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“Where do you sleep?” Josie asked.
Delia gave her daughter a stern stare. Not only was she being rude, but they didn’t need to know any more about this man. “You don’t have to answer—”
“It’s no problem. I’m in one of the cabins this winter,” he said. “My dad usually stays in this part of the lodge, but he’s away for the next week, so you’ve got it to yourself.” He shot a quick grin at Josie over his big, wide shoulder and she grinned back.
Her daughter clearly trusted him. Liked him.
He was making an effort, Delia could tell, to put them at ease. His smile, while rusty, had a trace of his brother’s charm and she found herself smiling in return.
Would it be so bad, she thought, to have a friend right now?
“Is your cabin like the one you’re building?” Josie asked, and Delia looked down at her daughter, stunned.
“A little bit bigger.”
“You guys sure got friendly.” She tried to make the comment sound light. As though she didn’t care, but it came out accusatory and suspicious. She’d told Josie not to talk to strangers.
“Here you go,” he said, standing in front of a wide door with the words West Suite burned in script on the oak panel. He held out the key, and carefully dropped it in her hand when she reached for it.
The key was warm, hot even, from his skin. She felt a wave of heat climb her face and wash over her chest. God, she was so stupidly aware of this man she could feel his gaze on her skin like a caress before he turned to Josie. Delia, in turn, glanced at him. He was handsome. Not Gabe handsome—but really, to have two men who looked like Gabe in the same family was practically criminal. Max was rugged. Strong and powerful. And his eyes…his eyes were magnetic.
“Where’s your scar?” Josie asked, and Delia nearly gasped in horror.
“Josie! That’s not polite—”
“What scar?” Max asked.
“Gabe told us about the scar…right here.” She lifted her thin little chin and drew a finger across the white skin of her neck. “He said pirates got you, but I don’t believe him.”
“You don’t?”
“Josie,” Delia butted in. “Gabe was kidding—”
“It was pirates,” Max said, giving Delia a quick smile to indicate Josie’s interest was okay. And then he tilted his face, revealing a thick band of scar tissue that went from his ear halfway to his chin along the hairline of his scruffy whiskers.
Delia bit her lip and Josie gasped.
It was bad, that scar. A reminder of something violent. Something bloody and scary. Delia was sure of it.
She wrapped her hand around Josie’s shoulders, pulling her slightly closer, away from Max. They were running away from those things, from violence and injury and pain. She was trying, desperately, to leave it all behind.
That’s why you can’t trust your instincts, she scolded herself, panicked and light-headed from the sight of that scar and the answering throb of the scratches and bruises around her own neck.
She’d been right to doubt herself, to shove away all hints that this man was good or kind or helpful to them in any way.
He was trouble.
And she was on her own.
She quickly unlocked the door so Josie could run in and flop facedown across one of the big beds.
“Shout if you need any help,” Max said politely.
“Thank you,” she said, forcing herself to mean it, to not run inside and lock the door against him. “We appreciate it.” From inside the room Josie squealed and Delia stepped farther into the room.
“Your daughter—”
“Isn’t any of your business,” she snapped over the sound of her screaming instincts.
Her words hung in the air and she felt as if she’d slapped him. The sadness, the deep melancholy she sensed in him, was visible in his eyes.
I’m sorry, she wanted to say, to eradicate the hurt she’d caused. I’m not like this, but I’m so scared of you. I’m scared of everything.
“Right,” he said as if he’d read her mind. “It’s okay.” He nodded, stepped back and was gone before she could blink.
Shaken slightly by Max and her reaction to him, she shut the door behind her and gave herself a moment. Just a moment to give in to all the things she really couldn’t afford. Doubt. Wishes. Hopes that she could fall asleep and everything in her life would be right again. That she wouldn’t have to run from Max and their strange connection. That she was a different kind of woman.
Josie darted out of the bathroom to stand in the box of light coming in from the windows. Her hair sparkled and glittered, and her smile, unguarded and genuine, was like a pinprick to Delia’s heart. Josie turned to face her and slowly, like the sun setting on the flat, barren desert she came from, the smile vanished only to be replaced by caution and worry that made Delia want to howl.
