Belatedly, it hit him. Andler was a psychiatrist. And he doubted very much if there was more than one in a town the size of Hemlock, or maybe even Eagle County. So it followed that this was who her mother had meant when she’d told him Ashley was seeing a psychiatrist. Andler was her shrink.
He used the term purposely in his mind, remembering the man hated it. He remembered the time in court when another witness had used it, and the man had jumped up and called out “Objection!” as if he were one of the lawyers withstanding in the case. Judge Clarence, who was a good guy, had slapped him down hard, and Brady had enjoyed every bit of it. Small of him, perhaps, but he had.
But what kind of doctor had this effect on a patient? Ashley had practically crumbled the instant she’d seen him. She’d gone from cheerful, outgoing, even happy to a cringing, fearful, broken soul right before his eyes. She mumbled something to Andler so quietly he couldn’t hear it even from just across the table.
“You just enjoy your time outside,” the man said with a little too much cheer for Brady’s taste. “We’ll deal with everything at your next session. I’ll see you a week from this Friday, as scheduled. Don’t forget, now. Do you have the reminder card taped to your door, as we discussed? An alarm set on your phone? We don’t want another problem like last time, do we?”
Brady felt himself frowning and relaxed his expression before the man noticed. He was talking to her as if she were a child. And Ashley was reacting like one, chastened, looking as if she wished she could disappear.
“What happened last time?” he asked after the man left. Warnings chimed in his mind even as he asked, reminding him he’d vowed not to get involved in her personal troubles.
“I…got the day mixed up.” He hated the way she sounded. So…tiny. As if she were in fact disappearing. “I put it in my phone. I had the little reminder card he gave me taped up, like he said, where I saw it every day. Every time I looked at it, I noted the day in my head. That day, I couldn’t believe I’d gotten it wrong. I ran all the way home to look at that damned little card that I swear said Wednesday. But it was Tuesday. It was right where it had been all week, saying Wednesday, but now it said Tuesday!”
Her voice rose a little at the end. Instinctively he reached across the table and put a hand over hers. She went quiet and still. Raised her eyes to his. And the sheer terror he saw there gouged deep, somewhere low and gut-level. A bloody sort of pain swirled in him as he realized the full extent of what she was facing, the sheer horror of a mind slipping further and further out of her control. He’d feel the same way. As her father apparently had. And understanding crashed in on him.
Get off your high horse, Crenshaw. You’d blow your brains out, too, facing this.
And in that moment it felt suddenly all too real to him. He’d had himself half convinced in was a mistake. That there was no way the woman he’d just spent the last hour talking with was crazy, or anywhere close to it.
But the woman he sat across from right now? Maybe.
Probably.
He wouldn’t go through this again. He couldn’t. He’d dealt once with a woman who used her supposedly fragile emotions to manipulate him time and again. And while he had no doubts Ashley’s problems were real, not manufactured to that manipulative end as Liz’s had been, it made no difference. He was not going there.
Not. Going. There.
No matter how much he liked her when she was…in balance.
No matter how much she made him smile and laugh.
No matter that she sparked something in him that he’d never felt before.
CHAPTER 9
Ashley sat with her legs curled up in the big leather chair, staring out the window. The carefully landscaped yard looked clean, almost pristine after the fresh snow overnight. It hadn’t been much, maybe an inch. Certainly nothing that ever would have kept her inside before. But now it seemed a good excuse to stay inside, as her mother had suggested.
On the thought, her mother came into the living room, holding the two mugs of the tea she prepared every morning. She handed Ashley one, along with her morning medication. Ashley didn’t care for tea and would rather have had coffee, but it was a ritual her mother had begun with pleasure, saying what a delight it was to have her here to share it with her, and she didn’t have the heart to refuse. Her mother’s schedule was so full it was one of the few times they had to spend together, and so Ashley drank the brew.
“You can have a nice, quiet day,” her mother said, sitting opposite her on the matching leather couch, shifting slightly to adjust the jacket of her neat pantsuit. “Read, perhaps. You’ll be fine.”
“Yes.”
She took a long drink from her cup. “Or you could watch movies. That would be a lovely snowed-in day, wouldn’t it?”
Ashley didn’t bother to point out that they were hardly snowed in, since her mother would be leaving momentarily. She glanced outside again, the new snow just enough to make everything look bright white.
“It’s lovely,” she murmured. And had she thought that before—for that’s how her life seemed to be divided now, into before the nightmares and after—she would have been happily donning warm clothes and boots and going out for a walk in it, loving every aspect of how things looked, smelled, felt.
Her mother took another long drink. As if she were in a hurry to finish. And who could blame her? Why would she want to be here with a daughter who was apparently going the same way as her father?
“Or you could think more about your room, how you’d like to redo it.”
“The room is fine, Mom.”
“But it’s not yours,” her mother said briskly. “I was thinking perhaps a lovely pale yellow. Very cheerful.”
Also, Ashley thought, the color her room had been in childhood. Sometimes she felt as if her mother was trying to go back to that era. As if she wanted Ashley a child again.
