Harlequin Superromance September 2014 - Bundle 1 of 2: This Good Man\Promises Under the Peach Tree\Husband by Choice (69 page)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

A
S
SOON
AS
Chantel left on Thursday, Max turned off the TV, packed his son into the van, and drove.

He wasn't going anywhere in particular. He had juice boxes. Extra diapers. Vanilla wafers and a couple of Disney movies downloaded on the tablet. And he was driving. On every single street in Santa Raquel.

“Sha sha!” Caleb called out, kicking the back of the seat in front of him. Max had already seen his son's favorite restaurant. He was the one who disapproved of feeding Caleb fast food.

But he knew that Meri did. Once a week.

She'd been gone more than a week now.

And before he really thought about what he was doing, Dr. Maxwell Bennet found himself in the drive-thru for the second time in fewer than seven days.

He strained to see inside the joint. Maybe Meri was there. In honor of Caleb. Clinging to pieces of the life she'd left behind.

One thing was for certain.

Meri was here someplace. At least she had been as recently as two days ago.

And he had the rest of the day off.

He couldn't sit at home knowing that she might be out there somewhere in the same city. Even if he just had a glimpse of her—one second to see the bounce in her step, or a smile on her face—he would feel better.

Hell, just being out driving, knowing she was there somewhere, made him feel better.

And if Steve Smith thought that Max's being hopelessly in love meant he was weak, he had another think coming. He was going to find the bastard.

And have him put away permanently.

The guy was never going to have a chance to bother Meri again. Ever.

* * *

J
ENNA
COULDN
'
T
SLEEP
Thursday night. And couldn't stay cooped up in her room, either.

Caleb was young enough that he wouldn't even remember her, wouldn't need to be hurt by her past life, or her abandonment. If his father was providing him with a new mother, she wasn't going to get in the way of that.

She wanted to, though. So badly that it was eating her alive. She wanted to order Chantel Harris to get away from her men. To stay away.

She wanted to go home.

Instead she quietly made her way out to the living room she'd yet to use except as a corridor from the front door to the kitchen or her bedroom.

She wasn't going to turn on the television. Didn't want to disturb her housemates.

But there was a library out there—a collection of fiction—as there was in every bungalow on the premises. She used to love to read.

She couldn't remember the last time she'd picked up a book. Sometime after her marriage to Steve, but when?

He hadn't liked her reading, she remembered. He'd said that her reading made him feel lonely, had tried to distract her with butterfly kisses any time he'd seen her with a book in the early days.

Later there had been fights. He'd resented her time with her romance novels. He'd said the books were filling her head with dangerous notions about women's roles, giving her false expectations of relationships. They were coming between them, ruining their marriage. The books were changing her.

Standing in the living room, perusing shelves of novels that were unfamiliar to her, a tiny bit of anticipation started to grow within her.

She couldn't remember making a conscious decision to give up reading. But she remembered feeling guilty for wanting the escape.

Remembered sitting in the bathroom, pretending to do her business so she could finish a book after Steve got home.

She remembered the broken wrist she'd ended up with the time she'd pulled one of her novels out of the drawer in her desk, looking for an excerpt to use as proof of an example of something she was trying to explain to him. She'd long since forgotten the conversation. It had had something to do with differences between men and women, a statement a character had made that resonated with her. But she remembered that he'd grabbed for the book, he'd said, in attempt to understand, to share it with her, and had grabbed her wrist instead.

Who grabbed a book with a grasp hard enough to break a wrist?

But she'd wanted to believe him, she guessed. Because she'd stayed. She'd been a stay-at-home wife back then and had let him take her to the emergency room, telling the doctors that he'd accidentally broken her wrist as he saved her from tumbling down the stairs.

Once again he'd come out the hero.

And now, here she was, in the middle of the night, pondering a book choice and still looking over her shoulder for Steve. She'd come full circle.

But this time she was going to make a different choice. She was going to choose a book, instead of giving them up.

Studying the spines, she pulled one out, returned it and then pulled out another. There were so many choices.

She heard something. Heart pounding, she froze, trying to ascertain just where the sound had come from.

Outside? Or did the noise come from within the house?

It had sounded like a scrape. Like metal against wood. A window jamb being jarred?

