Dangerous

by Lee Magner

  “How’s your mother?” he asked.

  Clare, taken by surprise, glanced up at him.

  “She’s fine.” Clare hesitated. “You know, she’ll be sorry that she missed you.”

  Case didn’t say anything, but Clare thought he might be feeling a little sorry that he’d missed her, too. If he admitted it, though, he’d give her an excuse to invite him to come back. Since he had made it clear that he had no interest in staying in touch with Clare or her mother, he probably wouldn’t want to return, she thought.

  She looked over the small puncture wounds.

  “They don’t look too deep,” she said, wrinkling her brow in concentration.

  “No. I had the window half up so he couldn’t really get at me too easily. But if I hadn’t put up my arm, those teeth would have gone for the side of my face instead.”

  Clare paled and looked at him.

  “You always were fast, Case,” she said wryly.

  Too fast for you, little Clare, he thought.

  She daubed antiseptic onto each canine bite puncturing his skin.

  “So have you talked to your father yet?” she asked. She kept her eyes on the cotton and the antiseptic, thinking that might make her interest seem safely casual. It was hard not to hold her breath, though, as she waited to see if he would actually answer the question.

  “No.”

  “Luther told me a little bit. I’m sorry about your father’s illness, Case.” She lifted her eyes to his and a world of caring and concern shimmered in their warm, golden amber depths.

  Case didn’t say anything. Just watched her touch the cotton swab saturated in antiseptic against the bite marks on his arm. The stinging helped him keep his feelings safely contained beneath a tough layer of resistance to pain.

  “If there’s anything I can do…”

  “There isn’t,” he said curtly.

  “I guess you’re staying at Luther’s tonight?”

  “Yeah. Unless my old man throws a fit at having me under the same roof.”

  “Case! After you’ve come down here to see him?”

  Case half laughed, half snorted in dismissal. “We don’t get along.”

  “It must have been difficult for you,” Clare said quietly. She slowly put the cap back on the bottle of antiseptic. “I know Luther used to go see your father once a year or so.”

  “Luther’s piling up riches in heaven,” Case recalled wryly.

  “Are you?” Clare asked gently. “Did you go see your father when he was in prison?”

  Case didn’t want to answer, didn’t want to get into all that. Especially with Clare. But there was something about being in her kitchen, having her sitting so near and wanting to know. Some of his guard loosened up and he let himself relax the rigid defenses he’d kept all these years where she was concerned.

  “Yeah. I saw him. Every Christmas for fifteen years.”

  Clare heard the bitterness. And the anger. She laid her hand over his in sympathy.

  “That was very good of you, Case,” she murmured. “I don’t know of many people who would have done that, if they’d been in that position.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know why I bothered. And don’t think I forgave him for what he did,” he added in a hard, uncompromising voice. His face darkened and grew taut with anger. “I don’t think I can ever forgive him for what he did to Lexie.”

  “So you never believed the defense that his lawyer argued at the trial?” Clare asked, frowning slightly.

  “That he didn’t remember doing it, but that someone else must have because he just couldn’t imagine murdering that young girl? Hell, no! Did you?”

  “I don’t know. I…I wanted to. I’ve always found it so hard to imagine your father—”

  “Yeah, well, imagine it,” Case said harshly. “According to the jury, he did it. And there wasn’t any evidence pointing the finger at anyone else.”

  Of course, Crawfordsville’s law enforcement never got much practice investigating homicides, Clare thought. It was possible they’d overlooked something important. Well, it was too late to think about that. Besides, Seamus was free! It was time for all of them to move forward with their lives, to put that terrible crime behind them forever.

  Case stood, rolled down his shirtsleeve and fastened the button at the cuff.

  “Come on, Clare. I gotta get back to Luther’s and you’ve got to get to sleep. It’s late.”

  Clare threw the swabs in the trash and put the antiseptic on the hall table where she could take it up with her later when she went to bed. As they stepped out onto the porch, Clare hesitated long enough to lock the front door.

