by Dana Marton
She played catch with him outside for a while. Fresh air was important for kids, and movement too. She didn’t want her son to grow up in front of the TV.
Joe made a dozen calls and worked on his laptop, tracking down leads for a case. She figured it had to do with his friend’s death and stayed out of his way.
When dinnertime came, she made chicken and rice and invited Joe to join them.
“I meant what I said about not giving you extra work.”
She shook her head. “I have to cook no matter what. It’s no extra effort to put another plate on the table.”
She’d worked hard at improving her cooking skills and enjoyed creating a healthy meal for herself and her son. The kitchen at Keith’s penthouse had been for show. He ate out every night, liked to network, liked to show off his model girlfriend. Starting to cook was another way to assert her independence and make her own choices.
“All right.” Joe sat by the table. “But then we’ll take turns at cooking.”
She wasn’t going to hold her breath on that. He was a nice guy, but he was still a jock and had probably been surrounded by women most of his life. She doubted he’d done much work in the kitchen.
But he did help her clean up after dinner, then played ball with her son until she took Justin upstairs to give him a bath. She read him a picture book, then he “read it” back to her, more or less. He knew the words by heart. He was so proud of himself.
Then, of course, as his reward, she had to sing the sheep song, complete with the bleating. She sincerely hoped Joe couldn’t hear that.
Once Justin was asleep, she went back downstairs to settle down in front of the computer.
Joe was watching the local news. He glanced over to her. “Checking out colleges for Justin already?”
She turned the screen from him on reflex. She didn’t want him to mock her for trying to take some college classes. But since he’d caught the college logo already, she had to say something.
“It’s an online class.” She swallowed. “For me. Digital photography. Manipulating digital images.”
He raised a questioning eyebrow. “Want to know what it’d be like on the other end of the camera?”
She rubbed her palm over her knee. “Do you think it’s stupid? Modeling is not exactly a steady, long-term occupation. Photography isn’t much better, is it? There’s a reason for the expression starving artist.”
But he didn’t rush to say that she better rethink it. Instead, he said, “If you’re looking to branch out, you could check the Broslin Tourist Board’s website. They have a photo contest each year with some pretty good prize money. And if you win, you might get some commissions for flyers from local businesses. Weather’s supposed to be nice this week. I’ll show you and Justin around. You could snap some pictures. We have art shows twice a year at the high school. You could put up photos there and sell some, maybe.”
Okay, that completely overwhelmed her. “Why do you want to help me?”
“Why wouldn’t I? Not everybody has an agenda, Wendy.”
She nodded uncertainly.
He relaxed back in his seat. “How did you get into modeling?”
God, that seemed like a lifetime ago. “I was discovered in a shopping mall in Upstate New York when I was sixteen. It felt like winning the lottery. I had to move to New York City, everything arranged by the agency.”
“Your parents must have been worried.”
“Oh God. My mother cried her eyes out. But I was living in a dream and talked them into letting me go. What sixteen-year-old doesn’t think that she’s ready for anything?” She flashed a half smile. “They simply didn’t have the energy to fight me. My mother was forty-five when I was born, my father fifty-five. By the time I was a teen, they were planning retirement.”
He nodded. “Mine passed on last year. Dad had colon cancer. Mom died of a broken heart three months later. Her heart just stopped.” His brows furrowed. “She wasn’t even sick.”
Oh. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
He looked toward the window, silent for a moment before turning back to her. “Was modeling as glamorous as you thought it would be?”
And he waited for the response, as if really interested in her, not just being polite about it.
“As glamorous as expected,” she told him, “but more cruel. I was never tall enough, definitely not skinny enough. If a picture doesn’t come out right, it’s always the model’s fault. You’re assumed to be empty-headed and superficial, and definitely easy. Some of the clients routinely came around to ask for dates. Models who declined were struck from the roster with one excuse or the other.”
She shrugged. “What I remember most of the early years was the hunger. I was expected to lose weight. Endlessly. If a model has to drink, do drugs, smoke, or throw up on a regular basis, she’s expected to do it and keep her mouth shut about it. In the world of high fashion, appearance is everything.”
He held her gaze. “That had to be difficult.”
“Early on, I was so dazzled by the city, by the sparkles, I barely noticed anything else. Later….” She pressed her lips together. “Having no voice, no choice in even the most personal things became difficult. Others controlled the color and length of my hair, the makeup I put on, and the clothes I wore.”
Her career had never been her own, not from the moment she’d signed on the dotted line at age sixteen, next to her mother’s signature as guardian.
“My career belonged to the agency. My time belonged to the customer. My body wasn’t my own. Even my fears weren’t my own. I was asked once to pose naked, wrapped in giant snakes. I just had to suck it up and do it.”
She folded her hands on her lap. “Big boo-hoo, right? Being a model and living on the top of the world. People would kill for a chance like that. It’s not like doing shift work in a factory. I was lucky.”
His face remained expressionless. “You were a kid. All that had to be scary.”