Slowly, Jenna let go of the book she'd been about to pull out and turned, looking for signs of anything amiss.

Both of her housemates' doors were closed. She prayed the women were safe behind them.

Had Steve found her? Had he grown bold enough to breach a shelter in his quest to have her?

And then she heard it again. Definitely a scraping sound. Coming from outside. As if someone was trying to get in.

The inside grounds of The Lemonade Stand were completely secure, accessible only by personnel with individual key cards for tracking purposes. There were also security locks and alarms on all of the windows and doors.

None of which would stop a man like Steve Smith, who knew all of the devices on the market and how to manipulate them. How else did you rescue a young victim from a pedophile kidnapper?

Steve would know how to disarm the devices.

But how had he gotten inside the grounds? Even he wasn't able to scale ten-foot high walls and become invisible to the security cameras set up all over the grounds. Those cameras were manned twenty-four hours by the police.

And there were four security guards on duty at all times, too.

As she moved toward the kitchen, the sound came again. Not from that direction, but as if it was coming from Carly's suite. Heading quickly toward that part of the bungalow, she stopped only long enough to pull her cell phone out of her bra and send a 911 call to the Stand's emergency broadcast line. She gave only their bungalow number before hanging up to lessen her chance of being overheard.

Then, without waiting for help, fearing that Steve would get inside and hurt Carly, she quietly opened the younger woman's door, entering slowly.

Carly was wide-awake, frozen in her bed, staring at Jenna as she came in.

The scraping sound came again, loud, now, and was clearly coming from the window.

Dropping down to her hands and knees, Jenna made her way to the side of the bed opposite the window.

“Slide out of bed,” she whispered to Carly. “I'll get in.”

“What?” Carly mouthed the word. “No.”

“He's not coming for you,” she whispered as fiercely as she could without making noise. “It's me he wants. Get out of here, now. I've already called for help. They'll probably be here before he gets inside, but just in case, go to Latoya's room and stay there with her. Quickly.” She pulled at Carly's wrist just enough to get the girl moving.

Within seconds, Carly was out of the room, closing the door behind her, and Jenna, in the nightgown she'd borrowed from the clothing room, was lying beneath the sheet and comforter on Carly's bed.

Waiting.

I should be afraid,
she thought.

But she wasn't.

* * *

C
HANTEL
WAS
WORKING
second shift on Thursday, Friday and Saturday and then would have three days off before going back on days for two weeks. Las Sendas police schedules changed on a regular basis to keep officers from seeing the same people on the same streets at the same time every day—an attempt to prevent complacency.

The changing schedule had once ruled Max's life, as he never knew when to expect his wife to be home. When to plan dinners with his folks. Or a night out with fellow residents from the hospital.

Jill had never seemed to mind the unknown when it came to her working hours. She lived to work. Any time she was on was fine with her. It was the off time that she seemed to find more challenging.

But then, her family was all in upstate New York. Max had only met her immediate family once before the funeral—when they'd flown out for their wedding. He'd never met the myriad aunts and uncles and cousins she'd left behind at eighteen when she moved to California. And her only friends, other than Max, whom she'd met while on a call in a hospital emergency room, had been work associates.

Waiting up for Chantel's call Thursday night brought back memories of other nights he'd waited up for Jill to be off duty and safe.

His full day of appointments on Friday loomed just as they'd done back then.

He was lying in bed when his cell phone, set on vibrate so as not to disturb the sleeping toddler in the next room, started to buzz.

He greeted Chantel, hand over his eyes, as though he could somehow hide his desperate wish that it was Meri's call he'd been awaiting. “How was your day?” he asked. Because it was the decent thing to do.

And for the same reason, he listened as she gave him a briefing on the meth lab she and her partner had stumbled upon that afternoon. She'd taken an attempted rape call, too, near the college campus.

“Did you hear from Diane?” he asked as soon as Chantel fell silent.

“No, but don't get discouraged, Max. You heard her say it could take a few days.”

How could he not be discouraged, every single night that he slept alone, wondering where Meri was sleeping—and with whom?

Wondering if, while he lay in the big soft bed he and Meri had purchased together, on sheets she'd washed and put there, she lay somewhere frightened for her life.

