Dead End (19 page)

Sounds crowded her ears. Pops and creaks, even the soughing branch of a persimmon tree against the windows jolted her. She looked at the phone. Marc would be home soon. She could call him.

No, she absolutely could not call him. No matter how she’d reacted to him, they didn’t have that kind of relationship.

Calling him to thank him for taking her out would be okay.

Tomorrow would be soon enough for that, and they both knew it—if there was any need to call at all.

Darn it, she would make noise of her own and scare away her own fears.

Whistling, trotting downstairs, she started toward the kitchen…and stopped, cold all over, almost feeling a draft on her back. Slowly she turned around.

The light, usually on all night outside the front door, was off. A trailing fern in a hanging basket softly swept the green pebbled glass panel at one side of the door.

A shadow, perhaps a shoulder and an arm, showed against the lower portion of that glass. Why hadn’t she already bought the pepper spray. Moving quickly and quietly, she went into the kitchen and, without turning on a light, found a carving knife.

Reb returned to the hall, slipping along with her back to a wall, Gaston in one arm, the knife in the opposite hand. She was good with knives, maybe not carving knives, but blades and using them didn’t bother her.

The clock in the surgery socked out its hollow, brassy bong and she almost dropped both dog and knife. Her hands sweated, and she wiped each one awkwardly.

Flitting through the gloom, she went into the patients’ waiting room and rose to her tiptoes to approach the bay window. No way was she calling anyone out on another false alarm. She edged behind a heavy curtain and managed a one-eyed peer through lace curtains—and had the sensation she’d just swallowed her own heart.

A man sat on the top step, his back against the front door. She dared another peek, and quickly drew back again.

Walking quickly and quietly, she went to the door, realized that since she hadn’t been there when Marc and Spike left, the bolt wasn’t on and neither was the chain. Reb yanked on the handle.

The man with his shoulder pressed to the door, fell backward, flat backward. He scrambled to get up, but flopped down again when he came eye-to-blade with the carving knife.

“Look,” he said, holding up both palms.

Reb didn’t wait for whatever he had to say. With her weapon she made small circles at inch from his nose. “I used to think I’d like to be a plastic surgeon,” she said. “Maybe I still would. I could start by getting rid of your ears. You’d appreciate a narrower head for sneaking in and out of places. Women like scars, y’know. How about something flashy about here?” She rested the knife on the side of his neck. “What’ll it be, Marc? Ears, throat, or…anything else we might come up with?”

He thought, Marc decided, that Reb O’Brien was the cutest serious woman he’d ever met. Telling her so at this moment might not be wise. “Look,” he repeated for the third time, knowing her reaction would probably be the same as on the first two attempts to communicate.

“I’m not ready to listen to your excuses.”

Right again, Girard.
Not that being right would make her wooden floors any easier on his back. The knife he could so easily take away continued to dangle a few inches above his nose.

“Reb, I’ve got a confession to make.” The pesky poodle poked his nose in Marc’s ear.

“Save it.”

She stood with her feet braced apart. Her silhouette was fuzzy inside the flimsy cotton gown and robe, but not too fuzzy for a man with any imagination. He adjusted his position on the floor without any positive effect on his discomfort.

“Reb—”

“I said
save
it.”

“I can’t. I need to use the bathroom.”

“Hold it. It’s good to practice bladder control.”

He sighed and decided something so terrifying, he turned his head to avoid choking.
He loved her.
And not only because he wanted them to be naked together. That was asinine. He and Reb had only shared one kiss years ago. Okay, one kiss and a lot of time together when he didn’t think of much other than how much he wanted her. But that and the couple of days and kisses they’d shared since he’d returned to Toussaint didn’t add up to a reason to…Nothing was normal anymore, that’s what all this was about.

“Do you really need to use the bathroom, Marc?”

“No. I wanted to confess that I think you’re really something. In fact, I could become very attached to you.” Complimentary, but not overly effusive. Just the right note. So why was she staring at him like that?

“You worm,” she said through her teeth. “You lowlife. I’m not a wide-eyed seventeen-year-old anymore. You can’t sweep me off my feet, or distract me with a few wild lies.”

