The Obsession, Page 36

  “Okay.” He got the spare helmet, handed it to her. “You break the deal, I charge you double for the tires.”

  “Oh, Xander.” But she laughed and got on the bike behind him. “A deal’s a deal, and at least I get a cool ride to work out of it.”

  By the time he got to the big house, all he wanted was to sit out on the deck with Naomi, maybe have a beer. And let the entire day shed like dead skin.

  By the time he’d unstrapped the takeout, Tag had raced around from the back of the house to greet him as though he’d been off to war.

  Appreciating the welcome, he held the food up out of reach with one hand, gave the dog a rub with the other. And when the tennis ball landed at his feet, he gave it a good boot to send Tag joyfully after it.

  He noted that Naomi’s car sat alone, and wondered why Kevin hadn’t waited. Even with the delay, he’d expected Kevin to hang tight until he got there.

  He walked around the back, stopping long enough to give the ball another kick.

  She sat on the deck alone, working on her tablet, with a glass of wine on the little table beside the glider.

  “Got hung up,” he said.

  She only nodded, kept doing whatever she was doing.

  “I’m going to grab a beer, put this in the oven on low.”

  “That’s fine.”

  He didn’t consider himself particularly sensitive to moods—at least, he’d been told by annoyed women he lacked that insight—but he knew when something was off.

  In his experience, the best way to handle things when something was off, and you didn’t know what, was to just keep going until whatever was off popped out.

  Sometimes, if luck held, it just went away.

  He came back with his beer, sat beside her, shot out his legs. And Jesus, didn’t that feel good?

  “Where’s Kev?”

  “At home with his wife and kids, I imagine.”

  “I figured he’d hang out until I got here.”

  “I insisted he go home. I don’t need a bodyguard.”

  It didn’t take Mr. Sensitivity to recognize a bitchy mood when it snapped its teeth at him. He took a pull on his beer, let it ride.

  The silence lasted maybe twenty seconds.

  “I don’t like the two of you arranging shifts. I’m not an idiot, and I’m not incapable.”

  “I never thought of you as either one.”

  “Then stop hovering, and stop asking Kevin to hover. It’s not only insulting, it’s annoying.”

  “Looks like you’ll have to be insulted and annoyed.”

  “You can’t decide for me.”

  “Marla’s body, about thirty-five feet straight down from where you’re sitting, says I can.”

  “No one dictates to me, and if you think sleeping with me gives you that right, you’re very wrong.”

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw the dog slink down the steps—looking, Xander imagined, for a safe spot out of the line of fire.

  “That’s bullshit. It’s even weak bullshit. You can either tell me what crawled up your ass since this morning or not, but I know when somebody’s looking to pick a fight. I’m not in the mood for one, but that can change.”

  “You’re crowding me, it’s as simple as that.” She pushed off the glider, picked up her wine, set down the tablet. “I bought this place because I like being alone, and now I never am.” She took a long drink from the glass, which he’d bet a week’s profits wasn’t her first of the evening.

  “Yeah, that could change. If you’re trying to give me the boot, then be straight about it.”

  “I need some space.”

  “And clichés like that are more weak bullshit. You can do better.”

  “I shouldn’t have started this . . . thing with you, and it’s moved too fast, gotten too complicated.”

  Anger, and something he couldn’t quite pin down, spiked into her voice.

  “I’m tired of feeling surrounded and boxed in. And it just needs to stop. Just stop. You, the house, the yard. God, the dog. It’s all too much. It’s all a mistake, and it needs to stop.”

  He wanted to push back, and hard, because, Jesus, she’d hurt him. He hadn’t expected the punch or just how completely it flattened him.

  Complicated? She had that right. Complications twisted up inside him he hadn’t known existed.

  But she was shaking, and her breath came just a little too fast. She was working herself up to another panic attack, and he’d damn well know why.

  “You want me gone, I’ll go. I’ll take the damn dog if that’s how you want it. I don’t force myself on anyone. But give me the truth.”

  “I just did! This is a mistake. All of this, and I need to correct it.”

  “By dumping me, the dog, this house, what you’ve started making here? That’s not what you want.”

  “You don’t know what I want.” She hurled the words at him, along with a fear-tinted rage. “You don’t know me.”

  “I damn well do.”