And wished for the thousandth time in a week that he'd made her talk more about her years with Steve Smith. Wished he'd been able to listen to the horrors without getting upset for her, and thus shutting her down.

“How are you holding up?” Chantel's tone had softened. Become more intimate than friendly.

“Fine.”

“What did you do with the rest of your day?”

It was a Meri question. A wife question. “Drove every street in this city looking for my wife,” he answered honestly. Because he needed both of them to remember that Meri was the light of his life.

And if she was gone, his heart would be in permanent darkness.

He wasn't going to be in the market for another woman. Though he was starting to strongly suspect that Chantel was in the market for him.

“She's safe, Max.” The tone of voice didn't change. And he didn't want to like it.

“She was two nights ago.”

“She's safe tonight. Wayne's...in touch. He called earlier this evening to let me know that she's in for the night.”

“He's got a watch on her?”

“Not exactly.”

“But she's keeping in touch with him?”

“No.”

“Then...”

“Don't, Max. Don't ask. Please. Just trust me and know that you can get some rest. Meredith is where she chose to be and she's sleeping in a nice bed in a nice place.”

Nice place. Okay. That ruled out some of the horrors he'd been imagining.

And where she chose to be. Which was not with him.

“You're a good friend,” he told the woman who was giving him so much of her time when he hadn't tried once to see her in more than four years.

“You're a good man, Maxwell Bennet,” she said in return.

And he worried that they'd just turned onto a road he didn't want to travel.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I
T
WASN
'
T
S
TEVE
at the window. Jenna was still reeling from the news.

“You're going to be fine, now,” she said softly, sitting on the sofa in the bungalow with a still-shaking Carly.

They were close, curled up with cups of green tea laced with just a hint of brandy, given to them by Lynn Bishop. Their feet were touching.

Latoya was there, too, in a chair next to them, sipping on the same brew.

“They got him, girl. I saw them haul him away.”

Carly nodded. “I know. Lila told me.”

Lila, Lynn, TLS security, the Santa Raquel police had all been there. Sara, too. And they were all gone now. Because the three women had assured them they'd be fine.

As fine as any of the three of them were ever going to be.

They talked for another hour. Reliving the horrifying experience of having one of their abusers invade their safe place. Carly's ex-boyfriend. He was being held not only for trespassing, breaking and entering with intent to harm, and attempted kidnapping but for stabbing a security guard and knocking out another, as well as tampering with security devices. Jenna wasn't the only one with an ex who'd had special training. Carly's had been a marine.

Latoya, who had an early session in the morning that she still intended to attend, finally excused herself and went off to bed, leaving her door open as they'd all decided they would do for the next couple of nights, at least.

“You can go, too,” Carly told Jenna. “I'll be fine. You have that little girl to help in the morning, and then a couple of appointments here.”

She'd told her housemates a bit about her work when she'd returned that day. Latoya had seen her come in, before she could clean herself up and put on fresh makeup, and she and Carly had both wanted to know where she'd been. In another situation their curiosity might have been considered nosiness.

But at the Stand, it was an inherent part of their sisterhood that they watch out for each other. Victims of domestic violence couldn't always trust themselves, and, like any kind of an addict, needed a support group. Except that it wasn't alcohol or drugs that held them captive. It was the need to love and be loved that did it to them.

So when Latoya had asked where she'd been, she'd told them about Yvonne and Olivia. Fellow sisters.

“I wouldn't sleep if I went to bed,” Jenna said, more for Carly than for herself, but knowing the words were true just the same. She wasn't going to sleep, but she'd be okay in her room alone.

Carly wouldn't.

“I just can't believe you did that for me. That you risked your life like that.”

“I thought it was...someone else.”

“At my window?”

“He could have been at the wrong window.” But she had wondered, as had Lila and the others, how Trent Compton, Carly's dishonorably discharged marine ex-boyfriend, had known which bungalow was hers.

As it turned out, he'd been watching them from a rooftop for the past week. And had seen Carly come and go. He must have seen her at her window at some point, too, to know which room was hers.

