5.5 Contingent on Approval

by Jenna Bennett

  Or Tim, bent over the sink in the bathroom, his face as pale as death while bright red-tinted water swirled down the drain and away.

  I saw him as soon as I came through the back door. The bathroom is back there, off the hallway, and he hadn’t bothered to close the door. I guess he didn’t expect anyone to show up so early. And the sound of the back door opening must have been lost in the running of the water, because when I appeared in the doorway behind him, and he realized I was there, his whole body stiffened in surprise. The eyes that met mine in the mirror were wide, bloodshot, and terrified.

  “I’m sorry,” I said automatically, “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  And that’s when I noticed the red water sluicing down the drain.

  I noticed a few other things too, more quickly than it took to write them down. He looked a bit less than his best, dressed in a faded long-sleeved T-shirt with the sleeves pushed halfway up his forearms, and a pair of seen-better-days jeans, with his hair in disarray and the aforementioned bloodshot, dark-rimmed eyes.

  On someone else, it might not have been a big deal. But Tim is very particular about his looks. He’s gay, he’d gorgeous, and he has an image to uphold. I’ve never seen him look anything less than perfect: absolutely polished and put together. My mother would adore Tim; apart from the gay thing, anyway.

  But this morning he looked like he’d lived through the night from hell, and had woken up with a hangover.

  And what was with the blood?

  “Is that blood?” I asked.

  “No,” Tim said, in the mirror.

  “It looks like blood.”

  The water was running clear now, and Tim turned it off before turning around. “I had a nosebleed.”

  So it was blood.

  Not that I’d been in much doubt, really. I’ve seen a lot more of it than someone like me—a gently bred Southern Belle Realtor—should have to.

  Although as far as the nosebleed went, his face showed no sign of trauma, and also no sign of having been washed. His hands and forearms were wet, but not his face or neck. And when he reached for the hand towel hanging from the hook beside the sink, he dried his hands and arms on it, but not his face.

  It was fairly obvious he wasn’t thinking straight, to use a nicer word than flat out lying. Another clue that something was wrong. Tim is usually pretty cunning.

  “Something going on?” I asked.

  He busied himself hanging the towel back on the hook, without looking at me. “What would be going on?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know.”

  He faced me, finally. “What are you doing here?”

  “It’s Saturday morning,” I said. “I do floor duty on Saturdays.”

  He glanced at the Rolex wrapped around his wrist. Waterproof, I guess. “At seven o’clock?”

  “Rafe went somewhere early.”

  When Tim didn’t immediately smack his lips and make some X-rated remark about my boyfriend, that only reinforced my impression that something was seriously wrong. Tim’s had a crush on Rafe since the first time they met, back in August, and when word got out that Rafe was dead, Tim was pretty upset about it.

  Not as upset as I was, of course, for the eight hours or so I believed it to be true, but Tim was kept in the dark for months, and he was pretty miffed when he found out the truth. He does miffed quite well, too. But he had truly been upset when he thought Rafe had died, and for that, I could forgive him a bit of petulance. There were few enough people in the world who had grieved over Rafe’s supposed demise. My own mother, for instance, had been more upset to discover that he was still alive than she was when she thought he was dead in the first place.

  So the fact that Tim didn’t take the opportunity to salivate all over the mention of Rafe, only made me more certain that something was wrong.

  “It’s not like you have any room to talk,” I pointed out. “You were here before me.”

  “Early appointment,” Tim said, after a second.

  Looking like that?

  I didn’t say it, but he flushed. “New construction.”

  It was possible.

  New constructions, houses in the process of being built, are often danger-zones, full of sawdust and plywood and dirt and nails, so it makes sense to dress down when you’re escorting someone around. Even so, I would have thought Tim could do better than ripped jeans and a faded T-shirt.

  “By the way,” he said, “now that I have you here...”

  “Yes?”

  “Can you sit an open house for me tomorrow?”

  I blinked. Talk about a quick change of subject.