“Everything okay, Mama?” Josie asked, adult worry stamped on her young face.
The past year had aged Josie, turned her from a little girl to this changeling. Divorce was hard—Delia was proof of that. Having survived, barely, her own parents’ split, she’d always sworn she wouldn’t put her own children through the experience.
A promise she’d tried so hard to keep. Yet, here she was.
Delia braced herself against the door, let it hold her up when her knees wanted to buckle, while she wished, with all her heart, with every cell and granule of her self, that Josie had a different kind of mom. A better kind.
“Everything is great,” Delia lied, smiling. Those divorce books told her that Josie would be susceptible to Delia’s moods, so if she pretended everything was okay, Josie might start to believe it. And maybe Delia could, too. Someday.
Chapter Three
DELIA STROKED Josie’s hair—clean and sweet smelling—over the pillow while her little girl slept. Josie would never let her do this while awake.
She used to, of course, six months ago. Before France. Before Jared lost his mind and self-control.
Delia had thought, stupidly, that the divorce had been bad enough. But this? How could they possibly recover from what Jared was doing to them?
Josie always had been such a daddy’s little girl. And really, Delia couldn’t blame her—Jared had been an unbelievable father. Devoted, kind, more patient than she’d ever been, that’s for sure. He’d played endless rounds of tea party and dress-up. He acted as Prince Charming for Josie a hundred times a day.
But as the years stretched on in their marriage, it seemed that the better father he became, the worse husband he became. The qualities that she had found so earth-shatteringly attractive—his confidence, his willingness to fight for what he thought was right, his loyalty to friends—became disastrous as their marriage fell apart and she was increasingly what he fought against. The security she’d thought she’d found had turned to quicksand.
That had been her problem in the end—looking for security in someone else.
It was a lesson she seemed to have to relearn nearly every day.
Despite promises to the contrary—given in the rush of make-up emotion—Jared’s temper started spilling over into their relationship. He brought the pressures of his job into their home and sullied it with his uncontrollable rage.
She was never right and Jared’s opinion of her, which he vocalized more and more, plummeted. Until finally he started calling her stupid. Worthless. A terrible mother.
She’d moved out at that point, filed for divorce and joint custody. Probably too late, having stuck it out for Josie’s sake, but life had been okay for close to a year. Jared had been stable, their relationship civil. Then her mother got sick, alone in a shabby apartment outside of Paris.
Delia twined a lock of Josie’s hair between her fingers and thought about fate. About the way the world turned out of control all the time.
For Josie the past year had been one catastrophe after another. Culminating in this “vacation” with a mother she no longer seemed to like.
Delia had the memory of shrugging off her own mother. She’d been twelve or so and on one of her summer trips to France to visit the mother who had left them. She remembered wanting so badly to be touched by her mother but wanting to deny her at the same time. Hurt her. Wound her for leaving as she’d been wounded by the leaving.
Like mother like daughter, she thought bitterly about both connections.
Josie sighed and rolled on her side away from Delia. The little girl was exhausted. She’d barely eaten anything and had almost fallen asleep halfway through her bath.
Delia felt her own eyelids flutter, the panic and fear in her bloodstream ebbing as she relaxed.
Don’t start resting yet, she told herself, shaking away the weariness that stuck to her like cobwebs. There were things she had to do before she could let down her guard. She had to deal with Jared.
Assured Josie was out cold, Delia eased off the bed and grabbed her room key, calling card and cell phone from her purse.
She felt as though she was in some bad made-for-TV movie. Running around, buying cell phones from gas stations and throwing them away, using a calling card so the number couldn’t be traced. She didn’t even know if any of her tactics worked.
Those bad made-for-TV movies were her only guide.
The room door opened soundlessly, easing over the wide oak-planked floor. The floorboards creaked slightly as she stepped into the hallway and crept downstairs to the dark, silent dining room.
