That girl was the girl Delia remembered. The little girl from before the divorce and before France and before Delia loaded her up in the car and drove away from Texas two weeks ago.
Delia’s heart felt punched and kicked, battered and torn. She’d spent so much time, so many hours trying to coax the smallest smile, a courtesy smile, a sneer of pre-adolescent superiority, anything, from her little girl’s mouth.
To no avail.
Five days at this inn, an hour with this man and here Josie was a kid again.
Tears burned in Delia’s eyes and she wasn’t even sure what she felt. Anger. Jealousy.
A relief so profound she was light-headed.
She spent most of her time scared. Scared of the past, the future, whatever lurked behind the next corner. She was scared of cops and old friends and ex-husbands and her daughter. She worried late at night that her daughter’s childhood, any hope for a normal life was gone, ruined not just by Jared’s lunacy, but by the divorce, by the evil things her husband whispered in his little girl’s ear—much like Delia’s father had done to her.
But right now, at the edge of the forest, she sent up a brief prayer of thanks that they’d stumbled their way here to the Riverview Inn and, though it had taken her five days to admit it, to this man who was able to make her daughter feel like a kid again.
Her instincts were right after all.
Max was proving himself to be one of the good guys.
It felt so good, like letting go of a deep breath. Like letting in sunshine and kindness, and her heart grew.
“Hi, guys,” she said, her voice ringing through the trees and snow. Predictably, Josie’s smile vanished as though it had never been there, her little mouth settling into the stern lines Delia had seen for weeks.
It hurt, but Delia pushed the sensation away, embracing her relief that her laughing, smiling daughter was still in there—just not when she was around.
“Can I help?” Delia asked, and both Josie and Max looked at her, mouths agape. “I mean, if you need it. And—” she smiled “—it sort of looks like you do.” She nodded toward the half-completed little building.
The two of them eyed her suspiciously and she realized then what they thought of her. What she’d become.
I used to be fun, she wanted to say. I used to laugh and trust people. Is it my fault that’s been taken away from me?
The silence stretched so long that she felt like a fool. Her daughter, who, before the divorce, used to beg for Delia to play with her from the moment her eyes opened in the morning to the moment they reluctantly shut at night, didn’t say a word.
“I can just watch or—”
“Of course you can help,” Max said.
“I don’t have to if you don’t want me to.”
“I just said you could, didn’t I?”
It was quite possibly the worst invitation ever uttered to help someone build a mysterious little building. But beggars could not be choosers.
“Great,” she said, clapping her hands with an enthusiasm she was far from feeling. At least this way, Josie could spend time with this guy who made her laugh and Delia could maybe find out a little bit more about her daughter’s new best friend.
But that wasn’t all and she knew it. She wanted to know more about him for her own sake.
Josie simply just watched her with her amber eyes.
“Sweetheart?” Delia asked, her heart in her throat, already stung and wounded by Josie’s many rejections. “Do you want me to leave?”
Josie shook her head and Delia’s heart bobbed upward.
“Great,” Max muttered, his forced exuberance so trans-parent it was laughable. “The gang’s all here.”
“So? What are we building?” she asked.
“A shed,” Max answered, and Josie shot him a dubious look. “It is!” he insisted and Delia bit back a smile. They were a little comedy routine.
“She can help me measure,” Josie said, solemnly, like a serious project manager.
“Okay,” Delia said, her smile bright, her hands freezing. “Tell me where to start.” She blew on her fingers, wishing she’d stopped long enough to grab her mitts.
“With these,” he said, yanking off his thick yellow leather gloves and handing them out to her. “You’ll get frostbite.”
She stared at the gloves, at his bare hands, the calluses on his fingers, the cuts along his palm, the thumbnail with the dark spot that he must have hit with a hammer or something. Those hands said a lot about him. Much the way her husband’s soft, clammy hands should have warned her the first time they gripped her wrist a little too hard.
“You won’t?” she asked, her voice a strange croak.
He shook his head and his dark eyes bored into hers.
She tried to look away, but those eyes were magnetic and she could only blink and grip the soft leather between her hands.
“Thank you,” she said, breaking eye contact.
She slid her hands into the warmth of his gloves. They were big, loose and warm, hot even, from Max’s body heat. Putting them on, placing her fingers, the delicate skin of her palms against the places his had been was unbearably intimate.
The closest thing she’d had to sex in over a year.
She flexed her hands, the fingertips of the gloves hanging off by inches, and the smell of Max, caught in the soft inner lining, teased her. He turned away and she lifted the glove to her nose to sniff wood, pine trees and something underneath it all, a spicy note of bergamot and something else—smoke and danger. Max.
“We need to talk.” His tone was steel plated and her eyes flew up at the change in him. The surprising hard-edged difference in this quiet man.
“Come on, Mom,” Josie said, seemingly oblivious to the adult electricity in the clearing. “We need to measure all around the roof so Max can cut the logs the right length.”
Max handed Josie a piece of paper and a pencil so she could write everything down. And within moments Delia found herself on the small stepladder, bracing her daughter and handing her the metal tab so she could measure something that had already been measured.
