Hide From Evil (8 page)

He slid into the booth and cracked open the window. “You don’t have to,” he said as Krista leaned over to the window on her side to do the same, but he felt the tension in his shoulders unravel a degree as the cold breeze blew across his face. “You’re going to be cold.”

“I’m fine. The heat’s cranked up so much I need to strip off a few layers.”

Jesus, he wished she wouldn’t use words like
strip
.

The menu had barely changed in twenty-five years, but Sean studied it like his life depended on it, wondering how a woman could be sexy stripping off a parka that made her look like the Michelin Man.

“We’re causing quite the stir,” Krista said after a few minutes. Sean looked up. Sure enough, the handful of regular customers were sneaking glances at their booth, informed by Nancy of Krista’s identity, if the glares were anything to go by.

“Not every day a former convict has dinner with the prosecutor who put him on death row,” he bit out, angry with himself that he hadn’t anticipated this. Shit, he should have ignored her woeful look and left her in front of the B&B to freeze, but no, he had to be the nice guy and take her someplace warm, keep her company. You’d think he would have learned, especially after what had happened with Evangeline Gordon, that his stupid fucking chivalrous streak never brought him anything but trouble.

Now it got him here, across the table from a woman he wanted despite all logic and common sense, trying to ignore curious stares that made his skin crawl.

Nancy came by to take their order herself, her glare never leaving Krista’s face.

“If looks could kill,” Krista muttered.

“You’ll get used to it,” he lied. “I did.”

“I get a lot of dirty looks in my line of work.” Krista slumped against the leather cushioning of the booth.

She was quiet for a few minutes, staring out the window at the light traffic on Main Street. Their food was delivered quickly. Krista smiled and thanked Nancy, never even flinching when her bowl of scalding hot chili threatened to teeter over in her lap. Krista calmly steadied the bowl and picked up her spoon. “You’ve been coming here all your life?” Her blond eyebrows arched as she lifted a spoonful of chili to her mouth.

Sean nodded and swallowed a mouthful of battered cod before he answered. “My grandfather built the cabin back in the fifties. I came up every summer for at least a month until my sophomore year, and I had football camp starting in late July.”

“Why come back here?” she asked, indicating the mix of curious and hostile stares glued to their booth. “Why not a fresh start?”

Sean shook his head. “It’s the closest place to home I have,” he replied. He didn’t want to delve into the details, how after his parents’ death and moving in with his grandparents he’d felt the need to hang on to the one place that was a constant, the one place where he’d known nothing but happiness. After he’d been released from prison, ping-ponging around Seattle and trying to get a handle on his life, he’d come back here in an attempt to regain some sense of belonging.

He didn’t say any of it, but the way Krista was looking at him it was as though she knew.

“Anyway, there’s no such thing as a fresh start for me.”

Krista’s mouth pulled tight. “No, I don’t suppose there is.” She finished off her chili, sat back with a sigh, and picked up her beer. “So you played football,” she said with a faint smile. “Why am I not surprised?”

“Not just played,” Sean said, unable to stop himself from smiling back. “Captain.”

Krista laughed and took a sip of her beer and then trailed her finger down the damp glass. Sean forced his eyes to stay locked on her face and not on that slender finger sliding up, down, up, down. She took another sip, her pink tongue chasing a droplet of beer across her bottom lip. Sean shifted, his pants suddenly two sizes too small in the crotch. “Did you play sports?” he said in a desperate effort to distract himself.

But her sly smile just made him harder. “I was a nerd. Braces. Glasses. The whole nine yards. My dad thought sports would be good for me, but I was too uncoordinated to do anything but run track.”

“No hurdles,” he smiled.

“Or javelins. I would have lanced the mascot.”

Sean was shocked to find himself for the second time that day laughing at something she said. He looked around and caught the stares and realized how they must look. Like any other couple. Talking. Laughing. Flirting.

Like a normal date, the kind he hadn’t had—hadn’t even wanted to have—in over three years.

For a split second it felt so good he was almost ready to give himself up to the illusion of normalcy.