The moon still hid behind clouds and so the light sliding out from under the kitchen door was the only illumination in the opaque, thick blackness.
She was alone.
Stepping into the darkest shadows beside the staircase, she made a quick prayer to a no-doubt-incredulous god and dialed her phone with shaking fingers.
If you want to stop running, you have to do this, she assured herself. This is the right thing to do.
But every instinct—survival, maternal, self-preservation—screamed for her to stop, to not make the call.
“Hello?” Jared’s voice was enough to make adrenaline gush through her body, locking her muscles. Her throat closed and her heart hammered against her breastbone.
“Delia? Is that you?”
Her mouth was the Sahara Desert. “It’s me.”
His laughter, evil and snide, rippled down her back. “Well, if it isn’t my vacationing ex-wife. Tell me, how is South Carolina?”
Tears of panic and fear burned in her eyes and she couldn’t say anything.
“Did you think I wouldn’t look for you there?” he asked, so mocking and confident she wanted to reach through the phone lines and claw at his face. “Your cousin runs a shelter for idiots like you. I knew you’d go there.”
“I’m not there anymore,” she finally managed to say. “So who is the idiot?”
“Listen, you bitch.” His voice turned mean, a physical slap across the miles separating them. “I’m doing you a huge favor right now telling people you and Josie are just on a little trip. But I’m running out of patience. All I have to do is breathe the word kidnapping into my good friend the district attorney’s ear and this little ’vacation’ of yours is over.”
That galvanized her. Her spine straightened and the tears vanished. The good-old-boys’ club that her exhusband was so secure in had forced her to run, had turned a blind eye to his actions and had ruined any trust she’d had in the men she’d called friends over the years.
And she’d had enough.
What Delia knew about Jared he’d never want known. And that balanced the scales.
“You know your ’friends’ might forgive a man who beats his wife,” she said, her voice low. “They might understand an officer of the law taking some bribes now and again. Hell—” she was on a roll, feeling her own power well up from the ground under her feet “—an old football star like you might be forgiven a lot of things. But all I need to do is mention your involvement with the vanload of Mexican immigrants found dead in the desert to the press and you—”
“You don’t know anything,” he said, but she could hear the doubt in his voice.
“The man they arrested was staying with you, Jared. Josie saw him in your house in the middle of the night. She heard you arguing. Before you turned him in you kept him hidden. In the same house as your daughter!”
His laughter cut her short. “Who is going to believe you, sweetheart? I am the Lubbock County sheriff. I play golf with the governor. She’s just a little girl and you’re an unstable mother who abandoned her daughter to go to France.”
Anger blasted through her nervous system like an electric charge. “For six weeks, you bastard. My mother was dying and you wouldn’t let Josie leave the country with me.”
“Baby, you were never cut out to be a mother. And now you’re proving it by dragging our little girl all over the country for nothing.”
So mocking. So cocky. She wanted to go to the police right now. This minute. Just to see Jared’s mug shot all over the evening news.
But she didn’t know who she could trust. Where she could turn. And if something happened to her, if his evil web of golf buddies buried her and the evidence, what would happen to Josie?
What would happen to Josie if Jared truly understood what his little girl had seen?
“If I don’t know anything, and Josie’s just a little girl, why did you try to kill me? Why did Chris—” She nearly stuttered on the name.
“Sweetheart, Chris was doing his job. When he became one of my deputies he stopped being your friend. His loyalty is to me.”
“His job shouldn’t include protecting a scumbag like you, Jared.”
“Well, then maybe he decided it paid better to be my friend than yours.”
She pressed her forehead against the wall, wishing she could shove the memories of her friend’s betrayal out of her skull. But they were burned there. Like the fingerprints and fingernail scratches around her neck that, even though they were a week and half old, didn’t appear to be going away.
She’d thought she could trust Chris. The last person in her life who was on her side in the war between her and Jared. And when she’d gone to him with the information she had about Jared’s involvement in the human smuggling, her old friend had set her up.
