His eyebrows rose. “Everything okay?”
“Wonderful. Couldn’t be better.” She went to her bedroom and, with great restraint, closed the door carefully instead of slamming it.
For a moment, only silence came from the living room.
She flung herself into her chair and began rocking, desperate for some comfort.
The low sound of their voices came through the door. She could just imagine what they were saying.
She loved this chair. She’d had it upholstered with fabric she’d brought back from Africa. I’ll have to leave it behind, she realized. In fact, this time she’d have to leave behind everything she couldn’t slip into her messenger bag. Naomi was surprised at the way her heart cramped as she looked around at the objects she’d collected. They meant more than she’d understood. The few she’d been able to bring along gave her a sense of continuity, a sort of reassurance that she was still the same person she’d been. The bits and pieces she’d acquired since had given her the sense of home she so desperately needed. This time, she couldn’t take anything.
My cookbooks!
She hugged herself. Most could be replaced. And…she’d learned an important lesson. Whatever she did with her life after this would not involve cooking. Apparently that had been her biggest mistake. She wouldn’t make it again.
I don’t know how to do anything else.
Sure she did. She could type or answer a phone. If undocumented aliens cleaned hotel rooms, that meant a lot of hotels paid under the table. She could do that, too. Heck, she could wait tables. She could set up a housecleaning business. Go back to school, once she had a new identity. She’d find something.
Worry about that later.
The voices diminished, and she knew Daniel Colburn was leaving, abandoning her to Adam Rostov. Who made her heart race and her blood thicken. Who’d made her trust him, when all the time he was deceiving her because he suspected her of murdering his partner.
Which she had.
For now, she’d distracted him, but she knew that wouldn’t last. He, too, would want to know how Frank Donahue and his killer came to be in her closed restaurant.
Naomi squeezed her eyes shut and then opened them quickly, shuddering, when all she saw on the back of her eyelids was the change to that weary, regretful face in the split second when he knew he was dying. She’d never actually seen anyone die before, and hoped she never did again.
A knock on her bedroom door had her stiffening.
“Naomi?” His gritty voice was both matter-of-fact and gentle. “I’m going to make something to eat. Are you hungry?”
Her stomach growled. She didn’t want to sit down with him for a meal, but she had to eat. Pretending to cooperate would be smart anyway. She called, “I’ll be out.”
He must have stood there for a minute, but finally she heard his footsteps recede. With a sigh, she stood and followed him to the kitchen.
“I can cook,” she said to his back. He’d found a frying pan and set it on the stove.
He glanced at her, shook his head and reached into one of half a dozen grocery bags that had appeared on her counter. “You’re hurt. Sit. I can do hamburgers and baked beans. I even have buns.”
It actually sounded good. “You brought your own groceries.”
“No sense in letting the food I bought go to waste.” He poked in several bags. “Damn it, I know I have an onion.”
“If not, I do, in the bottom drawer.”
He gave up on his bags and took one of her onions. A minute later he had canned baked beans warming in a saucepan and hamburgers sizzling on the burner. He sliced the onion and a tomato, tore lettuce and set out a small jar of mustard. “No catsup, unless you have some.”
“No.”
He’d changed from sweatpants to faded jeans, but still wore the same long-sleeve black T-shirt. Black…suited him, she thought, remembering the comparison with Elias Burton, whom she’d always imagined as an archangel. So golden, and almost too beautiful to look at. And yet, she’d often thought, his paintings gave away how much darkness he carried inside. With Adam, she couldn’t tell. He was too guarded. She knew now that the times she’d thought he was being open, he’d been lying.
For all her anger, she couldn’t seem to look away from him, lean, strong, with a leashed grace in his movements that made her wonder if he did martial arts. Dark stubble emphasized the hollows beneath his cheekbones and made her realize he’d shaved a second time the night they went out to dinner. She had laid her hand on that hard jaw when he kissed her—
“What would you like to drink?” he asked, jarring her from a memory that was both erotic and painful.