“What are we building, really?” Delia asked Josie. “A mini log cabin?”
“I think it’s a fort,” Josie said. She stuck out her tongue as she carefully wrote down her measurement then stuffed the paper in her pocket and put her pencil behind her ear, identical to Max.
“For who?”
“For Max.”
Delia laughed. “Why does Max need a fort?”
Josie turned, wobbled slightly on the ladder and Delia held on tighter. “To hide,” she answered solemnly. “That’s what you do in forts.”
Delia swallowed her astonished laughter. From the mouths of babes. “I guess you’re right.”
They worked in silence for a few more minutes. With each moment she grew more and more aware of him behind her. Occasionally it felt as though his gaze would brush her legs, the back of her head, and she nearly whirled around to confront him.
At one point when it felt as though her skin flushed and burned under what she was sure was his secretive regard, she whirled, only to find him carefully working, not paying any attention to her at all.
“What do you think of Max?” she whispered to Josie.
“I think he’s funny.”
“Funny?” She looked over her shoulder at the über-serious man. “Max?”
Josie shrugged, her tongue out as she concentrated.
“Has he asked you anything about—”
“Dad?” Josie interrupted pointedly.
Delia turned slightly and thought she saw Max glance at them but it was momentary. “I was going to say us. Have you said anything to him?” She almost told her daughter that she had to pretend her father was dead, but they were having such a normal time that she didn’t want to ruin it.
It was hard to tell, but it seemed Josie’s wind-chapped cheeks turned slightly pinker. “Did you know his mom left him and his brother when they were kids?”
Josie shook her head and Delia leaned back slightly against the ladder, the wind out of her sails.
“Wow.”
“Hey, Mom?”
“Yeah?”
“Why were you smelling his glove?”
Luckily, at that moment the heavy sound of a handsaw biting and clawing through the wood filled the clearing and Delia was spared having to answer.
Max could smell Delia on the breeze—shampoo, soap, gum and something else, something warm and secretive—and it was throwing him off his course.
He should have confronted her when she arrived in the clearing. He could have easily sent Josie away and gotten right to business. But Delia had looked so heartbroken, so lonely for her daughter, so eager for a chance to do something normal that he’d let his objective go. Again.
He’d made the path of least resistance his home the past two years and it was tough getting off it.
But Joe was right—once a cop, always a cop, no matter if you were a bad one. And Max’s instincts, honed by years on the force, honed by domestic-crime task forces, said there was a crime being committed right now. Right here in his clearing. Too close to where his niece or nephew was curled, chin to knee, waiting to be born.
He had to do something about it. Now.
He’d given Josie and Delia the chance to talk, the chance to do something besides be worried. They’d let the opportunity to come clean pass so now he had some questions.
“Hey, Josie,” he called, putting down his tools. “I need you to do me a favor.”
The mother and daughter both turned to him with their similarly shaped eyes, their red hair like bright flags in the snowscape behind them.
“What?” Josie asked, clambering off the ladder and ignoring her mother’s attempts to help her.
“I’m starving. Are you hungry?” He barely waited for Josie’s nod before making his request. “Can you go ask Cameron to make us a few sandwiches?”
“We just had breakfast,” Delia said, and he nearly rolled his eyes. Was it any wonder her daughter resented her if she was going to be such a constant killjoy?
“This work builds up an appetite,” he said, and Josie nodded emphatically. “We’re going to need two turkey sandwiches. And tell him to use the good cheese, not that soy garbage that Alice is trying to get rid of. No tomatoes.”
“Josie loves tomatoes,” Delia chimed in, but Josie shook her head.
“No, I don’t.”
Max nearly winced on Delia’s behalf. Instead he asked her if she wanted one.
“Sure,” she said, and shrugged.
“Great, three Cameron turkey deluxes. Go. Go.” He shooed Josie off as if those sandwiches were the only thing between them and immediate starvation. She took off, a pink streak through the trees.
“And cookies!” he yelled after her.
“Okay!” she yelled back, her little voice echoing into silence in the clearing.
He and Delia eyed each other across a ten-foot separation, sizing each other up. She was stunning, her white skin flushed, her red hair speckled with snow.
He’d interrogated beautiful women. Women whose gorgeous faces and perfect bodies hid hearts of such blackness it kept him up nights pacing for the children who suffered such mothers.
But this woman…her heart was not black. Her heart was right there on her sleeve and it bled red for her little girl.
Sadly, that fact didn’t make whatever she’d done, or was doing, right.
“I have some questions,” he said. “And things would be a whole lot easier for you if you gave me some honest answers.”
7
“Questions?” Delia asked, stiffening with the stony fear that he’d seen a million times in witnesses terrified to confess what they knew.
“What are you hiding?” He jumped right in with both feet. Delia’s eyes, blue like distant water, like the horizon where the Hudson met the sky, widened in shock.
“Hiding? What are you talking about?” She crossed her arms over her chest displaying every classic sign that she was lying: her eyes never landed anywhere long and her hands, wearing his baggy gloves, had a death grip on her arms. Her heart beat hard at the pulse point in her neck.
