“And you’re sure that’s what killed Leeanne?”
“Can’t be sure of anything, Jack,” he told him in all honesty. “Say, is Angel around?”
If Jack’s face had gone slack before, he looked pale as ghost now.
“Ah,” he stammered, looking beyond the order counter for Angel who he must’ve figured was somewhere in the kitchen. “She’s right on back there.”
Rick stood and spotted the bombshell in the kitchen. She was ladling soup into a giant container to put it in the walk-in refrigerator, he guessed.
“Sweetheart!” he called out, getting her attention. “You have a few minutes for me?”
When he sat back down, waiting for Angel to finish what she was doing and join him, Jack asked, “What do you need to talk to Angel about?”
He sounded worried and it piqued Rick’s interest. He knew Jack had been spending an awful lot of time with Angel since she’d wound up in those woods behind her house. Hell, the whole town knew, and the residents would’ve been gossiping about it a lot more if there wasn’t a wealth of rumors about werewolves circulating the Fist. But it had struck Rick as odd. Very odd.
Jack had been angling to get Angel Mercer out on a date for as long as he could remember. Politely and without fail, the woman had declined, time and again. Now, all of a sudden, they were partnered up like a pair of lovestruck teenagers. Except that nothing about what had been percolating between them seemed lovestruck. As far as Rick could tell, Angel seemed only accepting of Jack’s constant presence, as though she was allowing it out of necessity rather than genuine interest. Why?
Of course, it wasn’t hard to reason that after a trauma like having wandered off into the woods with zero recollection of how she’d gotten there, she’d welcome the company of a man who clearly cared for her. But regardless, their dynamic struck Rick as odd.
And now he was worried about what Rick might need to talk to her about?
If Jack’s affection for the woman was no secret around the Fist, it was also no secret that Angel had definitely had at least something to do with the unlawful imprisonment of Reece Gladstone. Rick knew it and Jack knew it, and the one person that Rick had come here to question about it—Angel Mercer herself—knew it more than anyone.
“Actually, Jack,” he said, having reasoned that his old friend didn’t need to be privy to his every investigative interest. “I think I’d like to talk to Angel privately.”
“Oh?”
“That’s alright with you, isn’t it?”
“Ah, sure,” he said reluctantly as Angel rounded behind the diner counter and neared them.
Rick held a steady smile on Jack while he excused himself from his barstool. Jack gave Angel a long, lingering look, shot Rick an uneasy smile, and then retreated down the aisle and took up in one of the booths.
“The diner’s nice and quiet,” Rick commented as Angel smoothed the front of her blue dress uniform down, drying her hands perhaps. “I hope we’ll have at least a few minutes.”
“I don’t see why not,” she said easily.
It looked like Jack was nervous enough for the both of them and Angel wasn’t carrying even a twinge of the burden. She looked relaxed and friendly and just as beautiful as ever.
“Can I get you anything?” she asked before he could launch into his first and most pressing question.
“No, thank you,” he said, giving his gut a little pat. “I think it best if I watch the pie.”
“Oh, come on now, Sheriff,” she said with an air of flirtation in her voice that she’d never used on him before. She sank into her hip a little, too, which accentuated her very feminine curves, and it wasn’t until Rick had glanced down the length of her that he realized, much to his embarrassment, that he was checking her out. “You look healthy to me. Have you been working out?”
“Some,” he allowed with a proud grin. “Been covering a lot of ground hunting.”
“You’ve been looking slimmer,” she encouraged.
“Found a bit of time to pump the ol’ iron out in the garage,” he went on, flattered.
“I was gonna say,” she smiled, eyeing his biceps through his tan, sheriff’s uniform. “You look like you might be.”
“And I took up jogging, but with summer pressing in, I’m afraid it’s gotten a bit too hot for that.”
He was titillated by her interest, enjoying the impressed grin that had come over her, and could no longer see how she could’ve possibly played any nefarious role in Reece Gladstone’s unlawful imprisonment.
