“Number one,” Hayley said.
“Of many. Congratulations.”
“You sound pretty certain,” Quinn said with a grin.
He grinned back. “Buddy, it’s written all over both of you. So are you liking my mountains?”
“We’re going to look for a place of our own. Alex said we’d fall in love with it.”
“Alex?”
“Alex Galanis. A friend of ours. We’re staying at his vacation place.”
“He’s my neighbor,” Brady said, and then the pieces fell together. “It was you. Foxworth, I mean. You’re the ones who helped him out a few years ago.”
“We helped, yes.”
“From what he said, it was a lot more than that. You not only got his son out of that terrorist hellhole alive while the freaking officials sat around scratching themselves, you kept his whole family safe while doing it. Two other kids, in different colleges across the country, each of them being watched and under threat from the same ass—”
“Hats,” Hayley supplied with a grin when he cut himself off.
“Yeah,” Brady said with an answering grin. “Them.” Any lingering doubts he had about these people—there weren’t many, and most of those centered on their seemingly exaggerated faith in the instincts of their dog—vanished in that moment. Alex didn’t just swear by them, he damned near lit a candle for them at a church he didn’t even go to.
“Have you seen Ms. Jordan since Wednesday?” Quinn asked.
Brady sighed. “Stopped by there today. She looks,” he said frankly, “like hell. Probably just the pain meds, but…” He shrugged.
Cutter whined, and Brady looked down to find the dog sitting there, staring up at him. Intently. No, not just intent. Intense. He leaned down to pet the dog again. The animal let out a small sound of appreciation, but that look never wavered, the ears never shifted and the tail didn’t wag. He just sat. Staring.
“My dog-ese is a little rusty, my friend, so I don’t get what you want me to do,” Brady told him.
“Fix it.”
Brady straightened to look at Quinn, who had said the words simply, as if it were obvious.
“Like I told you that day, that’s his ‘fix it’ look,” Hayley elaborated. “He’s found the problem, and now it’s up to us to fix it. And in this case, that ‘us’ clearly includes you.”
His brow furrowed. “But what am I supposed to fix?”
“I’m guessing it’s who,” Hayley said softly.
The obvious image came to him, of the woman he’d walked away from a few hours ago. The beaten, haggard-looking woman who had so flatly, openly, told him she was going insane.
The woman he’d sworn was not his problem.
CHAPTER 7
She never should have taken those stupid pain pills in the first place. She was hurting, yes, but they were worse. She hated the disconnected feeling she got from her regular meds, but these made it intolerable. And besides, they made her want to throw up half the time. The half when she wasn’t so groggy she could barely move. Her mother, worried by the fierce bruises that had shown up, had pushed her to take them, but this morning she’d finally put them right back in the bottle and set it aside. It had been four days—it was time to get over it.
If only healing the brain was as simple.
She’d had, at her mother’s insistence—and expense—three different brain scans in the last five months, and they had found nothing. And that alone told her how terrified she was, when finding a brain tumor would be more hopeful than finding nothing.
But all the clean scans had done was prove that it was nothing physical, that the chaos her life had become grew solely out of her own mind. Prove that along with his love for baseball, reading and these mountains, her father had also passed down to her the gene or chemistry or quirk, whatever it was, that was sending her down the same path he’d taken. To pure insanity.
The path to the place she had reached yesterday. The realization that because of her refusal to accept what was happening to her, a brave, good man had had to risk his life to save hers. Two good men, one of them an actual good Samaritan who could have passed right on by. But somehow the fact that it was Deputy Crenshaw’s job to protect made it no easier to accept that it was her fault he’d had to do it.
And for the first time in her life, she understood, on a bone-deep, visceral level, why her father had killed himself. If this was what he’d been facing…
I’m sorry I was so angry at you for leaving me, Dad. I didn’t understand. Now I do.
She not only understood, but for the first time that permanent exit crept into her mind as a possibility. And that was what had her sitting here, shaking like the leaves on a quaking aspen.
She wanted some fresh air. Wanted to be where she could see the mountains, not holed up here in the study like some crazy recluse.
She nearly laughed out loud at herself. “You are a crazy recluse!”
That did come out loud, and it was followed by the laugh, the sad, pitiful laugh she’d stifled before. As the sound echoed in the book-lined room, she gulped in air, trying desperately to beat back hysteria.
She had to get out. She just had to. Surely if she just went for a walk, that would be all right? She wasn’t so far gone she would get lost, and as long as she didn’t drive, just walked, and if she didn’t go in anywhere and embarrass her poor mother by letting anyone see how far gone her crazy daughter was…that would be all right, wouldn’t it? She’d have to be careful, very careful. Her mother had been so kind, so understanding about the car, telling her it didn’t matter as long as she was all right.
If her mother was here, Ashley was certain she’d try to talk her out of this. But she was doing a ribbon cutting this morning, at the new park at the north end, with the new trail up to the falls that Ashley hoped to hike someday soon.
Well, not if she didn’t get herself back in shape. And what better way to figure out how far she’d backslid than to take a nice, long walk around town?
