Ransom River (37 page)

Seth said, “It was one of Dobro’s people.”

“Jesus. They tracked you from the restaurant?”

“Lured me. The emergency call was a setup.” He seemed to steady himself. Maybe to anchor himself, in case he was about to get blown away. “I should have let you out of my truck before responding to the nine-one-one call. Immediately. I made a mistake.”

She shook her head. “No. We’re done with this.”

“What—”

“It was the best choice you had in the situation,” she said. “There were no good choices, but it was the least bad thing to do.”

Seth paused, his face pained. Chiba shifted and looked up at him.

He nodded. “But if I could turn back the clock…”

“I know.” She held his gaze. “What happened after I left?”

“I went back to work. I was determined to finish the operation. The op was everything.”

Because he had nothing else left,
he meant. And after the wreck, she knew, he would not have been detached and coldly calculating. The man’s emotional wiring didn’t work that way.

“Tell me. Please. I need to know,” she said.

He took his time. “We joined forces with ATF to set up a sting. I had the connections and they had the firepower. We arranged to purchase a shipment of stolen automatic weapons. The ATF guy and I were going to close the negotiation with the sellers.”

“Dobro.”

Seth nodded. “The people he was working with. The purpose of the
meet was to sample the merchandise. Saco—the ATF guy—and I were going to get a look at the weapons, check quality control, finalize the deal. With SWAT and a federal tactical team nearby to back us up.”

She walked over and sat down beside him.

“The meet was at warehouse down past the railroad depot, beyond the industrial park.”

She knew the neighborhood. Corrugated metal, towers of crushed cars, and trash caught against cyclone fencing.

“We’d done recon. We had blueprints of the building, aerial photos of the property, talked to guys who’d worked there before it closed. We knew every entrance, every exit, every blind spot inside the warehouse where somebody could lie in wait. We had an escape plan, and a backup plan, and a shit-hits-the-fan plan.” He looked at her. “What we couldn’t do was take a walk-around before we went in, like a pilot checking out his plane before a flight. So we met the sellers’ man and followed him inside.”

The fire heated Rory’s face. She knew her expression was stricken.

“They were outside, hidden,” he said. “When we walked in, they chained the doors shut from the outside and set the warehouse on fire.”

“Oh my God.”

“They sacrificed their own man to ambush me and Saco. They sent him up in flames to lure us into a trap.”

She put a hand over her mouth.

“The ground-floor windows had security bars countersunk into brick windowsills,” he said. “We ran upstairs to a catwalk. Found a two-by-four and rammed it through a second-floor window. It was a real drop to the ground outside—but by that point we were willing to risk it. Heat and smoke. And loud. The fire was goddamned loud.”

Rory felt a stinging behind her eyes.

His gaze drifted. “We didn’t get out. The sellers’ man—weaselly guy, and not ready to martyr himself for the organization—tried to go out the window before we cleared away all the glass. Big shards, I mean, they looked like shark fins, and they were still in the frame. I took the two-by-four and
tried to smash them out, but wasn’t fast enough. The catwalk collapsed. The floor dropped out from under us.”

He stared at the fireplace. “Saco’s backup was on the way. He was live-miked, so they heard; they got on scene but had to break open the doors. By then the place was fully involved. As firefighters say.”

He cleared his throat. “The floor fell away as the sellers’ man tried to get out the window. He got his head and shoulders through and then…” He exhaled. “Nothing below his feet anymore. He was impaled on a shard of glass. Saco and I went down with the catwalk.”

His voice was nearly flat. “The fall, and falling debris, killed Saco,” he said. “The ATF team got to me. But there was nothing they could do for their own man.” He picked up the poker and jabbed at the fire. “We’d been set up. The sellers knew we were cops.”

“Who’d be willing to kill cops, and their own man, in a fire?” Rory said.

“Not your average criminal. Not even your average psychopath. I had a lot of time to think about it. I wasn’t clearheaded at first—morphine makes your mind sing, but not in tune. But talking to my handler, and the ATF guys, SWAT—they raided the sellers’ operation after the fire. Got a few of them on lesser charges than we wanted. The sellers knew I was a cop. But not because of anything I’d done to tip them. Nobody made me. Somebody had told them.”

“You think it was somebody in the Ransom River PD?”

He nodded. “Once I was finally—”

Again he cleared his throat. “When I got back on the street, you know, home from the hospital, I took a look at things. What I found was bad. The sellers knew ahead of the meet that I was a cop. They didn’t know Saco was ATF. It was me. And that’s why they ambushed us, and why a brother officer died when the warehouse was set on fire.”

His voice dropped. “My own department sold me out.”

He tossed the poker aside.

Rory was close enough to smell the fresh cotton and clean detergent on his shirt. To see the curve of his cheek. He stared unblinking at the fireplace.

She was inches away. She could practically feel the rise and fall of his chest. He seemed both stone and evanescent.

She raised a hand, as though to touch his arm, and stopped. She had run after the wreck. As soon as she could hold a phone, she’d called a contact from her Peace Corps days and begged—almost physically begged—for any leads on jobs overseas. She had left him exposed, emotionally, and hadn’t thought twice.

“I’m sorry, Seth.”

He held still, his hand resting on Chiba’s side.

Here was her life, sitting before her. Her past, her way through the world, every misadventure and discovery and moment of joy, laughter, and rage.

Please tell me you’re okay,
she almost said. She couldn’t move her lips. A bolus of emotion rose through her.

“What have you been doing the past two years? What’s your life?”

He seemed surprised. “Ex–Ransom River undercover cop. Self-exiled townie. Desk job. Long time on the road back. How have you been?”

Alone.