  “You don’t! That’s the bullshit. You don’t know me, who I am, or what I am. You know weeks, the weeks I’ve been here. You don’t know anything from before. You don’t know me.”

  It struck him then, clear as glass. That unidentified something under it all, the base of the anger and fear. It was grief.

  “Yes, I do.” He set the beer aside, rose. “I know who you are, where you came from, what you went through, and what you’re trying to make now, away from it.”

  She shook her head, took a step in retreat. “You can’t.” He saw her lips tremble before she pressed them together, saw tears glitter before she forced them back.

  “Chief Winston told you.”

  Now he had the match on the fuse. “No, I haven’t talked to him, haven’t seen him since the cemetery. But you have. He didn’t tell me anything. You did.”

  She crossed her arm over her body, gripped her own shoulder with her hand as if shielding herself.

  Not from him, he thought. Goddamn it, not from him.

  “I never told you anything about this.”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  He pushed down his own anger. He’d let it fly later, but for now, for right now, he spoke matter-of-factly.

  “The day up in my place, that first time. You saw the book on my shelf. The Simon Vance book. You looked like someone kicked you in the gut. It didn’t take much to figure it out from there. There are photos in the book. You were about eleven or twelve, I guess. Just a kid. You’ve changed your hair, grown up. But you have the same eyes, the same look about you. And Naomi, it’s not an everyday name.”

  “You knew.” The knuckles of her hand went white as bone.

  “I can wish the book hadn’t been there to put that look on your face. But it was.”

  “You . . . you’ve told Kevin.”

  “No.” The doubt in her eyes came so clear he waited a beat, kept his gaze level on hers. “No,” he said again. “Womb to tomb doesn’t mean I tell him what you don’t want told.”

  “You haven’t told him,” she repeated, and her fingers loosened on her shoulder, her hand slid down. “You’ve known all this time, known since before we . . . Why haven’t you said anything to me, asked me?”

  “I didn’t know, so the book was there. But once I knew? I wasn’t going to put that look on your face again. And okay, I hoped you’d tell me before I had to shove it in your face like this, but you pushed the buttons.”

  “You didn’t.” Rubbing the heel of her hand between her brows, she turned away. “You didn’t shove it in my face. Others have, so I know exactly what it feels like. I don’t know what this feels like.”

  She set the wine on the rail, pressed her fingers to her eyes. “I need a minute.”

  “If you need to yell, I can handle it. If you need to cry, I can handle it. Yelling’s preferred.”

  “I’m not going to yell, or cry.”

  “I think most people would do some of both. You’re not most people.”

  �
�I’m aware of that.”

  “Shut up.”

  The ripe temper shocked her enough to make her turn back.

  “Just shut the hell up.” Now he let some of that anger fly. “Are you fucking stupid? Maybe I don’t know you, because I pegged you as smart. Really smart. But maybe you’re stupid enough to believe because you share DNA with a psychotic bastard, you’re made wrong.”

  “He’s a monster. He’s my father.”

  “My father doesn’t know a carburetor from a brake pad, owns two sets of golf clubs, and likes easy listening.”

  “That’s not the same, at all.”

  “Why not? Why the hell not? We have blood ties, he raised me—mostly—and we’re as different as they come. He reads like one book a year, as long as it’s a bestseller. We baffle each other every time we spend more than an hour together.”

  “It’s not—”

  “What about your brother?”

  He threw her off stride, just as he’d intended.

  “I . . . What about Mason?”

  “What kind of man is he?”

  “He’s . . . great. He’s smart. Actually, he’s brilliant, and dedicated, kind.”

  “So he can be what he is, with the same gene pool, but you’re what? Tainted?”

  “No. No, I know better. Intellectually I know better, but yes, sometimes it feels that way.”

  “Get over it.”

  She stared at him. “Get . . . over it?”

  “Yeah. Get over it, move on. Your father’s as fucked-up as it gets. That doesn’t mean you have to be.”

  “My father is the most notorious serial killer of the century.”

  “It’s a young century yet,” he said with a shrug, and had her staring again.

  “God. I don’t understand you.”

  “Understand this, then. It’s insulting and annoying—remember that—for you to think I’d feel differently about you because your father’s Thomas David Bowes. That I’d act differently because seventeen years ago you saved a life—no doubt saved a lot of lives. And if this whole fucked-up bullshit is the reason you’re trying to kick me to the curb, you’re out of luck. I don’t kick that easy.”

