The Reckoning

“I can’t, don’t you see? I’ve lost so much time already. In another ten years, Ricky won’t need a mother.”

What could he say to that? What could he do to help? Unfortunately for Linda, he wasn’t the pep-talk type. His true expertise lay in looking at the dark side of life. “What’s the alternative?” he asked.

She spun away. “Giving up.”

The two words froze him. Not because he didn’t understand the impulse, but because he’d done it himself. After the Jessica Chandler case, so closely following his brother Chris’s murder, he’d given up and run away to the cabin in the Sandias. If he had his way, he’d probably still be there. Still be half-drunk. Still be full of pain.

Now he was sober. And still full of pain.

Linda spun back. “But I can’t. I won’t. I have a responsibility to Ricky, an obligation to Nancy and Dean who never gave up on me. Do you see?”

“I do.” It was the truth. “Sometimes what keeps us going is not what we want, but what we owe to other people.”

She studied his face. “The promise you made to Ryan.”

“And to myself. To my parents. To the memory of my brother Christopher.”

Linda winced. “I’m sorry.” She touched a hand to her forehead, then laid her fingers on his arm. “The injury…I’m still working on not thinking everything revolves around me, me, me. I’m complaining, but you’re in a bad place, too, and yet you’re here, playing Mary Poppins to me.”

He raised his eyebrows. “As long as you don’t ask me to fly you around with my umbrella.”

Her fingers tightened on him and her touch was once again warming his blood, that lust distracting him. “Seriously, Emmett. I know I’m not quite a whole person, let alone a sounding board, but I’m here if you want to talk.”

“I’m not much of a talker. I was always the lone wolf in the family.”

“You’re in luck,” she said with a half smile. “I practiced my silence for many years.”

Then she showed him how good she was at it. She sat down on the edge of the treadmill’s ramp, then patted the spot beside her. He surprised himself by obeying, seating himself next to her while the quiet grew around them.

She crossed her arms on top of her bent knees and rested her cheek there. He gazed at the back of her head while listening to the sounds of spring outside. Birds were trilling, peeping, cheeping. A branch, jostled by the warm wind, scratched against the glass of the window. Dogs barked in the distance.

A sense of the season settled over him. Springtime. Renewal. Hope.

Linda’s eyes were closed and he wondered if she was asleep. Her lashes were dark brown and curled against the soft pink of her cheeks.

“You’re still a woman, you know,” he murmured.

She wasn’t asleep, at least not all the way. Her lashes rose and she sat up, slanting him a half-drowsy glance. “You think?”

“I know.” Their gazes held. Darker pink color tinged her fair skin. His hand reached out and he palmed her warm cheek. “Shall I prove it to you?”

She swallowed. “Not because you’re obligated.”

He shook his head. “Not because I’m obligated.” But because he didn’t like to see her sad. Because he thought he could take one worry off her mind. Oh, yeah, and then there was that lust. He’d known it would complicate things, but right now he didn’t care.

Leaning close, he touched his lips to hers.

She jerked against his hand, as if he’d stung her, but he’d been gentle. He was gentle. So, so gentle.

For a moment, she kissed like a child might, her mouth pursed and stiff, but then she softened. Her lips parted, but he didn’t pretend it was an intimate invitation. Instead, he let her warm up to the kiss, let her warm up to him, without doing any more than keeping his mouth pressed close to hers.

“You should breathe,” he whispered against her mouth. “You still need air.”

“Is that why I see stars?”

It made him smile, and he drew back to look at her.

She traced his lips with two fingers. “You don’t do that often enough. Smile, I mean.”

“Keep kissing me and maybe I will.”

But she was shaking her head. “I have your number, you know. I’m getting smarter by the minute when it comes to you.”

“How’s that?”

She straightened away from him. “You’re sweet.”

He stared at her. “Sweet? You’re kidding, right?”

“You’re sweet.”

“I’m cynical. Cold. Distant. Determined. Ask anyone.”

Shaking her head, she rose to her feet. “I don’t need to. I was feeling low and not very confident and you kissed me. That’s sweet.”

“I didn’t do it to be sweet!”

She had the wide blue eyes of a baby. “Then why did you?”

“Because…” It had nothing to do with sweetness. It was because he thought she was beautiful and sexy, which, if she wasn’t so sweet herself, she’d see proof of in the tight fit of his now uncomfortable jeans.

“Told you.” With a little grin, she spun on one foot and sauntered out, her hips swishing with a sassy little twitch.

That womanly touch was almost worth being called sweet. Almost.

“Don’t fool yourself,” he called after her. “I’m cynical. Cold. Distant. Determined. Just wait and I’ll prove it to you.”

The bathroom door closing was her answer.

