Page 31 of Mean Streak

z

D oc?”

Emory tilted her head down to the hand resting on her shoulder and rubbed her cheek against the back of it.

“Are you going to wake up or sleep through?”

“Hmm?”

She came awake slowly and opened her eyes. The hand she was resting her cheek against was attached to a long arm covered in ivory cable knit, attached to a broad shoulder that blocked her view of the ceiling.

He was bent over her, his face close. Firelight cast his features in sharp relief, highlighting his cheekbones and strong chin, accenting the silver strands in his hair but etching deeper the lines bracketing his stern lips and making mysterious lairs of his eye sockets.

She wanted desperately for him to kiss her.

He withdrew his hand and backed away from the bed. She sat up. The window shades were still down, but there was no daylight limning the edges of them. Groggy and disoriented, she asked, “What time is it?”

“Six thirty. You pretty much slept the day away.”

“I can’t believe I slept that long.”

“You had a rough go of it last night. I didn’t know whether to wake you or not.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“Your tights.” He passed them to her.

She threw off the covers, got up, and went into the bathroom. She used the toilet, pulled on her tights, rinsed her mouth out, and ran a hand through her hair, which had dried crazily and in tangles because she had gone to bed with it damp.

When she came out of the bathroom, he was standing in front of the bookshelves, perusing the titles. She went over to the fireplace and checked her running top and jacket. “Still damp,” she said. “I’ll have to wear your shirt for a while longer.”

He didn’t say anything. There was a broodiness to his silence that compelled her to fill it. “In fact, I’m a right mess. No moisturizer for three days. My hair a riot. If you ever saw me looking like my normal self, you wouldn’t recognize me.”

Keeping his back to her, he said, “I’d recognize you.”

His somber tone and standoffishness implied a subtext to his simple statement, and when she realized what it was, dejection settled over her as heavily as his coat had felt earlier. “But that will never happen, will it? Once I go home, we’ll never see each other again.”

“No.”

He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t make it conditional. He declared it as a foregone conclusion.

She didn’t know what to say, and even if she had, she wasn’t sure she could speak. Her throat was tight with an emotion she shouldn’t be feeling. At the prospect of returning home, she should be experiencing a sense of relief and happy anticipation. Instead, she felt desolate.

Of course, once she resumed her life, she would get over this silly and inexplicable sadness.

She loved her work and her patients. She had the marathon to look forward to.

People were counting on her. Once she got home, she would have no time to waste.

She would need to plunge right in and make up for lost time, for the time she’d spent here.

Soon, these past few days would seem like a dream.

But why did she feel as if she were waking up before the dream reached a satisfying conclusion?

Breaking into her thoughts, he said, “If you want something to eat, help yourself.”

“I’m not hungry.”

Apparently he wasn’t either. The kitchen area was dark. He pulled a book from one of the shelves and carried it with him to the recliner.

She said, “Perhaps you aren’t as confident of the Floyds’ intentions as you wanted me to believe.”

When he looked up at her, she nodded down at the pistol that was on the end table, the lamp shining down on it, well within his reach. “No sign of them,” he said. “But I might have been wrong.”

She sat down on the sofa. “How did you know it was Lisa’s brothers?”

Absently, he ran his fingertips over the title embossed on the book cover.

“I didn’t until she told me. She was so dead set against anyone knowing about the baby, even though she’d lost it.

I guess any fifteen-year-old in that situation would be afraid of being found out.

But she was particularly insistent that Pauline not know about it.

“Meanwhile, those two jackasses were drinking beer and actually seemed amused over her situation. Suddenly I realized why. It was their inside joke. I hoped I was wrong. But when I asked Lisa straight out, she started crying and told me.”

Emory hugged her elbows. “Was it an isolated incident?” she asked hopefully.

“No. Been going on for a long time, she said.”

“How could Pauline be blind to it?”

“She knows, Doc. Of course she does. She hasn’t acknowledged it, probably not even to herself, but she knows. Why do you think she sent Lisa to live with her sister and brother-in-law in town?”

Emory propped her elbows on her knees and held her head between her hands. “It’s obscene. You read about it, hear stories about it on the news, but it’s hard for me to believe that things like this actually happen.”

He gave a mirthless laugh. “Oh, they happen. Worse than this. Your nice, sanitary world protects you from the ugly side of our society.”