Bastard.
“Just water.”
She turned her head and fixed her gaze on the Chamber of Commerce calendar that hung at the end of the wall-hung cabinets. November featured a photo of the sand dunes across Mist River from town. Naomi was startled to realize she should have flipped the page – it was December now.
Didn’t matter; she wouldn’t make any of the appointments scribbled in the little squares.
He dropped some ice cubes in her water and poured milk for himself. In a matter of minutes, he was setting plates on the table. Her mouth watered as she inhaled.
“You seem to know what you’re doing in the kitchen,” she said stiffly.
“Eating out all the time gets old. I can do the basics. I’d rather eat almost anything you cooked, though.”
Why she felt compelled to make stilted conversation, Naomi had no idea, but she said, “Almost anything?”
“I’ve never much liked seafood. Fish of any kind. Or cooked cabbage or spinach.” He took a bite of his burger and appeared to mull over his tastes as he chewed. “I’m afraid I’m a traditionalist. I like knowing what’s in anything I put in my mouth.”
Under other circumstances, she might have smiled. “You’re one of those people who’s happy to see macaroni and cheese on the menu.”
The corner of his mouth curled, although his eyes remained watchful. “Yeah. I admit it.”
“I…don’t do much with fish myself.”
“I noticed.”
She bet he’d noticed a whole lot.
She set down her own burger. “Why are you so sure your partner wasn’t on Greg’s payroll?”
Anger flashed in his eyes. “Because I knew Frank. We’d worked together for almost three years. He never let me down.”
She studied her food instead of him. “Was he married?”
“Yeah,” Adam said gruffly. “Three kids. Two still in college.”
She didn’t say anything.
“He grumbled about how much it cost.” He knew what she was thinking. “But Frank, sell out so he didn’t have to borrow money? That’s bullshit!”
She nodded, even though he was wrong. Frank Donahue had been willing to kill an innocent woman in cold blood for money. What other explanation was there?
What if I was wrong? What if—? But she wasn’t wrong. He’d regretted what he was going to do, but he had every intention of doing it anyway.
“What I can’t understand is why he went after Cobb on his own.” Adam almost sounded as if he was talking to himself. Repeating a conversation he’d had over and over. “Why didn’t he call me? After I heard, I checked my phone. No messages, no missed calls.” The pain in his gritty voice brought her head up. “He had to know I’d come.”
“Had…you ever investigated Greg? I mean, how would Frank even have known about him?”
The pain was in his eyes, too, along with dark fury. “Cobb has come close to being arrested half a dozen times. If he doesn’t have an unbeatable alibi, witnesses recant. Every cop in southern California knows who he is.”
“I really was a fool then.” She’d only taken a few bites, and was losing her appetite.
He hesitated. “Journalists have been careful. I don’t know if they’re scared of him, or just of lawsuits. Even if you’d done a search, you wouldn’t have come up with much.”<
br />
She might have been comforted had it not been for that hesitation. The one that said, Hell, yes, you were a fool. Plus, there was what he’d said earlier: It didn’t once cross your mind that meant he might be bad news?
It should have crossed her mind. Greg had been too vague about what his business was. She’d let herself get sucked in by how flatteringly interested he was in her business. About his tales of international travel. He’d been charmingly self-deprecating even though he exuded arrogance.
She’d been stupid. Call a spade a spade.
“How long had you been seeing him?”
“I told you. He’d been dining at my restaurant for a year or more. He’d brought women he was seeing or entertained what I assumed were other businessmen. When he found out the restaurant was available for private parties, he booked that same room four or five times, maybe. But he asked me out the first time only about a month before that night. I worked almost every day, and supposedly he was out of town for a week in there. We’d gone out only a few times. Dinner, when I was off. He thought I’d like to try other restaurants.”
Adam’s eyes flickered. Both of them were remembering that he’d suggested the same thing when he asked her out.
