Officer in Pursuit (5 page)

Truth was, Elizabeth was the most
steadfast facet of Kerry’s existence. The one thing she could count
on, no matter what. And that terrified her, because anyone even
passingly familiar with the plantation’s history and legends would
know exactly what that meant.

* * * * *

“You look like you just bit into a
crabapple,” Sasha said, spearing a bite of cucumber salad and
waving it at Kerry. A couple toasted sesame seeds flew off the
slice of cucumber and bounced onto the corner table in Harvest at
Wisteria, the restaurant where Sasha was head chef.

Kerry, Sasha and Alicia all ate lunch
there every day they worked. Today, they were all there, occupying
a table in the otherwise empty restaurant – it was later than most
people ate lunch, and earlier than most ate dinner. Which meant
that Sasha would probably let her mouth run unchecked.

“I’m fine,” Kerry said, taking a bite
of her own salad. Sasha liked to cook what she called ‘healthy
stuff’ for Kerry’s lunch sometimes. Kerry accepted the kind
gesture, even if light dishes like cucumber salad were usually
accompanied by things that had been drowned in questionable amounts
of butter.

Like the platter of shrimp Sasha had
brought out for the three of them to share.

“Bullshit,” Sasha said. “You’re down
in the dumps and have been ever since yesterday evening. We all
heard you tell Grey you wouldn’t watch the sunset on the pier with
him, remember? Either you’re just sadistic, or something’s got you
down.”

“I’m not sadistic.” The accusation
stung. Did her friends really think she was the type to toy with
someone’s feelings on purpose?

“Well, you spent all day with Grey,
rode him through the water like a show pony and then gave him the
cold shoulder at sundown. That was pretty mean.”

Kerry frowned. She hadn’t thought of
it that way. Had Grey?

“Did you see his face?” Sasha
continued. “When you turned him down after all that, he looked like
a little kid who’d just dropped his ice cream on the
sidewalk.”

“Okay.” Kerry dropped her fork. “I get
it. At the time though, I didn’t think it was such a big
deal.”

“Why didn’t you want to watch the
sunset with him?” In another life, Sasha could’ve been a police
interrogator. “You obviously had a great time yesterday, and then
it was like a switch flipped. Did I miss something?”

“I just…” Kerry picked up her fork
again, then set it down. It clanked against the side of her plate,
the one full of salad she’d barely tasted.

How could she explain to
Sasha and Alicia? She couldn’t tell them about the man she’d seen
strolling the beach the day before – the one who’d looked so much
like
him
at first
glance.

At second glance, he’d been ten years
too old, a couple inches too short. But the damage had been done by
then – she’d been reminded of who she really was, of why goofing
around with Grey at the beach was an exercise in
futility.

When he’d asked her to watch the
sunset with him, she’d panicked.

“I was having cramps,” she eventually
said. “My period started yesterday and the ibuprofen I’d taken that
morning wore off. By the time we left I was miserable.”

Sasha and Alicia both groaned, Alicia
reaching out to pat Kerry’s hand.

The lie burnt in the pit of Kerry’s
stomach like a chemical fire.

“That sucks,” Sasha said. “You
should’ve said something – I keep a few pills in my
purse.”

Kerry shrugged. “It would’ve been hard
to pull you aside with the guys around. I just wanted to get
home.”

Though the lie left a bad taste in her
mouth, it had rolled off her tongue so easily. This was who she
was: a person who’d lie to her best friends to keep them from
catching a glimpse of the mountain of secrets she was sitting
on.

“Poor you,” Alicia said. “And poor
Grey. You know he had no idea – guys never think of stuff like
that.”

Kerry shifted in her seat, no longer
hungry even though she adored Sasha’s soy-wasabi cucumber salad. As
she took a sip of her water, it cooled her burning insides and the
truth struck her: no one truly knew her. Not even her best
friends.

The other women looked at her with
sympathy, oblivious to her deceit. Diamonds glittered on their
hands, reminding everyone that they were loved. Kerry’s heart
cracked as she marveled at their openness, their inexhaustible
capacity to care – what honest and truly likeable human beings they
were.

Yesterday she’d granted herself a few
hours’ pass, had pretended to be someone she wasn’t. Those hours
had shown her herself in a way she hadn’t anticipated, had opened
her eyes to who she’d really become.

She felt strangely broken, and more
than a little hollow. Part of her was more glad than ever that the
people she cared about didn’t share her secrets.

“So Alicia,” she said after forcing
down a bite of her cucumber salad, “your wedding is this weekend. I
can’t believe we hardly talked about it yesterday.”

Alicia grinned and dabbed the corner
of her mouth with a napkin. “I figured you two were tired of
hearing about it by now.”

“Not at all.” The crack in Kerry’s
heart deepened. “I tried my bridesmaid dress on again last night.
It matches perfectly with the shoes you had dyed. Anyway, you must
be excited.”

* * * * *

“The sleeves are too short!” Grey
turned away from the mirror, rounding on Liam. “What the hell am I
supposed to do now?”

Liam didn’t say a damn
thing.

Grey tugged on the tuxedo sleeves,
gave himself another look in the mirror. He looked like a ten year
old who’d just hit a growth spurt.

Henry snorted.

“Hey!” Grey pulled off the jacket and
put it back on the hanger. “Don’t laugh. Not everyone can have your
short little T-Rex arms.”

“Nobody’s arms are short,” Liam said,
holding up his own tuxedo jacket against Grey’s. “And you’re not a
circus freak – the jacket’s just too small. I’m pretty sure this
isn’t the size Alicia ordered.”

“Can I help with anything?”
A woman in high heels and glasses popped out from behind a wedding
dress-wearing mannequin. She stared at Liam, Henry and Grey like
they
were
circus
freaks, no matter what Liam said.

