Concealed Attractions (Cedar Island Tales) (28 page)

She waited, hoping that he approved of her decision, wanting
someone
to acknowledge that she was doing the right thing. She
pull
ed
her sweater down
over her belly
. “I was hoping you would be happy
for me. Y
ou know, about what I
decided
.”

He
rose out of his chair
and p
laced
his cup in the sink. “You’ve thought a lot about this
.
I’m glad for you.”
He
went to the door.
“Joel scheduled three surgeries tomorrow. The first one’s
early and I
need
to review what I’ll be doing.”

She nodded at his subdued response and her heart seemed to
slide past her lungs
into her stomach.
Maybe he thinks I’m wrong to keep the baby.
“You don’t seem very happy about
what I said
.
”

His eyes seemed to bore into her.
“If that’s what you want to do, I’m happy for you—but if you made that decision because you thought you should—well, then, I’m not happy.”
He
stood up.  “Just because my sister
kept her baby
doesn’t mean you should.”

“
I didn’t make it because of her.
”
Danni
’s
eyes
burned
.  “I decided
. Myself
. On my own.” She gulped. “
I want to keep th
is
baby,
my
baby,
even
if my fa
ther n
ever speak
s
to me again.
Little Mister Bump
here”—she rubbed her belly—“
deserves to be wanted, and I do want him—or her—whateve
r it is. I
really
do
want him.” H
er voice trailed off
as she looked at him
. “I
was hoping you would see that ….
”

“In that
case, I’m happy for you.” H
e
pat
ted her arm and pecked her
on the
cheek. “But I have to
get back
.”

“Well, thanks for coming up to see how things were go
ing
.” S
he
tried to smile warmly at him.
“One
more
thing
, Ben
.” She stopped him at the door. “If you’re not doing anything for Thanksgiving,
you could
eat here.
It’ll just be Happy and me,
and it won’t be much, but
I haven’t introduced him to turkey scraps yet.
I thought you might want to see if he likes them.
”

He
turned
and
stroke
d her cheek
with one finger, its warmth giving her hope that he would accept her invitation.

He gave her a smile that thrilled her and said,
“
I’d love to.” Then h
e squeezed her hand and left.

Ben drove slowly out of town, berating himself for not being more enthu
siastic about Danni
’s decision to keep the baby. He’d been hoping she would, but he hadn’t wanted to influence her with his comments ab
out his sister, and now it seemed
he had.

He slammed his hand against the steering wheel.
Maybe I shouldn’t have told her about
Julie
. But at the time, he’d thought if Danni knew someone else in her
sam
e situation, she would have confided in her parents sooner.
Ben sighed
. He
wanted more than friendship with Dann
i
, but she seemed
un
aware of his feelings, how his pulse picked up whenever she looked at him with those wide blue eyes, so innocent and yet troubled. Whenever she touched him, he wanted to hold her close, stroke her silken hair, breathe in her scent, an intoxicating combination of vanilla and roses, like she’d opened her windows onto a garden through which the breeze was wafting.

He shook his head. “Gotta concentrate on the job,” he muttered to himself. Joel had said Ben would lead off two of the three surgeries tomorrow. He’d have to set aside his thoughts of Danni, thoughts that again triggered a tightness in his groin, and focus on perfecting his cutting skills.

Ben was almost out of town when he stopped for gas at a convenience store. As he entered, he noticed a man arguing with a
young woman wearing a Buckley College t-shirt
,
standing
next to the other pump.
He watched
as their voices rose. The
n the
man grabbed
her
and pulled her toward a beater truck.
“We’ll finish this at my place.”

“No! Let me go!” She tried to back away then stopped and slapped at the man’s face and chest
.

Ben’s heart rose in his throat.
“Do you need
some
help?” Ben called to her.

But she ignored him
. The man grabbed her again in a bear hug,
forcing her arms down to her sides.
But the woman
continued to struggle, though less so than before
.
The man holding her must have said something to her, for she stopped crying out and looked over at Ben.

She doesn’t want my help. Maybe it’s just an argument between friends.
Not my business
,
he
reminded himself, even as he pushed open the door of the convenience store
. But
he had
a bad feeling
about what he’d seen, what he’d overheard
.

When he
finished
paying
his
bill
and left the
store
,
Ben saw that the
man was still fighting with the young woman
.
Her purse lay on the ground, her
t-shirt
was now torn, and she
seemed to have
lost a shoe in her struggles.

