by Julie Miller
“Who are you? Why are you saying these hateful things? What do you want?”
Robin jumped at the loud click that ended the call.
The first thing she did was pick up Emma and hug her tightly to her chest, rocking her back and forth and pressing a kiss to each cheek, taking strength from the scents that had become as familiar to her as breathing. “You are my daughter,” she vowed, needing to hear the words herself as much as she wanted to reassure the infant who couldn’t understand those words yet. “I’m not leaving you. I’m not letting anyone take you from me.”
The second thing she did was strap Emma back into her stroller and head out the front door, turning up the sidewalk toward the Shamrock Bar. Detective Montgomery would want to hear about the call, right? That CSI last night had said the accomplice who cleaned up after the Rose Red Rapist’s attacks was a woman. Were those vile threats related to the assault? Even if the caller was just some crank drunk who’d been reading the morning paper, the message was disturbing.
Robin wasn’t ashamed to admit that her sense of independence and security had been rattled again. She needed to feel safe.
She needed to find Jake.
Chapter Six
Jake shrugged into his insulated gloves and lifted the two cases of bottled beer. The strain on his muscles was as welcome a distraction as the blast of cold air from the walk-in fridge had been.
He’d had a fitful morning of sleep, plagued by images of Robin Carter soaked to the skin, tearing at his clothes while he tangled his fingers in her soft, sable-brown hair and plundered those bewitching lips and other parts of her body with a hunger he hadn’t indulged since the day he’d woken up without a past. The erotic dreams had been as disturbing as the violence that normally haunted his sleep, and had required a cold shower to wash most of them out of his head.
Plus, he hadn’t been able to catch the guy in the trilby hat who’d been watching him. Either the guy had walked away before Jake could reach him, or he was really good at blending in with a crowd. As good as Jake was when he put his mind to it.
His snarly mood hadn’t improved much at work, either. Instead of figuring out why the guy at the newsstand might be interested in him, Jake had been thinking about events he could remember, like the feel of Robin’s long, lean body pressed against his side. He could recall the exact moment when the fear in her eyes had turned to trust. And he’d never forget her thrusting that baby girl into his arms. If the mama was a temptation he didn’t need, then that infant with the big blue eyes and snuggling instincts was downright dangerous to his determination to fly solo through the shadows of the world.
The woman was pretty in that classy, PTA mom kind of way that meant she was more at home with a white-collar executive who drove a minivan and lived in the suburbs than with a...whatever he was. In the light of day, he’d like to think she was too skinny to entice a man with his baser tastes. But he’d seen the curves on that backside. He’d touched that soft, cool skin. How could he justify getting attached to anyone—a stubborn woman or a sweet little girl—if he didn’t know who he was and what he had done? And if he thought his brain was screwed up now, what if the things he’d done came back with a vengeance and hurt the people he cared about?
“Care about,” Jake sneered. What a ludicrous idea to think he’d formed any kind of attachment to the Carter girls in the short span of hours he’d known them. Swearing at his own weakness for even considering such a thing, he hit the insulated door’s release handle and carried his load through the back hallway into the front of the Shamrock Bar.
He pushed through the swinging door behind the polished walnut bar and froze. Speak of the devil. No, not the devil—more like a pair of angels walking through the front door. Robin Carter looked pretty nice all dried off, too.
Jake took a breath, recovering from a jolt of eager recognition, and thumped the cases down on top of the bar. “What are you doing here?”
The armed suit who’d held the door open for Robin and the kid in the stroller moved in before she could speak and flashed his badge. “Spencer Montgomery, KCPD. You’re Jake Lonergan?”
For now. “Yeah.”
Robin pushed the stroller right up to the barstools. “That’s him, Detective.”
So she’d brought the cops right to him, served up his name and face on a platter despite every effort to disappear from her life. Thanks for nothin’, honey. His effort to glare Robin Carter back out the door made her pull her shoulders back and tip her chin. Oh, yeah. She was quivering in those running shoes she wore, but she refused to be intimidated.
