***
7
Jade had thought there was nothing
more destructive than a man in his twenties. That aimless, mindless wandering;
the restless dissatisfaction with their lives and everything in it. They were
cocky and brass and unapologetic, clambering from day to day like stampeding
wildebeest. They cared about nothing save the idea that they stood for
something: “paper-maché Mephistopheles,” each one of them.
But she’d been wrong.
Calculated, focused destruction –
the cold cruelty of an impartial predator – was devastating. A man in his
forties, lean and sharp-eyed and jaded, could draw you in with such skill you
never noticed that he was planning to cut you down all along. A man like that
could play charades and spin lies effortlessly; they could let you go without a
backward thought. A man like that was untouchable. Jade had always thought
she’d been smarter than to be fooled so thoroughly.
But she’d been wrong.
She was twenty-four
when she met Ben. She had jury duty, and the parking deck on the Marietta
square was a nightmare. She parked in a loading zone and when she left the
courthouse, she found a tow truck backing up to her F-150. The tow truck driver
didn’t want to hear her pleas or accept the twenty bucks she offered for his
time, but the dark-haired man in a suit walking past came to her rescue.
“Hey.” He fished a badge from inside
his jacket, overhead all-weather lights catching the gold shield. He flashed it
to the tow guy. “Unhook this truck.”
Jade folded her arms beneath her
breasts, closing her knee-length sweater coat over her dress, eyes doing a
fast, startled sweep of her rescuer. He had one of those angular, strong faces
too stern to be considered outright handsome, his nose thin, but prominent,
cheeks lean and tight. His dark hair was clipped short on the sides and soft on
top, gleaming under the parking deck lamps. He was tall – decidedly over six
feet – and his suit fit well. He was older than her, probably a lot older, and
that only fortified her impression: he was attractive.
The tow driver pushed his cap back
and scratched at his hair, mouth pulled to the side in a grimace. “I got called
to take this in, so I gotta take it in.”
“A patrol called you; I’m a
detective, and I’m telling you to unhook it.” The command in his voice, the way
he didn’t expect to be disobeyed…it was nothing like the posturing of boys her
age; it had true authority behind it. He turned to her – as the tow driver,
grumbling, starting taking the chains off her truck – eyes impossibly dark, and
said, “I don’t normally condone blocking loading zones.” He smiled, a feral,
white, frightening smile. “But I figure since you’re about to agree to have
dinner with me…”
Jade coughed a startled laugh. “Just
like that? Does this white knight routine work for you often?”
His smile turned pleased; he liked
her comeback. “Always.”
She smiled. “Hmm. Detectives lie all
the time, though. If you even are a detective. How do I know that badge isn’t
from Party City?”
He put it in her hand, still smiling;
their fingers brushed, his warm and rough. The badge was solid smooth leather
and cool metal. She traced a nail over the shield. Cobb County Police Department she read. She’d never seen one up
close before, but this looked and felt like the real deal. She hadn’t really
doubted him, but there was something reassuring about the way he’d given it to
her. That automatic trust.
“I’m Jade,” she said when she
glanced up, offering his badge back.
His hand lingered when he took it,
sending little ripples of sensation moving beneath her skin. “Ben.”
Dangerous. The word woke her, echoing through
her head like someone had whispered it right up close to her. But her room was
empty. A wedge of blue from the hall nightlight cut across the carpet, touching
the corner of the hope chest at the foot of her bed. Her reflection was a
twitch of movement in the dressing table mirror across from her. For a long
moment, she searched the familiar lumps and shadows of the room, pulse slowing,
then she fired off a text and climbed out of bed.
It was just after five and though it
had stopped raining, the sky was an inky black, the darkness heavy, the air
soupy. The wet grass swished against her ankles and all around, the leaves dripped
water with little splats.
The horses were used to early
wakeups, and they blinked against the onslaught as she flipped the lights on.
There was a chill in the barn, a dampness that gave her the shivers. She nudged
Fat Monty the cat off the lid of the sweet feed can and scooped up a handful for
Atlas. Down the aisle, he was waiting for her, head hanging over his stall
door, ears swiveling, nostrils quivering in a silent whicker as she reached
through the bars and dropped his snack in his feeder.
“Hi, boy,” she greeted as she slid
into his stall with his brushes. “You sleep well?”
He licked up the crumbs of feed and
craned his neck around to snuffle at her pockets while she curried him.
Jade smiled. Atlas never failed to
brighten her mood. He was a beautiful animal, big-boned and solid in the old
warmblood style that had been popular before leggy typey types like Rosie had
come into fashion. He had big dinner plate feet and a broad back; thick,
powerful legs and a neck like a chess piece. He was a rich blood bay with a
white snip on the end of his nose that sunburned in the summer; he had a
flymask with a nose guard to keep it protected that he always talked Merry into
pulling off for him. He’d been her baby before Clara had come along, and
because she felt guilty that motherhood dominated her life now, she made time –
like five-fifteen on a Sunday morning – to ride.
The arena was smooth and hard-packed
after the rain, like the beach at low tide. All the shoe prints had been washed
away; it was hard to imagine that it had been a crime scene two nights before.
Jade swung up into the saddle and all conscious thought promptly evaporated. It
was her, and Atlas, and the wet sand under the lights, and nothing else.
