Serendipity (Southern Comfort) (38 page)

Not what she wanted, she mentally continued, and simply upended the entire contents of the drawer into her cosmetic bag.  She had so much to live for, after all. But it was… an acceptable risk, she guessed.  One she had no choice but to take.  And acceptable only if Jordan didn’t pay the price with his.

Jordan.

How had this happened?  How had he come to mean… well, everything to her in such a short amount of time?

Ava’s mind drifted back to a conversation she’d once had with her mother.  An argument, really, because Ava had confronted her mother about her decision to willingly involve herself with Ava’s father, when she had to have known all the trouble it was sure to bring.  Ava had been fifteen, a typical, sullen brat, she thought now.  Angry because the parents of a boy she liked had made noise when they realized he’d been hanging out at her house.  The house of a known drug runner.  Certain her parents’ sole purpose of existence was to ruin Ava’s life.   

Her mother had taken Ava aside, explained things in her characteristically simple terms.

“Ava,” she’d said.  “As my grandmother used to tell me – if love falls on a cow flop, there it lies.”

Ava chuckled at the memory.  While Jordan was far from a cow flop, the point was still the same.  Somehow, she’d fallen in love with a big, gorgeous, unconscious fool lying helpless in the trunk of a car.  And she’d been just as helpless to fight her own feelings.  For her, love had fallen on Jordan Wellington, and there it lie.

Ava pressed a hand to her stomach when it fluttered.  But this time, this time it wasn’t nausea. 

Jordan had asked her to marry him.

And unlike Michael, he knew exactly what he was signing on for. And seemed to want her just the same.

Despite the less than ideal circumstances – she couldn’t overlook the fact that she was currently stuffing tampons into a suitcase, after all, and might lose her practice before this thing was over – Ava figured she was pretty damn lucky.

“Hello.”

She dropped the box as she spun around.  It landed on her foot, the sharp corner hitting her big toe, but Ava couldn’t feel anything but the knock of her heart against her ribcage.

He was blond.  The man in her bathroom was blond, innocuous looking.

The knife he held in his hand was not.

JORDAN slammed on his brakes to avoid crashing into the car stopped directly in front of him.  More brake lights shone like irritated red eyes, and he realized the one-way street he’d turned down was a parking lot.  A man stood outside his car, leaning against the door and smoking a cigarette, and Jordan rolled down his own window to call out to him.  “What’s going on?”

“Tree limb down.”  The guy motioned to the enormous oak that shaded the street.  “Must’ve been hit by lightening.  Someone called it in.  There should be a crew here with a chainsaw in a few minutes.”   

A few minutes that he didn’t have.  There could be a perfectly reasonable explanation as to why Ava wasn’t answering her phone.  Maybe her phone was turned to vibrate.  Maybe it was buried in her purse.  Maybe she’d popped into the shower.

But reasonable explanations took a back seat to the panic climbing up his throat.

He pushed the gearshift into reverse, but just as he started to move another car came up to block him.  “Damn it.”  He slapped his palm on the steering wheel and looked for a way out.  The sidewalk was too narrow.  The median thick with vegetation.  “Okay, let’s do this.”  He shifted into park, turned off the ignition, and climbed out of his car.

“Hey buddy.  You can’t just leave your car parked there,” the man with the cigarette called as Jordan started trotting up the sidewalk.

“Sue me.”  Dodging puddles, more debris from the storm, Jordan pulled out his phone again and tried Ava.  When he still couldn’t reach her, his uneasiness kicked up to fear.

Why the hell wasn’t she answering?  Jordan was furious with himself for leaving her.  And vowed to tear Bender limb from limb if anything happened to Ava. 

As that thought swirled, Jordan turned another corner at a fast jog, and was past the white van parked on the street before it registered.  He slowed, jerking around.  Glass Doctor.  Jordan trotted back, peered into the passenger side window.  No one inside, nothing to indicate who it belonged to.  Could be any number of these in the city.  But really, what were the chances? 

Jordan moved to the front, spotted the sticker that proclaimed the driver had donated to the Fraternal Order of Police. 