  Case stood on the top step, waiting for her.

  “You still have that old swing,” he noted.

  Clare grinned. “Want to sit on it sometime?” she teased.

  “It’s so old, it’ll probably fall down.” There was a glimmer of amusement in his eyes as he spoke.

  It had fallen down once. About fifteen years ago. The night after Clare had dared him to teach her how to really kiss.

  Clare walked over to the swing and gripped one of the four steel chains holding it.

  “Nope. Nothing will snap these,” she assured him.

  “Are you speaking from experience?” he teased.

  “Of course. All my beaux sit here on the swing with me. We take the summer breeze on Sunday evening, after Mother’s fed us a fine and tasty dinner.”

  “Do your beaux help with the dishes?”

  “Of course.” Clare grinned. It was all a fantasy, of course, the business about her “beaux” coming around on Sunday and sitting on the porch swing. “Just like you used to,” she teased.

  “But I was never a beau,” he reminded her sharply.

  “True,” Clare said lightly. “And it’s probably a good thing. I mean, you were such a good friend, Case, and, well, I’ve heard that it’s hard to stay friends when you become…”

  “Intimate?” he supplied. He grinned roguishly.

  Clare’s cheeks turned a darker shade of pink.

  “Right. Intimate.”

  “I suppose that swing has seen quite a bit of kissing since you tried to get me to teach you all about those mysteries?” he asked with mild curiosity.

  “Oh, yes. Lots.”

  Clare looked at it innocently and crossed her fingers behind her back to cover the lie. She’d been kissed some, of course, since Case had left. But never on that swing. And not “lots” by any stretch of the imagination.

  Case’s gaze drifted from her to the wooden porch swing and back to her again, lingering at last on her lips. Then he blinked and frowned and shifted his focus to her wide, innocent eyes.

  “Lots, huh?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Anyone in particular?”

  “Uh, well, naturally.”

  “I hope you’re not talking about Franklin Bonney,” he said, his jaw tensing with anger and jealousy. Franklin wasn’t good enough for Clare. Not his beautiful, fiery, protective little Clare.

  “No. Um, Franklin and I haven’t actually gotten that… Um, well, he’s gone a lot, so we haven’t had the opportunity…”

  “I get the idea,” he said irritably. He leaned against the square post next to the front step. “So how many guys have you been kissing since you grew up and figured out how that works?” he asked, trying to get his sense of humor back. It was turning out to be a little difficult for some reason.

  “How many?” Clare desperately tried to think of some way to forestall an answer to that. She didn’t want to lie and she didn’t want to tell the truth. The truth wasn’t very impressive, and she wanted to annoy Case with an impressive number for some irrational reason. Then she thought of the perfect counterattack. Smiling like a siren who’d just spotted a ship full of doomed sailors, she leaned toward him and said, “Well, I’ll try to come up with a number if you will.”

  “What?” A frown burrowed into his brows.

  “You tell me how many women yo
u’ve kissed since you sat here on my porch swing, and I’ll try to count up the number of men I’ve kissed. How’s that? Fair enough?”

  Case laughed.

  “I’ll need a calculator,” he said. “But you’re bluffing,” he guessed, shrewdly watching her for any evidence that he was right. “I can’t see you kissing hundreds of men. Not even scores. Not even a handful.”

  “Oh, really?” He was right, but it annoyed her no end that he’d say it to her face. “Things haven’t changed between us at all, have they, Case?” she asked, stiffening with irritation. “You still think of me as some sort of naive little ninny, don’t you? A small-town girl with no sophistication.”

  He stopped smiling.

  “I never thought you were a ninny,” he said.

  “Naive?” She spat the word out as if she’d hated it for a very long time.

  “Yes. I thought you were innocent…”

  “And you laughed at me for it, didn’t you?” She wasn’t exactly angry. It was anguish that she felt, really. Pain that he hadn’t cared for her the way she had longed for him to. “Are you still laughing at me, Case? Looking down on me? The small-town girl with nothing better to do on Saturday night but give an old friend a lift home?”