“Hello, Jake.”
“I don’t do the niceties, remember?” Jake pulled a box cutter from his apron pocket, sliced open the top crate and starting loading beer bottles into the cooler beneath the bar.
“I’d like to ask you a few questions,” said the detective. “Namely, why would you flee the scene of a crime?”
Yeah. He was ignoring him, too.
“Jake?” Robin cleared the husky catch in her voice and spoke again. “It is Jake, isn’t it? I told him you didn’t run away—that you were there, watching over us, all night.”
He tossed the empty box to the floor and proceeded to open and unload the second one. “I don’t need you to defend me. Am I under some kind of suspicion, Officer?”
Before the detective could answer, the door swung open behind Jake, and Robbie Nichols, Jake’s boss, carried out a freshly washed crate of beer mugs.
“Customers, already?” Robbie’s Irish heritage was evident in both his accent and his jovial greeting. He set the glasses on the bar and grinned through his bushy black beard and mustache.
“No.” The place was nearly deserted this early in the evening, so there was no mistaking that Robin and the suit with the badge were here to see him.
“Friends of yours, then.” The fact that Jake had never had one friend stop in for a visit didn’t seem to faze Robbie. The burly Irishman stretched his arm across the bar to shake hands with the detective. “Spencer Montgomery—we don’t see enough of you around here anymore.”
The carrot top with Robin nodded. “Mr. Nichols. Since my partner got engaged, he’d rather take his fiancée out for drinks after work than come here with me. Go figure.”
Robbie chuckled. “So it’s a date then?”
“No.”
“No.”
“No.” Jake, Robin and the detective all answered in unison.
Seeming oblivious to the tension in the room, Robbie lifted the gate at the end of the bar and circled around to squat down beside the stroller. “And who might this little beauty be?”
He poked his fat finger into the stroller and laughed when Emma Carter batted at it and then latched on. He tilted his face to Robin. “I’m Robbie Nichols, the owner of this fine establishment. May I, Mrs....?”
“Ms. Carter. Robin.” Jake watched a smile warm her face as she bent down to unhook the baby and pick her up. “This is Emma. She can hold up her head now, but you still want to make sure you support her.”
A protective impulse, as instant as it was foreign, heated Jake’s blood as he watched Robin place the baby in his boss’s arms. “Be careful with her, Robbie.”
Robbie waved off the warning and buzzed some motorboat noises that made Emma giggle and tug on his beard. “I know how to handle a wee babe like this. Don’t I take care of my great-nephew just fine when Josie brings him in for a visit?”
Jake remembered how small and fragile Emma had felt in his hands. “Aaron’s a boy and he can walk.”
“He’s one and a half. Still in diapers. He was this size once. Josie—my niece,” he explained to Robin, who didn’t seem to have any problem handing her baby off to men she’d just met, “trusts me with him.”
“Yeah, well...be careful,” Jake warned. The notion that it wasn’t his place to warn anyone away from the little girl registered a moment too late.
Robin’s eyes narrowed with a question for Jake before she smiled at Robbie
again. “You handle her like a pro, Mr. Nichols.”
“Robbie,” he said, making both the Carter girls feel welcome.
While they spent a minute getting acquainted, and Jake tried to bury that troublesome penchant for rescuing damsels in distress by diving into his work, Detective Montgomery slid onto the green leather seat of a barstool and slyly voiced a comment. “Thanks for the tip on the license plate.”
Jake stopped with his fists around the necks of two bottles and flashed an accusatory glance at Robin. Her cheeks flushed with rosy heat before she defended herself. “I didn’t tell him you gave it to me.”
Montgomery coolly eyeballed Jake and vice versa. He’d have to be careful around this perceptive cop if he wanted to maintain his anonymity as the strong, silent type who served beers and threw out drunks who disrupted the peace. The detective probably made a hell of a poker player in most circles, but Jake had known men like him before. He wasn’t sure who or when, but he recognized a man who was a lot smarter and more aware than he let on. Maybe because Jake was that type of man himself.