Bender.  Had to be.  What the hell was the kid up to? The van was less than a block from Ava’s house.  Was he planning to jump Jordan when he came back?  But how the hell did he know where to find Jordan?  Had the little prick been following him?

And as all of those questions coalesced into fury, one of the little doors in Jordan’s mind creaked open, and he heard Daniel Hatcher saying some of the glass flew in and hit Sonya.  He’d broken the window.  When he’d hurled Elijah Fuller against it, he’d broken the window.  Hatcher had said something about having it replaced – and a week later Sonya was dead.

And Mackenzie Wright’s car window had been smashed in, her laptop stolen.  A little over two weeks before she’d been killed.  It was in the police reports.  Tracy Buckler… she was the first.  Jordan pinched his fingers to the bridge of his nose.  Hadn’t there been something about a neighbor’s kid’s baseball breaking the kitchen window, and a dispute?  They’d questioned the kid’s father when she was murdered.

Shit.  Shit.  Why the hell hadn’t they seen the pattern?  Why the hell… Simpson’s nephew.  Had Simpson suspected?  Was that why he’d been so damn adamant about Fuller’s guilt? 

And if the kid was guilty, why had he called claiming that his uncle had concealed evidence unless…

“Oh God.  Oh no.  Ava.”

Ava’s window had been broken. 

Heart screaming in terrified rage, Jordan took off at a flat run.  But he had the wherewithal to pull his phone out again, managed to call up the one person he knew he could trust.

“I don’t have time to explain,” he panted when Jesse answered. “But send the cavalry to Ava’s apartment right now.”  

“W-WHO…” Ava cleared her throat.  “Who are you?”

The man wasn’t one of her uncle’s typical goons.  Military-short blond hair. He looked well kept.  Young.  Like any guy you’d pass on the street.

Harmless.  Why was it so much worse that he looked harmless?

He smiled, and it twinkled in his eyes.  Shouldn’t he look cold?  Ruthless?  Like the goon with the T-bird?

“I’m your worst nightmare.”  When he laughed at her widened eyes, Ava jumped back.  The bag of cosmetics fell off the counter, lipstick skittering across the tile toward his feet.  “That’s what my mama used to say,” he told her, and kicked at the tube.  “Bobby Lee,” he continued in a sing-song voice that made her freeze while her nerves shivered.  “You’re a no good piece of shit, just like your sonofabitchin’ father.  The day you were born was my worst nightmare.”  

Confused as well as terrified, Ava tried to figure out how fast she could make it to the bedroom.  The man had a knife, but Jordan’s gun was on the bed.

“How did you get in?” she asked, mostly hoping to distract him.  If she could keep him talking, he wasn’t using the knife.  If he wasn’t using the knife, she had a chance to get the gun.

He smiled again, rocked back on his heels.  Passed the knife from one gloved hand to the other, and had Ava biting back a whimper.  She’d felt the prick of a blade before, and it wasn’t an experience she cared to repeat. 

“You don’t recognize me, do you?”

She stared at his face, but it appeared blurry.  And was horrified to realize it was because she was looking through her own tears.  She blinked, determined to keep her head.  She wouldn’t let her uncle win after she’d come this far.  “Should I?”

He looked a little disappointed at that.  “The others figured it out, but I suppose that’s because our previous interaction was more one on one.  You and me, we only saw each other from what you could call a distance, I guess.  But I sure did notice your mouth.”

“My mouth?”  Ava watched the knife pass back to the other hand.

“You’ve got a foul one.  Funny thing about that.  It tends to set me off.”

“Sorry to have offended you,” Ava said a little more dryly than she intended.  The man might be weird, but he had the knife.  Which put him firmly in charge for the moment.

He angled his head, as if considering.  “You know, you don’t seem all that scared.”

“You want me to be?”

“Oh yes.” 

“How’s this?”  When she made a break for the door, he slapped it shut an instant before she reached it.  And pushed her against it, pinning her in place with his body.

He was hard.  God, God, he was hard.