There had been work. Important, tiring, and endless work reading pallets of bureaucratic files while sitting in warehouses. Work that could save families’ lives. Work that seemed to pull through her hands like cotton candy sometimes, when families like Grace’s fell through the cracks.

And there had been men. Lovers. One-night stands. Friends with drunken benefits. Mostly young, mostly fleeting. Mostly because she felt numb. A pit had yawned opened in her life, and falling into it seemed inescapable.

That’s what she’d told herself at the time. It was easier. It was okay. Nothing got under her skin anymore. She didn’t want it to. She wanted companionship. A laugh. Somebody to lay down with and hold on to until the sun came up. She had trouble now, seeing their faces.

“I’ve felt like I was cut loose from my moorings,” she said.

His shoulders canted unevenly. The rakish smile, the brio and daring, seemed long gone.

The flames, skittish and hungry, heated a keen impatience in her. The orange light burnished Seth’s hair, illuminated his face. She could see the fire in his eyes, reflecting.

She leaned forward and kissed him. Not caring about the wisdom of it, knowing only that she would have turned to ashes if she didn’t do it.

He took her face in his hands, his palms warm and callused against her skin. She closed her eyes and felt the scratch of his beard, tasted the salt of his lips. She snaked her fingers into his hair, thinking this was all she wanted: his mouth on hers, his skin against hers, his hand caressing her cheek. She didn’t tell him how long it had been since she’d felt at home, and surprised by longing. How long it had been since she could trust that her longing would be returned, and held safe, and never betrayed. That it had been two years—that she hadn’t felt this way since the last time she was with him.

He pulled her to him. His back was taut and hard. He kissed her again, and then his mouth left hers and found her cheek, her neck, her shoulder. She let her face fall forward into his hair. He smelled like fire smoke and Old Spice.

She shoved him down and climbed on top of him. Her heart pounded. She kissed him, hard.

He seemed to hold motionless, suspended. “Rory…”

“Don’t speak.”

He put his hands on her shoulders. “You sure?”

“If I were sure I’d play lotto. Run for president. Stage a coup. Hell, what’s the problem? You’ve become a priest? Tell me now.”

“No problem. Not a priest.”

She fell on him.

They rolled nearer the fire and grabbed each other. Rory breathed. “Not in front of Chiba.”

“Thank God.”

He pulled her up and headed to the bedroom. Shut the door and kissed her, walking to the bed. She felt rabid. It was familiar and strange and she
felt a yearning like a coil of pain, drawing her in. He pulled her sweater over her head and started on the buttons of her blouse. His hands on her skin. And she was dry throated at the last moment, facing him, even though he should have been known territory. The room was dark. He got a lighter from his jeans pocket and she took it and lit a candle on the nightstand by the four-poster bed. Her fingers trembled. Seth wasn’t a new lover. He was the flame.

He held her face in his hands and kissed her hard. She thumbed the top button on his jeans. She knew that she could surrender and swing into lovemaking as they had for the years they were together; it was their lives that had been sabotaged, not their choreography. They both knew the moves. They could do them with their eyes closed.

He looked goddamned amazing in the orange flame. He tasted familiar, and new, and felt like a lifetime she’d missed. She ached to hold him against every inch of her skin. She drew his shirt over his head.

He went very still. She ran her hands around his back. And she stopped, cold.

“Seth.”

He didn’t move, didn’t speak.

Her hands were pressed flat against the curve of his back. She looked up at him abruptly. She stepped back, worry flooding through her. He briefly tried to hold her, then let go. Like surrendering.

“It’s a scar,” he said.

She resisted the compulsion to tell him to turn around. Scar? The rough skin she’d felt covered his back.

“The warehouse fire,” he said.

All the pieces came tumbling down on her. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

His smile was crooked, and sadder than anything she’d ever seen.

A hospital stay. The long road back. His dad talking about tough times and seeming unable to look Seth in the eye when asking him how he was.

She saw now the way Seth tended to stand with his shoulders uneven. It wasn’t a cocky pose. It was from damage and pain. She took a breath.

“It ain’t pretty,” he said.

For a second, she heard it as, I
ain’t pretty.

“Why do you think I would care?” she said.

“People do. At the beach. Moms with kids, men who stare…” He shrugged.

She backed up a step. Unbuttoned her blouse and let it fall to the floor. Unzipped her jeans and kicked them off.

She stood in front of him in the flickering light. He saw the surgical scars. The knee, the hip. Across her abdomen.

“Exploratory surgery,” she said. “Internal bleeding.”

For a moment he glanced away.

“Seth. Look.”

He turned back. Breathed. “You’re beautiful.”

He reached toward her. She raised one hand—
wait
—and put a finger to her lips. The flames guttered. Her nerves were about to pour from her body.

Tell him.

The small voice inside her head grew sharp teeth and a demanding tone. It grew a frown and tough little feet and began to kick at her.

“I was pregnant.”

His eyes widened.

“I was going to tell you. I was going crazy. Sick and thrilled and scared to death. I was going to tell you that night.”

His lips parted. He didn’t move. “You lost…”

“They say I probably won’t have kids now.”

He squeezed his eyes shut.

They stood in the dim flicker of the candlelight. Two years hovered between them. Then he stepped toward her and held her.

“I gotcha,” he said.

They fell together onto the bed.

T
he morning air felt cool. Outside the cabin hung a pearly sky. It had poured overnight, and mist seemed to fizz from the ground outside. It clung to the live oaks and gave the park an eerie feel.

Seth said, “Do you always chow down like this at breakfast?”

He was sitting across the table from her, wearing a green flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, leaning on his elbows.

She drank her coffee. “You’re asking, when I’m satisfied.”

His mouth lifted into a half smile of confident amusement. Other men had to practice that look in front of a mirror. He said, “You don’t smoke, so I need some way to judge.”