Hush: A Thriller Part 9

NINE.

"What? It's been a bad day," Riley managed to get out despite the tightness in her throat. As she spoke, she swiped belligerently at the wet tracks on her face with her free hand. Nothing she could do about the streaming tears other than keep wiping them away. She only wished she could have kept him-or anyone-from seeing them. "You try-"

She was going to say something along the lines of "going to your ex-husband's funeral and then almost getting murdered in the same day," but her voice caught on a sob at the thought of Jeff's funeral and she couldn't, could not for the life of her, get any more words out.

"Hey," Bradley said, and there was that d.a.m.ned am-I-imagining-it sympathy again, in his voice. Then her knees quivered and she kind of tilted toward him and he caught her and kept her upright. She thought he sighed. His arms came around her and tightened until she lay fully against him. "It's okay."

He felt as solid as a concrete pillar, and something about that, about having someone she could lean on after a lifetime of being the pillar that supported everyone else, got to her. All the pent-up emotion inside her came bursting out. She buried her face in his wide chest, slid her arms beneath his jacket to wrap them around his waist, burrowed into his warmth like a lost child, and cried like she hadn't had a chance to do since Jeff had died.

She didn't do it prettily, either. She sobbed and gasped and sniffled. By the time she was done, his s.h.i.+rt front was damp and he was smoothing loose tendrils of hair out of her face with one hand.

If she could have kept her eyes closed and her face pressed against his chest forever, she would have done it. The fear and grief and guilt had eased; the physical act of crying seemed to have washed away the hard knot that had formed in her chest. But with her tears spent, she was suddenly aware of the man-the absolute stranger-in whose arms she rested. The sheer size of him should have been intimidating. So, too, should the shoulder holster that she could just glimpse against his white s.h.i.+rt because her arms were inside his jacket lifting it a little away from his body. To say nothing of the knowledge that he was an FBI agent whose primary purpose for being in her company was to ferret out all her (guilty) secrets. Instead, she felt protected. Safe. And for that brief time while she had been weak, feeling protected and safe was precisely what she'd needed. But that time was at an end: she was ready to be strong again.

She had to be strong again.

Even so, she stayed where she was for a moment longer, regrouping, gathering herself, savoring the unaccustomed luxury of relying on someone else for support. She could feel the heat of his body through the s.h.i.+rt she'd cried all over, feel the rise and fall of his chest, hear the steady beat of his heart beneath her ear, smell the subtle scent of his skin. His legs were long and hard with muscle against hers. The arms around her felt hard with muscle, too, and his chest was as unyielding as a wall.

She didn't know precisely what his job entailed, but he clearly wasn't a desk jockey: he had the body of an athlete. Or a soldier.

The kind of hard, honed body that belonged to a man of action.

Tempting as the prospect was, she couldn't stay in his arms all night.

The real world was still there, still sucked eggs, still had to be dealt with.

Much as she hated to face it, she'd made a complete and utter fool of herself by breaking down like she had.

The only thing to do was own it, and move on.

Taking a deep breath, relieved to discover that she was finally able to do so, she unlocked her arms from around his waist and straightened her spine. G.o.d, he was big. In her flat shoes, the top of her head didn't reach his chin. His shoulders were broad enough to block her view of everything behind him.

At this change in the status quo, his hand that was smoothing her hair stilled, dropped away. The arm around her loosened fractionally. As her hands finished sliding around his muscled rib cage to flatten on his chest and push a little so that she wasn't just plastered against him any longer, Riley faced the inevitable and looked up and met his eyes.

His face was still in shadow. She couldn't see his expression, let alone read it.

It was disconcerting to discover that her heart was beating faster than it should have been.

"Better?" he asked.

"Yes." She could have stepped away from him at that point, but she didn't. A sniffle caught her by surprise. She was more surprised when he produced a wad of tissues from a pocket and handed it to her.

"You carry tissues?" she asked on a note of incredulity in between a hiccup and another sniffle. She made good use of them, drying her eyes, wiping her nose, resting comfortably against him all the while.

"They're napkins. Clean ones, don't worry. Courtesy of today's lunch at Burger King."