  There was nothing unusual about the question, though. I often sit open houses for Tim on Sunday afternoons. Usually he doesn’t want until the day before to ask, though, but it’s happened before, when he’s had something come up. I’m happy to sit open houses for anyone who asks me. So far, in the just over six months that I’ve had my real estate license, I’ve managed to nail down a few clients and actually bringing them to closing, but they’ve all been buyers. I haven’t had a listing of my own yet. Mrs. Jenkins’s house, the one Rafe was working on—or not working on this morning—was supposed to be my first. I hosted other people’s open houses in the hope of snagging a new client, and because a lot of realtors find open houses to be at best boring and at worst a waste of time.

  Open houses very rarely sell a house, true, but you can occasionally pick up a new client. So I’m happy to do it. Which is what I told Tim.

  “Which house is it?”

  Sometimes he lets me have my pick of a few, and I choose the one that sounds most promising, but in this case he rattled off an address. It was in the same neighborhood as the office—Historic East Nashville—and not too far from my rented apartment on the corner of 5th and East Main.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’m happy to.”

  “Thank you.” Tim’s baby-blues flickered, as if he were looking for a way out. I guess I had sort of captured him there in the bathroom, and he had nowhere to go except past me. I took a step out of the doorway. “I should head up front.” To the reception area and the front desk.

  Tim nodded.

  “Are you sure nothing’s wrong?”

  “Positive,” Tim said, with a look on his face that said the opposite. But if he didn’t want to tell me, it wasn’t like I could knock him down and sit on him until he did. It would be unladylike. And although I’ve gotten better in that regard—if I had to, I’d totally knock Rafe down and sit on him until he told me where he’d been later—but Tim was different. So I let him walk out of the bathroom and down the hallway to the back door. “Thanks, Savannah,” he told me over his shoulder.

  “You’re welcome,” I said. “Tim?”

  He turned around in the doorway, with the door already open and the colder air from outside flowing into the hallway. “Aren’t you going to freeze without a coat?”

  It was February, after all. I was wearing a wool overcoat myself.

  “It’s in the car,” Tim said, but not in a way that made me believe it; more in a way that made me think he’d forgotten to put one on, and now he was making an excuse.

  There was nothing I could do about it, though, so I just nodded. “Have a good day.”

  Tim’s lips twisted, but not in a smile. “Oh, sure.” He stepped out and let the door close and lock behind him. I turned off the light in the bathroom and hallway, but instead of heading for the other side of the building and the reception area, I stepped into the office to the right of the hallway for a moment, and walked over to the window. Tim’s baby-blue Jaguar was parked nose-forward in the lot, with its back against the brick wall. Now I watched as the lights came on and cut through the dusk outside before the car rolled out of the parking space and toward the exit to the street. It wasn’t until it was moving away from me that I could see the back clearly, and the smear decorating the trunk. Red, like blood. Palm and five fingers, as if someone had put his hand there and slammed the lid closed. />
  There was a logical explanation, I told myself. Maybe Tim hadn’t been lying. Maybe he’d really had a nosebleed. Maybe he’d walked into a door. Maybe he’d gotten into a fight with someone, and they had popped him in the nose. Just because his nose wasn’t swollen—that I could see—and just because I hadn’t noticed any blood on his face, didn’t mean he was lying. He could be telling the truth. Someone could have hit him, or he could have accidentally hit himself. With his nose throbbing and blood streaming, he could have parked the car—carefully backed it into a parking space, a tiny voice in the back of my head reminded me—before getting out and staggering toward the door to the office. Catching himself on the trunk of the car on his way past for balance.

  Except the car was parked nose out; the trunk against the brick wall. There’d be no way to get behind it, and no reason why Tim would. It was just a couple of yards from the driver’s side door to the back door to the office, with no obstacles in between. Tim would have had no reason to go to the rear of his car. Unless there’d been something in the trunk he’d wanted to get out, but then he probably wouldn’t have parked so close to the wall it would be hard to get into position behind the car.

  It was none of my business, anyway. If he’d wanted to tell me what was going on, he would have. My curiosity has gotten me in trouble plenty over the past six months. I decided I’d just leave this one alone.

  It wasn’t like I didn’t have enough other things to worry about, after all.

  Why would Rafe just slither out of bed and sneak out of the apartment without a word to me this morning? Without telling me he had made plans? Without leaving a note? Without calling?

  It was after seven. He had to realize I’d be awake by now, and worried about where he was. Why wasn’t he calling me?