  “I don’t know what to say to you now.”

  “If you want me gone, don’t use Bowes as the lever to pry me loose.”

  “I need to sit down.”

  She sat on the glider. Obviously deciding she needed it, the dog picked his way back, laid his head on her knee.

  “I didn’t mean it,” she murmured, and stroked the dog. “I didn’t mean it about the dog, or the house. I didn’t mean it about you. I told myself I should mean it; it would be better all around if I could mean it. It’s easier to keep moving than to root, Xander, for someone like me.”

  “I don’t think so. I think that’s something else you’ve told yourself until you mostly believe it. If you believed it all the way through, you wouldn’t have bought this place. You wouldn’t bring it back to life. You sure as hell wouldn’t have taken on that dog, no matter how I worked you on it.”

  He crossed over, sat beside her again. “You’d have slept with me. I saw that the first time you came into the bar.”

  “Oh, really?”

  Not yet settled, but getting there, he picked up his beer again. “I’ve got a sense about when a woman’s going to be willing. But if you believed all that crap all the way through, this wouldn’t have turned into a thing.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to.”

  “A lot of good things happen by accident. If Charles Goodyear hadn’t been clumsy, we wouldn’t have vulcanized rubber.”

  “What?”

  “Weatherproof rubber—tires, for instance, as in Goodyear. He was trying to figure out how to make rubber weatherproof, dropped this experiment on a stove by accident, and there you go, he made weatherproof rubber.”

  Baffled, she rubbed her aching temple. “I’ve completely lost the point.”

  “Not everything has to be planned to work out. Maybe we both figured we’d bang it out a few times and move on, but we didn’t. And it’s working out all right.”

  The sound of her own laughter surprised her. “Wow, Xander, my heart’s fluttering from that romantic description. It’s like a sonnet.”

  Yeah, he realized, he was settling again. “You want romance? I could bring you flowers.”

  “I don’t have anything to put them in.” She sighed. “I don’t need romance, and I don’t know what I’d do with it. I like knowing my feet are solid on the ground. And they haven’t been, not consistently, since I saw this house. Today . . . the funeral. It hit so hard because it reminded me, again, of all the people my father hurt. Not just the women he killed, but the people who loved them.”

  “I’d have been sorry you found her no matter what, but I was a hell of a lot sorrier knowing what it would bring back. Have you talked to your brother, your uncles about it?”

  “No. No, why bring it back for them? I wasn’t going to talk to anyone about it. Not about what it brought back.”

  “It’s yours to tell, or not. You’d find good friends in Kevin and Jenny. Not trusting that? It’s a disservice to them, and to you.”

  “That’s what Chief Winston said to me, about telling you. That same word. Disservice.”

  “Do you want to tell me what else he said?”

  “I knew as soon as he drove up.”

  She closed her eyes, let herself feel the dog at her feet, the man beside her.

  “The world just fell out from under me. Just dropped away. I’d expected it—he’d do a background run on me because I found the body. But the world dropped away. He was straightforward, and he was kind. He said he wouldn’t tell anyone else, that he hadn’t and wouldn’t. I’ve never been around anyone but family who knew. Or if it came out, I left before things changed.”

  “Left before you knew if they’d change or not?”

  “Maybe that’s true, but I’ve been through those changes, and they’re awful. They steal everything,” she said quietly, “and crush you.”

  “I’m sitting here having a beer like I’d hoped to do since I closed the garage. There’s a hot meal keeping warm in the oven, a nice sunset right out there. Nothing changed or needs to. You’ll get used to it.”

  Nothing needed to change. Could that be true? Was it really possible?

  “Maybe we can just sit here for a while longer, until I get used to it.”

  “That works for me.”

  —

  Hours later, when all but the bars shut down for the night, and the streets in town went quiet, with pools of light from streetlamps shimmering against the dark, he watched and waited.

  He’d taken the time to study the routine along the main street with its shops and restaurants. To study the women who closed up those shops, or walked home from their job as line cook or waitress.

  He had his mind on the pretty young blonde, but he wouldn’t be picky. At least three young ones worked the late shift at the pizzeria.