Sometimes it had been. Other times, the city and the job were exhilarating. “I met Keith in New York.”
He waited a beat. “How old were you then?”
“Eighteen. He was older, educated, sophisticated. He knew about wine and could quote black-and-white art movies.” She’d thought Keith was her knight in shining armor. “When he walked in on a client manhandling me in the hallway, Keith put the man in his place and threatened to rip off his head if he came near me again.”
Keith had been her protector. He’d been a real man, not like the boys her age she’d been partying with.
“How old was he?”
“Thirty-four.”
“He seduced you,” Joe said in a flat tone.
“It wasn’t like that. We were friends first.” He’d been kind back then, interesting, exciting. “Apartment prices being what they are in New York, I rented with three other models who were more into the party scene than I was. Drinking, some light drugs, bringing home strange men.”
She made a face. “When Keith eventually offered his plush apartment, it was like a Cinderella story come true. He wooed me, and I fell for it.”
She’d been so incredibly happy for a while. The happiest she’d ever been. But then he told off more of her clients. And then he told off her agent. He went behind her back and canceled photo shoots that he didn’t think were appropriate.
“Eventually, my agency dropped me. At around the same time, Keith’s company was opening a new office in Wilmington, and he was transferred to a more senior position here. He asked me to come with him.”
The New York fashion world was for airheaded whores, he’d told her. In a smaller city, she’d find more family-centric work. They could spend more time together. He tossed the word family around until she was dreaming about white weddings.
But that wasn’t what she got after they’d moved from New York to Wilmington. Keith became more and more controlling, and she didn’t have her New York friends for support. She had nobody she could go to for help.
Joe turned off the TV, although the news wasn’t over yet. “When you met him, you were so used to others controlling every aspect of your life, it seemed natural to give him control over everything.”
Her first instinct was to deny that, but she couldn’t. Honestly, she was just trying her best not to cry, because, by some miracle, Joe seemed to understand. Not only did he know that she’d been weak, stupid, had let herself be abused, but somehow he didn’t judge her for it. She pressed her lips together.
He pushed to his feet and strode to the window to look out, his face inscrutable. “I’ll go check on things outside.”
Okay, just because he understood her, it didn’t mean he was interested. He was probably bored with her silly story. Of course he was. This was nothing but babysitting for him. He probably had a lot better things to do, with people a lot more interesting than her.
“Won’t your girlfriend miss you tonight?” she asked from her desk. “You can go. Seriously.”
“No girlfriend. That’d interfere with my hordes of other women,” he said in a dry tone.
Oh God. He probably thought that she’d been fishing for information. “None of my business,” she rushed to say, but he was already through the door and she didn’t think he heard her.
Great. Now he probably thought she was after him.
Chapter Five
Joe closed the door behind him and stood on the front stoop for a minute. So there. He could be in the same room with her, want to throw her over his shoulder and carry her off to bed, and he could still remain professional and walk away.
The street was quiet, no cars. The sky stretched clear over Broslin, its onyx bowl dotted with stars. He loved his town, loved every damn thing about it.
Wendy took him for a small-town jock. So maybe he was. He liked beautiful women. Frankly, he didn’t see the crime in it. Her opinion of him shouldn’t have mattered. It didn’t matter.
He checked his gun, then walked around in the cold night air. He’d spent too much time on work lately, especially with the undercover gig. He needed to go out and have some fun. He hadn’t been out with a woman in a while. Since that night with Wendy.
That can’t be right. He squinted his eyes, turning his face up to the sky. Had it been that long? Huh. It had been.
A couple of weeks ago, the new waitress at the diner had asked him out for coffee, but he’d been busy. Then there’d been that old high school flame who’d been looking to rekindle things. He’d put her off too, had wanted to do extra research on the Brant Street Gang.
Which wasn’t right. A person had to make room for fun in his life, or it wouldn’t be worth living.
He walked around the house again, leaving Wendy to her online class inside, checked up and down the street, but saw nothing suspicious.
His thoughts kept circling back to Wendy.
She’d been eighteen when she’d met Keith—living alone in a big city, without her parents, only her agent to watch over her. And her agent had probably only been concerned about how much money she was making him.
She’d been a magnet for a predator.
Joe rolled his shoulders. He had some stiff tension he needed to work out of his system. What were the chances that Sophie kept some weights in her basement? Probably slim to none since she wasn’t supposed to overtax her new heart.
He pulled his phone from his pocket and called in to see if Lil’ Gomez had turned up yet.
“I just talked to the chief a minute ago,” the captain said. “Nobody has seen or heard from the kid. What happened, happened. You can’t let it get to you. You did what you could for him.”
But Joe didn’t feel like he had. He was Broslin’s favorite son. He wasn’t expected to lose. He was expected to win.
His body still ached from the crash and the beating it’d taken in the river. Circling back, he stretched his muscles on the deck. He did a hundred sit-ups and a hundred squats, then a hundred push-ups, using exercise to block Lil’ Gomez from his mind, the desperate look on the kid’s face as he’d floated downriver in the night.
