“You might say I’m here on a call.”
Sliding his hands in his pockets, he continued to peruse her, an odd glint to his eyes. Sadness?
What? She didn’t look recovered enough to him?
The thought left her wanting to march him straight upstairs to her third-floor office, show him her walls and furniture and big mahogany desk. The drawers of patient files, proof of her success, and the awards that were hanging on the walls of the private bathroom attached to her suite. They were there so she would see them several times a day to remind her who she was. And so only she would see them. She wanted to instill a sense of comfort in her clients. Not intimidate them. Not to spill her ego over onto others.
“I’m here to see you, Bloom. Is there someplace we can go?”
Bloom. She liked the inflection he put on her name. Liked that he’d finally used it. Honoring her request.
Liked the fleeting sense of power that it gave her. But knew it for what it was. A change from her past when he’d insisted that he wasn’t comfortable using her first name. That he needed the distance of formality between them.
Because she’d looked horrible with a broken jaw, drug-blurred eyes and black-and-blue skin?
He’d seen her later, too. Physically healed and pretty enough to turn heads...
“Bloom? Is there someplace we can go?”
She didn’t move. Inside or out. “Why do you need to see me?”
The part of her life where she had a detective in it was done. Forever. No more trouble with the law. Of any kind. She’d promised herself. Never again.
“I just... Is there someplace we can go to talk?”
They could go back up to her office. But she didn’t want him there anymore. Her car? No better.
She took him to a bench out in the yard behind the building. It was in a garden. With several benches. And a winding walkway with trees for shade. She chose to sit in the sun.
“What’s going on?”
Even as she asked the question, she had a flash of the news headline she’d seen less than an hour before.
Trevor Banyon.
Had the jerk said something untoward about her? Released some confidential information pertaining to her case? Were his files being turned over as part of the investigation against him? Was there something incriminating to her reputation there? Something that would embarrass her professionally?
“I assume you’ve heard about Trevor Banyon...”
She started to breathe again. Relaxed against the seat. That was it then. Something from her case was going to be exposed.
She wouldn’t wish for it. But didn’t care all that much, either. In her new life she kept no secrets. So there was nothing to hold over her. And thus, nothing to fear.
Not that he’d know that. The Bloom Freelander he’d known had been afraid of her own shadow. When she was even aware of it following her around.
“I just saw something this morning,” she said, looking him over again, glad to have a few minutes with him now that she knew she had nothing to worry about. He was there as a courtesy. She got that now. And liked him all the more for it. It was so like him to follow up. “Something about him running illegal guns on the side?”
Sam Larson nodded. That flop of blond hair coming down on his forehead. The man had to be nearing forty, but you wouldn’t know it by his hairline.
Maybe the lines at the edges of his mouth gave a hint of experience...
“Do you think he’ll go to jail?” she asked now, trying to keep her mind on topic—something that usually came naturally to her these days. “Locked up with all those people he put away...” She didn’t wish it on him.
The man had done her a great service—putting Ken behind bars. He’d fought hard for her.
“That’s what I’m here to talk to you about.”
“What does Trevor Banyon going to jail have to do with me? Do they need me to testify on his behalf? To talk about the good he’s done? The lives he’s saved? Because while I don’t condone anything to do with illegal arms, he really did help save my life...and I’m sure many others. Are they thinking that if they have enough mitigating circumstances he’ll just get probation?”
She had no idea how serious the charges were against the man because she’d closed the app without reading the article.
It was about that time, when her voice dropped off and nothing else filled the silence, that Bloom realized part of the reason she’d been rambling so much. He was letting her. His long silences almost begging her to ramble.
“What’s going on?” Was he in trouble? Did he have something to do with Banyon’s side career?
She’d never have thought so. Couldn’t believe it.
Maybe Banyon had something on him?
He was clearly having difficulty saying whatever it was he’d come to say...
Just like that she switched from a previously needy woman with her earthly savior to psychiatrist mode. Wanting to help him as he’d helped her. Whatever he needed...
“Sam...” she used his first name, though he’d never invited her to do so. “What’s going on? Can I help?”
He was there for a reason.
When he shook his head, her heart sank. Please, God, don’t let this man have done something bad enough to put him in jail. A world without him in it, Santa Raquel without him out there keeping it safe...
The idea left her bereft.
His expression cleared. “Yes, you can help.” He seemed to have fought some internal battle and...won?
“Okay.” She smiled. Couldn’t seem to stop smiling at him. Wanted to put her hand on his knee where it rested close to hers. Or on the hand he had resting on it. “What can I do?”
“I need you to do me a favor.”
“Sure. Fine. What?” This was Sam Larson. He’d saved her life. She owed him far more than she’d ever be able to repay.