“Once he took me to his house at Malibu. It was right on the beach. We bodysurfed, then his housekeeper laid out a really lavish lunch.”
“After which she made herself scarce.” His tone was dry.
This was none of his business, but for some reason she told him anyway. “Yes, but I’d gotten sunburned. I burn easily. Even if I’d wanted to, there was no way.”
“Did you want to?”
“What difference does it make to you?” Naomi cried. He was the one who didn’t say anything this time, but he didn’t look away, either. It was her who finally did.
“No,” she said softly. “I was glad to have an excuse. I…couldn’t figure out why I— I mean, he really is good looking. Athletic, smart. He can talk about anything. He was openly interested in me but also…patient. I kept making excuses, even to myself.”
“You wondered what was under the surface.”
She hadn’t thought of it that way, but it was true that she never felt as if she really knew him. She remembered that night thinking how cold and flat his eyes were. The windows to the soul. She’d never seen his soul.
“He claimed his father was an international businessman, and that he’d grown up around the world. He said he spoke half a dozen languages. He had that confidence. Was any of it true?”
“To some degree. His father owns a couple of import-export stores, and he takes buying trips. He’s pretty small time, though. Greg and his mother probably went with him on occasion, but mostly he grew up in Akron, Ohio. Dad’s stores are in Cleveland and Akron. Greg was smart, won a National Merit Scholarship. He went to Ohio State, where he majored in business. He ended up with an MBA.”
“He did say he had an MBA.”
“Did he tell you he was on the pistol target shooting team at Ohio State, too? Won a lot of medals.” Cynicism and rage burned in Adam’s gray eyes. “He got a useful education in more than one way.”
“You really think he killed your partner. But he was stabbed, not shot.” With my knife. The one that had my fingerprints on it.
“I doubt Cobb himself killed Frank. I suspect he kills only when he earns a great deal of money to pull the trigger himself. Even then, he may not do it himself anymore. Most contract killers are loners. They either live like ghosts, or they have a boring, everyday identity. Cobb’s different. He has employees. According to my FBI friend, he’s got his fingers in the drug trade now.”
No wonder Adam had been disgusted with her. What universe had she lived in, dating the head of a drug cartel? “And I thought I could hold him off with my little video,” she murmured. “I bargained with him. How funny is that?”
“Funny is not the word that comes to mind.”
“No.” Naomi shook her head, more to clear it than in denial. “So…you don’t think he killed James Heath himself?”
“A high profile client like that? Yeah, I think he might have offered personal service. So to speak.”
Naomi pushed her plate away. Adam looked at it, then at her, expression regretful.
“We shouldn’t have talked about this while we were eating. I’m sorry.”
Her stomach turned over. Frank Donahue had regretted what he felt he had to do, too. And maybe Adam’s motives were pure, but she had no doubt he would be as ruthless in his own way. He was consumed by his quest. If she got trampled underfoot, he might be regretful, but he wasn’t about to let any danger to her divert him.
I’m pretending to be cooperative, remember?
“We’d have both been thinking about it. I’m not a big eater, anyway.”
“So you said.”
“I hardly ever sit down to a real meal, like I did—” She stopped. With you. “Mostly I taste when I’m cooking, and that’s enough.”
“All right.” He sounded unexpectedly kind.
I can’t do this anymore. She stood and carried her plate to the sink, awkwardly scraping the leftovers into the trash, then rinsing it. When she started out of the kitchen, he said, “Don’t go yet.”
“Why?”
“There are things I want to say.”
She stopped to gather herself, then turned. “Things.”
“Yeah.” Color rose to his cheeks, unless she was imagining it.
All she wanted was to get away, but she almost had to go back to the table and sit down.
His eyes narrowed. “You hurt.”
“I was going to take one of the pills and go to bed.” Which was the truth. Escape wasn’t happening tonight, and maybe the pain pill would help her sleep. It would help to be well-rested when the chance came to run.