She could do this. She would make an effort to look normal, too. She’d been aghast when she’d awakened this morning and seen her own reflection clearly, without that drug-induced fog, for the first time. It was a wonder Deputy Crenshaw hadn’t had her committed on the spot Friday. It had been Friday, hadn’t it? She frowned. She clearly remembered opening the door to see the tall, strong man in his utilitarian uniform standing there, looking at her with shocked concern.
No wonder he’d left so quickly. Probably thinking if he stayed any longer he’d end up doing that mental health committal. She remembered vividly the first time they’d taken her father away, remember her mother crying, an event rare enough that it had stunned her, and stopped her from screaming at them to let her daddy alone.
It wasn’t until her mother insisted that she move in here with her that Ashley had realized what a nightmare this must be for her. She’d been through it with her husband and had to be strong for her little girl. And now she was watching that little girl heading on the same path.
And what would it do to her if you took the same way out?
Sometimes she thought that was the only thing that kept her from doing it.
She did what she could with makeup she hadn’t used in a while. She dressed with more care than she had in weeks: jeans, but her black ones, a soft alpaca-blend sweater and boots that were a compromise between warm feet and comfortable walking. She picked up the phone her mother had gotten her after she’d misplaced—permanently, it seemed—her own. A bigger disaster than it might seem, since all her contact info for friends was in it, and none of it had downloaded properly when she’d tried to switch over. She’d even had her mother try, only to have her check and sadly say there were no contacts in the cloud to download.
Served her right for not having memorized any numbers except her mother’s, for relying on the phone for that. She�
�d thought of calling the ski equipment store where her best friend, Caro, worked, but she knew she got in trouble for personal phone calls at work.
What’s the point? What are you going to say? “Just a hello and goodbye before I completely lose my mind”?
She felt better the moment she opened the door and stepped out onto the porch. And better yet when she was clear of the house and could really see the mountains. She drew in deep breaths of the crisp, cold air, and to her it was like breathing in rejuvenation. By the time she reached Mountain View and downtown, the fog had completely lifted, and her mind felt clear and sharp. It didn’t seem possible that her life was in such disarray.
She found herself looking at every shop, reading the signs in the windows, as if to prove to herself that she could. Everything seemed perfectly normal to her. She seemed perfectly normal to herself, if she discounted the various aches from her adventure down the mountainside. The shadows in her mind threatened to return whenever she thought of that, of what others had risked because of her. Especially the deputy, who had gone to the trouble to check on her. He—
He was right in front of her.
For a moment she thought a brand-new facet of her mental problem had manifested; think of someone and poof, imagine they were there. But he reacted when he saw her. Almost a double take, which told her how bad she must have looked yesterday.
And told her he was real.
“Ashley,” he said, staring at her. “Ms. Jordan,” he corrected himself. Why? she wondered. Perhaps he thought it was no longer appropriate for him to use her first name. Now that they weren’t in danger of dying together on a steep mountainside. Her gaze darted to his cheek, where she was glad to see only a faint red line where he’d been bleeding that day.
“Ashley, please,” she said. “Let’s not go backward at this point.”
He smiled. It truly was a wonderful smile, just as it had been out on the mountain. He’d come out of the cell phone store, although empty-handed. Perhaps they’d had a theft.
“You look…like you feel better today.”
She smiled back at him. It seemed the very least she could do. “That was very tactful. I know how I looked Friday.”
It was out before she remembered her earlier worry. What if it hadn’t been Friday? What if she really had lost more time, as she had on occasion? But he didn’t look at her as if she were crazy, or even confused, and his smile—no, she couldn’t have seen this smile before; it wasn’t the kind she, or any woman, would forget—just widened.
“You did look a little ragged. Understandably.”
“It was those pills, I swear. I’ve felt better ever since I quit them.”
That smile again. “You seem to be moving okay without them.”
“I am. Or maybe it’s just that I’m so glad to be free of the fog, I don’t care about a couple of aches and pains.”
“Good.” He nodded toward the cell store. “If you were headed in there, they’re pretty busy. They had an attempted break-in last night and got backed up dealing with it.”
“Oh. Thanks for the warning.”
“Phone didn’t survive the crash?”
“No, it’s fine.” She grimaced. “Thankfully, since my mom already had to replace the one I lost. I only wanted to see if they could retrieve my contacts from the cloud, since I couldn’t get them to transfer to the new one.”
The walkie-talkie on his belt crackled, and he said something into the microphone clipped to his shirt. Ten something. Then he looked at her.
“I was going to stop for coffee while I get this report organized. May I buy you a cup?”
She drew back, a little startled; she hadn’t expected that. “Seems I should be the one buying you coffee,” she said, and then, driven by that overwhelming need for normalcy, she added, “But I’d like that. Thank you.”
And that easily, she was in a place she’d never thought to occupy again. Sitting in a coffee shop, across a table from a very handsome man, feeling as if perhaps, just perhaps, she wasn’t really going crazy after all.
