Mean Streak(26)

“I didn’t say that, you surmised it. I said I found you lying unconscious.”

“Because you clouted me in the head with that rock!”

“No, Doc. I didn’t.”

“Did you keep it as a trophy?”

He didn’t honor that with a reply.

She moaned. “I wish you’d just get it over with.”

“What?”

“Whatever it is you’re going to do to me. I wouldn’t have to go on dreading it, fearing it. The suspense is killing me. Is that part of the torture?”

Her hands were on her knees, clenched into fists so tight that all the blood had been wrung out of them. They were bone white and cold to the touch when he placed his hand over them.

When she tried to pull them from beneath his palm, he held on. “Look at me.”

She turned her head and looked directly into his eyes. Hers were hazel, more green than brown. The orange specks in them, which he’d first thought were a trick of the light, were real. This close, he could have counted them.

“I didn’t hurt you. I won’t hurt you. How many times do I have to say it before you believe it?”

“I’ll believe it when you let me contact—”

“Not yet.”

“When?”

“When I can deliver you safely.”

“But in the meantime, people are worried about me.”

“I’m sure they are. But they don’t need to be. And you don’t need to be afraid of me. Why would you be?”

“You can ask that when you won’t even tell me your name, or anything about you?”

“All right. If I tell you one thing, will you stop fighting me and trying to get away?”

She nodded.

He knew she was making a false promise, but maybe it would calm her down if he told her something that revealed nothing. “I lost both my parents, too.”

“You loved them?”

“Yes.”

“Did they die before or after…whatever it was you did?”

“Before. For which I’m glad.”

“What did you do?”

“Don’t ask again, Doc. I won’t tell you.” He looked down to where his hand still covered hers and realized that his thumb was reflexively stroking the back of it. His mind began to spin with erotic images of other patches of her skin that he’d like to caress. “If I told you, you truly would be afraid of me.”

Moving quickly, before he invalidated every promise he’d made her, he lifted his hand off hers and stood up. Keeping his back to her, he retrieved the sack from the table and tucked it beneath his arm. Then he went to the door and took his coat, scarf, and cap off the peg. “During your fit, you reopened the cut on your scalp. There’s fresh blood in your hair. You might want to rethink that shower.”

He closed the door soundly behind himself and stayed on the porch until he’d put on his outerwear. The wind was strong enough to bend treetops. It blew snow and ice pellets into his eyes as he crossed the yard toward the storage shed.

He placed the sack on a high shelf and pulled a spool of wire in front of it. He then dragged a wooden pallet from the shed out to the stout chopping block on the far side of the structure. Loading recently split logs onto the pallet was mindless work, so he could do it without thinking.

Which left his mind free to concentrate on Emory Charbonneau.

It bothered him that her instinctual distrust was so strong.

It bothered him even more that it was valid.

Nothing else, no one else, had ever distracted him from his resolve. She did. His preoccupation with her was foolhardy, potentially dangerous, and could be ruinous. He struggled with it, but he felt himself losing ground each time he looked at her…and each time she looked back.

He made three trips between the woodpile and the cords of firewood stacked against the exterior south wall of the cabin where they were semiprotected from the elements. When done, he returned the pallet to the shed.

Pausing there inside, sheltered from the weather, his breath ghosting in the cold air, he removed his glove and took from his jeans pocket the silver trinket.

Emory hadn’t noticed it was missing, and he hoped she wouldn’t and ask for it back. Rubbing it between his thumb and finger, he acknowledged how juvenile and foolishly sentimental he’d been to secretly collect a token from her. In his life, he’d never kept something to remember a woman by, not even if she’d given him the souvenir herself. Especially if she’d given him the souvenir herself.

He wasn’t a romantic. Never had been. When he’d failed to order flowers for his prom date, Rebecca had been incensed.

“Who cares about crap like that?” he’d grumbled.

In a temper, she’d said, “I do! I care about being the sister of a complete and total *,” and had ordered the flowers for his date herself.

He would never hear the last of it if she knew…

But she would never know about Emory Charbonneau. No one would. Her time with him would be a secret he would take to his grave. He had to let her go. He would let her go. But at least he’d have this trinket as a keepsake.

He put it back in his pocket and pulled on his glove. Before leaving the shed, he looked up at the shelf where he’d stored the sack to make certain it was well hidden this time, then went out and latched the door behind him. On the porch of the cabin, he stamped his feet to shake loose the snow and sleet that had stuck to his boots, then pushed open the door.