Inescapable (Men of Mercy Novel, A) (18 page)

Tally blew air into her cheeks. “I kind of know that too.” She tapped her finger against the glass. “Intellectually I know that I’ll get through this, know that it’ll get better. I know that one day I’ll be able to remember my mom without sobbing. I know that the anger over her death will fade. I know it up here.” She tapped her head. “But it still fucking sucks.”

Flick didn’t react to her swearing. Hell, the kid had had her world explode—she was entitled to use a
fuck
or two. Flick pushed the muffins toward her. “It does and it will get better. But in the meantime, there’s chocolate. And running. And there’s a town here that’ll help you find your feet.”

“If I can find a job. And somewhere to live.” Tally placed an index finger on a crumb and lifted it to her mouth.

There wasn’t much work in Mercy but Flick was sure she could find her a job doing something. She’d employ her as a waitress, but that might just be the straw that would snap Pippa’s back.

“We’ll find you something. In the meantime my baker Mo is looking for someone to do some babysitting. “

“How old is his kid?”

“His grandkid, and Mel is about four, five? She’s a sweetie.”

Tally looked uncomfortable. “I don’t mean to sound picky but if I could find something where I don’t have to deal with people, then that would be great.”

“Dealing with people is better than brooding on your own,” Flick suggested softly.

“I know, and if you could guarantee—” Tally shook her head. “Ignore me, anything would be great.”

Ignore her? She didn’t think so. “What were you going to say, Tally? What do you want guaranteed?”

“Not guaranteed, just . . . I’m being silly.”

Flick would’ve taken her sentence at face value and brushed it off except that she saw panic flash in Tally’s bright blue eyes, and a little fear. She reached across the table and tapped her finger on Tally’s knuckles. “Spill.”

“I’m just not . . . shit . . . comfortable around men.”

Tally wore exactly the same don’t-even-ask-why look that Flick had seen on Kai’s face. So she wouldn’t. Not yet anyway.

“Okay. A job where you don’t have to deal with guys. Let me think about it, put out some feelers.” Flick noticed the relief on Tally’s face when she didn’t ask any probing questions. Rape? Molestation? Domestic abuse? She really wanted to know so that she could track down the bastard and kick the crap out of him.

Or send Kai to beat him up. Or, more realistically, pray that karma acted quickly and made sure that he got hit by a bus.

Flick heard the back door to the building slam shut. She heard Pippa’s and Tiffany’s voices and her stomach clenched into a tight knot. Yeah, being at work was going to be not so fun if her heart ached and her intestines remained in a tangle.

Pippa walked into the room and sent her a dirty look. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

Well, good morning to you too, sunshine.
“No. Are you going to apologize for being a first-class bitch?”

“No.” The word was like a gunshot and Flick was certain that she could hear Tally’s eyeballs snapping from her to Pippa and back again.

Pippa sent her another drop-dead look before stomping over to the stairs that would take her up to her office. The office that was now, Flick presumed, strictly off-limits.

“Tense,” Tally stated, breaking the loaded silence.

“You have no freaking idea.”

***

It
was end of another crappy day in a series of crappy days when Flick pulled up into her driveway. She draped her wrists over the steering wheel and stared at the window to her bedroom, the curtain fluttering in the cool evening breeze. Since her fight with Pippa more than ten days ago, she’d spent as little time as possible downstairs. She fed the animals and did laundry but she didn’t linger, and if Pippa was there they basically each pretended the other didn’t exist.

It was a special type of hell.

Flick’s house had become her prison, her best friend a stranger. Her world had been turned upside down and inside out and she hadn’t felt this lost since she was twelve. She wasn’t sleeping and she wasn’t eating. She knew that she couldn’t go on like this for much longer—something had to break and soon.

She couldn’t let this terrible tension linger. Every day that passed added a layer of resentment to the situation, dropped them further into the abyss of non-communication. She didn’t like conflict—who did?—but she was adult enough to know that avoiding the situation wasn’t helping. They had to talk this out, but Gina’s insistence that she maintain her silence was problematic. How was she supposed to find a solution to Gina’s problem, and how was she supposed to mend fences with Pippa if her hands were tired?

