Sweeter Than Sin (34 page)

Brascum had a hand on her shoulder.

As Caine’s boots rang on the floor, gazes cut his way and then bounced off.

Adam saw him and tensed.

Sorenson looked at him and then back at the woman.

The woman glanced up.

Twenty years fell away.

Her pale-grey eyes locked with his. She stared at him, her jaw dropping.

“Lana,” he whispered, coming to a halt like he’d been jerked on a chain.

*   *   *

Staring into those dark-blue eyes, Lana slowly rose to her feet. Sorenson was still glaring at her. Adam stood at her back, his hand tightening on her shoulder.

“Damn it, Rossi, are you listening to a damn thing I’m saying?” Sorenson said, his voice edgy.

“No,” she said, faint.

Then she took a step forward.

A second later, she lunged for the man standing in the middle of the hall.

Sorenson reached for her, but Adam cut between them and a moment later she was caught in David Sutter’s arms.

“David,” she whispered.

He said nothing. Twenty years ago, he’d been six inches taller than her, and all arms and legs, almost painfully skinny. There had been signs of muscle starting to show, but now … a tall, powerful body all but shook as he hugged her against him.

Long, silent moments passed, and then finally she eased back, staring up at him. His eyes were exactly the same.

Absolutely nothing else was.

The plain, simple clothing couldn’t hide the fact that David was completely, utterly beautiful. Even if his eyes were all but icy. A watery laugh escaped her as she studied him, from the straw hat to the toes of his brown shoes. “Geez, you decided to stay there, huh? What did you do? Go completely Amish? Did you do that Rumspringa thing and everything?”

He grinned, his teeth a white flash in his face. “Nah. It just keeps people from looking twice.”

He flicked a glance past them and Lana tensed.

He squeezed her shoulder. “It’s okay, Supergirl. You’re done trying to save me, okay?”

As they turned to face Adam and Chief Sorenson, she saw the appraising look on the faces of both men. Adam had already figured it out. Sorenson, though, was still glaring at her. “Now that you’re done reacquainting yourself, Ms. Rossi, grab your things. You’ve got questions to answer,” he bit off.

“About?” David said quietly.

“Caine, this is no concern of yours.”

“Oh, I don’t see how.” He reached up, tugged off his hand, ran a hand through his hair. “I overheard some, you see. You asking Lana about the Sutter family.”

He smiled, and a hard light glinted in his eyes. “If you wanted to know about my parents, Chief, all you had to do was ask. I’ve been here for twenty years.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

She couldn’t get in to see Max.

Lana stared at her short, ruthlessly clipped nails and fought the urge to bite at them.

She’d never been a nail-biter, but the urge was strong. If for no other reason than because she had nothing else to do.

She had things she
wanted
to do—David sat in the chair across from hers, his face serene, composed. Everything about him threw her—his face, the strength of him, those plain, simple clothes, the hat that sat on his knee. Hell, everything about him threw her off-balance, but she guessed that was why he’d done it. He looked nothing like the skinny kid who’d been just this side of veering into manhood. David Sutter had dressed in designer clothes, driven a Mustang that was just a few years off the lot, and he’d been sullen and moody and anger had simmered just below the surface.

He went by the name Caine now. Caine Yoder. People looked at him and saw a simple Amish man with a peaceful countenance and a calm demeanor and eyes that skimmed the surface.

People were stupid.

His eyes came to hers and she watched as his mouth hitched up in a faint smile.

As the questions threatened to bubble up inside she jerked her eyes away and focused on the clock on the wall. The second hand seemed to sweep by with excruciating slowness, and she groaned, turning her face and pressing it to Adam’s shoulder. “What is taking so long?” she whispered.

He shifted and slid his arm around her.

There was a hesitancy to it, something that she wasn’t used to from him, and she pressed herself more firmly against him. If they hadn’t been in the middle of the waiting room, she might have climbed onto his lap and wrapped herself around him, clung to him. She so desperately needed that contact, that reassurance. “Max is an old man, sugar,” Adam said, nuzzling her temple. “He’s a stubborn goat, but he’s still an old man. Even under the best circumstances, I don’t think he had what we could call a minor injury. They are trying to keep him alive.”