Except the whole thing was completely ab-fucking-normal, starting and ending with the woman sitting across from him. Jesus Fucking Christ, what the hell did he think he was doing? What the hell did he think
she
was doing—flirting, acting all interested so she could lure him out, get him to help her on this misguided need for the truth? As if that would ever help anyone.

“So football, that’s how you got to be friends with Jimmy Caparulo, right? Before you joined the army together and met Nate?”

And just like that she confirmed his suspicions. “Damn, I gotta give you credit. You’re good. Subtle. You almost made me believe it.”

To her credit, she didn’t bother to pretend to not know what he was talking about. “Look, I get it. You want nothing to do with my investigation. But before he died, Jimmy said he should have told you something—he should have helped you. If you can think of anything, no matter how random, maybe it will help me figure out the truth—”

Sean threw a couple of bills on the table and stood up. “I told you. I have no idea what was going on with Jimmy and Nate.” Except that he had trusted both of them, loved them like brothers. “Whatever it was, it didn’t involve me.” He snatched his coat from the booth and headed for the door.

“Except for the part where Nate framed you for murder and involved Jimmy in the cover-up,” she called after him.

Sean’s stomach twisted, the fish and chips sitting like a bowling ball in his gut. “And now they’re both dead, so I guess they got what they deserved.” The other diners were staring, transfixed. Sean kept his gaze on the door, careful not to make eye contact with anyone.

As he looked through the pub’s front window he could see that the B&B was still dark. “Nance,” he called. “Do you know when Wendy will be back?”

Nancy looked up from the cash register. “I believe she’s back next week.”

“Next week?”

Nancy looked up, startled at the menace in his voice. “Yes, she went to Seattle to visit her sister like she always does this time of year.”

“Then who’s running the B and B?”

Nancy frowned at him. “It’s closed for the season.”

Oh, shit. “Closed,” he parroted like an idiot.

“We don’t get enough people in the shoulder seasons.”

“What about the place farther out on Highway Two?”

“They’re not opening up until Memorial Day. No one is. If you need a room, you should be able to find something in Wenatchee.”

Sean nodded curtly, grabbed Krista’s arm, and yanked her out the door.

“Wenatchee is nearly twenty miles away,” Krista protested. “How the hell am I supposed to get back to my car?” she said.

“Not my problem, just like this whole fact-finding mission isn’t my problem. You’re lucky I’m feeling generous enough to give you a ride.”

They reached the truck and he climbed inside. She rapped sharply on the window until he unlocked her door. She flung herself into the seat with an irritated huff. She opened her mouth, but before she could utter a sound he gunned the engine and turned on the stereo full blast, the roar of Alice in Chains drowning out any questions.

Krista reached out and snapped off the stereo and did her best not to shrink under Sean’s menacing stare. She’d definitely caught glimpses of a nice guy lurking underneath, but Sean could turn on the mean like few people she’d ever encountered. And in her line of work that was saying something.

But despite the real, justifiable rage she could feel simmering through his blood—toward her, toward the friends who had betrayed him, toward the friends who’d lost faith in him—she trusted him not to hurt her. Trusted that he was the kind of man who wouldn’t use his far superior strength against a woman.

If only she’d had that insight years ago.

“I came a long way to talk to you, and I’m not going to leave without something—”

His hand flashed out and turned the stereo back on. She switched it off. “God, do you have to be so juvenile? I just want to talk a little bit—”

“I don’t have any answers,” he snapped. “I don’t know how to make it plainer.”

“Did you know we traced the ownership of Club One back to a dummy corporation linked to Nate?”

Sean’s gaze flicked in her direction. “So Jimmy worked for him?”

Finally, a response. “No, at the time Jimmy was contracted through a company called West Hall Security. Apparently that’s where they got most of their security staff up until recently.” Jimmy had quit West Hall shortly after Sean’s arrest and had worked as a private contractor until his death.

Sean’s hands tightened on the wheel and Krista’s stomach dipped as the road made a steep decent down the mountainside. “That’s right. Jimmy tried to recruit me, right after I got back to town.”