She wanted to close her eyes, she wanted to curl into herself, to get away from the insistent press of his body.  She tried to bring back what she knew about how to defend herself in this kind of situation, but the knife he pricked just under her eye held her rigid as stone.

“Scared yet?”

It was a whisper, silky.  From a man completely certain of his dominance, of his control.

“Yes,” Ava admitted, the word burning like acid as it scraped her throat.

He moved the knife and – no.  Please no – pressed his lips to where the tip had been.  “Thata girl.”  A hideous parody of a lover.

Was this her uncle’s plan?  The final insult of rape before his man killed her?  Had her mother suffered this way as well?

When a tear spilled, unchecked, the man nearly hugged her with what seemed like happiness.  Ava smelled the rain on his hair, the sweat on his skin, felt the awful heat from his erection.

“I wish we had more time,” he said, almost sadly.  “This could have been so good.  But since lover-boy will probably be joining us soon, we’ll have to cut our relationship short.”  When her phone rang, quite close by, Ava’s heart jolted into her throat.  Jordan.

He’d walk back in, unknowing and unarmed.

Why hadn’t she kept the gun in her hand?

“This was in your purse,” the man said as he moved back a step, eased her phone from his back pocket.  “It was ringing when I came into the kitchen a couple minutes ago so I figured I’d better… well, yep,” he said as he checked the readout.  “It says right here: Jordan.  Guess our good little public servant is getting tired of waiting for me down at the Enmark.  Seems awfully anxious to get a hold of you.  You two plannin’ to go somewhere?” he asked, seeming to notice her travel cosmetic case for the first time. 

“I…” confusion mixed with nerves.  “It was you on the phone.”

“Sure was.  I thought about taking care of this drive-by style.  Bam.  Bam.”  He held the phone up like a gun, mimicked shooting.  “But he took off and left you here, and well, who am I to overlook an opportunity to have some alone time with his special girl.  It was like a gift, really.  I didn’t think I’d be able to use this at all.”  He laughed when she flinched as the knife flashed under her nose.  “It makes it sweeter for me.  Of course, I can’t do all the things I’ve come to discover I’m really, really good at, but if I left your body raped and mutilated, it might bring some uncomfortable attention down on me.  Whoa there,” he said when her legs buckled.  “Don’t you go passing out on me.  It’s no fun when they pass out.”

Nearly swimming in terror, Ava forced her mind to think through the waves.  “But Jordan knows you.  He knew who you were.  Or who you said you were.”

“Oh, he knows me, alright.  Or at least he thinks he does.  We met – sort of – once upon a time.  You know, this might work out better if you’re in the bedroom.  Both of you in the bed,” he said almost to himself.  “Might be easier to believe someone was able to break in, shoot you both, if it’s apparent you were distracted.   You’ll have to take off your clothes,” he said conversationally.

“No.”

He slid her phone back into his pocket, drew a mean-looking forty-five from his waistband.  “Oh, I think you will.  Me – gun, knife.  You – pathetic little female.  You’ll take off your clothes, bitch, and anything else I tell you to do.  Now, open the door behind you.  That’s it,” he said when her hand went to the knob, nearly slid off of it.  “Sweaty palms?  Wipe it off on your pants.  Good girl.”

He herded her into the bedroom.  Ava kept her body between him and the pile of her belongings on the bed.  He didn’t know about the gun.  If she could just get her hands on it without him seeing, she’d blow the bastard away.

“Undress.”

“There’s… there’s all this stuff on the bed.  I’ll have to move it if you expect me to lie down.”

“Aren’t we the helpful little woman?  Undress.  We’ll get to your suitcase in a moment.”

Ava’s trembling fingers went to the button of her shirt.

“Now, now.   Let’s not be modest.  Turn around so I can see.  Mmm-mmm,” he said when Ava gritted her teeth and turned.  “You have quite a lush little body.  It’s disappointing I won’t have the chance to better enjoy it.”    

“Did…”  Ava had to know.  “Did you kill my mother?”

The man’s eyes shot up from the slowly-widening expanse of flesh beneath her parted shirt, clearly off guard.  “What?”