he realized how much his eyes gave away. He acted like it didn’t matter, but she could tell he felt at least a little discontent in the way it all ended. “Was she right? There’s been no one else in the last decade? That was a long time ago.”
He shrugged again. “I don’t know if she was right. Probably. I was young and stupid and looking ahead to getting into SEAL training. I still hadn’t qualified yet, but I was doing everything I could to reach it. I dated other women on and off, no one steady. I know Navy life isn’t easy on a lot of the women who are left behind. It’s dangerous work and SEALs are gone a lot, more than most, probably.”
She nodded, wondering if they had met earlier, while he was still in the service, would she have been able to accept how much he would have been gone? Could she have accepted the risks of his job and carried on while he was out saving the world? Was his life here that much less dangerous?
SEALed With Love (DiCarlo Brides book 2) (The DiCarlo Brides) Page 17