But he had distracted her. He captured the knife-toting wrist and lunged upward at the same time. The knife clattered to the floor. Marc threw Reb over a shoulder, kicked the front door shut, and threw the deadbolt.

“How does this go, you idiot?” she said, her voice jarring with his every move. “Tarzan subdues Jane with brute force and she loves it? What happens now? The tree house? Are you going to gather fruit? What?”

Gaston yipped about his ankles. “Call him off, Reb. If he bites me…I think dogs that bite have to be shot.”

“
Shot?
”

“Put down.” He carried her into what he remembered as her father’s study and switched on the first lamp he came to. The dog ran ahead and made his way, via a swivel leather chair, onto a handsome desk. There he stood: grinning.

“Enough of this,” Reb said.

He dropped her to a couch and sat close beside her. “Escape is impossible,” he told her. “Don’t try. What’s gotten into you? You opened the front door when you were all alone in here.”

“Why were you hiding outside?”

“I wasn’t hiding. I was keeping watch.”

“Why?” The lamp didn’t give much light, but it was enough for Marc to see Reb clearly.

“The deadbolt wasn’t on. Neither was the chain.”

She made to get up, but he plunked her down again. “Being manhandled isn’t a turn-on to me,” she said. “How would you know about the locks?”

“Think about it.”

“Maybe I put them on after you left.”

“Uh uh. Spike got in his car and took off first. I started to leave but doubled back. You were walking all over the house. I could tell by the way the lights went on and off, but you didn’t bolt the door. That was stupid, Reb. You still aren’t thinking like an intelligent woman who knows she’s being threatened.”

She shrugged his hands away. “I didn’t think you believed me.”

“Spike made good points, but he doesn’t know you as well as I do. And I do still know you. You aren’t an alarmist. You’re levelheaded. How well would you do as the primary medico in this town if you weren’t? I know some of what you’ve been through, but you aren’t falling apart.”

Her eyes glittered. “If I were a man, that wouldn’t surprise you.”

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe I need you to teach me how strong women can be.”

She didn’t answer him. He ought to be glad because he didn’t seem to be able to stop his mouth from running away.

If he told her she was sexy when she got mad, she was likely to kick him out, and he’d deserve it. He said, “Spike and I let ourselves out, remember? You can’t put deadbolts on from the outside. All I intended was to wait until I heard you lock up, then be on my way.”

Her light, freckled skin in that white gown and robe, her scrubbed face and startlingly red hair hypnotized him. When she was angry, Reb O’Brien’s green eyes were a sight no man was likely to overlook.

“You don’t frighten me, y’know,” she told him. “You can get as close as you like, and stare as hard as you can, I’m not intimidated. You never have been able to make me feel small, and you tried hard enough in the past.”

He wasn’t ready to face uncomfortable history. “If you were intimidated more often, Reb, you might be less annoying.”

She caught at the neck of his shirt and held on. “I’m a gentle woman. I spend my life looking after people, but you bring out the worst in me. You incite me, just the way you always did.” She had more than shirt in those strong fingers and her hair-removal technique wouldn’t become popular.

“Taking a man by the throat isn’t what I’d call gentle.” He sucked air through his teeth. “People don’t get into situations like this if they don’t care about each other.”

She whipped her hand away and thought about that. Marc added, “How did you know there was someone outside?”

“I saw your shoulder through the glass.”

“But you didn’t think the smartest thing would be to call for help?”

“Call who?” Her fingers slackened against his chest. “You? Or Spike, who doesn’t believe a word I say, any more than you do?”

He didn’t want to fight with her, oh no, he surely didn’t want to fight. “Yes, cher, that’s exactly what I had in mind.”

She took hold of his shirt and chest hair again. “Why didn’t you just go home? Why did you stick around here waiting for another opportunity to insult me?”

“Gimme a break. So I say the wrong things sometimes. I didn’t mean you were an idiot with too much imagination, I just meant you should have called for help if you thought something was wrong.”

