Kaleidoscope (5 page)

That was all the ugliness to be found.

After searching the kitchen, as he moved through the house, Deck saw nothing but beauty.

Extreme beauty.

Seeing it, he finally got it, why she chose this place, what urged her to restore it, bring back that beauty, show this house it was loved.

It was not a mess in the middle of restoration. It needed work but it was clean, tidy, what seemed like acres of handsome wood glowing.

There was another starburst, this one spectacular and fashioned by varying woods in the floor of the massive circular entryway over which hung a huge chandelier and around the walls a sweeping rounded stairway.

She had work to do, definitely, and he saw she was in the middle of several projects.

But he was pleased to see long gaping holes in the walls that exposed she’d already had the entirety of the electrical rewired but hadn’t yet replastered. New light switches. New outlets. Dimmers.

She needed to do some sanding. Painting. Plastering. And he saw she was in the middle of cleaning the chandelier in the great room at the front. The floors, woodwork and walls had all been done, furniture covered in sheets, the chandelier all that was left to do. It was down, sitting on a sheet on a table, but the hundreds of crystals had been removed with great care, keeping their array intact even if they were arranged on another sheet on the floor. This so, after they were cleaned, she could reattach them where they were meant to be.

His Emme. Smart as a whip.

But as he moved around inside, even with the walls not re-patched after electrical work, it was a home. It was furnished in a mix of antiques and modern that worked beautifully, albeit it was furnished sparsely. But in that place, it’d take years to fill it with furniture.

Upstairs, more of the same except many of the rooms were closed, draft protectors at their bases, radiators off inside, rooms freezing cold, no furniture or even boxes in those rooms.

Except one room, a guest room, was entirely refinished. Its bathroom the same. The only rooms he saw that were complete. All in keeping with her décor, but in those rooms, mostly antiques, black-and-white mosaic floor in the bathroom, claw-footed tub, beveled mirrors, heavy wood queen-size bed with lots of pillows and understated but attractive bedclothes.

He kept moving through the house.

No stolen property.

No burglary gang command center.

Just a home. A big one. A fucked-up one that would one day be sheer beauty. But a home.

The last room he went to was the room he knew to be her bedroom. It was unlikely he’d find anything there, but Deck was always thorough.

But there was something outside of being thorough that drew him there. Something he’d contemplate later, after he got her shot of McFarland.

Cautious, silent, he turned the knob to the closed door and hoped it didn’t creak. Then again, not a floorboard or a door creaked as he moved through the house so someone knew how to use WD-40.

The door opened silently.

He turned out his flashlight, moved in and stopped dead.

The large windows were covered but with sheers, the curtains were opened. The room was warm.

And the moonlight illuminated Emme in bed.

She was on her side and had her back to him.

Her bare back.

The covers were pulled up to her hips but not high. He could see the curve of her hip, the top of the round of her ass.

No panties.

Just all that sleek skin of her back, shoulder, side, her hair splayed dark against the light of the sheets

Fuck.

Fuck.

His body reacted, his mind engaged, and seeing her, remembering all she was to him, knowing that had not changed, not ever, spending time with her that night, Jacob Decker made an instant decision.

He also began to back out of the room.

He tore his eyes from a naked, just-fucked-by-another-guy Emme in bed. His mind consumed with what he’d decided and all he felt knowing fucking Dane fucking McFarland had his hands on her, his mouth on her, his dick inside her, when he spied the small, opened jeweler’s box on her nightstand, he almost missed it.

But he saw it, stopped and his eyes narrowed on it.

Furtively, he moved to the bed and stared at that box, the ring inside.

Quickly, he picked it up, moved quietly out of the room, down the hall and tugged out his phone. He took a picture of the large oval ruby surrounded by diamonds and set in white gold.

Just as quickly, he went back, replaced it, backed out of the room and closed the door.

Then he got the fuck out of the house, throat now burning, gut tight, shafts of piercing pain driving through his brain.

He pulled out his phone and texted Chace,
I’m out. You lose him?

No. I’m on him. He’s taking a meet. I’ll send a car.

Copy,
Deck typed in.

New guy. Don’t know this guy. Got pictures,
Chace texted back.

Good,
Deck replied but didn’t share about the ring. He’d do that in person tomorrow when he could state plain to all involved how they were going to proceed.

He shoved his phone back in his pocket and moved through the woods.

He stood and waited, hidden by a tree, and only came out when Jeff Jessup rolled up in his SUV.

Jessup took Deck to Chace’s Yukon and while he did, Deck did not invite discussion. Jessup, not stupid by a long shot, didn’t push it. Jessup also had a very pretty wife and a new baby so he didn’t have time to shoot the shit. Deck knew the man just wanted to get home.