And who wouldn’t, if your adult child is going insane?
“Thank you, Mom,” she said quietly. “I’ll think about it.”
As if that was all she’d been waiting for, her mother stood. “I’ll see you this evening, then. I’ve got that meeting with the Chamber of Commerce, so I may be late, but there are meals in the freezer. Only the microwave,” she cautioned.
Ashley flushed. “I know.”
“And don’t forget your medication, now.”
Ashley nodded, and picked up the pill her mother had put on the table beside her. She had been quite upset when she realized Ashley hadn’t been taking them since the accident, although she gently forgave her because of the accident and the confusion from the pain pills.
Her mother still stood there watching. Like I really am that child, and she has to make sure I do what I’m told. She popped the pill in her mouth and picked up her tea.
“See you later,” her mother said and swept out of the room in that regal manner she had. She always had had it, Ashley thought. She’d just let it show more since she’d been elected mayor, and more so since she’d been reelected last year.
Ashley lifted the cup, grimacing at the thought of the big swallow it was going to take to get that pill down. She hadn’t missed that in the days since the accident.
A cascade of images and thoughts flowed through her mind. She lowered the mug. Spat the pill out into her hand. Stared at it.
When she’d been taking the pain pills, she hadn’t been taking these. She hadn’t really decided on it—it was just that they made her so groggy she hadn’t been thinking at all. And when she’d decided that morning to stop the pain pills, she’d felt so wonderful, so clearheaded again, she hadn’t taken these. She knew that many of the medications for mental conditions caused such things—fogginess, a disconnected feeling—but she hadn’t realized how much they’d affected her until she’d missed them for a few days. And if she’d had any withdrawal problems, they had been masked by the aftermath of th
e crash and the powerful medication.
And then she’d had the most wonderful day in recent memory.
Her fingers curled around the pill. In her mind she was back in the coffee shop, looking across the table at Deputy Crenshaw. Kind, brave, handsome, strong, humble, with a grin that could knock down trees…what more could a woman ask?
She could ask to be normal, so something might come of it.
And no matter how loudly her common sense clamored that he was just feeling…responsible for her or something, as if saving her life wasn’t enough, or as if it connected them somehow, she couldn’t seem to stop herself from wondering, if she was normal, if something really might come of it.
Or maybe she’d just imagined that spark she’d felt when he’d touched her. Maybe it was all part of the downward spiral into madness, imagining things.
Although she didn’t think she’d imagined how he’d suddenly had to go after they’d encountered Dr. Andler.
Her mood crashed. She’d been so hideously embarrassed by that whole scene. Being treated like such a helpless child in front of a man like the deputy had been utterly humiliating. Especially when she had been feeling so good until the moment when Dr. Andler had shattered the mood.
She should do exactly what her mother had said, stay here, holed up, read a book, binge-watch some movies, something…safe.
Something moved outside, drawing her gaze. She saw a tiny bird on a snowy branch, apparently looking at its reflection in the window. It looked chipper, cheerful, as if this little bit of snow was nothing, even if it was a third its height.
Even this tiny, fragile bird had more strength, more gumption than she did.
She was on her feet and heading for her bedroom and warm clothes before she could talk herself out of it.
And she tossed the pill into her wastebasket.
* * *
When he saw Ashley walking toward him on Mountain View, Brady was torn between the urge to go to her and the urge to run the other way. He would do neither. The decision sounded a bit like a stern order in his head, which made him grimace inwardly. But he was doing his monthly security check with the businesses in town, and that’s what he would continue doing.
But he could see her face, her expression. It was the same smiling, happy look that had so captured him on Sunday. She was walking with confidence, moving with a grace and feminine sway that nearly stopped him in his tracks. She had the demeanor of a self-assured, at-ease woman, enjoying a walk through the crisp winter air.
A demeanor he’d seen from her before.
The demeanor that had crumbled before his eyes when Dr. Andler had arrived to shatter her calm.
He didn’t know what that meant. His gut wanted to make the doctor the bad guy, to believe that instead of helping her he was somehow causing that change, but he was afraid that was because of his own antagonism toward the man. Maybe it was simply that the doctor had reminded her of her problems—maybe she’d been able to put them aside for a few hours. Although he wasn’t sure mental disorders worked like that. And not knowing which type she had, he couldn’t research it to find out.
Not that he would. He’d warned himself off, right? No way he was getting tangled up with someone that fragile, whose mental balance was so delicate the simple appearance of her shrink in an ordinary setting could send her off the edge. He didn’t ever want to witness anyone—especially the lively, funny, smart, beautiful woman he’d been sitting with until that moment—disintegrating like that again.
The sun broke through the clouds, not in a shaft of light but a full, brilliant explosion of illumination hitting the new snow, and instantly the whole world seemed to glitter and dazzle. Pedestrians stopped walking and looked, one of the things he loved about his people. He heard the light, airy laugh of someone taking a deep sort of pleasure in the suddenly gilded world.