“I need you to pack up whatever keepsakes and possessions you most value, along with clothes and personal items, and be ready for me to pick you up late tomorrow afternoon.”
She felt the blood drain from her face. Didn’t know her mouth was hanging open until she felt the dryness on her tongue.
“You’re abducting me?” They were the first words that came to her mind. He was in that much trouble?
“Of course not!” He shifted next to her and she felt the holstered gun he always wore under his jacket. He’d have one strapped to his ankle, too. “Well, not in the way you make it sound.”
“But you are planning to take me away against my will.” Her insides were frozen. Not shaking. She wasn’t even sure her heart was still beating.
And she didn’t give him time to answer. “I trusted you.”
He was wearing his badge. She’d seen that hooked to his belt, too, when he’d first taken a seat. He was on the job. Not committing a crime.
Didn’t feel any different to her.
When he bowed his head, she started to shake. Just her hands. Nothing else.
“Banyon.” She managed the one word past the sting in her throat. A tainted prosecuting attorney.
“He was selling guns to certain disreputable persons while prosecuting their competition. Twenty-four of his cases have been thrown out,” Detective Larson was saying. “Drug dealers are going to be back out on the street.”
“I don’t know any drug dealers.”
“You know someone who provided drugs to one in exchange for protection in prison. Drugs he’d been slowly, illegally, siphoning for years.”
To use on her. And others?
“Ken gave away the evidence.”
After a lot of intricate tracking of hidden trails, Sam Larson had found proof that Ken had been writing prescriptions for the various ingredients in the cocktail he’d been feeding her. Bu
t they’d never found drugs that correlated with the prescriptions. If he’d fed them all to her, she’d have been dead.
Her mind was working on facts. The rest of her was silent.
Gone.
“I need you to come with me, Bloom. Just for a few weeks.”
“I’m not running from him. I won’t let him make me a prisoner in my own life. Not again.”
“I’m not suggesting that you quit living your life. I’ll have someone posted to watch you at work and anywhere else you want to go. I just need you out of that house. Word came up from his cell block that he has plans for the place...”
“So I’ll sell it.”
“That’s fine. I need you safe in the meantime.”
She wasn’t afraid. Didn’t he get that? At least not of Ken hurting her. What scared her most was giving up control of her life again.
“No. If I run, he wins.”
“If he hurts you, he wins.”
She saw a friend of hers, Dr. Molly Higley, a woman who had an office on her floor, leave the building and get in her car. Bloom wanted to be as free as Molly was. Free to get in her car and drive off to a normal Saturday afternoon.
“I...know some people...inside...”
He had informants. Who’d say anything for favors.
“Word is that he’s going to see you pay...”
But, of course, there was no evidence that Freelander had said such a thing. No way to restrain a man before he committed a crime.
“I need time to build another case against him. Without any of the evidence Banyon presented.”
“With what then?”
“We’ve got this new information about him ditching the drugs to a dealer, for one.”
In exchange for protection in prison.
“Let me guess, some thug’s going to testify to that.” She’d learned how it all worked. Knew far too much.
His shrug wasn’t enough. Because he didn’t have enough.
“And you want me to believe that a thug’s word that a respected professor gave him drugs is going to be enough to convict Ken in court?”
When two and a half years before only her testimony would have been strong enough? And now they wouldn’t have that. Double jeopardy wouldn’t allow it.
“It won’t be enough. No. But it’s a start.” His gaze was piercing. “You’re in danger, Dr. Freelander.”
So they were going with formality again. Fine by her.
“You’re trying to scare me.”
“That depends.”
She hadn’t been asking a question. She’d been stating a fact. She knew what he was doing. What he’d done from the first time she’d met him in the emergency room. Frightened her so much she’d felt she had no choice but to appear in court, face her ex-husband, the man she’d given not only her heart, but her entire future, and talk about how he’d been responsible for her broken jaw. The detective had been right to ask things of her then. She’d taken the stand and taken back her life.
“Depends on what?”
“On whether or not it’s working. I need your cooperation on this, Bloom.”
Bloom again. Back and forth. Push and back off. Forcing her and then letting her choose. He knew how to manipulate, that was for sure.
“How long do you propose keeping me hostage?” She wasn’t going. At least not with him. Maybe she’d check herself into a hotel. Until she could figure out what else to do.
“Not long.”
She studied him. Wanting to trust him. But she’d trusted him when she’d been adamant about not testifying against Ken, and Sam had assured her that they had such an airtight case that nothing could possibly go wrong.
She’d trusted him when he’d told her that the way to ensure freedom from Ken for the rest of her life was to testify...
She’d trusted Ken, too, when he’d promised to love and honor her.
Turned out he’d been more threatened by her intelligence, her ability to surpass him in their chosen field, than in love with her.