Gina, I love you like crazy but I don’t trust myself with a pillow around you right now.
Flick felt Rufus’s hot breath on her neck and turned in her seat to bury her face in his neck. He needed a bath and his teeth brushed but he was solid and real and he loved her. Totally, irrevocably, and absolutely. He was the only creature on the planet that she felt was totally on her side.

My best friend is now a slobbery dog.
Her life was definitely in the toilet.

Rufus barked and Flick jumped, slapping her hand against her ear. “Aaargh! Dammit, Ru!”

Ru’s bark bounced off the windshield and he did an ungainly twirl on the backseat, placing his big paw on the half-open window. Because he wasn’t the brightest dog in the world, he tried to shove his upper body through it.

Flick grabbed his leash as she opened her door and Rufus squeezed between the front seats and stepped on her thighs. He sprang from the car and Flick had no choice but to let go of the leash. Flick bounded across the grass and hurtled up the steps to the porch and onto a man who was sitting on Gran’s swing bench.

Kai.

Flick didn’t blame Rufus for his little man-crush. It was weird, sure, but she could easily see herself slobbering all over Kai as well.

Flick pulled her bag over her shoulder, slammed her door shut, and walked up to her house. Kai, dressed in a pair of running shorts, running shoes, and a sleeveless athletic shirt, looked like he’d been on a run and had made a quick detour to see if she was home.

Maybe she could persuade him that there were better, more fun, ways of burning off some excess energy. Sigh. She was such a tart.

“Hey.” Kai pushed Rufus off his lap and onto the floor and Flick saw the tiny head of one of her kittens poking out from behind his back. Protective to the nth degree, he’d obviously shoved the kitten behind him when he realized she was about to be attacked by a monstrous dog/horse. Awww. Flick had no defenses against kindness, especially kindness to animals.

“Hey back.” Flick dropped her bag onto the table in front of the swing and folded her arms. “I wasn’t expecting you to drop by.”

Kai shrugged. “I was going to run and thought that I’d take the big guy with me.”

The Big Guy looked at Kai with adoring eyes. He
so
had a man crush. So did she. “Sure. That would be great.”

Kai stood up and cupped the side of her face, his thumb skimming the sensitive area under her eyes. “You’re not sleeping.”

“Not really,” Flick admitted.

“You and your cousin still at odds?”

“Yeah.”

Kai bent down to pick up Rufus’s leash and pulled his foot out from under his paw. “Go put on some gym clothes. Let’s see if we can tire you out enough so that you can sleep.”

Oh, what the hell? He could only say no. “I can think of a better way for you to tire me out that doesn’t involve running.”

Kai’s smile was brilliant enough to power the sun. “Oh, we’ll do that too.” He kissed her hard, stepping back when she tried to deepen the kiss. “I intend to make you very tired indeed.”

“If you make me run then I’ll probably be too tired for sex,” Flick warned him.

“I’ll take my chances.” He patted her hip as the kitten hopped off from the bench. As it walked past Rufus, it lifted a tiny paw and tried to swat his nose. Rufus, the big weenie, yelped, and Kai’s laugh rumbled over her. Flick felt a little of her tension melt away.

“Go get changed,” Kai suggested. “I’ll wait with the wimp.”

Rufus, in retaliation for the insult to his manhood, slammed his enormous paw back onto Kai’s foot.

***

“Okay.” Flick held up her hand, certain that that she needed an oxygen tank. “Enough. Can’t breathe.”

Kai handed her a bottle of water and led her to a boulder. Flick plopped down onto the hard rock and sucked in some air. When she thought she could talk without throwing up, she scowled at him. “You made me run.”

“Well, yeah.”

“For miles.”

Kai clicked a button on the side of his watch. “Miles implies that you’ve run more than one. You only ran one thousand, two hundred and twenty-nine yards.”

Flick narrowed her eyes at him. “Most of it was uphill. That has to count for something.”

“Not really.” Kai sat down next to her and placed a hand on her thigh. His breathing hadn’t changed and he looked like he’d barely exercised at all, which, to be honest, he hadn’t.

God, she was out of shape. And boy, she’d kill for a double-chocolate cupcake.

Flick pulled up her foot and linked her arm around her bent knee. She’d always loved this particular spot on the trail. “This is one of my favorite places to rest on the trail.”