Max wanted to tell her that if she was going to lie, she shouldn’t give herself away with her body language. And suddenly he was so weary. Weary of this bait and catch, this bullying dance.
“Please,” he said, surprising himself. “Just tell me the truth.”
She hesitated before throwing back her hair. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do. Do both of us a favor and tell me what’s going on. It’s obvious you and your daughter are hiding something.”
“What has Josie said?” Delia asked, too fast.
“She’s said she misses her father.”
Delia blanched and turned to hide it. “She’s just a little girl. She’s—”
“Very smart,” he interjected.
Delia looked over at the building, the skeleton roof. “She said you’re building a fort so you can hide,” she said.
“It’s a shed,” he muttered, but she looked at him over her shoulder and his gut tightened at the picture she made. Her beauty and foolish bravery. He just wanted to help, for crying out loud.
“What are you hiding?” she asked.
“Don’t change the subject.”
“Is this an interrogation?” she asked, bristling all over. “Are you a cop? Is that what you were before you were a carpenter? The job you used to like going to in the mornings?”
Wow. She remembered everything from that conversation days ago. Fair, he thought. He’d been playing it over and over in his head.
Somehow she made being a cop sound a scarce step up from being sewer sludge. His gut instructed him to lie. “No. I’m not a cop and this isn’t an interrogation. These are the questions my brother is too trusting to have asked.”
“He already gave me the job, Max.”
“And I can just as easily have him take it away, Delia.” He could and he would and she knew it. And they both knew that whatever she was hiding was making her desperate enough to need to be here.
“Fine,” she said, sending out sparks into the dangerous air between them. “Ask your damn questions.”
“I don’t want to fight you, Delia.”
“Well,” she said, and tilted her chin, her eyes snapping, “you’re going to have to. I’m not in the habit of spilling my secrets to men who blackmail me with my job.”
Their breath curled around them in gusts from their parted lips. The air between them grew warmer, the threat of explosion more definite. He stood too close to her and knew he should step away. But she was a fire on a cold night, and he was frozen to the bone.
“Your husband?” he said.
“What about him?”
“You told Alice he was dead.”
“Gossiping about the bereaved? That’s not a very neighborly thing—”
“Josie told me you were divorced.”
“We were. Then he died. Terrible accid—”
“Josie said he’s still alive.”
Her nostrils flared with her sharp intake of breath.
“No more lies, Delia. Please.”
Finally, her eyes shut on a whispered curse, the fight visibly ebbing from her body. She accepted the inevitable. She’d tell him everything, but the victory was expensive and Delia was the one paying.
“Which is it, Delia?” he asked, pushing harder.
She sighed and angled her head back to look up at the sky.
“He’s alive.”
Her throat, delicate and white, arched. Above the edge of her turtleneck he saw the yellow edge of a bruise and an angry red scratch.
The puzzle came together with that bruise. Her fear, her worry, her fragile control.
That old rage he felt, on behalf of the bullied and brutalized, rushed his chest, pumped adrenaline into his blood
stream and he wanted to fight. Take whoever had done that to Delia and pound him into dust.
Max fisted his hands and forced himself under control.
“Why did you lie?”
Her lips parted and he could tell the words were there, right on the edge of her tongue. Against every scrap of better sense and self-preservation, he wanted so badly to touch her. To stroke her cheek, ease his hands into her hair, cradle her head against his chest and press his lips to those bruises.
To ease part of her burden, to restore some of her foolish courage and feisty attitude.
“He hurt you?” He posed it as a question when the silence became so heavy they were sure to crumple under it. He wanted to make this easier for her. For both of them. “Delia?”
Again her hands went to her neck. She tucked her fingers under the high collar of her red shirt, as if she were about to pull it down and show him. But she didn’t. She stood, so still she was like wax.
“Can I see?” he whispered. “Your neck. The bruises—” When she jerked away from him, he said, “I won’t hurt you. Not like him. I’d never do that.”
Her gorgeous eyes filled with tears and a sudden hot rage and, instead of letting him touch her, she pulled down the collar herself.
The fading bruises and crimson scratches that could only be made by fingernails made a gory necklace.
Ah, Delia. I’m so sorry, he thought tenderly, at complete odds with the blast of fury through his nervous system. His knees nearly buckled from the onslaught of emotion.
God, he’d worked so hard not to feel anything and now this wild surge of anger and sympathy hurt.
He shook it off, tried to anyway, focused on his reality—the cold snow, his numb fingers.
But she was right there and he couldn’t look away.
They stood even closer now, closer probably than she realized and he could see the black flecks in her blue eyes, the shaking of her hands, the tremble of her lips. The emotions intensified, the rage and the weak knees. It was wrong in the worst possible way that this woman would be hurt by a man she trusted—that any woman would be hurt that way. But she was so strong and so scared. His hands itched to brush the hair off her forehead, to ease some of the burden she carried, to stroke away the lines of worry on her perfect face.
Secrets of the Riverview Inn Page 9
