Exposed (6 page)

Nia wanted to scream, “
But you don’t want me! You want her!
” But instead, in a tight voice she asked, “Is Sadie Andersen still there?”

He finally managed to straighten and he slouched his hands into his pockets. “Well, blame her bastard husband for that. Sadie’s afraid to go home with those TV people around, and I don’t blame her.” Each word he’d spoken had gotten louder. Nia eyes darted around; her angry retort was lost when she saw several people peeking out of aisles to look at them.

“Just get out of here,” she hissed at Dan.

“I’m only going if you are coming home,” he stated with a stubbornness born from drinking, she knew.

An hour later, she’d lost her job.

Nia sat disbelieving in her car, staring out the windshield. Dan had taken her home, her money, her heart, and now her job. She broke down then with a hard sob that sounded as if it had been torn from her closed throat. Then it was as if she was dying for air as she sucked her breath inward.

Dan had made a scene and the only way she’d gotten him to leave was to promise him that she’d go home after work. Yet the scene had been too much for the owner and employees of Fabric Barn. She wasn’t certain she blamed them. So she cried for her lost job and her lost life. Thank goodness she carried a Kleenex box in her car, because she was going through them one after another.

“Nia? Are you all right?”

It was Jack coming to crouch by her car door where she had the window rolled down. For some reason being caught so vulnerable made her cry harder.

“I-I can’t stay with you,” she sobbed, then she blew her nose loudly. “I can’t pay you, I lost my j-job.”

“Jesus, Nia.” Jack’s voice was rough with concern, and she vaguely heard the car door open. “It’s okay. Really. Don’t worry about that.”

She was a sobbing noodle, so it wasn’t very hard for Jack to turn her and pull her into his embrace. She clutched his broad shoulders as if they were a rescue buoy and she was a drowning victim. He was so solid, compassionate, and just wonderful to her. She cried about that too. It was like all silly women did once they got started crying.

Jack said dozens of soothing things. “I’ll help you. We’ll help each other. It will be all right.”

Slowly, her tears worked their way into an occasional teary dribble.

“Tell me what happened,” Jack murmured, with his breath warm in the hair above her ear.

She had to move her mouth away from the angle of his neck and shoulder to tell him how Dan had come into her store drunk and argumentative. How she’d lost her job because of it.

“Bastard,” Jack retorted sharply. The bunched muscles in his chest and arms expanded and released beneath where she clutched him as he crouched, and she leaned forward from the seat of her car. She was calmer, but she didn’t want to let him go as she spoke into his neck.

“I just don’t understand why he’s so adamant about knowing where I’m staying, and he was insisting that I come home,” she said, at a loss.

“It’s a guy thing,” Jack said, and she could feel he was talking tilted more against her cheek.

Who would have ever thought she’d find support from the spouse of the woman that her husband was cheating with?

“I’m not trying to be rude,” Jack muttered. “But it’s kind of like our car. We’d do anything to make certain the ex-wife didn’t get our car, and no way we’d let another man get it through the ex.”

Nia stiffened with a small, offended “Oh.”

“Man,” Jack muttered. “That was kind of crass. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. I was just trying to say—”

“
What
the hell is this?”

Nia looked over Jack’s shoulder at the outraged sound of her husband’s voice.

“Nia, what the hell are you doing with
him
.”

Dan stood too close to Jack’s back. It was as if he’d rushed forward and intended to grab Jack. It made her gasp and jerk in Jack’s arms.

“We’re going to stand,” Jack warned in her ear. She was quite certain Dan didn’t hear it as Jack pulled her from the car seat.

“Let go of my wife!” Dan yelled.

Nia thought Dan must have grabbed Jack, trying to pull him backward.

“Stop it, Dan!” she cried into Jack’s shoulder, where she ended up in all the jostling, while Jack tried to hold her steady.

“Get away from him!” Dan shouted. “How could you, Nia!”

“Don’t touch me!” Jack blasted with a suppressed yell over the top of her head. Then Jack’s body was gone and she grabbed the open car door. She saw that Jack had pushed Dan back, giving Jack room to turn around.