Reb leaned toward him and Marc lost his battle to keep his eyes on her face. Her breasts were only a couple of inches from his chest. Erect nipples pressed against cotton.

“Reb,” he said, too aware of his heavy breathing, and of another painful heaviness he’d like to take care of. “I didn’t want to go home.”

“I knew it was you outside. I went to the waiting room and looked out of the window. I saw you there. That’s why I opened the door. It had nothing to do with my being an idiot.”

He smiled and she flushed, irritation turning the corners of her mouth down.

“I won’t make you pay for that remark. Did you hear me say I stuck around because I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to leave you.”

Her expression softened, and she started to straighten away from him. “You were always decent, even if you did, and do, hide it under all that prickly skin.”

“I believe you’re sure someone attacked you.”

She put the back of her right hand on his cheek and smoothed it. “I didn’t go into it a lot, but it was so bad when I knew someone was following me the first time.”

When she touched him, even lightly, and probably as she would an old friend, his body turned unbearably hard—in the most bearable way. Her hand rubbing his face wasn’t enough. He wanted to make love with her.

“Marc? What are you thinking?”

Maybe she should find that out—with a little help from him.

He checked Gaston’s whereabouts while he said, “You’re sure someone’s following you again. Is that what you mean?” The dog was still on the desk but now held a pen in his teeth.

“Someone is. I should have gone back to Cyrus like I promised I would—he’s very analytical. I’d started to explain to him but chickened out. You know how it is when you start to hear yourself explaining something and it sounds stupid to you.”

What he felt was new. Fear that gnawed at his gut caught him off guard. “Please don’t hold anything back from me,” he told her. He was thinking about Amy, visualizing her all twisted up on that stone. “Something’s very wrong in this town.” If it cost him his last breath, he’d find out what it was.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “I’ve already said I don’t think that man was ever caught. And I think he’s back. Marc, I’m trying to be cool with this, but he thinks he needs to shut me up—I’m sure of it. It must mean he thinks I could give the police some damning evidence against him.”

Gaston dropped the pen to the floor and yawned. Sometimes his eyes closed and he wobbled until he jerked awake again, and snorted. He gave the impression of having bags under his eyes.

“Reb, what’s happened to make you so sure you’re being followed? Apart from what happened tonight? And if you are right, why you?”

“I already told you about the first—”

“I’m asking about since Pepper Leach was put away,” he told her.

“You do believe what I’ve told you?”

“I believe you, and I want to help you. And I want us to help each other.”

He saw her make up her mind to talk. “When I made the mistake of leaving my cycle out one night, something heavy was used on the wheels, and the tires were slashed. That happened two weeks ago. Fortunately one of my patients insisted on fixing it for me. I feel eyes on me, and get the impression someone’s been watching me. Then I see something move—bushes mostly—and I know whoever’s doing these things is close by but has moved on. It’s happening a lot. And now all this.” She spread her arms to indicate the house. “This was meant to be a horrible, frightening warning. Whoever did it intended to scare me into taking some sort of action—so that he could know how I’d react. If he’d wanted me to die in that closet, he could easily have killed me.

“Then there was poor Gaston. What kind of person attempts to kill a helpless little dog?”

Marc glanced at the dog, who had stretched out on his back, with all four legs sticking up in the air, and who was snoring and chomping in his sleep.

“He likes to sleep that way sometimes,” Reb commented. “Marc, do you think someone broke in to put glass in Gaston’s food?”

“I surely do. And I believe he came through the window.”

Her great, relieved sigh exhilarated him. He was in a bad way with Reb. Marc didn’t want to look very far into the future. Too much could happen in too short a time, and it didn’t all have to be good.

“It wouldn’t be human if you weren’t scared about being alone with all this.”

She looked into his eyes, and, not for the first time, Marc was certain Reb knew something useful about Amy’s death. She might have no knowledge of what it was, but it was there and waiting for the right circumstances to trigger its revelation. He told her, “You aren’t on your own now. You’re with me. This man isn’t brave; this is a coward who attacks women. I’m taking you back to Clouds End with me where I can make sure you aren’t vulnerable.”