“I’ll get it.” Ashley jumped up and smashed half a dozen crackers beneath her heel. She laughed so she didn’t cry with humiliation. “I’ll get the broom for sure.” She retrieved it from the utility room and returned to sweep up crumbs and crackers.
Hunter took the broom and dustpan from her. “I’ll do it. I think the noodles might be done.”
The noodles were definitely done. She managed to pour them into the colander without incident, then mixed them with the soup heating on the stove after being defrosted in the microwave. She ladled the fragrant broth and chunks of chicken into bowls. By the time she carried them to the table, Hunter had the cracker crumbs cleaned up and the broom stowed away.
He drew out her chair as though they were dining at a fine restaurant. “Sit and relax.”
“Th-thank you.” Ashley slid onto her chair, not sure she could eat with her head and heart whirling around each other in confusion.
Since when did men draw out chairs for her? Maybe Daddy last time he was home? One of her brothers? Certainly not her last date.
But she was hungry. That candy bar was a long time ago and far from substantial.
She rested her hands on the edge of the ancient wood table. “Do you ask the blessing over meals?”
“I do. Would you like me to ask it?”
Ashley nodded.
He kept it short and to the point, his melodious voice calm and sincere as he prayed for Mary Kate’s and Boyd’s recovery, for blessings upon the men who had helped them, for their meal together.
Their meal together. Ashley shouldn’t make too much of it. He wanted her help, and once his curiosity about his stranger was satisfied, he would be gone to some other part of the U.S. or some exotic country. Which was just as well. She would be off to Richmond or DC.
Hoping the heat of the soup would loosen the knot in her middle, she took up her spoon and dipped it into her bowl. Across from her, Hunter did the same. They ate in silence for several minutes, hungry, needing sustenance, needing warmth.
Then Hunter set down his spoon and reached for his cup. “Now that you don’t look like a human icicle anymore, will you tell me why you are so sure that man in the black truck deliberately ran us off the road?”
CHAPTER 17
HUNTER NEEDED THE conversation to focus on something serious, something that conjured cold and rain and SUVs caught in the mud. If he didn’t focus on the unpleasant, he would fall into the abyss of the pleasurable, mainly gazing at Ashley in a soft pink sweater that emphasized her feminine curves, and her hair, that glorious waterfall of golden brown that was far more than either gold or brown. It rippled. It flowed. It shone in the overhead light. Mostly, it beckoned him to bury his hands in its luxury.
“You made a report with the deputy.” He looked into her eyes behind lashes he would have suspected were fake if he saw them on any other female. “Why? Just for careless driving?”
She toyed with her spoon but didn’t lift it or set it on her plate. “I could have. It’s a serious offense, especially in the mountains on these treacherous roads.”
“Yes, and he wouldn’t have taken it so seriously.”
“No.” She set her spoon on the plate beneath her bowl and picked up her sandwich. A healthy bite gave her time to come up with an answer.
“Unless it’s something you can’t tell me.” He resumed eating, filling a hollowness he sometimes thought had no top or bottom.
A hollowness he knew had a name other than hunger—loneliness.
She swallowed some coffee, then some water, then folded her hands together on the edge of the table. “I can tell you because it’s a police report, so it’s public knowledge. A month ago a man and woman showed up at my door. Jane and John Davis.”
Hunter snorted. “Not particularly creative of them.”
“Not the type to be creative. The woman was in labor. I should say girl. If she was eighteen I’ll turn in my license. She said nothing. He didn’t say much. I had to deliver the baby and did. She seemed healthy enough, but the mother was bleeding . . .” She glanced at his half-finished supper. “This isn’t good table conversation.”
“I’m not squeamish.”
“I’m not either. We all grew up with earthy dialogue around the table. I mean, polite, not foul, but—medical stuff. Baby stuff.”
“We talked politics around ours.” He thought a moment. “I think I might have preferred the physical. It’s more human.”
“Ah.” She relaxed enough to remove her hands from the table and resume spooning up soup between lines of her story. “The girl started bleeding. I wanted to get her to the hospital immediately. But I went to get my Tahoe ready—the man had a truck with only the front seat, so we couldn’t take her and the baby and me in it—and when I was outside calling the hospital, another truck, a jacked-up pickup, came roaring up the driveway. It nearly ran me down. And he—Mr. Davis—took off with mother and baby in another truck.”
“Are you serious?” He set his cup on the table with more force than he intended. “What kind of a fool would do that?”
“One running? But from whom or what I don’t know. I mean, obviously the man in the F-150, but why . . .” She shuddered visibly. “A couple of weeks ago I came home to find my kitchen table overturned like someone’d had a temper tantrum, and . . . and—” Her face paled, and her spoon clattered into her bowl. “A man grabbed me around the neck and demanded to know where the Davises were.”
Adrenaline surged through Hunter, and he shoved his chair back as though he could find the man who had assaulted her and grab him around the neck. He gripped the edge of the table instead. “Why are you staying here alone?”
“People need to find me.” Her voice sounded matter-of-fact, but she gripped her spoon again and stirred her soup as though needing to turn it into whipped cream by hand. “That girl needed me, and if I hadn’t been here . . .” She finally spooned up a mouthful of noodles.