She lowered her hands. “Don’t you dare do that.”

“What?”

“Insult me like that.”

“I wasn’t—”

“Yes you were.” She stood up. “I can’t help it that my parents were affluent. I didn’t ask to be born into a nice, sanitary world any more than Lisa can help the circumstances of her birth.”

He set his book aside and raked his fingers through his hair. “You’re right. I was out of line. I apologize.”

“Don’t patronize me either.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Next you’ll be calling me a do-gooder again.”

He came out of the chair. “All right, then tell me something I can say that won’t piss you off.”

Still angry, she asked, “What will become of Lisa?”

“Hopefully the aunt and uncle will take her back.”

“They don’t sound like the most generous of hearts. A foster home might be preferable.”

“Foster home?”

“CPS could place her—”

“CPS?”

“Child Pro—”

“I know what it is,” he said, vexed. “But to get them involved, Lisa would have to report the sexual abuse.”

“Of course she’ll report it!”

“She hasn’t up till now.”

“But she will. Those two degenerates need to be in jail.”

“Yes. But it’ll never happen. It should . But it won’t .”

“What are you talking about?”

“I know the mind-set, Doc. It’s a clannish mentality. They protect their own, no matter what. Pauline has ignored and denied it up to this point. She’ll go on the same way. She’ll handle it, but outside the law and without government interference.”

“If neither she nor Lisa reports it, if you don’t, then I will.”

“You would do that to Lisa? Put her through the fallout, which could involve harsh reprisal from Norman and Will on both her and her mother?”

“So we’re supposed to look the other way and let them get away with rape?”

He didn’t say anything, but Emory shivered at the look that came over his face.

“What are you going to do?” She looked down at the pistol. “You can’t kill them.”

He held her gaze for a moment, then walked over to the fireplace and began shifting the logs with the poker. “Not your problem.”

“You made it my problem.”

“Well, it won’t be from here on.”

She was about to launch another volley when she noticed the controlled actions of his strong hands. Not a single motion was wasted, each was deliberate. She experienced that misplaced constriction in her throat again. “You’re taking me back.”

He didn’t say anything, only stared into the heap of embers.

This accounted for his mood since he’d awakened her. She swallowed. “Tonight? Now?”

“Whenever you’re ready. The roads are clear enough.”

“We should go now then,” she said, although it hurt her throat to speak. “People are out in the cold, looking for me.”

“Not tonight.”

“What?”

“I went online and checked the news while you were asleep. They suspended the search until daybreak tomorrow.”

She glanced over at the laptop that she’d noticed earlier on the kitchen table.

“What are they speculating happened to me? Did you read anything about Jeff?”

“I only read the bullet points, not the details.” He kicked at an ember that had fallen just outside the grate. “What will you tell him about your time here?”

“I haven’t the slightest.”

His head came around, his right eyebrow slightly arched. The expression was so familiar to her now. He wanted an answer but didn’t want to come right out and ask for it.

“I have no idea what I’ll tell Jeff. Or anybody. I don’t remember what caused my concussion, so I can’t describe it as either an accident or an attack. I don’t know where we are, exactly. What can I tell them about you when I don’t know anything? Not your name or…or even why you brought me here.”

He cursed on a soft expulsion of breath as he braced his hands on the mantel and dropped his head between his arms. He remained staring down into the flames for several moments, then added logs to them and replaced the screen. He dusted his hands on the seat of his jeans.

Then he turned to her. “Well, I can clear up that last uncertainty for you. Why I brought you here. I found you on the trail. What I did for you, sheltering you, feeding you, providing first aid—”

“You would have done for any stranger in need.”

“Hell I would,” he said harshly. “Yeah, I would have taken an injured person to an ER, dropped them off, and driven away. No risk, no involvement, no chance of exposure. But you, the most serious threat of all to—” He looked around at the interior of the cabin.

“To everything. You, I wanted to hold on to for just a little longer.”

He held up his hand and closed it into a fist, as though demonstrating.

“You’ll never appreciate the risk I took to keep you here.

You sure as hell can’t identify with the struggle it’s been to keep myself off you.

” He walked toward her, and when there were only inches separating them, he asked, “You still scared of me?”

“Very.”

He took another step. “But you’re not running. How come?”

“Because I do identify with that struggle.”