Secrets and Lies (17 page)

The thought of other women in his bed sent a rush of jealousy through her. It was crazy she knew that, because she, too, had been with another man before. She still felt envious that those other women had known what it was like to feel Thomas deep inside of them.

She heard another thud. “Thomas?” She eased up on her elbows.

He pulled a pair of pants from the drawer and slid them over his naked behind before pulling out his weapon. “Stay here.”

“Thomas?”

“Stay here,” he stressed before leaving the room.

She pulled the red cotton sheet from the bed and wrapped it around her body. Why hadn’t she set the alarm? She answered that question for herself. She hadn’t set the alarm because she was too busy thinking about sex with Thomas to focus on setting the alarm. Had he not locked the door, it too, would still be unsecure.

Stay
, he wanted her to stay; she was trying hard to do just that because she knew he didn’t need her getting in the way. Still, she wanted to go with him, just in case he needed her help. She paced the floor. The light from the hallway illuminated the room enough to see clearly. What was taking him so long? What if he was hurt and needed her? “He said to stay here, Thena,” she chided herself as she stopped pacing. He would be angry if she didn’t listen to him. Of course, if he needed her help then he would probably be glad she didn’t listen. She turned on the overhead lights and waited for Thomas to return.

She heard the shot, the glass breaking, the sound of her own cry, but it hadn’t registered. She thought she heard a car speeding away.

“Thena!” She heard Thomas running down the hall. She immediately knew when he stepped inside the room. She was clutching her arm, lying on the floor in pain.

“I’ve been shot,” her voice was laced with tears and pain.

He dropped to one knee. “First aid kit?”

She moaned and rolled away from him as he tried to get a look at her arm. He pulled her back, easing her onto her back and harshly bit out the words again. “First aid kit?”

“Bathroom, cabinet…in the hall.” She kept a kit in the hall guest bathroom, one in the kitchen and one in her own bathroom. The guest bathroom was closest.

He was gone less than a minute before he was back by her side. He called emergency services as he pulled bandages from the kit.

“They’re sending an ambulance, and police,” he assured her.

“Clothes…I need clothes.”

“That’s not important right now.”

“I don’t want them to see me naked,” she cried.

“They won’t see you naked.”  He took the bottle of peroxide in his hand. “They’re going to be a while because of how far out you are. I’m going to dress this.” He brushed a hand over her forehead. “It’s going to sting.”

She blinked and took in a sharp breath. “Okay,” she turned her head and closed her eyes, unable to watch him pour on something that she anticipated would do more than sting.

It didn’t just sting; it burned; burned like fire. She had always heard peroxide didn’t burn, which is why she kept it on hand instead of a bottle of alcohol. She cried out and he leaned in, placing a soft kiss on her forehead and calmly reassuring her with the softness of his voice.

He had her arm wrapped in a bandage before he disappeared into her room, when he returned he had a summer dress from her closet. He assured her it would be easier to get on, and easier for the doctor’s at the hospital to redress the wound if she weren’t wearing long sleeves. He eased a fresh pair of panties onto her body and helped her to the hall where he sat her on the floor just outside the bedroom. He managed to pick up their clothes from the hallway and secure his weapon before the police and ambulance services arrived. She had lost some blood, but she didn’t have a hole in her arm so she figured it must have hurt worse than the damage actually was. Thomas had said the bullet grazed her, that it took out some skin and a little bit of flesh, but that she would be fine. She wondered just how he knew so much about first aid and bullet wounds. Had he learned while on the SWAT team? Had he been shot himself?

“The bullet is still in the wall,” he told one officer.

She vaguely kept up with the conversations going on around her. Everything was cop speak to her and she didn’t have a clue what half of it meant. Ballistics, she kind of remembered from some of those CSI shows she had seen, but the rest of the jargon was a mystery…maybe her head was just in too big of a fog to make sense of anything.

“I hate hospitals,” she shook her head. “Hate them with a passion. People die here.”

“You’re not going to die,” his voice was a low growl. He was angry again; or was it still? She couldn’t tell if there was a point over the past few hours where he wasn’t angry. She hoped he understood that this wasn’t his fault. Somebody was trying to kill her before she even met him.

“I used to feel so safe in that house. Dad and I built it together,” she shook her head. How one event could shatter her feeling of security was something she would probably need a few hours on a therapist’s couch to figure out.

“Alarms don’t really keep anybody safe…especially when they’re not set. I can’t believe I didn’t set the alarm.”

“As I recall I was shot from outside, not in.”

He grunted. Clearly she wasn’t helping alleviate his feelings of guilt. She sighed. “I only had the alarm because dad insisted. A few weeks before his death he insisted I call Brinks and have the alarm installed, so I did.”

“This was a few weeks before he died?”

She nodded. “We built the place together and we lived there together. Dad gave me the main bedroom since I designed the place and he took the…well, what’s now the guest bedroom. I know it seems weird that I’ve always lived at home, even in college, but after mom vanished he was just so afraid the same would happen to me. I went to New York once by myself and he insisted I call every hour on the hour.” She shook her head. “He was afraid to lose me. And I guess I was afraid I would lose him. So, we stuck close to each other. I’d be lying to myself if I thought his constantly dragging me to a new site had a lot to do with my architectural skills.” Her dad valued her skills and her opinions, but he didn’t always need them. Yet, for some reason he had insisted she look at every new project with him. He also insisted on having her there working. She knew he wanted her to take over the business, and that he was grooming her for that. But it also seemed a lot like he was trying to make sure she wasn’t alone—especially at night. She went to day school three days a week. She went to work after school and on her days off from school. Since her job was with her father’s company she never had to worry about getting home by herself at night. He even insisted she call, whenever she got to school, or home from school, or to the office, or on a site that he wasn’t at. At first it annoyed her, but then she realized he was worried she would vanish too.