He told her she and Josie were safe staying at his cabin. He told her he would bring the chief of police and the D.A. to hear what she had to say. He held her and listened to her and that night, after she put Josie to bed, when she answered the door expecting the cavalry, Jared had stood there instead.
“The hospital in Charleston has records of what you did to me,” she said. “And I have proof of those men you’ve been dealing with.” A slight lie—she had no real proof. But her cousin had told her about private investigators whose job it was to dig up the dirt no one wanted found. If she told the right people, they could find the proof and they both knew it. “So why don’t you cut the bullshit? If you didn’t think what I knew could hurt you, you’d have already called out the dogs on me.”
He was silent for a moment and it was so gratifying more tears bit into the back of her eyes. Victories, no matter how small and brief, were not something to be taken lightly these days.
“What do you want?”
“I want to make a deal,” she said.
“Forget it. I’m not dealing with trash like you.”
“Fine then. I’ll call my lawyer—”
He laughed. “Please, no one in town would dare represent you.”
She laid down her ace card and hoped it was enough to scare him away from them for good.
“My cousin knows people who would.”
He paused for a second and Delia held her breath. Her cousin Samantha, who ran the shelter in South Carolina, had resources such as lawyers who specialized in these sorts of cases.
“You haven’t talked to her about this,” he finally said. “I know because I talked to her when I tracked you to that crappy shelter you took our baby to.”
“I haven’t talked to her yet, Jared. But I could.”
She could hear him breathe, could imagine the vein in his forehead pressing against his skin. The ugliness in his soul turned his handsome face into something evil.
He was not the man she had married. He was not Josie’s father. This man was a monster and she didn’t understand when it had happened. When had he lost control? This all seemed like some absurd nightmare, one of his terrible practical jokes that only he thought was funny.
“You wouldn’t,” he said. “You’re too weak. Too scared.”
Once maybe that had been true. But she was Delia Dupuis. And she was her daddy’s girl and tough as nails.
“Don’t push me, Jared. You’d be surprised what I could do.”
“I’ve seen what you can do, and I owe you for that.” That night in the cabin she’d nearly split open his skull with a fire poker. When his grip around her throat eased, she’d pulled herself free, prepared to run, but rage and a long list of injuries for which she deserved retribution forced her to turn back to him and kick him solidly, viciously, between the legs.
He’d passed out from the pain on Chris Groames’s floor and she’d grabbed her sleeping daughter and run.
She swallowed bile, hating herself and what she’d turned into when backed into a corner.
“Why haven’t you talked to her, then?” he asked. “With all this proof you’ve got on me.”
“You want Josie to see what you really are?” she asked, her voice cracking. She was doing the unthinkable, protecting him in order to protect her daughter. “You want her to be called as a witness against you? She’s a little girl, Jared. It would kill her.”
The line was silent for so long she allowed herself to hope that he was seeing reason.
“Jared, let us go. We can—”
“You talk to your cousin and she’s dead,” he growled.
Ice water like fear chilled her to the bone. Years ago, she would have said Jared, despite his temper, wasn’t capable of real violence. But the last year of their marriage and whatever mess he’d gotten himself mixed up in with the smuggling of drugs and immigrants over the Mexican border had convinced her otherwise.
He was capable of anything and she had the bruises to prove it.
“Stop looking for us and I won’t say anything. To anyone. Just leave us alone,” she nearly begged.
“I’m happy to leave you alone. I’m happy to let you rot wherever you want to. But you’re not taking my girl.”
“I’m not letting you have her back.”
“Tell me, does Josie even like you? You left her for six weeks, Delia. That’s a hard thing for a kid to get over. You divorced her father. You’re making her run all over the country. What are you telling her about this little trip of yours?”
“We’re doing fine,” she lied.
So many mistakes.
But she hoped keeping Jared away from Josie was the one good thing she could do as a mother, to make up for the mistakes she’d made. Even if Josie hated her for it.
“You’re a criminal, Jared. You think I’m going to let her go back to you?”
“And you think I won’t hunt you to ground like an animal? Josie is mine, Delia. You proved that when you walked away from her.”