“And that has nothing to do with the fact that this is where you ran out of steam?”

“Shut up.” Flick bumped him with her shoulder before gesturing to the view in front of them. Below them was forest and beyond that, rolling hills. The trees were at their brightest, boldly displaying their red, yellow, and rust-colored leaves. Fall was her favorite season, and particularly beautiful in this area of Virginia. The air was crisp but not cold as the trees flaunted their colors.

She wished Kai would stick around to see fall move over for winter and then into spring. And she hated the fact that she was starting to wish that Kai would stick around. Period. She had to stop that.

“I haven’t seen Tally lately. Is she around?” Flick asked, partly because she wondered where the girl was and partly because she wanted to, mentally, change the subject.

“She went back to D.C. to pick up some more clothes, some things,” Kai replied. “She’ll be back in the morning.”

“Has she found a job yet?” Flick asked.

Kai shook his head. “Not yet. We need some filing down at Caswallawn but that didn’t work out.”

Flick cocked her head at his puzzled tone. “Why not?”

“It was weird. She was in my office, picking up some files for Jenny when McDougal and the PPO trainers came in. She bolted out of my office and Jenny said that she dumped the files on her desk and literally ran out of there. But then Jenny said that she saw Mac talking to her in the parking lot later.”

“Were they big guys?”

Kai lifted his hands in confusion. “Not particularly.”

“Super fit? Masculine? Threatening?”

Kai ran his hand through his hair. “Where are you going with this?”

“I’m not sure . . . Tally just said something to me. Actually she half said something to me. Maybe intimated is a better word . . .”

Kai scowled. “You plan on telling me what she said sometime soon?”

“She intimated that she’d prefer to work with women. At the time I thought that maybe something had happened to her. You know . . .”

Kai shoved a hand into his hair as his expression darkened. “Hell, yeah, I know all the things that can happen. She had an issue with her mom’s boyfriend but I got the impression that she handled it.”

“Teenage girls lie easily and they lie well. I think the important thing to realize is that Tally, for some reason, is scared, and she shouldn’t be.”

“Damn straight,” Kai growled.

Flick turned so that she was facing him. “So you planning on doing something about that?”

“Like what?” he demanded. “What can I do?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe you know of someone who trains people in self-defense, or in personal protection,” Flick deadpanned. “Maybe if someone—I have no idea who—could teach her to defend herself, she wouldn’t be so scared of men.”

Kai gripped the back of her neck with one hand and gave her a tiny shake. “You are a real sarcastic ray of sunshine, aren’t you?”

Flick grinned. “I try.”

Kai took the stick Rufus rested on his knee and tossed it down the path, and they watched as Rufus roared off. “I’d teach her some moves but she flinched when I touched her shoulder . . . you know, to guide her through a door.” He looked up at the sky. “You know, I used to have an uncomplicated life. No teenagers, no crazy dogs, no sassy women.”

“And you were bored senseless.” Flick jammed an elbow into his side.

The tilt at the corner of Kai’s mouth suggested amusement, or that he agreed with her. She’d take either, both. Speaking of his mouth, she wouldn’t mind it on hers, right now. But if they started kissing then they wouldn’t stop kissing and that could lead to a lewd-behavior citation. She had no objection—at least she didn’t think she did—against some outdoor nookie but, frankly, she was giving the town enough to talk about as it was.

Besides, the thought of Tally, that gorgeous kid, living her life being scared of men—even good men like Kai—made her feel like vomiting all over her shoes. There had to be a way for her to regain her confidence. To feel a little more in control . . .

Flick rested her chin on her knee, squinting as the rays of the rapidly dropping sun hit her eyes. If Kai, or Caswallawn, offered self-defense classes for the women of Mercy, then Tally could attend the classes with other women and, more important, she could practice the moves on other women. It might just work.

She tossed the suggestion out and Kai looked like she’d asked him to lick a lamppost. “Hell, no,” he added, just in case she didn’t get his objection from his horrified look.

“It would be a way to help Tally and to provide a great community service,” Flick cajoled.

“And it would be a great way for me to go off my head.”

“Stop being a baby,” Flick told him briskly. “You could do these classes with your eyes shut and Tally, and the women of Mercy, would benefit.”