It was hard to blame her. What kind of
guys went to a bridal boutique without a woman to make them do
it?

Maybe they were the first. The wedding
was less than a week away and there’d been some sort of order delay
with the tuxes. Liam had promised Alicia that he, Grey and Henry
would all go and get it sorted out today, on their day
off.

Alicia, Kerry and Sasha were all at
work during the boutique’s business hours, so there was no female
to translate for them.

“My jacket’s too small,” Grey said.
“Sleeves are too short.”

The woman pushed her glasses up onto
the bridge of her nose. “Let me take a look – go ahead and put it
on.”

He shrugged back into the jacket and
immediately got sweaty. Trying not to think about how hot he’d be
wearing a tux outside that weekend, he turned to the shop
lady.

“Wow.” Her eyes got big behind her
glasses lenses. “You weren’t kidding.”

“I’m pretty sure it must be a
mistake,” Liam said. “We all got measured here, and my fiancée
placed the final order.”

“Well, that’ll be easy to
verify.”

Grey took the jacket off and
surrendered it to her.

She looked at it, went to the computer
at the register and quickly returned. “This isn’t what you ordered
– the sleeve size is off. I’m sorry about that.”

Grey was stricken with a sudden vision
of being the only member of the wedding party standing in
shirtsleeves, like an idiot. Not exactly how he wanted to look as a
groomsman, especially since he’d be walking Kerry down the
aisle.

He’d practically begged Liam to make
sure he got Kerry instead of some cousin of Alicia’s from DC, who
was also a bridesmaid.

“What are our options?” Liam asked.
“He needs a jacket for Saturday.”

“I’ll place an order for the correct
size right now. I’ll have it express shipped and it should be here
within three days.”

“Great.” Liam seemed
satisfied.

Grey had to admit, he’d never been so
relieved about any clothing-related news. After yesterday and the
way Kerry had shot him down at the beach, the last thing he needed
was to look like a chimp stuffed into a tuxedo when it came time
for their moment of wedding aisle glory.

Right now, the prospect of being
paired with her during the wedding ceremony was all he
had.

* * * * *

“Spot me,” Grey said, lying down on
the bench in his garage as a bead of sweat dripped from the tip of
his nose. Having a garage gym was great, except for one thing:
there was no air conditioning.

He seriously needed to invest in a
window unit or something.

“Can’t,” Liam said, reaching for a
towel and wiping his face with it, “it’s about time for Alicia to
get off work. Promised her I’d be home – Monday night is our pizza
and movie night.”

“You’re abandoning me in my time of
need for pizza?”

Liam shrugged. “Wedding’s this
weekend. Not gonna break a promise now. Besides, I love
pizza.”

“All right, Henry – you spot me
then.”

“Sasha gets off early tonight. We’re
going on a date.” He stared out the window like he wished he was
already gone.

“What the hell – you’re both ditching
me? What about my bench press?”

Neither of them had said anything
about their evening plans. If they had, Grey would’ve pushed for
them to leave Wilmington earlier instead of grabbing lunch after
trying on their tuxes. Now he had no one to help him with chest
day.

And he wasn’t about to bench press
without a spotter – although he sometimes suspected he might die
alone, it sure as hell wasn’t going to be because he’d dropped 280
pounds of iron on himself.

“Sorry, man.” Liam threw his towel
over his shoulder. “I’ll come over and spot you next time we have a
day off.”

“Bullshit – you’ll be on your
honeymoon.”

“Later then.”

Grey tried not to be too pissed when
Liam and Henry left him. Instead, he set up his bench at an incline
to prepare for an inverted bench press and then went to set his
adjustable free weights on their highest setting. Not heavy enough,
but he wasn’t going to go inside and sit on his ass in front of the
TV.

“Come on. Piece of shit.” He rocked
the adjustable weight in its frame, pulling on the red plastic tab
that controlled how much weight it’d bring with it when he picked
it up. It got stuck all the time. Sometimes he wasted five or ten
minutes getting it into the right position.

The entire weight stand rocked as he
struggled with it, and just when he was about to let a string of
obscenities fly, the tab snapped off right in his hand, then went
skittering across the concrete.

The little piece of plastic stopped
directly beneath his weight bench, like it was mocking
him.

“Damn it!” He barely resisted the urge
to kick the weight stand, which probably would’ve broken his
toes.

The weights had been expensive. And
now he had no way to do chest day.

He grabbed a clean towel, scrubbed his
face like his life depended on it and let a few more obscenities
fly. He was in the middle of cursing every single factory line
worker who’d ever touched the weights when his phone went
off.

If it was Liam or Henry, they could
kiss his ass.

But it wasn’t. It was
Kerry.

He dropped the towel and turned his
back on the traitorous little bit of plastic lurking beneath his
weight bench. “Kerry?”

“Hey Grey.” Her voice was
soft.

Hearing her speak made him feel
idiotic for spending the last several minutes swearing to himself,
alone in the garage.

“Hey. What’s up?”

His anger over his weights forgotten,
his thoughts flashed back to the day before: a perfect day with a
weird ending that’d left him wondering where he’d gone
wrong.

It wasn’t just that Kerry hadn’t
wanted to watch the sunset on the pier with him that’d confused
him. It was the way she’d turned him down: in a hurry, without
looking him in the eye. She’d practically leapt into her car and
had been the first one out of the lot.

He still had no idea why she’d run
away like that. Had he done something to scare her off?

“I want to apologize for yesterday,”
she said. “I was rude to you. When you asked me to walk out onto
the pier with you, I was in a hurry to get home because I wasn’t
feeling well.”

“I didn’t realize you were feeling
bad,” he said. “You seemed fine until then.”