Thick as Thieves(27)

“I thought it might make you uncomfortable.”

“It made me uncomfortable learning it from someone other than you.”

“What difference would it have made if you’d known?”

“Exactly!” She jabbed her index finger toward him.

When she did that, her breasts moved beneath her nightgown, and that drew his eyes to them, which made her aware of something he’d been keenly aware of since she’d confronted him: She didn’t have many clothes on.

In fact, the nightie was it.

“Don’t leave until we’ve had this out.” She went into the bedroom and slammed the door behind her.

He ran his hand over his mouth and chin and around the back of his neck. He should have anticipated this. She was bound to find out sooner or later. He’d been busted. He had just as well face the music.

He opened the refrigerator and helped himself to a bottle of water, uncapped it, and chugged it.

When she came back into the kitchen, she was wearing a pair of Christmas-plaid pajama bottoms, a gray hoodie zipped up to her chin, and fuzzy slippers. A knight of the round table couldn’t have been better armored. She set her cell phone—decisively—on the table near the pistol. He supposed that both were to serve as warnings that he had better not get out of line.

“Want some water?” he asked.

“No.”

He placed his empty in the trash can. When he came back around, she looked ready to launch.

“I went to your uncle’s bar this evening.”

“I get the feeling you didn’t just stumble upon it.”

“No. I went there on a fact-finding mission.”

“Facts about me? Why didn’t you ask?”

“Because I didn’t want to be lied to.”

He figured he had that coming.

“I met Don,” she said. “He was very pleasant.”

“A job requirement.”

“We had an enlightening chat.”

“Don didn’t tell you that I was in the store that day, because he doesn’t know. You must’ve chatted with someone else.”

“Lois Miller.”

“Don’t know her.”

“Well, Lois knows you. You’re hard to mistake.”

He couldn’t account for the emphasis she placed on that, although she looked him up and down as she said it.

“You should remember her. Seventy-ish. You were right there with her. The whole time, she said. You, she, and another woman. Younger. Dressed for yoga. Is any of this jogging your memory?”

He ignored her sarcasm. “I remember.”

“So?”

“The older lady hovered. The younger one went into action. She helped you to lie back. I was there to sort of…” He held out his hands, palms up. “Keep you off the floor.”

She looked at him curiously, making him wonder just how descriptive this Lois person had been. Had she told Arden that he’d rested her head in the hollow where his rib cage divided, that his hands had cradled her shoulder blades while that younger woman coached her on breathing?

He remembered looking at the gray-haired lady to get her read on what was happening and receiving only a worried frown and a sad shake of her head.

That might have been when he’d slid his hand from beneath Arden’s back long enough to brush a silky, stray curl off her cheek. The sequence of events during that eternal wait for the ambulance ran together and blurred in his memory, but he remembered the feel of her hair. Too well.

“Lois told me that you attacked a man for taking my picture.”

“Attacked? No.”

“Verbally.”

“He was a jackal.”

It had been a crass invasion of Arden’s privacy for the guy to take her picture in those circumstances, but Ledge conceded that he might have overreacted. Unknowingly, the fellow had triggered a memory of Afghanistan. Pinned down and helpless to prevent it, Ledge had watched as men photographed soldiers already dead, their bodies butchered post-mortem, some American, some their own countrymen.

“No mercy for jackals,” he mumbled.

He could tell by Arden’s expression that she didn’t grasp the subtext, but she didn’t deviate from the subject. “You stayed in the store with Lois and a few others, waiting to find out…” She let the rest go unspoken.

“It seemed the decent thing to do.”

She was still regarding him in that curious, almost wary, manner. “Well, this explains how you recognized me yesterday when I came to your shop,” she said. “But it makes me wonder why you didn’t take credit for your involvement that day.”

“Because only a prick would take credit.”

“That’s the only reason?”

“Sensitive subject like that, I didn’t want to embarrass you.”

She nodded, but not like she wholeheartedly accepted that explanation. Shaking off the pensive demeanor, she drew herself up straighter. “My visitor drove past.”

“When?”

“A couple of hours ago.”

“Damn. I got here an hour too late.”

“You’ve been lying in wait?”

“Down there by the road, hoping I’d catch him at it.”

“That explains the camo getup.”