She’d been riding since she was
seven, and it was the only area in which she’d ever excelled. Her legs and seat
and abs and shoulders knew the rhythms by heart; her body accommodated and
encouraged Atlas’s big swinging gaits and her fingers moved feather-light on
the reins: flexing here, slowing there. The sound of his hooves on the wet sand
was as familiar as music to a dancer.
She was spiraling him out of a
canter circle when she noticed the man-shaped shadow standing down by the gate,
and her heart leapt against her ribs before she remembered that it had to be
Ben, and that she’d texted him. She slowed Atlas to a walk, let out the reins
and headed toward him.
Ben was in jeans and a dark canvas
jacket with the collar turned up. Mist had settled in his hair, glittering in
the arena lights. “You look good out there,” he said as she reined Atlas up at
the rail. It was an observation, but not a compliment; Ben didn’t do
compliments.
Her stomach tightened. “How’d you
know I was down here?”
“It’s black as shit out here and
you’re riding under a spotlight. Everyone with eyes in their head knows you’re
down here. You’re lucky our killer likes them younger than you.”
She was long since used to his lack
of tact and his black sense of humor, but she wasn’t in the mood for it this
morning. Fear at the mention of the killer streaked through her, followed by
indignation. “You could have called,” she said, deciding it was so much better
to talk to him on horseback than to dismount; she was taller than him this way.
“You didn’t need to come by.”
He shrugged and offered his palm for
Atlas to inspect. The gelding – traitor – licked Ben’s hand. “I had to be up
anyway. Autopsy’s this morning.”
Jade ignored the mental image that
conjured. “Asher told me what you did to him,” she said, not wanting to prolong
this visit if it could be helped.
He made a face. “That little
squealer.”
“Ben, what the hell is wrong with
you? You can’t just – ”
“Do my job?” His voice was low and
conversational, but the glance he tilted up to her froze her cold. “I’m doing
my job. And don’t you think I know better than you what that entails?”
“Don’t call me stupid,” she said,
but her voice quivered. “Asher isn’t a suspect.”
“Do you know that for sure? How well
do you know him, Jade?”
“I know you, and this is just your sadistic streak getting the best of
you.”
“Maybe.” He stroked a hand down
Atlas’s neck before he crammed it back in his pocket. “Or,” his eyes looked
black, “you’ve been letting a sicko spend time with our daughter.”
He’d never referred to Clara that
way: our daughter. Acknowledging her
as belonging to the both of them together.
Then the full weight of the
accusation slammed into her. She sucked in a breath. “I would never…”
But Ben already had his back to her
and was walking up the drive.
“He never spent time with her!” she
called to him. “Never!”
Ben was forty-two when
he met her. She was twenty-four. He didn’t think, at the time, that anyone could
have blamed him. She was impossibly long legs and gently flared hips in a clean
sheathe dress under a sweater. Her face was fine china with dark, arched brows
framed in sleek mahogany hair; but it was her eyes that stunned him: big and
blue and stuck on him like she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. She was
captivated, and he wanted to see what was under her dress, and that was all
there was to it.
“What’s a girly girl like you doing
driving that truck?” he asked her over bacon-wrapped filets that night at his
favorite out of the way steakhouse.
“Girly?” Her lipstick had some kind
of glitter in it. “What makes you think that?”
“Killer detective work.”
“Ha.” She grinned a shy, sideways
grin at him. “More like going off stereotypes.”
“What’s wrong with stereotypes? A
lot of them are true.”
“Wow. Okay.” Her slender brows
quirked with amusement or doubt or something worse. She set her fork down.
“Let’s see if you can guess then.”
She was playing with him, and he
liked it; she was smarter than he’d originally given her credit for being.
“Okay. It’s your dad’s – ”
“Don’t have one of those.”
Daddy issues: this night just kept
getting better. “It’s your boyfriend’s –
”
“Do you think I’d be out with a
much-too-forward cop if I had a boyfriend?”
He grinned. “You stole it – ”
“Again with the cop reason.”
He wondered if she was a first date
kind of girl. Probably, given the daddy issues. “Or you -
”
“Or I have horses,” she said. “And I
tow a horse trailer and haul hay and there’s nothing strange about me having a
truck at all.”
Dear Penthouse…
“Or there’s that.”
He kissed her on her front steps in
the cool autumn air, one hand cradling the back of her head, the other sliding
between the halves of her long sweater. Her mouth was soft and yielding; her
lipstick tasted like cherries; and her breath caught in a startled gasp in her
throat. He molded his palm around the swell of her breast before she came to
her senses and shoved him away.
She was smiling, but her eyes were
wide and wild, glittering with a hesitance akin to fear. “You’re a cad,
Detective Haley,” she said on a crystalline laugh. “Utterly and completely.”
He was. And she was something else
entirely.
He’d left his Charger
up at the split in the drive and he turned when he reached it, a hand braced on
the roof as he glanced back down the hill at Jade and her great beast of a horse
in the spotlit arena. Dawn was still an hour off, and the darkness was thick,
consuming, nightmare-quality stuff. In the warm glow of the lamp posts, Jade
was regal as a queen: head lifted, shoulders squared, the lines of her body
long and elegant.
He was on his way to watch a dead
girl get laid open on a steel table, so he took a moment, in the dark, to watch
something alive and vital and graceful. He was still a cad, and if anything,
Jade was even further out of reach than she had been four years ago.
So good! Can't wait to read the whole thing.
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