“No! Don’t you dare fight,” Nia shouted at both of them. Then to her husband, she yelled, “Dan, don’t! You don’t understand!”

“
What
are you doing with her?” Dan demanded, shoving Jack and making Nia scared.

“Don’t,” she hissed, cringing.

Jack snarled back harshly, “Taking care of her! Not abusing her like you are!”

Then Jack shoved Dan backward and his shoving seemed to have more impact, because Dan stumbled.

"No, Jack!" Nia cried.

"You need to get away from her!" Dan shouted, rushing Jack. "This is between husband and wife."

"You lost your damn rights," Jack shouted. Then he punched Dan squarely in the face.

Nia screamed, and then screamed again, at Jack to stop as he punched Dan another time. The men grappled. Dan had blood spurting from his nose. Nia dug into her purse, intending to call 911, when she heard the smack of a fist on flesh. Dan went down to his knees.

"Dan!" she cried, rushing to him. "How dare you!" she yelled at Jack, accusing him. She'd never been so mad.

Jack stepped back from decking Dan Cooper. He grabbed the pain in his fist with his other hand, watching Nia offering support to Dan while she glared up at him.

"Don't you dare hit him again!" she shouted. "Or I
will
press charges."

Jack staggered back, unable to believe—

"The ambulance will be here any minute, Dan. Don't move. Here, put this on your nose," Nia said.

Jack watched Nia working over her husband with the devotion of a loving wife. His stomach turned and he physically turned away from the sight. How could she do that?

The cops and an ambulance arrived, and it seemed Mrs. Cooper was furious at him. She left the cops with a scathing view of events ... not in his favor. Besides that, she was going in the ambulance with her puny husband. It seemed he'd broken Cooper's nose.

So while he wanted to do a victory dance, it seemed Nia had forgotten about the infidelity.

That pissed him off. Maybe even worse than Cooper trying to manhandle him. The bastard abused Nia in ten different ways, but still she made it obvious she was going to side with her cheating husband. Jack thought it seemed as if he’d been thinking about the entire mess wrong, because it looked as if you could walk all over Nia, and she'd just take it.

Jack watched her look up and glare at him, right before she headed toward the open back door of the ambulance her husband had stepped into. Jack looked at the officer writing down information ... probably for the event of Cooper pressing charges.

"Can you excuse me a couple seconds?" Jack asked.

Officer Matt Dyer nodded. They'd known each other from high school. He knew that Matt knew he wasn't going to bolt.

Jack sprinted to Nia's side, catching her off guard, before she stepped up into the ambulance. He reached out and clasped her hand, stopping her movement as he pulled a key from his pants pocket and he pressed it into her palm.

"Anytime," he muttered, looking down on her surprised face as he curled her fingers over the key to his house.

"Hey, get away from her!" Cooper yelled from within the ambulance.

Then Jack heard the EMT demanding that Cooper be still.

Nia looked as if she were about to say something, but the EMT called, "We have to go now, Mrs. Cooper."

Jack shrugged, trying to ease the tightness in his shoulders as he dropped Nia's soft hand. Then he resolutely turned back to the police interview. There'd been a couple of moments before this when he'd thought, sometime in the future, that he and Nia might become something more.

Jack grumbled at his obvious cluelessness. He was batting three strikes and he was
out
with women. Maybe he'd better just hunker down?

"You should not have hit him," Nia's voice sounded behind Jack, and then he heard the ambulance doors closing.

When he couldn’t help but look ... she was gone.

N
ia slowly turned the key to Jack's front door.
He'd given her the key.
She couldn't believe Jack had done that after she'd been acting like such a bitch. Somehow ... maybe years of doing it, she'd fallen headlong back into "loyal and fiercely protective wife" mode.

"I'm such an idiot," she muttered as she slowly opened the door. She didn't want to disturb Jack, who'd been making his bed at night on the couch in the living room. She didn't blame him, shuddering to think of trying to sleep on the same bed Sadie and Dan might have been screwing on.

Basically, she was attempting to sneak in, tiptoeing into the front entryway. It was two in the morning, and even though Jack's truck wasn't in the driveway, she assumed it was in the garage. Part of her was probably slinking her way in over the way she'd treated Jack.