  He stepped up onto the porch and put his hand beneath her chin, tilting her face up to look at him. The warmth of his touch, the firmness of it, enveloped her.

  “I never looked down on you, Clare Browne,” he said softly.

  “Not even a little?” she whispered unsteadily. The pain of that long-ago hurt glimmered in her dark eyes.

  “Not even a little.” He felt the softness of her skin against his palm and told himself he shouldn’t have touched her, that he should stop touching her. And yet, he couldn’t quite withdraw his hand. “I thought your innocence was the most enticing quality I’d ever seen in a woman. You were fiery and fearless and as pure as the snow falling on New Year’s Day.”

  “Why did you always make it seem like some miserable shortcoming?” she demanded, caught between delight and outrage.

  He shrugged and dropped his hand to his side.

  “Teasing you was one of my greatest pleasures, Clare,” he admitted with an unrepentant grin. “I teased you as hard as I could.”

  “Well, I always felt about ten years old after you’d finished cutting me down to size,” she complained.

  She looked at the swing and remembered that time when she had dared him into kissing her. The memory still made her lips tingle. And her heart began to race. She quickly glanced away, but her gaze connected with his and she realized he’d been watching her. And he’d been remembering, too, from the darkening expression in his eyes.

  “I didn’t always succeed in putting you in your proper, girlish place,” he recalled with wry self-deprecation. “That night on the swing, I don’t recall your behaving like a ten-year-old.”

  Clare blushed a little, but it was in pleasure as much as embarrassment. At least he hadn’t laughed at that particular memory, she thought gratefully. That would have hurt. Deeply.

  “Why didn’t you write to me, Case?” It was painful to ask, but she wanted to know. “After the trial, when you went to live with your relatives in Chicago, I worried so about you. I begged Luther to give me your address, and he finally did, just to get me to leave him alone. But you never answered my letters. Why?”

  He sighed and leaned against the pillar, looking out into the darkened street.

  Why hadn’t he written? How could he explain it to her? Without revealing how very much he had cared for her?

  “Hell, I never write letters,” he said. “And after my old man was convicted, well, I wasn’t exactly feeling very proud of myself. He was my father. I was his son. It was like some of the crime somehow rubbed off on me. I’d gone out with Lexie. And even though I’d told her I wasn’t interested in being more than friends with her, I kept thinking I should have been able to protect her from what happened…”

  The bitterness, the fury at his own inability to save Lexie, came surging back through him with frightening strength. He hit the porch rail with his fist and grimaced.

  “Anyway, I didn’t much feel like talking about anything,” he said.

  Clare studied him thoughtfully. There were threads of truth in what he had said, but there were missing threads, too. She was older now, and more experienced in listening to people. She listened to people spin tales of their lives as part of her work, and she’d learned to trust her feelings about what was being left out of a story.

  “Did you read my letters?” she asked quietly.

  “Yeah.” Over and over. And over again. Laid them under his pillow and hid them under his clothes in the dresser drawer that Logan had given him at the house. “Yeah. I read them.”

  “I wanted to comfort you, Case. And it was so hard, wanting to hug you and tell you how much I believed in you… and you were gone. You wouldn’t even lift the phone to call me…”

  “I’m sorry, Clare,” he said tiredly. “But sometimes it’s better that way. It was a clean break. You went on with your life, and I went on with mine.”

  “Did someone tell you that?” she asked in surprise.

  “No. No, I thought it was better that we just forget each other. You didn’t need to be reminded of what happened, and neither did I.”

  “Is that what you thought? What you still think?” she asked, becoming angry with him now. “That all we had was that horrible murder? You’d throw away the summers we went running through the fields? Swimming in the lake? Driving the adults crazy with our adolescent concepts of fun?”