With chagrin, she knew that, pills or no, she wouldn’t have slept at all if he hadn’t been here. Even though he was a threat to her in one way, he also made her feel safe.
“I’ll get you one.” He stood. “Where are they?”
“In the bathroom.”
He returned a moment later with the bottle and shook a pill out into her hand. She swallowed it, using the glass of water she’d hardly touched.
Resuming his seat, Adam frowned down at his plate. “You accused me of lying to you. I did lie about one thing.”
“What was that?”
The eyes that met hers were wary. “My parents. The way I grew up.”
“Why would you lie about them?” she asked in astonishment.
“I was trying to give us something in common.”
“The constant moves.”
“Yeah.” He grimaced. “I’m sorry.”
“You made that all up.” I am so gullible. She’d lashed out at him without really believing he’d lied about everything.
“No, I borrowed. Juan Ramirez is a good friend of mine. He’s with S.L.P.D. too. I’ve been lucky because his parents have sort of adopted me. I was talking about them.”
“The aphids.”
His mouth twisted. “Yeah.”
She wouldn’t ask him about his parents. He and she weren’t friends.
“My dad was a cop,” he said abruptly. “L.A.P.D. When I was eight or nine, he lost his job. He’d been accused of being on the take. He denied it. Said he was a scapegoat, or he’d been chosen as cover for guys who really were dirty. We ended up moving to this dusty, nothing town almost on the Mexican border where he got hired as sheriff.” Adam told the story in a near-monotone, but she heard the perplexed, scared boy he’d been. “He was bitter, started boozing. A familiar story. Mom got quieter and quieter. I tried to find places to be besides home.” He fell silent, expression brooding.
Finally, Naomi couldn’t help herself. “What happened?”
He met her gaze. “When I was fourteen, he killed himself.” His jaw muscles flexed. “The bastards who blackened his name killed him.”
Connecting the dots, Naomi wanted to bang her head on the tabl
e. I am doomed. She knew, but asked anyway. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you told me about a tough childhood, and I lied. I didn’t feel good about it.” His jaw tightened again, before he finished. “There’s been talk about Frank. I won’t see Frank’s family go through what we did.”
It was almost funny. She’d think the perfect storm that was her life couldn’t get worse, and it did. Now she knew: Adam really was on a crusade, with Frank standing in for his father.
Tasting bitterness, she said, “So you want to prove I’m guilty of something horrible so you can clear your partner of suspicion. But being a stand-up guy yourself, you’d like to think you’ve been completely honest while you’re going about it.” She rose to her feet, furious and exhausted and feeling hopeless all at the same time. She let her lip curl. “God forbid you should have anything to feel guilty about.” Then she walked out, hearing nothing but silence behind her.
*****
Shaken by the expression on Naomi’s face right before she left the kitchen, Adam didn’t move for a long time. What he didn’t like was the knowledge that she was right; he’d wanted her to be… How had he labeled her? An amoral bitch. Yeah, he’d convinced himself that’s what she was, because it was the easiest answer. He couldn’t get to Greg Cobb, but he could get to Naomi Varner slash Kendrick.
Oh, yeah, he thought, I got to her all right. What he’d done was lie, and then kiss her as if he hadn’t been able to help himself. As if he’d needed to kiss her more than he needed to eat or sleep or breathe.
And now he was more confused than he’d ever been in his life. She was nothing like he’d assumed. What he’d found was a complex, vulnerable, courageous, proud woman who, against all evidence, he believed.
For two years, she had defied Greg Cobb and gotten away with it. That was miraculous. She’d have lost eventually, of course; in fact, one thing he hadn’t lied about was his conviction that she’d already be dead if he hadn’t followed her when she set off on that run.
He knew something else: she hated him, and for good reason. He had lied, if mostly by omission, he’d manipulated her, and he did want to use her as bait.
See How She Runs (A Cape Trouble Novel Book 2) Page 12