“How did your father die?”

“Car accident,” she looked at the new bandage on her arm. It may have just been a fairly superficial wound, but it still hurt like the dickens. “He was on his way home after work one night and his truck hit a patch of ice or something…he shot straight through the guardrail and went dead smack into a tree. The officer said that he probably died on impact. I think that was his way of telling me my dad didn’t feel it. He may not have felt it, but he saw it coming and that’s probably worse. You know it’s like they say, anticipation of death is worst than death itself. He was helpless to save himself.” She wiped a fallen tear away from her cheek.

“Was he working on anything in particular before he died?”

She looked at him, trying to decipher why he was asking her these questions. “He owned his own contracting business; of course he was working on something. But you know,” she thought back to the weeks leading up to his death. “He was kind of different before…”

“Different how?”

“He started getting to the worksites later. He started asking me to cover for him more. I had already graduated college, but I was trying to get myself started with my business. I kept putting it off to help him with things. But that week I was scheduled to meet with a banker about taking out a loan. I had enough money to rent a space for six months without worrying about finances, but not enough to cover hiring an employee, or really getting the marketing that I needed done. Anyway, since dad needed my help I canceled all my appointments and started managing his sites.” She was already well acquainted with the company. She had worked for years with those same men. She had worked on sites, in the office, keeping the books and writing out checks. She had practically run the business for her dad at times…but he had always been there. He had always been her fallback if she wasn’t sure of herself. When he died, the weight of keeping his company from dying with him nearly crushed her. Fortunately, she was stubborn. Her dad always said she got that from her mother. She refused to let the pressure get the best of her. She refused to surrender to defeat. If it hadn’t been for trying to keep that piece of her father alive and flourishing she probably would have broken into pieces when he died. His business kept her busy, so busy that she didn’t have time to fall apart, to let him down. Even with his death she still aimed to please him, to make him proud.

“Did he say where he was going on those days?”

“No,” she shook her head. “And I didn’t ask. To be honest I was kind of hoping he had found a girlfriend or something. I know my mom was the love of his life, but he just always seemed so…lonely. I mean he had me, but it’s not the same; you know? He needed a different type of love in his life.”

“Do you think he had found another woman?”

“No. Every night he still had that same sullen look on his face, like a piece of his heart was missing and he could never get it back. But something was going on…I know that because the weeks before he died he seemed unfocused on work. I had never seen him like that before. Dad was the guy who demanded one hundred percent focus, one hundred percent of the time. He would always say that distraction on a site could get you killed. But I was working with him one day and I noticed that he had miss set an entire row of bricks.”

“Your father worked on the sites and did manual labor too?”

“Yeah. That’s where I get it from. He said never let the job you ask your men to do be beneath you.” She laughed. “When he first started training me I got off light because of my age, but then it went from help me clean the glass blocks to mix up the mortar mix, get that wheelbarrow, remove that toilet that looks as if it hasn’t been flushed in centuries,” she laughed again. “I went from being daddy’s little girl to being one of the guys—on the site at least, off the site was a different story. I loved working with him. It was like I could do what he could and I knew I had to be making him proud.” So what if she had thrown up on the site where the feces looked as if it had been there so long that it had embedded itself in the toilet; her dad was still proud of her. He wouldn’t have left her the company if he didn’t think she could handle it.

“Anyway,” she shook her head. Memory lane was not the best place to be right now. “I stayed late and helped him take it all apart and start over. He was ten rows in, and the third row was set wrong, and he hadn’t even noticed it. I pointed it out to him. I had never seen him do that before. That’s a total rookie mistake. My dad didn’t make rookie mistakes—not even on his worst day.” She had asked him if something was wrong and he had assured her that he was fine. “I’m just sorting some things out; he had said. But he never told me what things. Three weeks later he was gone. We never got a chance to talk about it. I should have asked him more questions, but that’s not how my parents really worked. If they wanted me to know something they told me. If they didn’t…well, I learned early on not to ask about “adult” stuff. The dynamics changed a little when dad and I became all each other had, but he was still very guarded, very closed off when it came to things that bothered him. He spent so much time focusing on whether or not I was okay that I’m not sure he spent a lot of time checking in with himself and asking himself if he was okay.”

“Thena Davis,” Doctor Evans parted the curtained area and came in.

“Yes?”

“I’m Doctor Harold Evans. I worked here when your mother did. The nurses have been chattering about you. Debbie Grenwald was here when your mother was here; she came up and told me you looked just like her, only difference was color.”

Thena almost cringed at his choice of words. Instead, she smiled politely. “You knew my mother?”

“Not really. I worked beside her once or twice, but not much more than that. I just wanted to see Neenah’s little girl all grown up. She talked about you incessantly.”

She felt confusion spattering her brain. If he only worked with her mother once or twice then how did he know that her mother talked about her all the time? “So you still work here, in the ER?”

“No, I’m a surgeon now. Much like your mother was, but there are times when I’m needed here at night. I cover here when I can. I like to try to make sure they have the best surgeons, even down here in the ER. I make a lot of money.” He looked her over from head to toe. “Not like these ER boys.”

She refrained from rolling her eyes. Did he think he was superior to the other doctors simply because he wasn’t dead smack in the middle of the carnage that rolled through the doors everyday and night? Did he think he could impress her with talk of money? What a jerk.