“Before you had your falling out?” Krista kept her gaze pinned to Sean’s face as she tried to ignore the sheer drop-off on her side of the road. She wasn’t usually a nervous passenger, but the guardrail along the highway was little more than window dressing against the hundred-foot fall.

A curt nod was his only response. Krista started to press him, but the words caught in her throat as they saw the sharp curve coming up. “Uh, maybe you should slow down?”

“I’m trying,” Sean said through gritted teeth.

“Try harder!”

The engine screamed and the smell of burning clutch permeated the truck cab. Just then, bright lights flooded the interior. Krista looked back and saw the outline of a dark SUV looming inches from the truck’s bumper. “Holy shit, they’re going to hit us. You need to get out of the way!”

Sean pulled the car over to the left, riding the yellow line so the SUV wasn’t directly behind them. The other side of the road was thickly forested with old-growth evergreens but Krista would take a head-on with a tree trunk over going off a cliff any day. Krista closed her eyes, praying another car wasn’t around the next corner. Though at the speed they were going, it wasn’t likely they were going to make it. “Why aren’t you slowing down?”

“Accelerator’s stuck,” Sean said, his eerie calm doing nothing to slow her heartbeat. The SUV thumped up against the bumper and sent them hurtling toward the guardrail and then it screeched to a halt just before the curve.

Krista swallowed hard, unable to take her eyes off the scene of her own death. She hoped she would pass out before they hit the ground.

“Brace yourself,” Sean said.

Brakes squealed and the scent of burning rubber invaded her nostrils. The seatbelt threatened to cut her in half at the waist as she was flung forward toward the dashboard. Pain exploded as her forehead made contact with the dashboard and then was wrenched to the side and into the window. Krista wasn’t sure if it was her head or the truck that was spinning.

Metal crunched and the truck shuddered to a stop. Krista blinked her eyes. The sun was almost down, but she could see the front of the truck crunched around the thick trunk of a pine tree. For several seconds, all she could hear was the sound of her own heartbeat pounding in her head, the harsh echo of her own breath.

A big, masculine hand curled around her arm. She looked over at Sean. His face was grim, and he had a cut over his eyebrow that was streaming blood that looked black in the dim light, but from what she could tell, he wasn’t seriously injured. Relief washed through her so intensely that it took her several seconds to register the fact that his lips were moving.

She shook her head to clear it, wincing as the movement shot a spike of pain through her skull. “What?”

“Are you okay? Can you move?” His voice was quiet, but she could sense the anxiety.

“I think so,” she said, unbuckling her seatbelt and carefully sitting up as she took stock of her injuries. Her head was ringing, and when she put her hand up to her forehead she could feel a goose egg that was tender to the touch. But somehow, miraculously, she seemed otherwise okay. “You’re bleeding,” she said, reaching with a shaky hand toward his face.

Sean leaned over to look in the rear-view mirror and lightly fingered the cut. “Nothing a Band-Aid can’t help,” he said. He unclipped his seatbelt and reached behind the seat, wincing as the motion pulled at some unseen injury. He had a bottle of water and a bandana in his hand, which he soaked and used to dab at the cut on his head.

“Nice driving,” she said.

“Thanks,” he said with a half smile. “I was first in my class when we did defensive and evasive driving techniques. Never thought they’d come in handy like this.”

“You saved our lives,” Krista said, feeling her muscles start to tremble as the enormity of what had almost happened hit her with the force of a truck. “I thought they were going to run us off the road. I thought we were dead for sure.” Her heart raced and her teeth started to chatter, her body shaking so hard it felt like her muscles were going to detach from the bones.

She heard the sound of a car door opening and shutting, and a few seconds later her own door opened and she was being pulled out of the truck. Her knees started to buckle and he wrapped his arms around her to hold her up.

Krista instinctively wound her arms around his waist, up under his jacket, burying her face against the rock wall of his chest, seeking relief from a cold that had taken hold of every pore.

“You’re okay. We’re okay.”

Screaming engines. Screeching tires. The guardrail hurtling at them, and after that, the abyss…“Oh God, we could have—”

“Stop.” His command was firm, but gentle. She wondered how he could possibly be so calm. “Don’t let your mind go there. Don’t think about what could have happened.”