"Thanks." Finis.h.i.+ng with the napkins, she stuffed them in the pocket of her jeans, to be disposed of later. She still felt a little shaky-but that wasn't the reason she didn't go ahead and move out of the circle of his arms. The sad truth was, having a man to lean on felt good. She flicked another look up at him. "I have to confess, I'm embarra.s.sed."

"No need to be."

"I don't usually cry all over people."

"I don't usually get cried all over, so I guess that makes us even." Was that a hint of humor in his voice?

"That answer did not make me feel better," she informed him.

"Sorry."

"I don't usually cry at all."

"Like you said, you've had a bad day."

At the reminder, Riley's stomach started to tighten. "I think me being so weepy has something to do with the concussion. Or maybe the meds."

"Probably."

"Are you laughing at me?" she asked suspiciously. Because the light had s.h.i.+fted enough to allow her to see his face. It was still heavily shadowed, but not so much that she couldn't see that slight uptick at the corner of his mouth that she'd decided earlier pa.s.sed for his smile.

"G.o.d forbid."

She narrowed her eyes at him. "You are. I can tell."

The uptick was gone. "Nope."

She was feeling better, stronger. Standing so close to him, being in his arms like this, was starting to feel unexpectedly intimate. Nestled right up against him as she was, she was suddenly, acutely aware of him as a man, in a way that she absolutely didn't want to be. His size, all those muscles, the very smell of him, was overwhelmingly masculine, and it touched something deeply feminine in herself. To her horror, she found herself speculating about what he would be like in bed, and instantly banished the thought.

Straightening in his hold, she pushed off against his chest.

His arms dropped away, her knees held steady, she took a step back followed by another, and there she was, standing on her own with a couple feet of s.p.a.ce separating them.

She wasn't prepared to acknowledge even to herself what she'd felt between them at just about the time she'd started wondering about him and s.e.x: he'd had an erection the size of a log.

Just thinking about it disconcerted her. It also made her pulse quicken, and her blood heat.

He had to know she'd felt it.

"Ready to go?" he asked, as impa.s.sive as always.

So he was going to ignore it. Good. Riley found that she wasn't able to meet his eyes. Thanking G.o.d for the darkness that made it difficult for him to read her face, she nodded, said, "Yes," and started walking toward the car. She half expected, half wanted to feel his hand on her arm again, but she didn't. Instead he walked silently beside her, opened her door for her, waited until she was seated, and closed it again.

All without a word.

Watching him walk around the front of the car, she felt fl.u.s.tered in a way that was completely foreign to her nature. She noticed that he moved with an easy athleticism. There was a kind of coiled energy about him that reminded her once again that this guy didn't make his living sitting behind a desk. In fact, he made it investigating people like her, a thought that made her nervous all over again and made her sudden attraction to him doubly stupid.

The last thing she needed in her life was that kind of complication. Since her divorce from Jeff, she'd had a lot of men ask her out. Some invitations she'd accepted, some she hadn't, but in the beginning she'd been too freshly out of her marriage to even start to get serious with anyone, and then, after George's downfall, there'd been too much chaos in her life. There was still too much chaos in her life. And given the nature of that chaos, Bradley was absolutely, positively, no-doubt-about-it the wrong guy.

So when he opened the door and slid in beside her, taking up way more than his fair share of s.p.a.ce in the small car, she avoided looking at him in the few moments that the interior light was on by pulling down the visor above her seat and checking herself out in the mirror.

What she saw appalled her.

"Oh, gosh, they're going to be able to tell I was crying," she exclaimed dismally, referring to Margaret and Emma, who were probably starting to get worried about her by this time and could be counted on to converge on her as soon as she came in.

"Is that so bad?" Bradley closed the door and started the car.

"You have no idea." The family dynamic worked like this: she didn't cry; instead, she stayed strong for them when they cried. They would be upset-no, frightened-by this evidence of weakness in her. She looked at her red-rimmed, swollen eyes and pink nose with dismay. The coil she'd pinned her hair into was all lopsided, and at least half of it had fallen down to straggle around her face. Not the cool, calm, and in-control image she wanted to project. As the Mazda pulled away from the curb, she grabbed her purse and busied herself making necessary repairs.