She bowed her head, hiding her face behind that waterfall of hair. “I failed her. If she didn’t get medical care, I am so afraid she couldn’t have survived.”
“That’s terrible.” He reached across the table and touched her hand. “But it wasn’t your fault.”
“I don’t blame myself, and still . . .” Her head shot up and tears filled her eyes. “That baby is in foster care, not with her mother, and that girl is nowhere to be found, possibly dead. I didn’t even know her name, except for Davis.”
He cast her a questioning glance. “How do you know that’s her name?”
“The man who assaulted me here, the one I think belongs to that truck, asked where the Davises are.”
“Ashley.” He reached across the table and touched her hand, wanting to clasp it, hold her with another surge of protectiveness. “If he’s the same guy who tried to run us off the road today, this is dangerous.”
“I know. I know.” Her lower lip quivered. “But I keep thinking about that girl and the man with her . . . Hunter, she’d been beaten, and I did too little to help her.”
“You tried—”
“I didn’t try hard enough.” She shot to her feet and began to clear away the dishes. “I’m sure I could have done something more.”
“What?” Hunter stood and joined her at the counter. “They ran off.”
“They were chased off. And that man’s still looking for them.”
“Why? If he’s the same one who tried to run us off the road, why would he risk it?”
“He seems to think I know more abut the Davises than I do.”
“And why is catching them so important?”
She set a stack of dishes in the sink before facing him. “I believe I smelled meth production chemicals on Mr. Davis.”
“Meth? Here? I thought moonshine was the illegal substance in the mountains.”
“Stereotyping.” She half smiled. “And a lot of that still goes on. But meth is cheaper and easier to make and transport and hide.”
“And dangerous.”
“It’s bad here. Lots of places to tuck away a trailer down in these hollers.”
He tried not to smile at the way she turned the word hollow into holler. So mountain. So adorable.
Hunter crossed to the table and cleared away the salad containers to give himself a moment to think, gather the snippets of data Ashley had given him and collate them into some sort of logic. By the time he had placed the remains of salad in the fridge, he could at least put the information into sequence.
Turning back to her, he said, “A man and woman show up here at midnight. The woman gives birth, has some kind of trouble, and you go outside to call the hospital. Why outside?”
“My landline wasn’t working.” She braced the palms of her hands on the granite countertop and leaned toward the kitchen window. Light reflected off the night-black glass, showing her face taut and pale. “I learned later that my phone line had been cut.”
“Your landline was cut and you’re staying here alone still?” He wanted to beat his head against the wall at her stubbornness. “Ashley—”
The look of impatience she shot him reminded him he had no power to stop her from doing anything. They had barely crossed the line into friendship, if they had crossed it, and this wasn’t a mere interlude in both their lives until he found the source of the strange phone calls.
“All right.” He took a deep breath to calm himself. “Before you can leave with the woman and baby, they are chased off. So what does this have to do with the pregnant woman and the man smelling like meth chemicals?” He tilted his head. “How do you know what those smell like anyway?”
“Jase told me when I said he smelled like a cat box.”
Hunter grimaced.
“So this has something to do with illegal drug production?”
Ashley nodded. “I think so.”
“And where does the woman come in?”
“Bad timing for her?” Ashley smiled. “Labor often is.”
“I guess it probably is.” He smiled, too, then sobered at once. “So why run you off the road? Do you think he recognized your Tahoe?”
“He’d seen it here.” She hugged her arms across her chest and rubbed them. “He might have just wanted to get where he was going in a hurry.”
“He came back pretty quick.”
“Return trip from a drug run? A lead on the Davises?” She rubbed harder.
Hunter wanted to wrap his arms around her for comfort, for protection, because he wanted to hold her.
He settled for leaning against the counter in front of her. “But you were afraid he was going to follow us.”
She nodded. “He thinks I know something I don’t.” Her gaze strayed to the blackness beyond the window.
Too much blackness outside that window. She’d been assaulted in daylight, let alone in the dark, where her cell phone only worked outside and her landline was easily disabled.
“Ashley, I know you want to be where you’re needed, but isn’t your safety more important?”
“Than my patients? No.”
“Can you forward your calls?”
“Yes, but if someone comes to the door—”
“It could be someone you don’t want at your door.” He didn’t bother to hide his impatience. “I don’t know about around here, but people get murdered for people in the city thinking they know something about drug dealing.”
“But—” She broke off, sighed, and nodded. “I can go to Heather’s house. Her husband is out of town.”
“I’d feel better about it.”
“But the cats need to be fed.”
“I don’t know a lot about cats, but I understand that they are independent enough to leave for long periods of time given enough water and food.”
“True.” She glanced toward the two felines who sprawled on a rug just outside the kitchen door. “They get along with one another pretty well.” She rose. “Let me text Heather.” She pulled her phone from her pocket and began to fly her thumbs over the screen.
Hunter wet a sponge at the faucet and began to wipe down the table and counter.
Ashley’s phone chimed. She input some more, then shoved it back into the pocket of her jeans. “I can go there. She’s feeling kind of lonely without her husband. That way I can get to Mary Kate early, too, make sure she’s doing all right.”
