Redstone, Incorporated: The Best Revenge Part 8

Jessa looked up at him. "But I've seen bruises."

St. John shrugged. "Beatings, yes. But the other...not yet."

She stared at him for a long, silent moment. "How can you be so sure?"

He had the odd feeling she had asked, not because she doubted his a.s.sessment, but because she wanted him to admit how he knew.

And that he would never do.

"Too much fight left in him." He turned away to continue his pacing, telling himself he simply needed the movement, not that he couldn't bear seeing the look in her eyes a moment longer. Not that it helped; the next words broke through despite his efforts to squelch them. "Still time."

"Time?"

"Take him down before it does."

She studied him for a long moment before she said, "You meant what you said after we saw Tyler. You want to destroy him."

She said it calmly, without surprise or dismay.

"Yes." He gave her a sideways look. "Problem?" "No."

He hadn't expected her to take it so calmly. But then, she didn't know what he meant by destroy, probably thought he meant it figuratively, when in fact he meant it quite literally. When he finished, there would be nothing left of that particular piece of human sc.u.m.

But at the least he'd expected some annoyance that he hadn't come here to help her win, but to make sure Alden lost. Of course, when he'd come here, he hadn't known she was the b.a.s.t.a.r.d's opponent.

"I've always known this was about him for you."

Her quiet words shocked him out of his thoughts. It was as if she'd read his mind, had somehow followed those thoughts. His gaze shot to her face.

But then, Jessa had always been able to do that before, and his cryptic speech pattern didn't seem to hinder her much now. "Mind?"

"Not if you can do what you say. For me, it's never been about winning this, it's been about stopping him."

"I can."

Again she studied him. And again he caught himself wondering if somehow, some way, she was able to see past the physical changes that made him unrecognizable as the boy who had fled this town all those years ago.

"I believe you," she said at last.

For an instant, a brief flash of time, she was that child again, and he was that scared, aching, confused kid, clinging to the one person in his life who had ever said that to him when it mattered. The one person in Cedar who had believed him over his father's accusations.

The person who had followed that fervent declaration with one even more burning, adding one tiny word that made him feel like doing what he'd refused to do in the face of his father's brutality. Cry. "I believe in you."

She'd said it fiercely, pa.s.sionately, and he'd known she meant it with all the strength of her gentle heart and bright, quick mind.

An urge nearly swamped him, the urge to tell her everything, what he'd done, what he'd become, who he was now. To show her she'd been right to believe in him, to believe he could find a way out, make a life for himself.

A rapping on the outer door reminded Jessa that she hadn't yet unlocked it for business. She moved quickly, letting in a red-haired man in worn denim pants and s.h.i.+rt.

"h.e.l.lo, Doc. I've got your order ready in back."

"Thanks, Jessa. I knew you would."

"I had to change suppliers, that's why the delay."

The vet lifted his grubby baseball cap, smoothed a hand over what was left of his hair and settled the cap back down before he answered.

"It's all right, we got by."

"Thanks, Doc."

"I haven't forgotten how your father carried us through that rough patch back in the day. I'm not about to s.h.i.+ft my loyalty now, no matter what Bracken's does."

St. John watched as she processed the sale of what was apparently some special kind of salt block. Another customer arrived before she finished, a woman in a pair of stained coveralls that somehow managed to look stylish on her thin frame. She gave St. John a curious glance, but said nothing.

Jessa greeted the woman by name, and the two customers nodded at each other and chatted briefly about their respective families as Jessa finished. Small town, he thought. Everybody knew everything about everyone.

Except the dark side of the man who would be mayor.

The man left, and the woman stepped forward. "I know you're not a garden shop, honey, but those berry plants you special ordered for me last year have done so well, I'd like more for next spring. Thirty, I think. You said you'd have to order early for that many."

"Of course. Anything to keep my supply of Margie's jams and jellies coming," Jessa said with a smile that made the woman laugh.

"That's why I come here," the woman said with a laugh. "Those folks over in River Mill, they don't even remember my name, let alone what I do."

"If they ever tasted what comes out of your kitchen, they would," Jessa said.

The woman gave a pleased laugh. "See? Why would I drive all the way there when I can get such lovely compliments right here at home?"

The woman gave St. John another sideways glance as Jessa made notes on an order form. When she finished, she tore off a copy and handed it to the woman.

"I'll call them right away and reserve them," she said. "And I'll let you know as soon as I find out when they'll be s.h.i.+pped."

"Thanks, Jessa," the woman said. "Give my best to your mom. You're both on my mind every day."

"I will. And thank you. It means a lot."

The woman turned to go, gave St. John one last glance, then looked back at Jessa.

"Sweet. Hope he's more than a customer, honey," she said with a conspiratorial wink. Then she flashed a grin at St. John, a grin that lit up her rather plain face.

The teasing caught him off guard, and he pretended to be fascinated by the display of birdhouses. But not before he'd noticed that Jessa had blushed. Furiously.

When she had finished with her phone call-when she'd said right away, she'd meant it-she busied herself filing the order in the box beside the register.

"Bracken's?" he asked. "In River Mill?"

She looked at him then. He hadn't been sure she'd been avoiding it, but he was now, by the relief in her eyes at the change of subject from Margie's arch comments.

"The feed and garden store there."

Something in the way she said it made him want to pursue the inquiry. He waited silently as she made a note on another order and refiled it.

When she turned to go back to her office, he realized she wasn't going to elaborate unless he pushed. Unlike most people, Jessa didn't seem always compelled to fill the silence, which made the technique much less effective.

"New?" he asked as he went after her, knowing they hadn't been around when he'd been here.

"Not really." She went to the desk, sat and reached for a stack of folders before continuing. "They opened about six years ago. Never been a problem for us, until they started undercutting our prices by enough to lure people to make the drive."

