Assumed Identity(34)
He moved to the glasses Robbie had brought in and finished drying them and putting them away. It was just as hard not to speculate about what kind of woman he’d been with before he’d been shot. Blonde? Brunette? Tough and street savvy? A no-strings-attached sex buddy? Or someone wholesome and trusting like the woman slipping him sly looks as she chatted with Robbie and played with the baby.
Maybe he’d been such an awful S.O.B. back then that he hadn’t had any woman in his life. Shards of need and regret cut through the emptiness inside him. With no link to his past and no one in his current sham of a life, he understood loneliness the way most folks understood breathing. He didn’t want to think he’d lived his whole life feeling this way. But if there was some good in his past, someone he’d been important to, then why hadn’t they come to see him in the hospital? Why had none of the addresses in his stash led to a real home? Every lead had taken him to a warehouse or an empty lot. All the clues to his past life were fake except for the nightmares.
He had a feeling if there’d been anyone like Robin Carter in his life, she wouldn’t have stopped searching until she’d tracked him down. Which was exactly what she’d done. Jake fisted his hand in the dishtowel and muttered a curse. Now that was irony. The thing he wanted most was the one thing he’d sworn he’d never let himself have.
“Did you see anyone in the neighborhood while you were out walking?” Montgomery asked, interrupting his thoughts.
Jake pulled his hungry gaze away from the dark brown waves of Robin’s hair that bounced around her face every time she laughed with Robbie or shook her head after reaching into her pocket to check her cell phone. “You want to know if I saw the guy who went after Ms. Carter.”
“Yes.”
Good. They were past subterfuge now and Jake gave a straight answer. “I didn’t. I heard her whistle, heard her scream and went to check it out. The guy was average height. On the skinny side. He wore black coveralls and a stocking mask, and he ran fast. Didn’t know much about fighting—probably why he had to ambush her with a baseball bat.”
“You had the wherewithal to pull the attacker off Ms. Carter and subdue him, but you never looked at his face?”
“Seemed more important at the time to make sure she was still breathing.” What was with the phone? Robin had checked her cell twice now that he’d seen. The easy explanation was that she was expecting an important call, but she had to reaffix the smile on her face each time she stuffed the cell back into her jeans and resumed her interest in Robbie’s chatter.
Something was off. It wasn’t his concern, though. It couldn’t be.
Spencer Montgomery must have finally decided Jake wasn’t going to be much help to his investigation. He pulled out his cell phone and set his notepad on top of the bar. “I’ll run the plate through the DMV and see if we can get a hit on who was loitering outside the shop. Maybe he’ll match your general description of Ms. Carter’s attacker and we can bring him in for questioning.” The detective slid one of his business cards across the bar. “If you think of anything else, call me.”
With the interview over, Jake knew he should pick up the empty boxes and carry them out to the trash, giving Robin and the kid plenty of time to leave before he did something stupid like go over there and ask what was bugging her about her phone.
But he was a cursed man. Cursed to have amnesia. Cursed to look like the aftermath of a lost battle. Cursed to feel that compulsion to atone for the violence from his nightmares.
When he saw Robbie lifting Emma over his head and pretending she was an airplane, Jake dropped the boxes and charged around the end of the bar. It didn’t matter that the baby was laughing from deep in her belly, or that Robin was carefully watching the ride through the air. Emma was too tiny, too pretty—too perfect—to risk her getting hurt.
“Stop!” Jake plucked the baby from his hands before Robbie sent her flying. “You’ll break her.”
Baby saved. Now what? He pulled Emma into his chest, keeping one arm beneath her bottom and leaning back a bit so she wouldn’t fall. But she kept wiggling around, batting at his neck and bobbing in his grasp. It was like handling a squirming piece of blown glass. Two tiny fingers hooked into the side of his mouth while the other miniature hand brushed across the stubble of his jaw. She squealed in his ear.
“She’s going to scratch herself,” he mumbled awkwardly, afraid to close his mouth around her fingers. “I haven’t shaved since last night.”