Then he walked around the house one last time before going in through the front.
Wendy was still studying, all rapt attention and poised grace as she sat in front of her computer.
He tried his level best not to think of her as she’d come apart in his arms three months ago. He browsed the bookshelf, rows and rows of paperbacks, but couldn’t focus on the titles. He saw her naked before him, back arched, dusky nipples drawn into tight buds as he grazed his lips over them.
The sound of her voice had him dropping the book he was holding. He caught it before it hit the floor, turned to her. “What?”
“Guest bathroom is upstairs at the end of the hallway,” she repeated, then she went back to her computer. “If you want to get ready for bed.”
That unleashed another batch of X-rated images in his brain.
He went and took a cold shower. He knew exactly what his fascination was with her. She posed a challenge. She wasn’t easy. He reminded himself that he liked easy. Easy was fine. Better than fine, great. Who needed complications?
He pushed the images of their one night together out of his mind, spent another few minutes under the cold water, then put on a Broslin PD T-shirt and sweatpants.
At home, he slept naked. And alone. If he spent the night with a woman, he usually stayed over at her place. He didn’t have a rule about not taking women home; it just never worked out that way.
He checked in on Justin on his way downstairs, the kid all snuggled up with his plastic dinosaur as he slept. Joe’s nephew, Max, was about the same age. They were both pretty great kids.
Wendy walked up softly behind him, her steps barely audible on the carpet.
Joe shifted. “He’s a good sleeper.”
The soft, exotic scent of her perfume surrounded him. It mixed with the scent of baby powder in the room. She was incredibly hot, and a mother. He’d tried to avoid that kind of complication in the past. The fathers were always in the picture and could be a pain.
He liked his affairs hot and intense, and his women all to himself. He didn’t want to want this—playing house. This wasn’t who he was. Yet there was something here that reached him on a deeper level.
“You’re good with kids,” Wendy said, close enough that he could have easily reached her to pull her into his arms.
“I like them.” He gave a carefree grin to mask how much he wanted to touch her. “As long as they’re someone else’s responsibility.”
An unreadable expression crossed her face. “Never settling down, huh?”
He shrugged. “When you have a good thing going, no sense messing it up, right?”
She turned and walked back down the stairs without responding.
He followed and dropped to the couch while she shut down her computer, pulling the rubber band from her hair, then massaging her scalp for a second. The overhead light glinted off her long silky hair that covered her shoulders in a cascade of gold.
The soft material of her shirt outlined her breasts.
Shapely, but definitely not a rack.
There, so she wasn’t perfect. He was a boob guy, so sue him. But Wendy Belle couldn’t be called stacked by any stretch of the imagination. No reason for him to feel all that tugging all over the place.
“So, what’s going on with your ex?” he asked. “Bing was a little sketchy.”
She turned to him as she shoved the rubber band into her pocket. “Everybody is completely overreacting.” She paused. “What happened to your face?”
Okay, so she didn’t want to talk about her ex. “Rough night on the river.”
“What river? Broslin Creek?”
“Never mind.”
“Chasing someone?”
“Something like that.” He couldn’t share details of his undercover mission. “Back to the boyfriend.” He hadn’t jumped right into questioning her earlier, didn’t want to in front of Justin, but he did need as much information as she would giv
e him. “Keith Kline, is it?”
She flinched.
The fact that the bare mention of the asshole’s name could make her flinch said something right there. “Bing said he’s turned threatening.”
“He’s going to be mad if he finds out that I was talking to the police. I don’t want to make him mad. I’m hoping he’ll sign over full custody to me.” She tucked her hair behind her ear.
“Is he using Justin to get to you?”
She pressed her lips together. “He’s been difficult.”
Violent, she meant. Joe kept a lid on the anger that bubbled up inside him. “A lot of smart women have been known to fall for difficult men.”
“He used to be different. Then I got pregnant with Justin, and Keith changed.”
“How?”
She hesitated again.
He didn’t want to push hard, but he did have to push. “The more I know about him, the more I’ll be able to anticipate his next move if he means to do you harm. Knowing more about him, about his personality, would be helpful.”
He also planned on running a background check on the guy, although, he was pretty sure the captain had run one already. Something to check in the morning.
Wendy rubbed the heels of her hands over her knees. “He’s a top insurance broker at his company. Driven. Type A. We met at an art gala. I was modeling wearable art. His company was one of the sponsors of the event. He has a lot of powerful friends.”
Joe watched the tight set of her lips. He’d never met the man, but he could see him in his mind’s eye. “He’s good-looking, charismatic. He can put on the charm like nobody’s business. When he wants something, he pulls out all the stops. Flowers, lavish dates.”
She tensed but then gave a reluctant nod.
“Then little by little he changed.” He was familiar with the abuser profile. They were all charming at the beginning. Then they took more and more control until they had their victims trapped. “He didn’t like your friends, so your friends started staying away. He used to praise your beauty, then suddenly began telling you that you’re fat, or ugly, or stupid.”