“Now, if a woman like me,” she began, leaning her elbows on the counter and coming to eye level. She’d given her back a little arch, too, pressing her chest out in a way that he was almost certain had been intentional. “Wanted to start working out, what would you recommend?”
Rick hoped to high heaven that Jack wasn’t watching this unfold, but hell, he thought, if Angel Mercer, the bombshell of Devil’s Fist, wanted to garner his intrigue and perhaps welcome him to ask her out, why in the good goddamn would he deny himself? Just because his friend was shacking up with her? No way. Willing women were hard to come by ‘round these parts, especially age appropriate ones. Rick was no spring chicken. He had gotten to the other side of fifty, and regal women in their mid-forties like Angel were few and far between and mostly married. It would take an incredible woman to open Rick’s heart. He mourned his Sally-Mae each and every day, God rest her soul. But it had been years since his late wife had lost her battle with cancer…
…and Angel Mercer was an incredible woman.
When he glanced over his shoulder, however, feeling eyes on him, he found Jack Quagmire glaring with a frown fixed on his displeased face.
Oh well. All’s fair in love and war.
And by the time he returned his gaze to Angel it had completely slipped his mind to start in on all the questions he’d been mentally batting around for over a week.
“Why would a pretty, slender little thing like you need to work out?” he asked, drinking in an eyeful of her perfect figure and hoping that this conversation would never end.
***
Kaleb rung out his sponge into the plastic bucket of bleach and hydrogen peroxide that was now pink with blood and slapped it back down against the wooden floor of the living room where he’d been kneeling and working silently.
Lucy hadn’t said a thing. She hadn’t rejected his help or kicked him out. She also hadn’t acknowledged him. At times her glassy eyes had welled up with fresh tears, but she’d blinked them away, hardening herself to the grim task at hand. During those moments, he’d felt an incredible urge to hold her, to reach in through the open doorway and pull her into his arms across the stained tiles. But he resisted the impulse each and every time it swelled up in his heart. He was starting to regard her more and more like a skittish animal, a rabbit or deer perhaps. Any sudden movement on his part and she’d bolt to take cover in the wilderness of her dark mind. Instead, he wanted to find a way to lure her out. He needed to show her that he wasn’t a threat, that he could protect her if she let him, and his strategy for doing just that was to be here for her, helping her, and asking nothing of her in return.
To his eye, the contents of the bucket looked more blood than bleach so he lifted the bucket as he got to his feet and quietly mentioned, “I’ll be back in a second.”
When he reached the kitchen sink and dumped the sloshy contents down the drain, he realized his red shirt was damp and stained. After rinsing the bucket and refilling it with a strong solution of bleach and hydrogen peroxide, he pulled his rubber gloves off and tried his hand at washing the stains off his shirt. There was no point. It was useless. The watered-down blood stain wasn’t going to lift no matter how much he tried, so he pulled the tee-shirt up and over his head then tucked it into the back pocket of his jeans.
As he returned to the open doorway where Lucy had inched closer to the seam where tiles met the wooden floor of the living room—she’d done such a good job of cleaning the bathr
oom floor that he could hardly tell Leeanne’s bleeding body had been stretched out across those very tiles only hours ago—he realized how he probably looked.
Shirtless, bare chested, a bit sweaty across the firm wall of his pecs.
It probably looked like he was trying to tempt her, turn her on, get her mind off of the grim tragedy that had befallen her by sexually-selfish means.
But nothing could’ve been further from the truth. He just hadn’t been thinking.
He set the fresh bucket down and as she plopped the rag she’d been using into it, she looked up at him and seemed to do a bit of a double take at his sudden lack of clothing.
His excuse was, “It got stained and damp.”
“Your shirt was red,” she reminded him.
“It was also damp,” he reiterated, hoping to highlight that his tee-shirt had gotten too uncomfortable to wear.
“I can take it from here if you want to go,” she said, which didn’t surprise him. If anything, he was surprised she hadn’t said it a half-hour ago when he’d first arrived.