He went still. "When?"

"A few weeks ago. Everybody in town started getting flyers."

"How bad?"

With a grimace, she looked up from the folder she'd opened. "Bad enough." She tapped a slender finger on the papers in the folder. "I know how much the stuff they're selling costs, and how much it costs to get it out here. I don't know how they do it and stay in business."

I'll bet I do, he thought.

His jaw set, he began to make plans.

Chapter 11.

Jessa didn't have to try to keep herself busy, didn't have to look far for distraction. The work was always there waiting, and she never seemed to catch up. If it weren't for her mother, and the fact that she needed to be with her as much as possible right now, she'd have spent all the evenings after they closed here in the office, trying to at least get even on the paperwork.

It wasn't that she didn't want to be with her mother, she did. She was the only person in the world who truly shared her grief, who had been as devastated as she at the loss of the man who had been their rock. But this store was their livelihood, had been her family's for decades, and she couldn't neglect it, either.

She thought again of that conversation with St. John about Bracken's. His intensity had seemed odd for the subject. It wasn't his problem, after all. But while his face had been his usual expressionless mask, his voice had betrayed a laser focus.

Yet after that morning he'd seemingly vanished. She hadn't thought much of it the first day, but after the second ended without a sight of him, she wondered if perhaps he'd changed his mind about this whole thing and gone as unexpectedly as he'd first appeared.

The thought unsettled her. She had things she wanted to ask, to know, not about the election, but about the boy he'd been and how he'd become this mysterious, laconic to a fault man. Perhaps she should have told him she knew who he was the moment she'd become certain. At least then she might have gotten some answers.

The fact that Adam Alden was not just alive, that he hadn't merely survived, but had apparently done well enough to truly make something of himself-although she had no idea what-had been a source of constant joy, wonder and more than a little bewilderment ever since the moment in the cemetery when she'd finally realized what she should have known instantly.

But she wanted to know how he did it, where he'd gone, and she only realized how desperate that desire was now that the chance she might never know was looming over her.

"He'll be back. He wants to beat his father too badly to give up," she told Maui, who was sprawled beside her on the office floor.

She turned her attention back to the paperwork on the desk. She'd come in here to work, not dwell on things she had no control over.

Her mother had gone to bed early, so Jessa had grabbed the chance to do some paperwork. The store was dark, the single desk light in the office and the glow of her laptop screen behind her the only sign that someone was here. She went at the papers methodically, sorting, making notes from each order on the chart she kept on their regular customers. It was something her father had started, and she liked the idea of always knowing what their best customer's preferences were, but she knew there had to be a better way than her father's voluminous handwritten notes barely kept together on a clipboard. She- "Need to computerize."

She jumped up, her heart slamming in her chest as a shadow loomed over her. She knew in an instant who it was, but oddly, her heart didn't calm. It just seemed to race in a different way, her pulse pounding along too quickly, the heat of that acceleration flooding her as she stared at him.

"Sorry," St. John said.

"You should be," she said, and then, looking down at Maui, added, "And so should you. Some watchdog you are."

The big golden simply looked from her to St. John, that plumed mood-indicator of a tail telling her that the dog was delighted at the late-night visit. And to be fair, as she'd been working she'd noticed, vaguely, that the dog had lifted his head and made a tiny sound moments before, and she could hardly expect him to bark at someone he'd been properly introduced to as a friend.

Or someone his DNA told him was a friend, she thought, laughing inwardly.

Laughing at herself over the dog's reaction, so she didn't have to deal with her own? she wondered.

She looked down at the papers she'd been working with, afraid that he would see her heated cheeks. Because she couldn't deny the truth of that a.s.sessment; every time she saw him-or even thought of him-she reacted as if she were that long-ago child, half crazy about him in too many ways to count.

Not that that wasn't perfectly understandable. Once you got past the terseness of his conversation, if you could call it that, the man who called himself St. John was nothing less than a presence. He made most of the men she'd known seem like pale imitations of men, made them seem like they were simply existing while he was vividly, almost violently alive.

Perhaps that's what barely surviving did to you, she thought.

Never mind what he was doing to her.

And never mind the fact that, deep down, she was all too well aware that there was nothing childlike now about her reaction to him. Nothing childlike about the jump of her pulse, the rush of heat or the quickening of her breath. Even the man she'd been engaged to in college hadn't done this to her.

It was just the shock, she rationalized. The shock of finding out he was alive, after years spent telling herself she was crazy, spending any time longing for someone long dead. Remembering was fine, appropriate, fitting for the boy she'd cared so much about. Mooning after a ghost had been something else, something she'd told herself countless times she should give up. "Still should."

Her heart slammed again as he seemed to read her innermost thoughts. And then she realized he was looking from the stacks on the desk to her open laptop, and had returned to his original statement about computerizing the store's process.

Get a grip, Hill. With an effort she managed it, and answered evenly enough.

"I'd like to. I just can't find a software program that will do all I want it to."

"What?"

"There are tons that will keep books, or do inventory or track purchases, all that, but I want one that will coordinate all that, tell me where some of our more obscure stock is stored, plus keep track of individual customer preferences and cross-reference them with other data, without having to input everything two or three times. I'd like to be able to let people who buy certain products regularly know if I come across a bargain on those, so they could stock up at a lower price. That kind of thing."

"Good service."

"That was my father's trademark." She sat back down wearily. "But I've been looking for nearly a year, ever since I finally convinced Dad it would be good for business, for a program that would do it all. It doesn't seem to exist."

"Could."

"Should," she said, earning a twitch upward at one corner of his mouth.

"Know someone," he said.

She frowned, working it through. "You know someone who...?"

"Could write it."