It had taken her only a short time riding in the ambulance with her cheater husband to come back to her senses. While it was true she didn't like physical violence, Jack had been beyond justified in punching her insolent husband.

"I just wish I had punched him myself," Nia muttered, looking into the living room.

No Jack.

That startled her a bit, but then she decided he must have braved the master bedroom. "He better not to run into me," she whispered, with a pang.

He had every right not to forgive her ... she was such a fool. Even though she’d been a sucker and so wrong, Jack had still given her that key.

Nia reached to take her coat off and set down her purse. Jack probably didn't expect her to show up at his house after the crazy way she'd been acting. It meant so much more that he'd still given her the way out, to come back to the safety of his house. A way out and a way to get away from her sleazy soon-to-be ex-husband.

If reality hadn't already settled in, it had quickly when she'd watched Dan calling Sadie from the ambulance, then later even harder when Sadie arrived at the hospital. Nia had seen
red
. What was it with her husband? Did he think they were going to be a threesome? He was delusional, thinking he could play both ends. She'd left immediately. Disgusted she’d stayed by his side that long, and then agonized that she'd gone with him in the first place.

At Jack’s house, about ten minutes later, she was surprised then worried to realize he wasn't at home. His truck was gone and not in the garage as she’d first thought. The reasons he might not be home that late at night made her close to tears.

"It's my fault," she whispered, dabbing at her tears while she sat on the bed in the guestroom.

***

J
ack was drunk, but he wasn't drunk enough not to know the buxom redhead hanging on to him was a
big
mistake. She was a barfly ... more interested in the drinks that his money could buy than what his stone-cold and uninterested cock could do. And what the hell was wrong with his love handle? It should be saluting instead of cowering. But damn ... the redhead reminded him too much of Sadie.

"Got to make a business call," he told the redhead, swiping the rest of his money off the bar while she was laughing too loudly at a crass joke the smarmy guy next to her spouted over his whiskey ... neat.

They made a pair, Jack decided, and he only stumbled once to the front door of the bar. He could hear the bass music thrumming from the dance area through a darkened entryway to his right. Small town. They still had a disco ball. Corny, but it nearly drew him in to look. He'd not been in a bar since his twenties.

"Damn, I shouldn't drive," he muttered. He wasn't a very good drunk, he decided, fishing for his cell phone. But when it filled his palm, he wondered who the hell he should call. Seconds later, without making a conscious decision, he put the phone to his ear.

"Hello." She sounded awake, but as if she might have a cold.

"Nia?" He leaned his shoulder against the wall by the front door.

"Jack, are you all right? You're not home, and I was worried." She had to be at his house. Before he could speak, she said in a rush, "That's so presumptuous of me. I'm sorry, I just—"

"I called you," he said, interrupting her.

"You did," she responded softly. Just the tone of her voice warmed him.

"I need your help," he began, but he wasn't going to bring up their earlier acrimony; nor was he at all willing to bring up her husband. "If you're not busy?" That would have to do for references to anything earlier.

"No, I'm not busy," she replied, relieving his tension. "I just got home ..." She hesitated, and he decided he liked that breathless ending in her voice.

"I need a ride." His voice rumbled, and he knew it for what it was ... interest. His alcohol-loosened brain wondered how easy it would be to get her into his bed. Under him. She seemed malleable on the phone to his inebriated brain, and that wasn't necessarily a compliment in his mind, but his lower appendage had immoral interests in it.

"Just tell me where you are, Jack, and I’ll come pick you up."

"I'd like to pick you up," he murmured, and he was certain he heard her intake of breath.

Then he told her where to find him. After he hung up he decided he didn't want the redhead to find him, so he wandered over to the dancing side of the bar. Might as well take a look at that disco ball and shrug off the feeling he was being bad by staying out so late ... getting drunk. Those were pre-husband feelings and nothing that the post-husband needed to feel guilty about anymore.

Nia parked her GTO outside the bar Jack had directed her to. She'd never noticed the drinking establishment before, maybe because it was on a different side of town than where she usually wandered. Her husband never came here, and that was how she knew most bars.