Carly was shaking her head. “He used to watch my window in L.A.” Her voice was soft as she shook her head. “My folks were...I don't know...they, neither one of them had careers, you know, but just worked as store clerks and my dad worked in a factory for a while. They were into motorcycles, smoked and drank a lot and hung out with a pretty tough crowd. My brother got into riding, too. We lived in a rough neighborhood and when they'd take off on weekend rides, I'd be home alone.

“And there was Trent. He lived in the apartment across from ours and he promised me he'd keep a watch on me, to make sure I was safe. He had all these sight things, like for guns, but they were more like binoculars. He'd ordered them off the internet. He said he was into stars and wanted to study space travel.

“I thought it was cool then....”

Because girls were vulnerable sometimes when it came to their own protection. Until they learned that they were the only ones who
could
keep themselves safe.

“It probably was cool, then,” Jenna said. “It was probably just over time that it got creepy.” Which was part of the problem. How could anyone predict how another person might change?

“I just don't get it. It's not that Trent was a bad guy. He was into animal rescue and fighting for the underdog....”

Steve had rescued human beings, and had put his life on the line every day to see that they were protected.

“What happened to him?” Carly's blue eyes filled with tears and she started to shake again.

Jenna had an answer. An odd burst of clarity in a mind that had been foggy....

The research she'd done over the past week, her trying to get into character...she was more prepared than she'd thought.

“Somehow he wrapped up his own sense of value, his sense of self-worth, in his possession of you,” she said slowly. Softly. “As long as he has you he is rich. Anytime he feels like he might not have complete control of you, his prize possession, his sense of self is threatened. He goes into survival mode. Those types of people will stop at nothing to survive. He starts to feel powerless so he has to exert his power. Only when he is certain that you will do only and exactly as he directs, is he at peace.

“You're a living being he has to own, in order to feel safe, but you have a mind of your own and are escaping him, which makes you an enemy to his basic sense of survival.”

Jenna's heart started to pound as she spoke. And she knew she was on to something important. Knew that she was stumbling across the key to beating Steve.

“He becomes filled with the anticipation of the hunt.”

“Kind of like those guys who spend a hundred thousand dollars for a chance to go out with some big game experience guy and shoot a bear or some other poor animal that's being held captive,” Carly said. “All so he can take the pelt home and hang it on his wall and make everyone think he shot it in the wild. Like he's some big strong man who can take on bears and win. I saw a show on TV about it not long ago. It was disgusting. These guys killed animals who were doing nothing more than living the lives they were born to live, animals who weren't hurting or threatening anyone. Just so these losers could feel more manly among their peers.”

“Exactly,” Jenna agreed. “Or like the guys who spend two hundred thousand to do the same thing over in Africa. It's like an instinctive need with some guys.”

“It comes, I think, from the the natural instinct to kill in the wild to provide food for his family....”

“Only completely twisted,” Jenna added.

She was in Steve's mind-set now. Getting him. He didn't just want to keep her on the run so that he could keep her vulnerable to him. He wanted her on the run because he got off on the challenge of the hunt.

Because I dared to get down off of his wall and tell the world that he wasn't a great hunter at all.

“A man who can't hunt well can't feed his family,” Jenna said, going with the metaphor.

“So a possessive guy who feels like he's losing control of his possessions, acts instinctively, as though, if he can't get the hunt right, he'll never have a family to feed. It's not that he needs me so much at this point as that he needs me not to be able to get away from him.”

“Yes. Though this could be complicated by the fact that on some level he really does love you.

“And I think it gets even more convoluted when you add in the social factor of how everyone else views him. Like the man with the bear pelt on his wall that he has to show everyone who comes to his house—Trent thinks that when people see you with him, they think he's some great guy. If you leave him, he feels like less in the eyes of the world, like your rejection says there's something wrong with him. Or makes him somehow less.”

Yes! She was getting it now. Pieces floated into place as though animated and on-screen.

Steve wasn't just an amazing brain plotting actions that no one could hope to outsmart. He was a fallible man with an emotional need that was being threatened.

He wasn't acting out of logic. He was acting out of emotion.

Which not only made him less likely to succeed and more likely to make a mistake, but made him more vulnerable, too.

There was something he cared about more than life. More than Jenna.

Something that controlled him.

His own threatened sense of self-worth.

That was her secret weapon.