CHAPTER 8
Ashley Jordan was in much better shape. She was moving well, and it looked as if her cuts were well on the way to being healed.
She also did not seem in the least bit crazy. Not that he was an expert. He had some training in handling the most common types of issues he came across, and he did his best to get people who needed it help, but that was it.
But she didn’t seem like anyone with active problems he’d ever encountered, on the job or off.
She was funny, amusing and rather sharp. Quick. Steady.
This was the woman he remembered from the crash—scared, but thinking clearly.
Scared.
There was still a trace of that, a vibe he could feel in the moments when she seemed distracted, something he caught glimpses of in those vivid, now thankfully clear again green eyes. And she yelped when the barista dropped a pot and it shattered. But hell, that had made him jump, too. By the time he’d checked on the guy and made sure he wasn’t hurt by flying glass, she seemed perfectly calm once more.
“Does your job run to rescuing everyone?” she asked in a commendably light tone when he came back to the table.
“Funny,” he said. “I spent some time the other day trying to figure that out—if it’s the job or just a misguided rescue complex on my part.”
He was a little startled that he’d said that. He didn’t usually discuss the things he thought about during those times at the lookout. Especially with a near stranger.
Especially one with mental issues?
But she tilted her head and gave him a smile that did…something. He wasn’t sure what, except it was odd. New. “You’ll pardon me if I dispute the misguided part. As a personal recipient, I mean.”
He found himself giving her a crooked grin at the way she put it. “You’re allowed a special dispensation, then.”
The smile turned almost teasing then, and his insides took a crazy tumble. “Thank you,” she said with an exaggeratedly gracious nod.
By then he was grinning so stupidly he made himself look down at the notes he’d scribbled about the attempted burglary. But he couldn’t seem to focus on them and gave it up. His laptop was out in the unit—he’d finish it up there, later.
She took a sip of the latte she’d ordered, basic, no frills or extras—one of the cheaper offerings, he noted, except for his plain black—and studied him over the rim of the cup.
“How did you end up here, Deputy Crenshaw?”
He opened his mouth to ask her to call him Brady, but stopped himself. It would not do to get too personal, not with her.
“I was born here,” he said. “Literally. Snowstorm, and my folks couldn’t make it down the mountain.” His mouth quirked. “In fact, I was born in the back of a sheriff’s unit on the way.”
Her laugh was a light, lovely thing. And it echoed in her voice when she asked, “So your calling was decided that early on?”
“Maybe. My mother thought I’d just heard the story so often it planted the idea.”
She tilted her head again as she seemed to consider that. “Does she ever regret that? It’s not the safest profession. She says with definitive certainty,” she added with another one of those smiles and a glance at his healing cheek.
He nearly shivered. Damn. What the hell was wrong with him? Was he getting sick? He never got sick. And he felt better in winter than any time of the year.
He gave himself a mental shake. “She felt better about it when I got hired here right out of the academy. It’s a quiet place, and most of our problems come from mother nature, not human nature.”
She grimaced at that but then smiled as she said, “I’m sure they snapped you up. Local boy, knows the territory, not to mention great PR with the whole born-in-the-back-of-a-unit thing.”
He laughed. He coul
dn’t help it—he just liked the way she phrased things. “They did like that,” he admitted. “In fact, I was sworn in on the day the deputy who delivered me retired, so they had him do it as his last official act.”
“What a wonderful story,” she said, smiling widely now. “Are your parents still here?”
“Mom spends winters in Arizona since my dad died five years ago, but she comes back every spring for the rest of the year. This place is in our blood, I think.”
“That sounds like a great compromise.” She lowered her eyes to her latte, took another small sip. “I’m sorry about your father, though,” she said quietly.
He wasn’t sure why he’d even told her that, so he only shrugged. But again, he had the thought of how different it must be, for a parent to give up on life—and you—and make that exit by choice. How horrible must it be to feel that lost, that hopeless, that there seemed no other way to end the pain.
“He was the best,” he said simply, as he always did. Because it was true.
She gave him a curious look. “Did they ever fight?”
“They disagreed now and then. Everybody does. But really fight? No. Did yours?”
“Sometimes. I think more than I really remember, because… I don’t want to. I’ve always wondered—”
“Ashley! How wonderful to see you out and about!”
A thin, rather round-shouldered man in an expensive suit strode over to them, a wide smile on his face. Brady felt himself go wary the moment he saw—and recognized—him. He didn’t care for Dr. Joseph Andler. He’d been called as an expert witness in a trial Brady had been involved in, and trial results aside, Brady’s private assessment was the man was both pretentious and arrogant, two qualities he despised more than most.
“Deputy,” the man said with barely a glance at him, and in a much cooler tone. Okay, so maybe he hadn’t kept that assessment quite as private as he’d thought.
But a glance at Ashley shoved all that out of his mind; it was as if the woman he’d seen on Friday was back, her eyes wide and fearful, her posture slumped, as if all the bright cheer and energy had drained away like melted snow.
Harlequin Romantic Suspense December 2020 Box Set Page 53