  He stared at her, surprised at her quiet fury. The old wounds were just barely below the surface, he realized. It wouldn’t take much for him and Clare to be right back where they’d left off emotionally. Even after fifteen years. That stunned him into silence. He was a grown man. She was a woman with a life and a career. And yet, all that had happened to them in the time since he’d left had not changed what lay between them. What he’d carefully denied and protected her from years ago, because he knew she was too young. Hell, he’d been too young and too poor to let her get involved with him.

  That was then.

  This was now.

  He reminded himself he was leaving town as soon as he could straighten out this mess with Seamus. And he’d be out of Clare Browne’s life again. Permanently. Just as he’d always wanted.

  “Case?” Her eyes glittered with anger.

  “Huh?”

  “You should have stayed in touch. I think you just took the easy way out by ignoring my letters. Just like you’re trying to take the easy way out by avoiding me while you’re here now.”

  “So I’ve got no guts, huh?”

  Clare shrugged and let his comment stand. She thought he had plenty of courage, just not where friendship with her was concerned.

  “Maybe you’re right,” he said slowly. “But it made good sense to me at the time. I’m sorry if it hurt you.”

  There was a warmth in his voice when he apologized that made tears well up in her eyes.

  “Hey, now, don’t cry!” he said in alarm.

  Clare blinked and brushed the silvery teardrops off her lashes.

  “That’s better,” he said softly.

  “I don’t know why I got an attack of the weeps,” she murmured, trying to laugh off the unexpected tears.

  “You always were tenderhearted,” he said quietly.

  “Could we blame it on the spring air? You know, pollen making my eyes water, or something?” she asked with a wobbly grin.

  “We could,” he said slowly. “But we both know it would be a lie.”

  Clare swallowed and nodded.

  “I missed you after you left, Case,” she admitted honestly. “And then I was mad at you because you were shutting me out of your life when all I wanted was to be a friend to you…” Well, that wasn’t quite true, but it was mostly true. There’d been more than platonic friendship on her mind, and she knew it.


  Case frowned. “I didn’t want to hurt you, Clare,” he said in a low, intense voice. “And I didn’t want to be hurt, either. I had all I could handle getting along with my newfound uncle and the family I’d never seen. And…”

  “And?”

  “I wanted to protect you from any more grief that could come to you from being involved with me.” There, he’d made it about as plain as he could. Maybe she’d let it go now.

  “Oh.”

  Clare stared at him, as if seeing him clearly in one, blinding moment of illumination.

  “I see,” she said slowly.

  “Great,” he muttered. He didn’t want her to see too clearly, damn it. Something in her eyes made him very uneasy. Why did he have the feeling he’d just opened Pandora’s box? “Look, can we leave? I’ve had a hell of a long day to get here, and depending on how my old man reacts to having me here, I may have a long drive back to Jefferson tonight.”

  “Of course. I’m sorry, Case. I wasn’t thinking… C’mon. Let’s go.”

  Clare tripped lightly down the steps with Case following close behind.

  “I’ll get you there in no time,” she promised, flashing him a smile. “And maybe on the way, we can fill in the rest of what happened to each other in the past fifteen years.”

  “I doubt that,” Case muttered.

  He closed the passenger-side door and fastened his seat belt. In a few moments, they were driving onto the county road and heading toward Luther’s farm.

  “Now,” Clare said, using a no-nonsense voice, “what do you do for a living, Case?”

  “I’m vice president of Reilly International, Limited, and I pretty much do whatever my uncle asks me to do,” he said dryly.

  “Do you like the work?”

  “Yeah.” Troubleshooting had always been something he enjoyed. He’d been surprised that Logan would actually create a job description that defined the work and paid him to do it.

  “Then I guess you probably like your uncle.”

  “Yeah.” He glanced at her and frowned. Her eyes were focused on the highway ahead of them, but her mind was going a hundred miles an hour on a subject inside the car. Namely, him.

  “Are you married?”

  “No.”

  “Ever been?”

  “No.” He sighed. “Is this the Clare Browne Inquisition?”