In the end, he was right. She’d left her little girl with a monster. A monster disguised as a devoted father.
She was suddenly tired, too weak to keep battling. Her adrenaline and nerves bottomed out and she sagged against the wall.
“Leave us alone,” she breathed.
“You can’t run forever, you—”
She disconnected the phone and pressed it hard to her lips until she felt her teeth. Her pulse chugged in her ears and cold sweat ran down her back. She slammed her fist against the wall, wishing it were her husband or Chris Groames.
How did I get here? she thought, hysterically.
Her fingers traced the yellow and purple bruises on her neck through the thin cotton of her sweater.
Two weeks ago she’d gotten back from France. She’d been trying hard to make amends with her daughter, to put aside the guilt she had about her mother. She’d been thinking about planting a garden behind her little house. Her own herbs and some tomatoes for Josie to pick when they were ripe.
But then the news story about the van of immigrants broke and her life changed.
This is too much, she thought, too much for me to handle on my own.
But she didn’t have a choice. Jared made sure of that.
Her father was dead. Her mother, if she were alive, would be less than useless, having spent her whole life avoiding anything messy or ugly. And this was both.
Turning to her cousin Samantha was now totally out of the question.
Josie has me. Me and no one else.
And I have no one. The realization filled her with a despair so heavy, so all-consuming she couldn’t breathe.
A rag doll without bone or muscle operating out of sheer habit and will, she turned only to realize the front door stood open, the silhouette of a man outlined in silver light watched her.
“JUST LEAVE US ALONE.”
Max heard the snap of a cell phone shutting and the distinctive sound of a fist hitting the wall. He had a sickening sense of déjà vu. How many times had he seen this while on the force? How many times had a woman’s voice, shaking with the same combination of fear and anger, haunted him? Echoed in his head long after the damage was done?
He turned to duck away, telling himself it was to let Delia have her privacy, but he knew the truth.
He wanted to pretend he didn’t hear the emotional plea for help in her voice. Because he was a coward.
But as he stepped back into the night, her voice again cut through the darkness.
“Who’s there?” she asked. She stepped into the slice of light from the open door, but the light didn’t reach her face and all he could see were her fists pressed against her stomach.
“Delia, it’s me. Max.” He was careful. Quiet. He kept the door open so he could avoid turning on the overhead lights.
He didn’t want to reveal what he knew instinctively she would want hidden. Her face, her eyes, the devils that chased her and from which she couldn’t hide.
“Sorry.” Her voice came out on a soft gust of relief and forced laughter. “You startled me.”
He did a hell of a lot more than that but he wasn’t about to push the issue.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Fine.” She swallowed and opened her hands to reveal the cell phone. When she spoke again her accent was more pronounced. “Just some family problems. You know how it is.”
He chuckled politely. She was telling half-truths, white lies that were inconsequential, while she hid something big.
She’s probably having a fight with a boyfriend or her ex or her mother, for all I know, he thought, convincing himself he didn’t need to get involved.
But then she sighed and her breath caught on a hiccup and something in the way she stood changed. She was cracking, falling apart right in front of him.
And if she did that they’d both be ruined. He was not the sort of man people should trust—that had been proved time and time again. He didn’t want the burden of whatever she was about to tell him.
“Max—” she breathed. “I—”
“It’s none of my business.” He held his arms out to his side, a position of surrender. “Just like you said.”
Her hands, alabaster in the moonlight, like white birds or handkerchiefs, clutched again briefly at her stomach then relaxed. He guessed she didn’t realize how much she gave away with that gesture.
I’m sorry. The words flung themselves against his lips, but he kept his mouth shut.
He suddenly wanted to tell her that she was safe here, to at least offer her that kind of succor. But it wasn’t true. Safety was an illusion.
Besides, she’d probably prickle and tell him to mind his own business.
“Okay,” she breathed, her own act of surrender. Suddenly they were linked by whatever she wasn’t saying and he wasn’t pushing her to say. They collaborated on her pretense. “Thank you. I better get back before Josie wakes up and screams the place down.’