“It’s almost done,” he told her. “I’ll stay.”
He lowered to his knees again and pulled on the rubber gloves he’d been wearing. The sponge he’d been using was floating in the bucket so he grabbed it and began scrubbing the stubborn wooden floor.
Lucy inched closer to him and joined him in working on the living room floor.
“My parents died,” she said, opening up.
He slowed his work to stare at her for a beat then said, “I heard.”
Without looking at him, perhaps without actually needing him to hear her, she continued opening up as though she had to come out with what had been weighing her down.
“They were killed when I was a little girl. I came home one day and they were just… gone.” She let that hang in the air between them for a long moment then clarified. “Not like they disappeared. They were there. Just dead. Gone, you know. Just like Leeanne.”
She paused again and Kaleb found the words to say, “I’m sorry.”
She shrugged and touched eyes with him, but didn’t hold his gaze long enough to truly connect.
“The guy was caught,” she told him and snorted a disgusted laugh as she said, “some kind of robbery gone wrong. There was so much blood.”
“Just like Leeanne,” he supplied, realizing that the comparison she’d made a moment ago might have actually been literal.
“Except there was no cleaning it,” she said as she sopped her rag into the bucket again. “I wasn’t allowed back into the house. Ever. I lost everything that day. I never saw it coming.”
Her hands had begun trembling. It was almost imperceptible at first and Kaleb might not have caught it if Lucy hadn’t quieted in favor of staring down at them. Her shoulders began shaking next and a guttural, tortured sound seeped out of her as she slowly keeled forward to bury her head against her knees.
He didn’t let her.
In an instant, he was holding her, having slid right up next to her. His arms were wrapped around her tightly and he could feel wet, silent sobs against his bare, muscular shoulder.
“Why is this happening?” she breathed against his chest.
He ran his large hand down the back of her head, feeling her silky, blonde hair as he soothed her. He didn’t have an answer for her. She clung to his arm, squeezing his bicep with both hands, as she curled up into him. He held her for a long moment, listening to her quiet sobs and wishing he could take her pain away.
It blew his mind that in a town as small as Devil’s Fist, he’d never known what had happened to Lucy’s parents. That was the Fist for you. Gossip and rumors tended to churn whenever something trivial happened, but when a painful tragedy struck, the residents became so riveted that they were incapable of breathing a word.
He was tempted to ask her what had happened after her parents had been murdered. Had the State swooped in and taken custody of her? Or had relatives prevented her from becoming a ward of the State? Had she ever gone back to her childhood home? Was a new family living there or had the place been leveled by bulldozers?
He couldn’t believe that this bright-eyed beauty who he’d always assumed had had a happy, typical life, could’ve been struggling all these years under the weight of such a traumatizing memory. She was strong. So strong. Stronger than he could’ve ever imagined.
Or so he thought.
When she urged him back, pressing her gloved palms against the firm wall of his chest so that she could fish around the pocket of her sweatpants and pull out her prescription pill bottle, he realized that she might not be as strong as he thought.
“I hate these things,” she complained as she twisted the cap off. “I’ve been on them since I was twelve and all they seem to do is turn my brain to cotton.”
“Then don’t take them,” he blurted as he wrapped his hand over hers to stop her from popping the cap off.
She let out a wet laugh and said, “You don’t want to see me off these things. Trust me. I’m a real mess.”
“I don’t have a problem with messes,” he assured her and their eyes met.
Though her face was damp with tears and her round eyes looked dark with sorrow, to Kaleb she looked alive. Raw, yes. In pain, unfortunately. But alive.
He wasn’t sure he could bear to see her a zombie again. That’s what she’d turned into before after she’d taken pill after pill. Like her spirit had gone to sleep and the puppet shell of her body had lost all vitality.
She countered his point by arguing, “I have a problem with being crippled by emotion.”