He was still smiling—smiling again!—when his cell phone rang. It sat on a low table he’d pushed to the side of the room, so he made a long reach for it.

“Jamison, here.”

“And here, too,” a voice said.

Emmett forgot about spring and sunshine. Darkness closed in on him again. He felt it, smelled it, sensed the sulfur whiff of evil in the air. Striding to the doorway of the exercise room, he glanced down the hall to keep watch on the bathroom door. To make sure Linda was safe.

“Where the hell are you, Jason?”

“Do you think I called to tell you, little brother? Then you’re stupider than I thought.”

Emmett gritted his teeth at his brother’s taunting. In a perverse sense, Jason was entitled to his arrogance. The police had had him in custody once and then he’d escaped to kidnap Lily Fortune. Later, even with experienced men like Emmett in the mix, the FBI had lost him during the ransom exchange. And an agent had lost his life.

“We figured you’d be on your way to the South Pacific or South America with the ransom money by now,” Emmett said, calming his voice.

“You’d like me out of the country, wouldn’t you?”

What Emmett would like was to find his brother and stop him once and for all. It was what he’d vowed to do. Cynical, cold, distant, determined. If Linda could look inside him right now, she’d have no doubt about the kind of man he was.

“I’d like to know why you called, Jason.”

“I read this morning’s Red Rock newspaper.”

There was a clue. His brother was near enough to Red Rock to have easy access to the local paper. What it might have said, though, Emmett had no idea. Since he was in San Antonio now, he read the San Antonio paper. But Jason couldn’t know what city he was in and Emmett certainly wasn’t about to tell him. His brother was smart enough without providing him any aid. “I didn’t get a chance to read it yet myself.”

“Didn’t get a chance to read it,” Jason mocked, his voice rising. “You don’t need to read it to know that Ryan Fortune left you a bundle of cash and stock options.”

Apparently some of the details of Ryan’s will had been leaked to the press. It might have irritated Emmett if it hadn’t also brought Jason out of the woodwork. “Hey, it wasn’t my choice, Jase. That was Ryan’s doing.”

“Why should you get any of the Fortune money when it was me who worked so hard for it?”

Jason had thought himself entitled to the Fortune wealth since they were kids, and their grandfather, Farley Jamison, had been obsessed with the money as a means to fund his grandiose political aspirations. “But you have some of the Fortune money—Lily’s ransom,” Emmett pointed out.

“I don’t care about that,” Jason snapped.

Emmett frowned. “You don’t care about the money?”

“Not as much as I care about taking you down, little brother. Keep looking over your shoulder, Emmett, because I’m coming after you. Then I’ll have my reward. And my revenge.”

The call clicked off. Emmett remained standing, staring at the phone in his hand. Well, well, well. This put a new spin on things.

The man Emmett had promised himself to stop had just promised to stop him.

Fine, he thought.

May the best man win.

Four

Emmett sat at the kitchen table the next morning, the last of a pot of coffee now a final swallow in the bottom of his mug. The dregs of black liquid were as dark as his mood after a sleepless night going over Jason’s phone call.

I’m coming after you, his brother had said.

As if Emmett were like the proverbial sitting duck, waiting for his brother to take him out.

He wasn’t afraid of Jason. But there was no doubt the other man was wily and Emmett had others to think of besides himself. However, Jason didn’t have a clue as to where Emmett was residing at the moment and would never think to look for him in the Armstrong’s guest house. Jason didn’t know that the older couple or Ricky and Linda even existed, so Emmett was reasonably sure they were safe from Jason’s latest threat.

But damn, the truth was Emmett was just sitting around.

Taking care of this promise regarding Linda meant he wasn’t taking care of the problem that was Jason. It put the ball in his brother’s court—I’m coming after you—and Emmett didn’t like it. At all. He was used to controlling the action, not letting others control him.

“G’morning.”

His gaze lifted in time to see a sleepy-eyed Linda enter the room. She was wearing a thick robe and terry-cloth slippers, had bedhead and a pillowcase crease across her left cheek.

He grunted, tightening his grip on his coffee mug as desire pinballed through his system. For some inconvenient reason, she gave him a bad case of the gimmes.

She squinched her eyes at him and pushed back a hank of her iron-straight, golden hair. “You are Emmett Jamison, yes?”

Was this another symptom of her brain injury? Had she forgotten him, or was she joking around? “The last I checked, that’s me.”

She nodded. “Good. I thought so, but the way you greeted me set me off my stride for a second.”

“The way I greeted you?”

“That cheerful good morning grunt.”

“Oh.” She was joking around. “Sorry.”

Her hand waved. “No apology necessary. I’m not much of a morning person myself. It’s just that after I came out of my…condition, I found myself often confused by new and unfamiliar faces. So I learned to gauge whether I was already acquainted with someone by the warmth of their response to me. Yours was a sort of stranger-type grunt.”