He had to respect the kind of cop Montgomery was. But that also meant he had to work a little harder—or maybe play a little nicer—to stay off the detective’s radar. “You have to include my name in that police report if I answer your questions?”
Montgomery’s gray eyes were wary. “Any reason why I shouldn’t?”
Jake placed the last of the beers in the cooler and ditched the box. Robin seemed to be holding her breath, waiting for his answer. He didn’t want the perceptive detective to get too curious about him. Robin, either. “I’m just a guy who likes his privacy.”
“Jake, I don’t mean to intrude,” Robin apologized, “but I asked Detective Montgomery to find you because I wanted to—”
“Ask your questions, Detective.” She wanted something from him? Jake nipped that notion in the bud before he even acknowledged that he liked the idea of Robin Carter wanting something from him.
“Mr. Lonergan, what were you doing in the alley behind the Robin’s Nest Floral Shop last night?” he asked.
“Walking.” Jake ignored the expression on Robin’s face—hurt? confusion? frustration?—and concentrated on what information he’d share with the detective. He pulled out the dishtowel hooked into the band of his apron and wiped down the bar.
“After midnight?”
“I got off work early and couldn’t sleep.”
“So you got up in the middle of the night and went for a walk in a thunderstorm?”
“I really couldn’t sleep.”
Despite his nod, Detective Montgomery didn’t look like he was buying Jake’s excuse. The red-haired detective would make a worthy adversary. Or a solid ally. It was hard not to speculate on which Spencer Montgomery would have been if Jake had his memory back and knew what kind of man he was.
He moved to the glasses Robbie had brought in and finished drying them and putting them away. It was just as hard not to speculate about what kind of woman he’d been with before he’d been shot. Blonde? Brunette? Tough and street savvy? A no-strings-attached sex buddy? Or someone wholesome and trusting like the woman slipping him sly looks as she chatted with Robbie and played with the baby.
Maybe he’d been such an awful S.O.B. back then that he hadn’t had any woman in his life. Shards of need and regret cut through the emptiness inside him. With no link to his past and no one in his current sham of a life, he understood loneliness the way most folks understood breathing. He didn’t want to think he’d lived his whole life feeling this way. But if there was some good in his past, someone he’d been important to, then why hadn’t they come to see him in the hospital? Why had none of the addresses in his stash led to a real home? Every lead had taken him to a warehouse or an empty lot. All the clues to his past life were fake except for the nightmares.
He had a feeling if there’d been anyone like Robin Carter in his life, she wouldn’t have stopped searching until she’d tracked him down. Which was exactly what she’d done. Jake fisted his hand in the dishtowel and muttered a curse. Now that was irony. The thing he wanted most was the one thing he’d sworn he’d never let himself have.
“Did you see anyone in the neighborhood while you were out walking?” Montgomery asked, interrupting his thoughts.
Jake pulled his hungry gaze away from the dark brown waves of Robin’s hair that bounced around her face every time she laughed with Robbie or shook her head after reaching into her pocket to check her cell phone. “You want to know if I saw the guy who went after Ms. Carter.”
“Yes.”
Good. They were past subterfuge now and Jake gave a straight answer. “I didn’t. I heard her whistle, heard her scream and went to check it out. The guy was average height. On the skinny side. He wore black coveralls and a stocking mask, and he ran fast. Didn’t know much about fighting—probably why he had to ambush her with a baseball bat.”
“You had the wherewithal to pull the attacker off Ms. Carter and subdue him, but you never looked at his face?”
“Seemed more important at the time to make sure she was still breathing.” What was with the phone? Robin had checked her cell twice now that he’d seen. The easy explanation was that she was expecting an important call, but she had to reaffix the smile on her face each time she stuffed the cell back into her jeans and resumed her interest in Robbie’s chatter.
Something was off. It wasn’t his concern, though. It couldn’t be.