He knew that laugh.
He looked back down the street. Saw her again. And that he’d been right; she was the one laughing, smiling, looking around as if she were drinking it all in with delight.
She spotted him. For a moment she went utterly still. Even from here he could see her lips part, and his imagination supplied a deep intake of breath. And then she was walking again, straight at him, and he was the one frozen in place. She was smiling that smile, as if the sight of him was as delightful to her as that burst of sunshine. And he simply could not move.
“Deputy Crenshaw,” she said as she came to a halt before him.
He had to again stifle the urge to tell her to call him Brady. Not that he was certain he could have spoken at all. Her eyes were that rich, bright green again, clear and focused. They were rimmed with thick, dark lashes that had him wondering insanely what they would feel like brushing against his skin.
Okay, maybe insane wasn’t a good word to be even thinking, given the circumstances.
“You look…well,” he finally managed to say. Which was, he realized, one of the greater understatements he’d ever made.
“Thank you, I feel wonderful today.” He heard the deep breath this time. “May I buy you coffee today? I’d like to…apologize.”
He knew what she meant, and that was murky water he did not want to wade into. He reminded himself of his determination not to get in any deeper with her. “There’s nothing you need to apologize for.”
“Then perhaps I should apologize for my doctor, who was less than polite to you and managed to reduce me to a quivering child,” she said, her tone very dry.
It startled him. He hadn’t thought she would have noticed the man’s coolness toward him, or at the least toward the uniform. People didn’t always notice or care about the person wearing it. He sometimes joked that if society ever went to actual robocops, it wouldn’t be much of a change for some people, since that’s what they already thought anyway.
“Not your job to apologize for him, either,” he said. “But he is a bit…much.” He ended with a shrug, keeping his reasons to himself.
“Amazing what putting an Ivy League degree on your wall will do for your ego.”
He laughed. Remembered how often he had laughed that Sunday. And how much time afterward he’d spent wondering what he would have done, if she’d been someone else. If she hadn’t been that fragile woman on a razor’s edge of sanity.
He had a fairly strong suspicion he would have asked her out. Because of how she made him laugh, if nothing else; that was rare enough in his world. Of course, that she had those eyes and that mouth that had him wondering things he hadn’t thought in a long time had nothing to do with it…
“Please?”
He realized he’d never really answered her invitation. And when he did, it wasn’t what he’d intended, which had been a polite, tactful refusal. “Only if I buy,” he said. “It feels wrong to me to let a citizen buy when I’m on duty.”
There. He’d categorized her now. She was a citizen of the county he was sworn to protect, that was all.
“Those are some pretty strong ethics there, Deputy.” She sounded half teasing, but also admiring, and that warmed him more than it should have. “To each our own, then?”
At her lead they went into the bakery this time, and he wondered if she was avoiding the coffee shop her shrink appeared to frequent. Or maybe she simply wanted the banana muffin she bought to go with her drink, today hot chocolate. Which suddenly sounded so good to him he bought one, too, although he passed on the muffin.
“If they could bottle the smell of those cinnamon rolls, I think they’d sell it by the case,” she said as she walked toward a table in the corner.
“But you didn’t get one.”
“Only once a month. Waistline,” she said succinctly.
“Nothing wrong with yours.” Oh, brilliant, Crenshaw. Way to keep things professional.
“Or yours.” He hadn’t expected that. Or her teasing addition of, “You obvious
ly don’t fit the old, tired cop stereotype about doughnuts.”
He grimaced. “If I never heard that one again, I’d be happy.”
He took two long strides around her and reached to pull out a chair at the small table. He gestured her to it then took the other, which faced out into the shop.
“Why do I feel a bit…herded?”
She said it lightly, so he gave her a crooked smile. “Points for noticing. I hate having my back to the door. Occupational hazard.”
It was a couple of minutes and about half a muffin later that she asked, “So how does it work, your job here? I know the sheriff is responsible for the whole county, but is it divided up?”
He nodded. “Into ten districts. The county’s just under two thousand square miles.”
Her eyes widened. “That’s a lot. How many of you are there?”
His mouth quirked. “I believe the required answer is ‘Not enough.’”
She smiled. It really was a great smile. “Are the districts all the same size?”
“No. Down on the flats, they’re smaller, because that’s where more of the population is. So there are six districts there, and only four up here in the mountains. Population of the county is just over a hundred thousand, if you’re into numbers. But a lot of the cities down there have dedicated police departments, so our jurisdiction is outside those.”
“Sounds complicated.”
He shrugged. “Only if the maps aren’t clear.”
“What about your district? How big is it?”
“About two hundred square miles.”
She gaped at him. “That’s…huge.”
“Only about fifteen by fifteen miles. And outside town, the population’s a bit sparse, so…” He shrugged again.
“But if you’re at one end and something happens at the other?”
He gave her a wry smile. “And there you have it, the challenge. Try it when there’s another few feet of snow on the ground.”
Harlequin Romantic Suspense December 2020 Box Set Page 54