Funny, how she could make him half grin and feel guilty at the same time. Then more guilty when he saw that she was staring at the now-empty coffeepot. “Let me,” he said, starting to rise.

“No, no, no.” She waved him down again. “I can do this. I can make coffee. We had a practice kitchen in rehab. Like kindergarten class, you know? We played house in order to relearn how to do simple tasks.”

He watched her trudge to the counter. She pulled close the bean grinder he’d left on the tiled surface and lifted off the clear plastic top to reveal plenty of freshly ground beans. Then she removed the basket from the coffeemaker. Inside was the used filter and a mess of wet grounds.

She stared at them. Then her gaze moved to the grinder. Back to the full basket.

Like yesterday in the grocery store, he could feel the confusion radiate off her slim body. Her spine became as straight as a steel rod, and her shoulders looked stiff. Something in the middle of his chest hurt.

He was almost out of his chair when she spoke, her voice tight. “Remind me again. What should I do?”

Breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding slid out of him in a silent whoosh. “Throw the old grounds and filter into the wastebasket under the sink,” he said, careful to keep his voice free of anything but information. “We put the fresh filters in that clear jar over there by the grinder.”

She crossed to the sink and he watched her reach for the wastebasket even as he pretended not to. He held his breath again and caught himself—barely—before telling her not to throw out the plastic basket along with the old filter and beans.

She caught herself—barely—before doing just that. Emmett let out a silent cheer as she rinsed the basket and then crossed back to the coffeemaker. “I knew that,” she said conversationally as she fitted in a clean filter. “That part about throwing away the used filter and grounds. But we’d only practiced with a clean coffeemaker in rehab and little things like that can stump me. I know there’s something I should do, and if it was on a multiple-choice test, I would recognize the answer. But sometimes I can’t dredge up the information from wherever it’s sleeping in my consciousness.”

His chest was hurting again and he said the first thing that came into his head. “I admire you for being able to ask for help. That can’t be easy.”

“It isn’t easy.” She finished preparing the coffee, then set the switch to On. “I don’t want to need help. I don’t want to admit I need help almost as much. But it’s a fact of life until I get more practice.”

She moved to the oven and set the timer, then turned to meet his gaze. “Strategies. Props. That’s how I get by. One of my strategies is to set a timer to remind myself to stay on task. Five minutes for coffee. When it goes off, I’ll check the maker. Without the alarm I might sit here for a while and never remember what I’m waiting for. Unless I write it down in my notebook—another of my favorite props.”

Her matter-of-factness was just something else to admire. No whining, no play for pity. The counselors at her rehab facility had told him about Linda’s strategies and props in order to prepare him for helping her out—and they’d also let him know that she was well on her way to needing them less and less—but they hadn’t prepared him for how watching her use them would leave him feeling so…

There weren’t words for it.

So, ignoring that ache in his chest, he grunted again and pulled a section of the San Antonio paper in front of him. He didn’t look up until the kitchen alarm went off and she was back at the table after filling up his mug and then her own.

“Thank you,” he said.

“That’s my line,” Linda replied. “I don’t think I was that good at being grateful pre traumatic brain injury, but it seems to be another skill I’m slowly learning to acquire.”

“You don’t—”

“I am, Emmett. Grateful and beholden. To the Armstrongs. To you. I don’t know how I’ll ever repay any of you.”

“Linda—”

“Don’t tell me I’m wrong. My brain isn’t that dead.”

“Wait a sec—”

“Oh, come on.”

“But—”

“Emmett, what could you possibly get out of this situation?”

“Lessons in how to edge a word into the conversation when sharing the breakfast table with a woman?”

Her velvety blue eyes rounded over the rim of her coffee mug. Then she laughed. “Okay. Apologies next.”

“Those are unnecessary, too.”

“Well, I’m certain you don’t need practice facing women across a breakfast table.”

“What about across a kitchen table?” He leaned back in his chair to study her. “Outside of my mother, you might be my first, come to think of it.”

Her eyes registered surprise again. “No wife? No ex?”

“Never married.”

“Fiancée?”

He shook his head.

“No lovers?” she asked, her eyes rounding even more.

“Of course I’ve had lovers!” Maybe she was joking around again, but he discovered his ego couldn’t take the chance.

“Ah.” That little smile playing around her mouth told him she had been joking after all. “But no long-term lovers. Nobody you wanted to share a bathroom or a breakfast with.”

“I’m a pretty solitary guy. Have been my whole life.”

She nodded. “How old are you?”

“Thirty-one.”

“Hah,” she said, that little smile reclaiming her pretty lips. She put one elbow on the table and leaned toward him. “I’m older than you. Maybe you can learn something from me.”

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