Jessup dropped him at the Yukon and Deck swung into Chace’s vehicle. Chace and Deck would switch trucks tomorrow.

Deck drove home.

When he got there, he pulled out the files, flipping through, finding it.

A picture taken for an insurance company.

He got out his phone and pulled up the shot of the ring.

He looked between his phone and the picture.

McFarland had given Emme a stolen ruby ring.

Dumb fucking moron.

And they had the dumb fuck but they had him with fruit from a poisonous tree. He’d got the photo searching Emme’s home without a warrant and Deck not yet being deputized.

It was inadmissible evidence seeing he got it essentially while breaking and entering.

They couldn’t use it.

“Fuck,”
Deck hissed.

With no choice but to wait until the next day, he put the file back, got ready for bed and slid between the sheets.

He did not find sleep.

This was not unusual. Since he was a kid, he slept deep but he never slept long. For as long as he could remember, he needed four hours a night, no more. It drove his mom and dad ’round the bend. Elsbeth hated it, bitched about it all the time and refused to entertain the idea of keeping him close so he could read, or do other things, when he woke early. So when he woke, he left her in bed and spent his early awake hours elsewhere.

But he wasn’t finding sleep that night because this was the norm.

He wasn’t finding it because, thirty miles away, Emme,
his
fucking Emme, was lying naked in a bed in a ramshackle mansion that looked good but needed a shit ton of work that, on her own, would take a fuck of a lot longer than a decade and a half, a bed where she’d been fucked by a criminal, a stolen ten-thousand-dollar ring sitting on her nightstand.

“Fuck,”
Deck clipped and rolled.

An hour later, still not finding sleep, he knifed out of bed.

Not knowing why, he went to the kaleidoscope on the mantel. He nabbed it, its box and took them to his bedroom.

He put them on his nightstand and stared at its shadow in the dark.

Five minutes later, he found sleep.

I looked out my office window, down to the yard, my eyes to the bustling activity, and I did this tapping my phone on my desk.

I should be working but I wasn’t thinking about work.

I was thinking about Jacob.

More precisely, I was thinking about calling Jacob, had an overwhelming urge to do so.

I was also trying not to do so because I had a boyfriend, even though he was a boyfriend I wasn’t all that sure about. He was sweet, he was into me, but he was just… off.

Then again, I didn’t have a lot of experience so what did I know?

Additionally, after my dinner with Jacob last night, within an hour, I’d called him after ten at night and now it was only eleven thirty the next day.

I didn’t want him to think I was psycho, and calling him would imply psycho behavior. Further, when I called him last night, I’d asked him to dinner, which was dinner two nights in a row with a woman he hadn’t seen in nine years, a woman with a boyfriend, and that was semi-psycho.

Okay, maybe it was totally psycho.

I didn’t want Jacob to think I was psycho.

Ever.

But I wanted to hear his voice. I wanted to connect with him on the phone. I’d missed him and I liked having him back. I liked it a great deal.

I also missed him a great deal.

And I needed to ask him something. Further, he was the only one I could ask.

I looked from the yard to my phone. My mind telling my thumb not to do it, my thumb not listening, I found Jacob’s contact and hit go.

I put it to my ear.

“I’m a psycho,” I whispered and luckily finished whispering two seconds before Jacob’s voice sounded.

“You okay?” he answered.

He kept asking that mostly, I figured, because I kept calling when I didn’t need to so he probably thought something was wrong.

Or that I was a psycho.

“I need to know if you don’t eat anything,” I lied.

Actually, it wasn’t a lie. Although I remembered a lot about Jacob (most everything, in all honesty), I couldn’t recall if there was something specific he didn’t like to eat.

I could recall how beautiful he was, how tall he was, how strong he was. I could recall how smart he was and how funny he was. I could recall how cool he was with me. I could also recall how much I missed him. But I couldn’t recall if he didn’t like chicken.

But that wasn’t the only thing I needed to know. I needed to know something else too.

Much like last night, when he didn’t make me feel like a psycho, in fact, the opposite and sounded like he was happy to hear from me and would be willing to talk all night, he again sounded like me psychotically calling him yet again in a precursor to stalker way was no big deal.

“I don’t eat it, I’ll pick it off.”

“You can’t pick it off if I cook with it
in
it or if the mainstay of dinner on the whole
is
what you don’t eat,” I informed him.

“You makin’ Indian food?” he asked.

“No. Don’t you like Indian food?” I asked back.

“Love it,” he answered.

“Then why’d you ask if I was making Indian food?”

“ ’Cause I hoped you were.”

I burst out laughing.

No, Jacob definitely didn’t make me feel like I was being a psycho.

When I quit laughing, I told him, “Sorry, honey, I don’t know how to make Indian food.”