Curling an arm around him, she fisted her hand in the worn fabric of his shirt, felt the heat of him, the strength.

Then she opened her eyes and stared at the wall opposite her, not seeing the boring textured wallpaper, the pamphlets on grieving or how to see if you were at risk for heart disease or how to cut your cancer risks. She was seeing how Max would watch his Mary, how he’d smile when she’d smile at him. How the light in his eyes would die when the old woman would look at him and not know him.

“Why?” Lana asked quietly.

Feeling Adam’s confusion, she pulled back and rose from the couch, moving to stare out the door.

They all watched her. Sorenson, Adam and David. Caine. Whatever he called himself now.

And now several of the people who’d been waiting in the hall were watching her, too.

“He won’t want to be here without Mary,” Lana said, staring down the hall, wondering what happened behind those doors marked:
Hospital Personnel Only.

“The judge isn’t a quitter.”

That came from Sorenson.

She shot him a glittering look.

He stared back at her from under heavy brows, his mouth twisted in a scowl, his arms crossed over a thick, heavy chest. She didn’t know him. He had moved to town not long after she’d left, from Otisco, a small bit of land out near Charlestown. Otisco made Madison look like a booming metropolis. She didn’t know much about him, but she could read the look in his eyes, had learned enough about him in the past few hours, since they’d settled down to wait. He was a cop. He wasn’t one who made her want to keep a witness with her at all times. And he was the kind who’d dig in and wait her out, too.

So she would be getting a lawyer, and she had better find a good one.

But being a good cop didn’t make Sorenson an expert on the human condition.

She looked back at the doors that separated them from Max. “It isn’t about being a quitter. Max had one person in this whole world … just one. And that was his wife. Miss Mary was his everything. Why he got up in the morning, why he worked so hard to keep those flowers blooming even though he hated them.” Lana thought about a time years ago when she’d seen him cussing a bed of petunias out—he was allergic, a fact not that many people probably realized, because Judge Max hid his weaknesses and he hid them well. But the bright and happy colors had Mary happy.

So he made sure she had them. Always. Even though Lana had seen over the past weeks how Mary had slid into a place where she didn’t even recognize Max at times.

“So you think he’ll just give up since she’s not here.” Sorenson shook his head. “That’s being a quitter.”

“No. If she was here, he’d have something to fight for. There’s a difference between
fighting
for something … and just letting go. It doesn’t make you a quitter if you’re just tired.” Lana thought of the weight she’d seen in his eyes and she knew it was the truth. Max
was
tired.

But she also remembered his words.

The gravity in his voice as he said,
I’ll find answers.

She didn’t know if that was enough to pull him through this.

Warm arms came around her. The scent that was Adam surrounded her and she turned, pressed her face to him. It was amazing how easy it had become to lean against him.

A jangling sound filled the room, loud and shrill, and she jolted.

Lifting her head, she watched Sorenson pull the phone from his belt, silencing the old-fashioned ringtone. “I’ll have to take this,” he said, addressing the room at large.

“Don’t let us stop you from important cop work,” David said, a sardonic smile twisting his lips as he spoke to Sorenson’s back.

Sorenson didn’t bother to look back at them as he pushed through the door and headed into the other private waiting room across the hall. He wasn’t in there even a minute before he came out, spoke quietly to one of the officers and then headed down the hall.

Adam’s phone started buzzing and he pulled it out, sighing. “It’s Trinity again. I need to call her.” He rubbed Lana’s back. “I hope she hasn’t heard about Old Max. She doesn’t need this right now. Her and Noah have had enough. They ought to have their wedding in peace.”

“Excuse me.”

All three of them focused on the door.

The nurse there smiled and immediately her attention shot to Adam. Lana might have been a little bit put off, but then the nurse glanced down the hall and slipped inside. “You know I can’t really tell you anything. But … well. None of you are family.” She grimaced and then checked the hall one more time. “He’s a tough old bastard, though.” Then she winked.