Spencer Montgomery must have finally decided Jake wasn’t going to be much help to his investigation. He pulled out his cell phone and set his notepad on top of the bar. “I’ll run the plate through the DMV and see if we can get a hit on who was loitering outside the shop. Maybe he’ll match your general description of Ms. Carter’s attacker and we can bring him in for questioning.” The detective slid one of his business cards across the bar. “If you think of anything else, call me.”
With the interview over, Jake knew he should pick up the empty boxes and carry them out to the trash, giving Robin and the kid plenty of time to leave before he did something stupid like go over there and ask what was bugging her about her phone.
But he was a cursed man. Cursed to have amnesia. Cursed to look like the aftermath of a lost battle. Cursed to feel that compulsion to atone for the violence from his nightmares.
When he saw Robbie lifting Emma over his head and pretending she was an airplane, Jake dropped the boxes and charged around the end of the bar. It didn’t matter that the baby was laughing from deep in her belly, or that Robin was carefully watching the ride through the air. Emma was too tiny, too pretty—too perfect—to risk her getting hurt.
“Stop!” Jake plucked the baby from his hands before Robbie sent her flying. “You’ll break her.”
Baby saved. Now what? He pulled Emma into his chest, keeping one arm beneath her bottom and leaning back a bit so she wouldn’t fall. But she kept wiggling around, batting at his neck and bobbing in his grasp. It was like handling a squirming piece of blown glass. Two tiny fingers hooked into the side of his mouth while the other miniature hand brushed across the stubble of his jaw. She squealed in his ear.
“She’s going to scratch herself,” he mumbled awkwardly, afraid to close his mouth around her fingers. “I haven’t shaved since last night.”
“Jake, she’s okay.” Robin’s smile probably meant his inexperience handling a baby amused her. But her hand on his arm softened the sting of overreacting and feeling out of his element. She guided his hand to the baby’s back and pulled the clinging fingers from his mouth. “Babies like to feel different textures. Touch is a big part of how they learn.”
They also didn’t seem to care a whit for how big and ugly the man was behind those textures. Emma flashed him those sweet blue eyes and squealed with delight as she rubbed both tiny palms along his scarred jaw. Oh, man. He was screwed.
He wasn’t the only one in the bar to notice that, either.
Robbie’s gut shook as he laughed and winked at
Jake. “I see how it is. The heart of the beast has been smitten by the wee beauty.” He reached over to tickle the back of Emma’s neck and then pat Jake on the arm. “I’ll take the trash out for you and leave you be with your friends. You’ve got about twenty minutes before the first round of customers stops by after work.” He had a wink for Robin, too. “Nice to meet you both. Now that I know we’re practically neighbors, you come visit again, anytime.”
“Nice to meet you.” After Robbie had picked up the boxes and exited into the back hallway, Robin peeked around Jake’s shoulder and confirmed that the detective was on the phone to someone at precinct headquarters. She had that determined tilt to her chin again when she looked at Jake. “Are you done talking with Detective Montgomery?”
The woman just wouldn’t leave him alone and give him the chance to get her out of his head, would she.
“Didn’t have much to say. Here.” He leaned in and carefully handed Emma over, pulling away just as quickly as it took for him to know Robin had a good grip on her daughter. “You get her out of here. A bar is no place for a baby.”
“I’ll leave you alone if that’s what you want. But I need to talk to you first. Will you listen?”
He wasn’t getting rid of the Carter girls until he did, Jake suspected, so he reluctantly pointed to a booth away from the main bar. “I’ll give you ten minutes.”
“Robbie said we had twenty.”
“I’ll give you ten.” Especially since his shirt now smelled faintly of baby, and he wanted to swap it out for a clean shirt he kept in his locker in the back room before he had to spend the entire night getting whiffs of the “wee beauty” who had somehow gotten under his skin.
At Robin’s request, he retrieved the stroller and followed them over to the booth. With Emma propped up on her mother’s shoulder, smiling at him the entire way, Jake had to wonder if the little minx knew she was casting a spell over him.
He’d let Robin have her say. But then he’d make it clear that helping her the night before had been a one-time thing. As far as he was concerned, their paths need never cross again.