“Shame,” he muttered, a smile in his deep, attractive voice, and if I was on an infrared scanner, specific parts of me would have shown up hotter.

You have a boyfriend, Emme!
I told myself.

For a while,
I answered myself.

Jacob is also your ex–best friend’s ex-boyfriend, Emme!
I reminded myself.

So?
I asked myself.

I shoved those thought aside, thoughts that, if anyone knew I was talking to myself in my head might prove I was indeed a psycho, and pointed out to Jacob, “You haven’t actually answered the question.”

“I’ll eat what you cook, Emme. Cook what you like.”

He was
such
a nice guy.

He always was.

Nice. Tall (
very
tall). Handsome (unbelievably handsome). Smart (so damned smart). Funny. Interesting. Gentlemanly. And a repeat of nice because it was worth a repeat since he was just that nice.

I liked all that about him. I liked that he wore his dark hair way too long. I liked that sometimes a thick hank of it fell over his forehead and into his eye. I liked that he was who he was and didn’t wear designer jeans or put gel in his hair. I liked that, even considering he was extortionately intelligent, in fact, a genius, he never made anyone feel less than him because they weren’t as smart. I liked that he never acted superior or arrogant and with all that was him, looks, body, brains, he was one person who could. And I liked that he liked to do what he liked to do, he did what he liked to do and wouldn’t get pushed into doing something he didn’t want.

Like Elsbeth tried to do.

He’d lost her to that and he’d accepted it. I knew it killed. He’d loved her to distraction. But he refused to be the man she wanted him to be and instead was the man he was.

She should have seen she had it all even if he didn’t make bucketloads of money and thus couldn’t give her the life she was used to getting from her daddy. Country clubs, tennis lessons, vacations in villas in Italy and beaches in Thailand, fabulous homes kept by maids and fabulous meals cooked by cooks.

She didn’t see all she had.

Stupid.

“Are we done?” Jacob prompted when I fell silent.

We were. Or at least we should be.

But we weren’t.

“Okay, well, I could obviously talk to you about this tonight but it’s preying on my mind so much I can’t get any work done. So do you have a second?” I asked.

“For you, anytime, babe,” he answered.

Really,
such
a nice guy.

I took in a breath and started, “Okay, you’re a guy—”

There was laughter in his voice when he interrupted with, “Glad you noticed.”

Oh, I’d noticed. Any woman who was breathing noticed Jacob Decker. Hell, it was possible he could walk through a graveyard and his very presence would call up the dead females as zombies rabid to get just an undead glimpse of him, he was that noticeable of a male.

“Shut up, Jacob, and listen, will you?” I asked, a smile in my voice.

“Right. Out with it,” he invited, a smile in his.

“So, you’re a guy and say you’ve got a girl. You’ve known her for a while but you’ve been dating her for a short period of time. You like her and she knows this. You also know that she’s holding herself back like she did the fifty times you asked her out before she finally said yes.”

I paused.

Jacob said nothing while I did and when I didn’t continue, he prompted patiently, “Right, Emme, got that part.”

I knew he did. I knew he knew I was talking about Dane. I didn’t know why I was beating around the bush. I just felt I had to, maybe to protect Dane, maybe to protect me from Jacob thinking I was an idiot.

“Okay, you got that part, so you’re a guy, say you’re
that
guy and no vows of love have been exchanged. No commitments, not even to exclusive. Would you, um… say, buy her an expensive gift to maybe get the ball rolling in your relationship?”

This question was met with silence that stretched so long I had to call his name.

When I did, he spoke.

“What kind of expensive gift?”

“A very expensive gift,” I told him.

“What kind, Emme?” he pushed.

I closed my eyes, opened them, looked to the yard, saw Dane was now there talking to a customer and I looked away.

“A ruby and diamond ring,” I answered quickly.

This was met with more silence that lasted longer.

I spoke into the void and I did it semi-babbling. “Jacob, honey, I don’t know. It’s weird. I mean, it isn’t an engagement ring or anything. More like a cocktail ring. Which is weird in and of itself because I run a lumberyard. I wear jeans to work. They’re nice jeans but it’s not like I go to the opera on weekends and hobnob with society. But more, the ruby is very big and you don’t have to be an expert jeweler to know it’s expensive. Like
very
expensive. Even the box it’s in is really nice.”

I was quiet a moment then my voice dipped low.

“It’s kinda creeped me out.”

I was quiet another moment then my voice dipped lower.

“It’s actually kinda made me make my mind up about Dane.”

Through this, Jacob said nothing.

“Jacob?” I called.

“And what’s your decision about Dane?” he asked.