And the self-admitted wedded-to-his-job detective needed her to close his case. Again.
Two very different men. Both serving their internal drive to be the brightest stars in their career universes.
“How can you sit there and calmly tell me that it won’t be long? If what you say is true, you can’t possibly know how long it will be before Ken does something else to get himself in hot water. Because if what you’re telling me is true, he’s going to be after me until he finds me, right? If you have your way, he doesn’t find me at all. Which means I have to stay hidden forever.”
Or be found.
She might be slow to see some things, but she was not stupid. Far from it.
“I have a plan.”
It wasn’t the look on Sam Larson’s face that stopped Bloom’s thoughts cold. Or even the words. It was the tone of his voice.
Like he wasn’t bullshitting her at all.
Like he was deadly serious.
“Will you at least give me a chance to lay it out for you before you decide?”
The choice was hers. To listen or not. To decide her course of action. Either with him or not.
It would be stupid not to avail herself of all the information.
“I’ll listen,” she told him. And she would.
But listening did not mean agreeing with what she heard.
It did not mean doing what she was told.
She was no longer a woman who could do that.
She’d rather die first.
CHAPTER FOUR
SAM HAD HER. He always knew when a subject he was interviewing was going to give him what he wanted. It was some kind of sixth sense he’d been given.
Sick sense, his ex-wife used to say. After she’d fallen out of love with him.
Whatever. He hadn’t asked for it. And he used it for good.
This wasn’t about having her. It had been. But now that he’d crossed that hurdle, he faced another.
How to make her think capitulation was her idea? How to make it her idea? Because the second he’d seen the spark of fear return to her eyes he’d known what he didn’t want to have to do. Control her. Manipulate her. Scare her back into the woman he’d met in that hospital emergency room.
“First, I have a place you can stay that will cost you nothing...”
“I’m not a charity case,” she interrupted, and he swore silently, giving her time to add, “I can afford to pay my own way. And then some.”
“I expect you can afford to pay my way, too,” he told her with complete honesty. “And then some. This isn’t about what you can afford. It’s about not letting that bastard take another thing from you. Or cost you more than the thousands you already spent on legal fees and counseling...”
She knew he knew the intimate details. So why did he feel as though he’d just knocked on the bathroom door while she was inside?
“And you think leaving my home won’t do that?”
He didn’t like feeling like a failure in an interview. Had no practice at it. “It also has to do with making you less easy to trace,” he said. “Hear me out, please?” Demanding was going to defeat his purpose.
The one where she was the one in charge and still chose his course of action.
“The place I have, it’s everything you told me you love about your house. It’s right on the ocean—closer than your house actually. It’s not as big—you’d said that you always thought that house was too much space just for you and the bastard. It’s higher up so you have the view you’d said was most important to you. And...it’s more private.”
She’d pictured a more peaceful setting for their beach home, but Ken had needed people around him. Rich people. All the time. At least that was what she’d told hi
m close to three years before when he’d asked her permission to search her home without a warrant.
“You remember every word I ever said? Or have you been reading my case file?”
“My notes aren’t that good. Did you catch the part about this place being private, Bloom? It’s set up on a cliff, on private property. Fenced property. There’s a small trail down to the ocean. One that can be easily guarded. You’ll be safe there.”
Her expression softened. Everything in him pushed for the close. He gritted his teeth and sat there.
“I don’t like how easily you can play me,” she told him. And he started to look for angles again. Was much more comfortable doing so.
So...his angle was to get her to agree without losing any sense of the control she’d gained over her life.
“Are you telling me it doesn’t sound good to you?”
“It sounds heavenly.”
Good. Hopefully he could get her to agree before she actually saw the place.
“But I need to be right here in the city. I’ve got early morning appointments and sometimes I don’t get home until nine o’clock at night as it is...”
Hours he could relate to. And didn’t like to hear her keeping. As if she had no life...
“It is right here in the city.”
“A place like that, here in the city, and it’s available?” Her tone had lightened. He took that as a win.
“Yes.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
Not as hard as she thought. As she’d soon find out. He’d gotten the place for a steal, on foreclosure, after years of neglect and abuse.
The toilets had been replaced. And the faucets. Structurally it was fine. He’d added braces beneath the porch. Done some painting—so far only on the inside. And covered holes in the walls with cheap prints...
“So, do you think it’s a good idea for you to stay there where it’ll be easier to keep you safe? At least for the time being?”
The way she stuck her out lower lip, as though she was considering, that was new. Drew attention to how full that lip was...
“So that’s your plan?” Her disapproving tone didn’t coincide with his thoughts at all. “To have me move to a safer place? Be guarded? Held hostage for the unforeseeable future, in case someday Ken decides to act on a threat that he might not even have made?”
The Promise He Made Her Page 3