  Was he doing something he didn’t want me to know about?

  Was he seeing someone else?

  He hadn’t exactly lived a celibate life. I didn’t know much about his past, but I did know that. Women tend to find him attractive, and to be fairly obvious about it, so he can pretty much have his pick. He’d even slept with a woman named Carmen just a few months ago, after he and I had been together. After I’d gotten pregnant and had lost his baby.

  I’d dealt with it—pretty much—since it had been part of the undercover operation he was involved in and nothing personal. Not something he’d wanted to do; something he’d had to do to preserve his cover. She’d have thought it strange if he didn’t sleep with her, since the man he was pretending to be—a hired gun by the name of Jorge Pena—would certainly have taken her up on the offer. And I wasn’t concerned about it, honestly. Carmen ended up in jail along with all the other criminals, and Rafe hadn’t said a word about her, other than the very first time I’d asked, point blank, whether he had slept with her. He’d told me not to worry about it, that it was all part of the job. And I hadn’t.

  Until now.

  I didn’t really think he’d gone to visit Carmen Arroyo in Riverbend Penitentiary, but was it possible there’d been another woman I didn’t know about?

  Over ten years of undercover work, it was pretty impossible that there hadn’t been someone. We hadn’t really talked about it, though. He knew all about my sex life—married at twenty three, divorced at twenty five, after my husband cheated on me with his paralegal because he claimed I was frigid. Single for two years until I met Rafe. The sum total of my sexual experience at this point consisted of those two relationships, and Rafe knew it. He didn’t ask me questions about Bradley’s and my habits, and I didn’t ask him how many women he’d bedded in the twelve years since he’d left Sweetwater.

  I hadn’t really been worried about it. As far as I was concerned, our sex life was good. Enthusiastic. Satisfying. And lest you think I’m too much of an idiot to know a good sex life when I see one, I did actually realize that my marriage to Bradley was lacking in that respect. Bradley wasn’t the only one dissatisfied; he was just the only one who saw cheating as a solution.

  I had no such problems with Rafe. I wasn’t frigid at all, and he didn’t seem dissatisfied with me. If he was seeing someone else, it certainly hadn’t manifested in any way in our sex life.

  I had reached the lobby and had dumped my bag on Brittany’s chair—she’s the receptionist, but not on Saturdays—and was in the process of hanging my coat on the coat tree beside the door when my bag chirped.

  It wasn’t a phone call, just the phone signaling a text message, but I dove for it anyway, and pushed buttons with hands that shook.

  It was from Rafe’s number, of course. I had assumed it would be. It wasn’t very informative, however.

  Rise and shine, Goldilocks.

  Rise and shine? Did he imagine I was still in bed?

  Where are you? I texted back. No sense in wasting time with preliminaries, after all. He’d know I’d ask.

  After another minute, the phone signaled another message. Had to go somewhere.

  No kidding. I’d already known that. The question was— Where?

  I hit send, and waited.

  And waited some more.

  Gotta go, came back. Love U.

  Sure.

  I didn’t bother to respond, just tucked the phone away in the bag, while I muttered evilly under my breath about the fact that he wouldn’t tell me where he was or what he was doing.

  After a moment, however, I changed my mind and pulled the phone out again. I’d spent too much time being worried about Rafe’s safety, before we got to the point in our relationship where we were now. I didn’t want to go backwards. And besides, he’d told me he loved me. So chances were he wasn’t in bed with someone else.

  Love U 2, I told him. Stay safe.

  This way, at least he knew. If something bad was going on, I wanted the last thing I said to him, the last thing he heard—or read—from me to be that I loved him.

  # # #

  About the Author

  New York Times bestselling author Jennie Bentley/Jenna Bennett writes the Do It Yourself home renovation mysteries and the Cutthroat Business mysteries, as well as a variety of romance, from contemporary to futuristic, and from paranormal to romantic suspense. For more information, please visit her website at www.jennabennett.com

  Contingent on Approval

  A Savannah Martin Christmas Novella

  Copyright © 2012 by Bente Gallagher

  Kickout Clause

  Savannah Martin mystery #6

  Copyright © 2012 by Bente Gallagher

  All rights reserved.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.