I shook my head like he could see me and didn’t even consider how weird this was, talking to Jacob about this, talking to him like there wasn’t nearly a decade between meeting him in town yesterday and the last time I saw him.

Then again, I’d talked through a lot with him, none of it really personal because, back then, I really didn’t have a life. But the personal part of my life, when he was in it, he knew. What movies I went to. What candidates I was voting for. The specifics (in detail) of where I was going on my next vacation and what I intended to do. That all was personal to me and very few people knew it, except family, my few friends and Jacob.

So it seemed natural, having him back, having him happy to see me, having him say it straight then act on the fact that he wanted us to stay connected this time.

We just, both of us, slid right into where we used to be.

Like real friends. Like the friends we once were.

So I answered, “I talked to him this morning, said I needed a bit of space but I wanted him to come over on the weekend. Then I’m breaking up with him.”

A moment, before, “How’d he feel about the space comment?”

“He didn’t seem pleased,” I gave him my understatement.

“I bet,” Jacob muttered, knowing it was an understatement.

We were conversing but he wasn’t giving me anything.

So I pressed for it.

“Okay, I laid that out and you haven’t said anything. You’re a guy. Is this something you’d do? The ring thing. I mean, is he being sweet and I’m just being weird?”

“Guy’s a dick and he’s a moron and he’s into you, Emme, too much. That feels wrong, smothering, creepy, you get the fuck out,” Jacob answered.

There was no way to misinterpret that and he was right about the last part. The first parts, I felt it necessary to say something.

“He’s actually not a dick or a moron, Jacob. But he is kinda into me, well… too much.”

That also was an understatement.

“Thought I was somethin’ else when he met me yesterday, called you on it right in front of me. Didn’t shake my hand, tried to break it. That’s a dick. That’s a moron.”

I didn’t know about the hand-shaking thing but I wasn’t surprised. That seemed a Dane thing to do.

But when Dane went weird about Jacob, that ticked me off.

Then again, Dane going weird around guys tended to happen a lot so I tended to get ticked off a lot which was one of the reasons why, even though he was usually sweet, not hard on the eyes and it felt nice that he was way into me, I wasn’t so sure about him.

That and him being… off.

I put my elbow on my desk and my head in my hand, mumbling, “Oh God, now I have to break up with him.”

“Do it on neutral ground then walk away. Or have me over, open your door to him, tell him it’s over, close the door. He knocks again, I answer.”

I blinked at my desk. “You’d do that?”

“Fuck yeah, Emme. Guy’s a moron and a dick. No tellin’ what he’ll do. So you break the news on neutral ground with people around and then get the fuck away from him or you do it when I’m over.”

“I can’t… I mean.…” I stammered. “I can’t believe you’d do that, honey. That’s so nice.”

“Today’s Thursday,” Jacob declared. “I got a lot of shit to do, put him off ’til Sunday and I’ll be sure I’m around.”

So,
so
nice.

But, this brought me to my next problem. I’d done what my father would call shitting where I lived. This was one reason I’d put Dane off since he’d asked me out the first time about three days after I got back to work after I’d been hospitalized. Now I had to work with him after I broke up with him. Work with him as in be his boss.

“Emme? Baby?” Jacob called.

Thoughts of breaking up with Dane exited my head instantly.

Baby.

What was that?

Jacob had said that several times since we reconnected and each time he said it, it felt like a physical touch. A good one. An affectionate one.

A sexy one.

Jacob had never been sexy toward me.

Ever.

He was my then–best friend’s boyfriend, of course. But he’d never even flirted in a casual way.

He’d called me “babe” before, a lot (even though Elsbeth didn’t like it). He’d also called me “honey” sometimes (and Elsbeth didn’t like that either).

But
baby
?

“Emme,” he growled, his voice rougher and getting impatient.

He’d also never growled at me.

It was hot.

I didn’t need to think of Jacob as hot, or not hotter than he naturally exuded simply being Jacob.

“I’m here. I’m freaking but I’m here,” I told him.

“It’ll be okay,” he assured, growl gone, his deep voice was again smooth.

“I work with him, Jacob.”

“Yeah, that probably wasn’t your usual smart,” he murmured.

I closed my eyes, plopped back in my desk chair and groaned, “Ugh.”

“You’re an adult, he’s an adult. You both suck it up and act like adults. I know you can do that. He can’t, you find a reason to fire him.”

I shot up and cried, “Jacob! I can’t do that. This is his livelihood.”

“He shoulda thought of that before he asked out the boss then creeped her out.”

This was true.

I straightened my spine and declared, “Okay, I’ve just decided I’m taking this one step at a time. I’ll tell him to come around Sunday. I’ll break up with him. I’ll ask him if we can behave like adults at work. And then I’ll call you for another strategy session if he’s unable to do that.”