“No, you don’t,” he stated firmly even though he wasn’t sure where the assertion had come from or why he’d had the audacity to say it. “You’ve put off feeling your feelings and—”
“Yes, I have,” she vehemently agreed, an edge of anger rising up in her tone at the fact that he hadn’t released her hands to allow her to shake a pill or two into her palm to take. “I want to put off my feelings. I want to function. I can’t live in the past.”
“But you are,” he shot back. “As long as you put off dealing with what happened to you, you’re keeping yourself locked in the past.”
“How would you know?” she demanded as she jerked her hand free. But before she could pop a pill into her mouth, they both startled at the distinct sound of footfall stomping up the stairs that led to her apartment. “Shit. Angel must have heard us up here.”
Quickly, they got to their feet and Kaleb took her by the arm, leading her towards the open window of the living room.
Shit was right. It sounded like the sheriff was on the other side of the door, and he wasn’t alone. If Rick had threatened to arrest Kaleb before for trekking his boots back and forth through the crime scene, there was no way in hell he’d spare Kaleb from making good on that threat if he found him up here with Lucy.
Thinking fast, as Angel knocked on the apartment door and asked, “Lucy? You in there?” Kaleb angled his head through the open window, assessed that the ledge outside would be wide enough to tight-walk, and jumped on through.
Lucy whisper-hissed, “What in God’s name are you doing?”
He reached in and offered her his hand. When she took it, cautiously but quickly, he pulled her out as he gripped the building for balance and she was practically airborne.
She landed against him, clinging on for dear life. His bare back was pressed against the cool brick siding of the building, the length of Lucy’s warm body facing him. He could feel her cheek on his bare chest and her slender arms wrapped so tightly around his torso that they were inhaling and exhaling at the same time. They’d cleared the open window, though, just in time for the sheriff, Angel, and it sounded like Jack Quagmire to spill into the apartment.
“Is that bleach I smell?” Rick barked, as Kaleb began inching down the ledge, shuffling his feet and urging Lucy to quietly do the same.
“And hydrogen peroxide,” he heard Jack add.
The street below was quiet and
dimly lit from the glow of lights within Angel’s Food. Creeping along with Lucy clinging and pressed against him, they reached the sharp corner of the building. It would take careful maneuvering to ease around it without losing their balance so he whispered, “You go first.”
Lucy loosened her arms just enough to angle her wide, twinkling blue eyes up at him.
“Are you crazy?” she hissed.
“Are you trying to spend the night in the precinct jail?” he hissed right back as he carefully urged her off of him.
She wobbled, but he had her firmly by the arm and trusted that there was no way in hell he’d ever let her fall.
She stepped boldly around the corner, wobbled again but caught herself, and then began inching at a shoe-shuffling pace across the ledge just in time for Kaleb to leap around, as Rick poked his big head through the open window.
“She’s not in trouble, is she?” he heard Angel ask Rick, who just missed Kaleb by a fraction of a second.
Judging the muffled volume of the sheriff’s response—“Oh, she’s in trouble, alright, and so is my Whitney for allowing this!”—Kaleb determined that the sheriff was back in the apartment.
Lucy was just now coming to the fire escape, which she climbed onto. When Kaleb reached it, they clamored down to the street and landed with two plops to the pavement. As soon as Lucy’s feet hit the ground, she wrapped her arms around Kaleb all over again and it made him grin. Force of adrenaline-rush habit, he figured, as he whispered, “Come on, my truck’s out front.”
“Mine’s in back,” she told him. “So is Whitney’s Jeep. I stole it to come here.”
“Oh good, I was worried you’d only committed one felony this evening.”
The tickled smile that spread across Lucy’s face in response filled him with a sense of reward greater than he’d ever felt, but there was no time to enjoy it.
As he jogged with her to the parking area behind the diner he said, “Keys,” and she tossed them to him before she jumped into the driver’s seat of the Jeep.
Kaleb hopped into her VW bug and in two shakes they were driving with their headlights off, Kaleb tightly following Lucy in the Jeep, and Sheriff Rick Abernathy none the wiser that he’d ever set foot inside the apartment for the second time that day.
Quinn Security Page 31