After that, she was gone, moving down the hall, her long blond braid bouncing against her back.

“Hey!” Lana went to go after her, but Adam caught her arm.

“Celia can’t say anything else,” he said, shaking his head. “She can lose her job if she says anything to people that aren’t family. It’s risky enough that she even said what she did.”

“But—”

Adam dipped his head, pressed his lips to Lana’s. “He’s going to be fine. She wouldn’t have said what she did if he hadn’t pulled through.”

Then Adam squeezed her arms and stepped away. It was a force of will that kept her there.

That and David’s blue eyes, resting on hers as Adam and moved to the door to make his call.

*   *   *

Like a lot of the teenage boys, David Sutter had had something of a crush on Lana Rossi.

She’d been part angel, part demon, all whirlwind.

People had either adored her or just outright abhorred her. She’d been all about causes before having a cause was even understandable. She’d gotten a C in her Honors Biology class because she hadn’t wanted to do the dissection labs, but then she’d proven to the teacher that she understood more about the anatomy of a frog
and
any other animal he could think of.

When David had mentioned it to her during their tutoring classes, thinking to poke fun at her and just get her to leave him alone, she’d just shrugged it off:
Hey, biology is easy. You want to see me freeze up, quiz me on chemistry.

He hadn’t quizzed her on anything. For the first three weeks of the tutoring—which had been set up by the principal and his parents had approved it—David had said as little as possible. Lana had been required to do it as part of the community service that had been set up after another one of her
incidents
. He couldn’t even remember what she’d done. She might have stolen all the frogs for a dissection class. It might have been when she left condoms and pamphlets in the girls’
and
boys’ bathrooms, along with notes about safe sex—
safe sex is more than just abstinence or pulling out, kids … be smart!

Since she was a smart kid, they tended to have her do tutoring or work with other kids as part of the community service, even though some parents protested that after the condom stunt.

David’s dad had said,
You’d be a good influence on her.

Peter Sutter couldn’t have been more wrong.

The son of a bitch didn’t live long enough to wish he’d hadn’t okayed the tutoring. Within a week, Lana had realized there was something very wrong.

Within two weeks, she’d seen deeper than anybody else ever had.

Within a month, David had told himself he needed to pull back.

Not long after that, he’d started to believe Supergirl when she told him they could make a difference.

She told him how.

She told him what to do.

She got him the cameras, told him how to set them up.

It had hurt his gut to know that she might watch the video feed, but she promised him, from the beginning, she never would and he believed her. Supergirl was too honest to lie to him, and the way she looked when she talked about stopping everything … Yeah, he could believe it. Supergirl wanted to save the world.

Instead, they’d just ruined their own.

Looking at her through a filter of twenty years, Caine tried to align the woman he saw now to the girl she’d been.

He tried to align himself, the man he was, to the boy he’d been.

David had been just his side of scrawny, a gawky kid just on the verge of growing into the man he’d become. He was six four now, weighed two hundred even. His back was marred with scars and there were some on his soul that cut even deeper. Once, a brutal backhand from one of his “handlers” had knocked him into the wall and he hadn’t seen straight for three days.

Now he could pick that man up by the neck. Caine could probably
snap
the man’s neck, if he so chose. He’d imagined it. Had fantasized about it. Daydreamed about it.

Even now, with the cop standing out in the hall, talking in a low voice about what a fucking waste it was that somebody had hurt a helpless old man like Max, had killed a sick old woman like Mary, rage pulsed inside Caine.

He wasn’t in the club anymore.

Max wasn’t the only one who’d paid some nocturnal visits over the years. Yeah, Caine knew about that. He’d figured out what was happening almost right away and resentment had burned inside him as he sat by, waiting for his chance.

It had taken Caine years to get strong enough, fast enough. Then it had taken him a while to find the mean inside him. Years more to learn who else had been involved.

But he’d done it.

And that cop out there, sorrowfully hanging his head and commiserating with other cops, had been Caine’s first nighttime visit.