Her mind raced as she tried to figure out how to use it against him.

* * *

M
AX
ARRANGED
FOR
the older neighbor lady who'd babysat Caleb a couple of times in the past, to come to the house and stay with him on Saturday while he made hospital rounds just around the corner from the clinic.

He saw patients all morning. Life had to go on. People needed him.

Caleb needed some semblance of normal.

But how in the hell did a guy do normal when his world was exploding around him and there was seemingly nothing he could do about it?

He talked to Chantel each day, too. Lived for her calls, and at the same time was glad the other woman was on shift three hours away. The comfort she offered was too tempting to a man ruled by grief and fear.

Until Sunday's call.

Saturday she'd told him that Diane had talked to someone who knew that Steve had undergone voluntary anger management counseling not once, but twice. She'd also added that he'd attended one of those times with his entire squad who'd been ordered to go as part of a continuing education LVMPD initiative that the human resources department had implemented.

On Sunday, she didn't even bother with hello. Or to get home from work, for that matter.

He'd just hung up from lying to his parents—telling them that Meri was in the shower and would call later in the week—and was still treading around his bedroom barefoot, getting ready for bed, when she called.

“Max. I just listened to a voice mail from Diane. She tracked down one of the anonymous witnesses from that dancer girl's death. As it turns out the guy across the hall still lives in the building—on the top floor. He owns the place now. And still remembers that night. He says there's no doubt in his mind that the girl was running from Steve when she left the apartment. She wasn't the partying type. And took cabs if she'd ever had more than one drink. He says there's no way she would have gotten in that car if she hadn't thought her life was in immediate danger if she didn't do so.”

Suddenly wide-awake, with nerves on the edge of needing a run, Max said, “Because why would you trust a call for help, a call to the cops, when you had a cop in your apartment.”

“Exactly.”

“So what happens next?”

“She's going to try to build a case. I can't promise that anything will come of it. Chances aren't good that a grand jury would indict an ex-cop with an exemplary record on circumstantial evidence, but if she can build enough of a case, she might be able to get an order to have the woman's body brought up.”

This was not normal bedtime conversation.

“You really think they might do that?”

“Do you remember that case in Chicago a few years ago? The cop who was charged with killing his second or third wife, but they couldn't find her body, so they brought up the body of his first wife who'd either committed suicide, or been ruled accidental, I can't remember which right now, but they brought her body up. Did an autopsy. Her death was ruled murder and he was later convicted.”

He didn't think he'd ever heard of the case. But was glad that Chantel had.

“Okay,” he said now, pacing his room, frustrated as hell that he didn't have Meri with him to discuss this newest development. “Keep me posted and let me know if there's anything I can do to help.”

If only he'd known these things years ago—if only Meri had...

“She just needs us both to keep quiet about this for now,” Chantel told him. “That means you can't tell anyone, Max. Not anyone. If Smith gets wind of what she's doing before she has a chance to build a big enough case, he could make it go away just like he did before. And if not, then he'd definitely be out to get her. He's already got the death of one woman on his slate, what's one more if it'll keep him looking clean?”

He hadn't thought of that.

“Of course I'll keep quiet. Who would I tell, anyway?”

“Well, it's just...she's put things in motion and if, by chance, you were to talk to Meredith, or she came home, she can't know about this, Max. We don't know what hold Smith has on her, or what she might tell him if, for instance, he threatened you or Caleb....”

Beads of sweat popped out on his lip. “You really think Caleb could be in danger?”

“Not now, I don't, or you can bet I'd be doing something about it. But if Meredith were there with you, the stakes could escalate a bit.”

The words quelled his fear, slightly. But they also hit home. “What you're inadvertently saying is that she might have left to protect us from him,” he said. He'd had the thought earlier, but had never quite been able to follow the reasoning through, knowing as he did that they'd have full police protection and knowing that Meri had been fully aware of that fact, too.

But it didn't sound as if she'd have trusted police protection....

Problem was, he didn't know at this point what she thought or whom she trusted.

And then something else occurred to him. By calling in Chantel, who was working on this privately as a personal favor, he'd put her in danger, too.

“I want you off this case,” he said, louder than he'd intended, the words filled with absolute intent. “I will not have you hurt because of me.”