“She’ll need a ride home.”
“If they release her.”
Hunter rinsed off their plates. “Dishwasher?”
“You might find room in it. I didn’t run it earlier.” She took the plate from him and opened the dishwasher. “But you don’t need to be doing this for me. I can clean up. You probably want to get going.”
“Yes ma’am, I’m in a hurry to watch reruns on a hotel room TV.”
“I expect you are.”
They shared a smile. Hunter’s heart went into overdrive. For a moment, breathless, all he could do was gaze at her, the delicate lines of her face, the flawlessness of her complexion, the masses of her hair. He raised one hand, aching to touch the nearest strand lying on her shoulder, then managed to keep reaching and picked up a coffee cup and wedged it into the nearly full dishwasher.
“You’re doing an amazing job loading that dishwasher. Were you good at Tetris as a child?”
He laughed, equilibrium restored to his senses—for now, as long as he wasn’t looking at her. “I was a great Tetris player. You?”
“Terrible. I’m not good at anything I can’t touch. I even write reports and papers in longhand before I put them into the computer.”
“I’ve been a computer guy all my life. Got my first one when I was seven.”
“I was about seven when Momma got one. Gramma never used it, though. Her notes are all handwritten.” She sounded a little breathless. “I think I’ll go pack.” Without another word, she fled the room and raced up the steps.
Had he made her run, or was she anxious to get away from potential danger? More danger?
He hoped she wasn’t running from him. Besides needing her help to find the woman on the phone, he wanted to get to know her better, spend more time with her. Which was ridiculous. She was headed for med school, and he traveled too much to get to know anyone well.
The emptiness that had plagued him since learning how the McDermotts had deceived him about his parentage washed over him, and he drew out a chair to sit and wait for Ashley. A cat leaped onto his lap. Tentatively, he stroked his back. No, her. It was a calico. Somewhere he’d read that calicoes were almost always female. She began to purr like a hemi engine and gazed up at him with big green eyes. The warmth of her fur, the rumble of her purr soothed him. Perhaps he should get a cat, something to keep him company.
A thud drew his attention away from the feline. Ashley stood in the doorway, eyes wide. “She normally doesn’t like strangers.”
“I fed her.”
“Maybe that’s it.”
He stood, the cat in his arms. She didn’t jump down. Instead, she crawled onto his shoulder and poked her cold, wet nose against his ear.
Ashley laughed. “You’re a cat person.”
“Not to my knowledge.” He extricated the feline from his sweater and set her on the floor.
With an indignant “Ma-row” she stalked away, her tail straight up.
“That makes me feel guilty.” Hunter pulled his jacket from the back of a chair. “Do you need to take your medical equipment with you?”
“I always do. I never know when I’ll need it.”
“Then let me help.” He stepped into the exam room where her cases still stood. “Where does your friend live?”
“Right in town.” Ashley wheeled her bag toward the door. “You met her Tuesday night. Heather. Tall, gorgeous blonde. She’s a midwife who works for a local ob-gyn.”
“No house calls in the . . . er . . . hollers?”
“Office and hospital work only.” Ashley held the door open for him since both his hands were full. “I’d get claustrophobic doing that.”
“So ho
w will you manage med school and a residency?”
She paused in the process of locking the door. “Lots of walks?”
“If you can get out of the hospital.”
“I know.” She paused beside him on the top step of the deck. The sky had cleared to reveal the countless stars’ glow unimpeded by ambient light from town. Other than the whisper of the wind through the bare branches of the trees, the night was still and silent. Washed clean from the rain, the air smelled crisp and sweet, a little spicy.
“I don’t know how my brother and sister and parents spend their days behind desks or in restaurants. I need to smell dirt and water and fresh air.”
“I survived undergrad in the city.” She moved, and her arm brushed his. “Though I admit I had time then to get out of the city and ride my bike on the W and OD Trail.”
He caught her reference to the retired Washington and Old Dominion railroad bed turned into a bike and walking path and decided to test her prowess as a cyclist.
“From Shirlington to Purcellville?”
“All forty-five miles or whatever it is.”
“Round trip?”
“Of course.” She smiled up at him.
He caught hold of her hand. The starlight and clear autumn night and the way he was beginning to feel about her demanded the contact. Her fingers lay tense in his for a moment, then relaxed. For several minutes, they said nothing, standing side by side until the intensity of the contact seemed to draw the oxygen from the air as though they stood at five thousand feet, not a thousand.
He released her and said lightly, “A girl after my own heart who goes on a ninety-mile bike ride for the fun of it.”
“Th-the trail’s easy.” He didn’t miss the little stammer to her voice.
His pulse echoed that hitch in rhythm. He moved away from her, not at all ready to feel this way about her, or any lady. He needed to get his own head together about his past and where he belonged in the future.
“I’ve got to find this woman claiming to be Sheila Brooks.” As he spoke, he heard the desperation in his own voice.
CHAPTER 18
WHAT IS GOING on?” Heather pounced on Ashley the minute she stepped onto the wide, wooden boards of the Penvenans’ porch.
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