Shelter from the Storm

by RaeAnne Thayne

  “Right. An accident.” He turned the last word into something harsh and ugly.

  “What happened?”

  “He was killed on one of R.J.’s construction sites in Park City, when the substandard materials Maxwell Construction was in the habit of using to cut corners collapsed. He fell eight stories. He was conscious the whole time until he died an hour later on the way to the hospital.”

  Nausea churned in her stomach and she pressed a hand there. She had seen construction fall injuries during her E.R. rotation. She knew exactly what kind of excruciating pain Roberto Galvez must have endured in that last hour of his life.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, the most inadequate words in the English language. Here was one more truth about her father she had been sheltered from, another illusion laid to rest.

  “My mother was lost without him,” Daniel went on. “She was already sick herself with the cancer and she just couldn’t function. My brothers and Anna and I knew one of us would have to come home and stay with her. They were all still in college and I couldn’t ask them to walk away from their educations. Since I already had my degree and was working as a cop in Salt Lake—something I could do anywhere, including Moose Springs—I decided to come home.”

  This was only the setup to whatever he wanted to tell her. She knew it, could feel the tension rolling off him as he continued holding her hand.

  “I was so angry when I came back. I had a million reasons to hate R.J. already. I blamed him for my father’s death, for the decades of substandard wages he paid him, for the subtle but pervasive humiliation he heaped on a man just trying to support his family.”

  He let out a breath. “Then Maxwell Construction used my father’s illegal resident status to somehow wiggle out of paying my mother any kind of financial settlement for his wrongful death or even paying his pension. When they cut off her insurance benefits—a widow fighting breast cancer—my anger turned to rage.”

  Oh, she hated this. She wanted her daddy back, the man who sat her on his lap and read her stories, who loved to tickle her with his whiskers, who roasted marshmallows with her in the fireplace when the power went out. She didn’t want to know how ruthless and amoral he had been in his business dealings.

  “Anyone would be furious,” she managed through a throat that felt raw and bruised. “What happened was wrong.”

  “I knew the score in Moose Springs. I always had. Your father called the shots in town and everybody jumped to do what he wanted. I came back home with one overriding goal, besides taking care of my mother. To bring your father down.”

  At last he pulled his hand away as he rose and stood by the fire. “I became obsessed with finding dirt on R.J. It sounds melodramatic now, five years later, but I spent every waking moment of my off-duty time digging through garbage. I followed paper trails, I studied budgets, I combed through his financial records, trying to find any dirt I could to bury him.”

  She folded her arms tightly, chilled despite the warm fire. “And you found it.”

  “You could say that. I worked around the clock trying to put the pieces together. It was all I cared about. I was consumed with it. All I could think about was vengeance. I wanted him to pay. No, I wanted to bleed him dry.”

  How could this man talking about her father in such a harsh way be the same man who had held her so sweetly just fifteen minutes before?

  “I had to take everything I found to the county attorney. When they finally filed charges and I was able to arrest him, it was the greatest day of my life, like finding the Holy Grail, Eldorado and the lost city of Atlantis, all rolled into one.”

  That nausea churned again in her stomach at his words.

  “I destroyed your father, Lauren. It was calculated and deliberate and driven by my thirst for revenge. I set out to bring him down any way I could and I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.”

  He reached for her hand. “I was looking for financial irregularities. That’s all. You have to believe me. I never expected the rest of it, about his bigamy and his other family. That only came out during questioning after he was arrested.”

  He paused and squeezed her trembling fingers. “And I certainly never expected things to end the way they did.”

  She slid her hand away and folded her fingers together. “You were on duty at the jail the day my father killed himself,” she suddenly remembered out loud.

  “Yeah. I was the deputy who found him.”

  She stared at him, this man she loved, as a horrible suspicion took root. She didn’t want to believe it of him, but she felt as if her whole world had been turned upside down and she had to ask.

  “Did you have anything to do with it?”

  He reeled back as if she picked up the fireplace poker and shoved it into his gut. She saw shock and hurt cross his features—and then she saw something else. Guilt.

  “Not directly,” he finally said.

  She rose, desperate for air, for space. “Directly or indirectly. What difference do semantics make?”

  “You’re right. Absolutely right.” He sighed heavily. “I have lived with this for five years, Lauren, wondering what I might have done differently. Should I have guessed R.J. would take that way out after he was arrested? I don’t know. I knew your father, both personally and from the profile I created while running the investigation. I worked for him for three summers and my dad was an employee of Maxwell Construction my whole life. I knew the kind of man R.J. was and how important his image, his standing, were to him around here.”

  Her father loved being addressed as Mayor, even of a little town like Moose Springs. He had loved being the most important man in town, the wealthiest, the most powerful.

  “I never expected him to end things the way he did,” Daniel went on slowly. “But in retrospect, I should have taken better precautions. Put him on suicide watch.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t exactly cry over his grave.”

  “Believe it or not, I found no satisfaction that he killed himself. Absolutely none. I wanted a trial. A public venue where all his wrongdoings could be aired for the whole world to know.”