“Hey!” Ben headed in
her
direction. “
Break it up
.”

The man looked over his shoulder and
gave him a dismissive scowl. “Mind your own business.”
But his hands came away from the woman, who pressed one hand against
her jaw and whimper
ed as she bent down to retrieve her purse
, her b
lond
hair mussed. A trickle of blood oozed from one side of her mouth
.

Ben’s brain flashed on
his sister,
Juli
anne. W
hen she’d
finally left
,
her
boyfriend had tried to beat her up.
The
sam
e man who’d gotten her pregnant and then tried to force her to have an abortion.
Was that how it was for Danni, too?
What was it about men who
had to have their own way
?

But a
s Ben approached,
the man dashed around the corner of the building and the woman
climbed in her car
, gunned it,
and skidded away from the gas station.

“Hey! You didn’t pay!” The convenience store manager burst out
of
the door as the woman’s
car
tires screeched
on the pavement
.

“I’ll take care of it.” Ben handed the man a twenty dollar bill. “Keep the change.” He looked around for the man who had been hitting the woman, but he seemed to have disappeared.

Ben
was about to
turn
back to his car
when he
heard
footsteps on gravel
. He glanced over his shoulder and spotted
someone exiting
the men’s room
on the far side of the convenience store
.
The
sam
e guy.
Scratch on his cheek, maybe from whe
n
the woman had tried to
get away
?
Ben’s
heart
pounded
a double-time jig
as his anger rose
. He
shoved his wallet in his back pocket
and followed the man. “Hey! You!
Since when do you beat up on women?
”

Images of his sister
again
floated in his head.
Then he
imagined what Steve must have done to Danni
when he’d followed her home
,
and
Ben’s
ire rose
into the stratosphere
. No way was he going to let some jerk
get away with
beat
ing
up
that girl
, even if she was a stranger
.
He needed to be stopped. He needed to be hauled
in
to the nearest police station.

The man looked back at him and began to run.

Ben’s longer legs quickly overtook the man. He reached out and grabbed him by the shoulder, stopping his quarry’s headlong run into the woods, and spun him around. The man
brought
his hands up
toward
his face.

“Why’re you askin’
me? I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, man.”
The odor of
stale
beer and cigarettes
almost gagged
Ben.
“
You’ve got me confused with someone else.”

“Oh, yeah?
I saw you at the station
back there
.
That
girl
scratched you, didn’t she
?
I’ll bet she said no when you wanted her to say yes. No means no, or don’t you understand English?
” Ben glared at the man, whose eyes kept slanting away from him, as if looking for the best place to run.

“What’
s it to you? That bitch
—you don’t even know her
,” the stranger sneered.

“Doesn’t
matt
er. What you did was wrong.”
Ben’s anger turned to rage, blocking everything from his brain except his fury at what the man was saying, what he had tried to do.  First one and then the other of
Ben’s
fists came up and he began hitting, barely feeling it when the man fought
back, at first backing away and then moving forward
.

The
guy
then
grabbed a h
eavy branch lying on the ground. He
swung it at Ben’s knees, connecting with one shin and knocking him sideways.
He
raised it again
and hit a
glancing blow on Ben’s shoulder and the side of his head, temporarily stunning him.

Ben roared his anger and leapt at
his attacker
, knocking him to the ground, punching his chest and face as the man tried to block each blow. Ben shook his head after taking another blow to the side of his face,
and
the man
staggered
to his feet and began to run. Ben followed him,
and
ducked when the man turned and tried to strong-arm Ben away from him with a fist to his face that slid past his cheek and scraped against his ear.

Ben couldn’t remember how long they fought, moving out of the woody area and onto rougher
rock-strewn
ground before they edged toward a bluff above the beach where the sound of incoming surf alerted him to the presence of
nearby
saltwater. Only when
his quarry
slipped on wet leaves and tumbled over the edge
of the bluff
did Ben’s head begin to clear. He leaned his hands against his thighs and tried to catch his breath
, still seeing what the man had been doing to the
young
woman before she managed to get away, still seeing
Julie
’s face when she’d fled to her mother’s house and Ben had opened the door to her
panicked cries and
frantic pounding
, still imagining Steve trying to hurt Danni
. When he looked
over the
edge of the cliff
,
the man
was sprawled on the sand about twenty feet below him, not moving.