  She drew in a ragged breath. “You hated me so much? Hated my mother so much?”

  “Of course not! You and your mother were innocent of everything. That was clear from the beginning and I was sorry you were hurt peripherally by everything. What choice did I have, though? Once I started to discover the magnitude of what your father had done, his years of corruption and greed, I had to follow through. I was an officer of the law, Lauren. I couldn’t let him get away with it.”

  “Of course you couldn’t.”

  She was suddenly exhausted, utterly wrung out. The emotional roller coaster of the evening had taken a grim turn and she wanted the hell off.

  She rose, desperate for space and distance. “You were wrong. I didn’t need to know this. I could have lived quite well the rest of my life without knowing that the man I’m…that I have feelings for is the same man who destroyed my family.”

  His features twisted with pain. “Lauren—”

  “Good night, Daniel.”

  She walked to her bedroom and closed the door gently, though it took every ounce of self-control not to slam the thing over and over to vent some of this consuming pain.

  She sank down onto the bed—the very same bed where he had just touched her, caressed her—and buried her face in her hands.

  She heard the echo of the harsh words he had said. I wanted him to pay. No, I wanted to bleed him dry.

  All these years, she had assumed correctly the awkwardness between her and Daniel had something to do with her father’s sins. She just never imagined what was beneath it all.

  Would her father’s crimes haunt her for the rest of her life? She thought tonight when she was in Daniel’s arms that she might just have a chance at happiness. Once more, like that imagery Daniel had used, the dead giant of the past was crushing her, smothering her, sucking any trace of joy from her present.

  Da
niel had been the one to shine a magnifying glass onto R.J.’s actions, the catalyst to everything that came after. If he hadn’t come home motivated by vengeance, perhaps none of the rest of it would have happened.

  She pressed a hand to her mouth to hold back the sob there. The man who had kissed her with such aching tenderness seemed a different individual from the hard-eyed stranger in her living room who had spoken of revenge and hatred.

  Intellectually, she knew she couldn’t really blame Daniel for her father’s death and for the circumstances leading up to it. R.J. had made his own choices, had created his own destiny with his arrogance and his greed.

  He couldn’t honestly have thought he could get away with stealing so much money forever, it was only a matter of time—and a dogged investigator—before he would be caught.

  R.J. had made his bed and lined it with stolen taxpayer funds. He had lied and cheated and stolen his way to a fortune. The sheer breadth of his wrongdoing still took her breath away.

  Circumstances had put Daniel in the role of that investigator. She understood he had been doing his job. And if not him, it would have been someone else on the police force or an auditor somewhere or another elected official with sharp eyes.

  But it had been Daniel. He had known, all these years, that he had set the wheels in motion that had crushed her mother and her. His investigation had resulted in her father’s last, horribly selfish act—leaving them behind to face the shambles he had created.

  Lauren curled up on her bed, hugging her arms tightly around herself. She had given her heart to the man who had destroyed her father and her family.

  She couldn’t snatch it back. It was entirely too late for that. She loved him and she couldn’t just stuff all those feelings back into her subconscious now that they had been set free to soar through her.

  She loved him. Now she just had to figure out how she could get past the brutal truth.

  And how she could spend another day trapped in this house with him, pretending her heart wasn’t broken.

  Chapter 13

  She finally fell into a restless sleep shortly before dawn. When she woke gritty-eyed and achy a few hours later, her first instinct was to cower in her bedroom all day, just drag the blankets over her head and hide away from the world.

  Or at least from Daniel.

  She knew she couldn’t. She had a guest in her home, a young, frightened girl who needed her. Lauren knew she couldn’t abandon her—for Rosa’s sake, she would have to walk out there and face him, no matter how much she dreaded it.

  She didn’t know what she could possibly say to him. She wasn’t angry with him. Somehow in the night, the worst of her betrayal had faded and she was left with only this deep sadness in her heart.

  Most of all, she hated that five years after his suicide, her father’s legacy was still tainting everything good and wonderful she wanted. She loved Daniel. Nothing had changed that.

  She loved him and as she had tossed and turned the night before, her mind raced through their interactions the last few days and she was fairly certain she saw signs that he might care for her in return.

  Could she move beyond his revelation? she wondered. Or every time she looked at his strong, beautiful features, would she see his hunger for vengeance and the chain reaction of calamities it had wrought in her life?

  She didn’t know. She hated thinking about him toiling away, digging through her family’s dirty laundry, and wondering at all the soiled linens he might have uncovered there.

  She was quite sure she still didn’t know the full story of all that her father had done. She didn’t really want to know, but she hated thinking Daniel might have all that information.

  Lauren pushed the blankets away. She wasn’t a coward. She never would have survived the rigors of med school and a grueling residency if she had been. She was strong enough to walk out there and pretend all was fine, even though she hated knowing she and Daniel would return to the tension that had marked their relationship before these last few days.

  She took a long, hot shower and spent longer than usual getting dressed, driven to take extra pains with her hair and makeup as armor against the day and the awkwardness she knew waited for her.

  Even with blush and more eye makeup than usual, she still looked haggard and worn-out, but at least her hair looked good, falling in soft waves around her face.

  She supposed a girl had to take what she could get.

  Filling her lungs with a deep, cleansing breath, she pushed open her bedroom door and prepared to spend the day with a polite smile stuck to her face, as if she had taken a staple gun to it.

  She followed the low murmur of voices and found Rosa in the kitchen talking comfortably in Spanish to another woman, with Daniel nowhere in sight.

  Rosa smiled a welcome when she saw her, as did Teresa Hendricks, the only female deputy in the sheriff’s office.

  “Hi, Teresa,” Lauren said. “This is a surprise.”

  “Morning.” Teresa gave her wide, friendly smile that made everyone trust her, good guys and bad guys alike. “The sheriff had some business in the office that couldn’t wait and asked me to come spell him for the morning. He should be back this afternoon. Hope you don’t mind that I grabbed some cocoa out of the cupboard. You’ve got quite a collection.”

  “I…no. Of course not. Do you want coffee?”

  “No. Cocoa will do me. I’m a bit of a fanatic, too.”

  That was Lauren. The crazy doctor who self-medicated with chocolate to heal all wounds.

  She had a feeling she better stock up in the coming months.

  She forced a smile for Teresa and joined them at the table. “So how are you? How are John and the kids?”

  “Great. Just great. They keep me running every minute.”

  Lauren treated Teresa’s two children at her clinic. They were great kids—Casey was ten and Mia was twelve and Lauren had been their primary care physician since she moved here five years earlier.

  Envious of Teresa’s fluency with the language, Lauren hauled out her halting Spanish to ask Rosa how she was feeling. She didn’t need to hear the girl’s answer to see that every day she seemed better.

  Something was different about her today. Her bruises were fading, but that was only part of the conversion in her. Lauren tilted her head, studying the girl. There was a new light in her eyes, something that hadn’t been there before.

  Hope, Lauren realized with a little catch in her throat. Rosa no longer wore that lost, disillusioned look in her eyes. For the first time since Rosa opened her eyes in the bed of Dale Richins’s pickup truck, she looked as if she was happy to be alive, as if she believed in a future.

  She had a long, arduous journey ahead of her, Lauren knew. But she was on her way, and that was the important thing.

  Rosa chattered something to Teresa and the deputy answered just as quickly.

  “How did you learn Spanish so well?” Lauren asked.

  “I spent a couple years in Guatemala on a church mission. I’ve lost a lot over the last fifteen years but I practice whenever I can.”

  Rosa said something and Teresa answered her and the two of them chattered away in Spanish for a moment, with Lauren catching one or two words in every sentence.

  Though after several days, Rosa seemed comfortable talking to Daniel, Lauren had never seen her talk to him with such animation. She talked to Lauren, but always with Daniel as a go-between.

  She must have been desperately missing the freedom of having another woman to converse with, Lauren realized. Had Daniel picked Teresa as his replacement for just that reason? she wondered. Because he wanted Rosa to have Spanish-speaking company to talk to?

  “Sorry,” Teresa said, making a rueful face after a moment. “Didn’t mean to exclude you.”

  “Not a problem.” She smiled. “To be honest, I’m glad you’re here to talk to her. I’m sure she’s frustrated with having to repeat everything she says to me a hundred times before I get it, or use Daniel as a trans
lator.”

  With the deputy there and Rosa in such good hands, she could escape the confines of the house for a moment.

  The thought whispered through her mind and suddenly she was desperate for a little air and to see something besides her own walls. “In fact, I have some paperwork at the clinic that I’ve put off longer than I should have. If you don’t think it’s unforgivably rude for me to leave, I would love the chance to run down there for and hour or so and try to gather some things to work on here at home tonight.”

  “No problem.” Teresa smiled. “We’ll just stay here and have a good visit while we dig into your hot chocolate stash.”

  “Mi cocoa su cocoa,” Lauren said with a smile.

  She grabbed a coat out of the closet and found her keys. Fifteen minutes later, she felt like a prisoner out on work release as she pulled her Volvo into the parking lot of the clinic. She paid a high school student to shovel off her parking lot every time it snowed. Brandon Tanner had a pickup with a plow on the front and took the job seriously, never missing a storm.

  Lauren walked through the cleared parking lot and unlocked the door to her clinic. She was here often alone by herself. Usually it didn’t bother her, but today the emptiness of it seemed to echo, giving her the creeps.

  That’s what happened when she was surrounded by people for three days. Rosa and Daniel had been a constant presence and she was just having a tough time adjusting to solitude.

  Still, she shivered and headed straight for the thermostat. She had turned it down before she left three days earlier, keeping the temperature just warm enough to keep the water pipes from freezing, but certainly not a comfortable level for anyone but a penguin.

  She turned it up, then walked to her office at the end of the hallway.

  She was proud of what she had done here. She ran an efficient, effective operation. Though she still had her detractors, many more people in the community trusted her than didn’t. She treated their grandchildren, their grandparents, and everyone in between.

  She was good at her job and she loved her patients, something most big-city physicians couldn’t understand. She was invested in their lives, in their health.