Which also provided her with the perfect excuse not to look at him. Because much as she was trying, she still couldn't get that ginormous erection out of her mind.

"You never answered my question: do you think Jeff knew where George hid his money?" Bradley was back in interrogator mode again, and because it kept her from having to deal with him in a more personal way, she almost-almost-welcomed it.

It helped that the question was easy enough to answer.

"I'm almost sure he didn't. George didn't confide in Jeff." Glad of this chance to at least outwardly reclaim her composure, Riley kept her answer matter-of-fact. She tucked the last pin back into her hair, slicked on a bit of lip gloss, called it a day, and flipped the visor closed.

And glanced Bradley's way in time to catch his gaze moving from her mouth to the dark street beyond the winds.h.i.+eld. She had the impression that he'd been watching her use her pinky to smooth the gloss over her lower lip.

Looking at his hard profile, she felt a sudden acceleration in her heartbeat. He was aware of her watching him, she knew: she could tell by the slight tightening of his jaw, by the barely perceptible elevation of tension in his body. As she registered those things, the interior of the small car started to feel way too warm. Riley would have suspected a malfunctioning air conditioner, but she could hear the rush of it blowing out through the vents, feel its cold breath on her skin.

Not that it helped.

"I'm kind of surprised at that, seeing as how Jeff was his only son." There was absolutely nothing in his voice to tell her that he was aware of her in the same (unwelcome) way she was now aware of him.

Still, she knew. The evidence was unmistakable.

Fortunately it seemed like he was no more interested in traveling down that path than she was.

"Jeff wasn't always... reliable." Drugs and alcohol would do that to a person, as Riley had learned. When he wasn't under the influence, Jeff was sweet and fun and loving, but when he was-well, he had become a different person. Riley said none of that. Instead, years' worth of memories of her ex-husband crowded into her head. A lot were good, many more were bad, but the fact remained: eternity could pa.s.s, and she still would never, ever get over the horrible manner in which he had died.

My fault. Her stomach tied itself into a painful knot.

"Who would George have confided in? His wife? An a.s.sociate?"

Bradley's questions were no longer in the least bit subtle.

In this cat-and-mouse game he hopefully had no idea they were playing, that meant advantage: Riley.

"Not Margaret," Riley said. "If he confided in an a.s.sociate, I wouldn't know."

"He have a girlfriend? A mistress?"

"I don't think so. But I wouldn't know that, either."

He didn't reply, and Riley got the impression that he was deep in thought. She looked away from him, out the window. The houses were of the same type as they had been on the previous street, as they were on Margaret's street, as they were throughout the subdivision: small ranches and split-levels. They were almost to Margaret's house now.

Riley was both glad and sorry.

"So when did you disable Jeff's phone?"

The tone of his question was so casual, such a throwaway, that it took Riley a second to internalize the question itself, to accept that, maybe, Bradley might still be harboring a suspicion or two where she was concerned after all. The question also confirmed that she'd been right all the way down the line: he, or his agency, had tracked Jeff's phone just like her attacker had. That was the real reason he'd been on his way to her apartment, she had no doubt.

She definitely was not the only one with an agenda here.

She replied easily. After all, there was nothing tricky about telling the truth.

"Right after I called 911. That's when it really hit me that Jeff had been murdered. Then I just got completely paranoid about being followed, and I took the battery out of his phone."

"I'm surprised it occurred to you to do that."

"Are you kidding? Do you ever watch TV?"

He gave a little grunt. "Not much."

Riley got the impression that she had allayed his suspicions once again, and gave herself a mental thumbs-up.

Then they turned the corner that took them onto Margaret's street. Riley took one look at the quartet of news trucks gathered outside the house, at the gaggle of reporters, at the klieg lights and crowd of gawking neighbors, and felt her stomach drop. Her eyes widened in alarm.

"Something's happened," she said.

"s.h.i.+t," Bradley said at the same time, and turned down the nearest side street. It was, as it happened, the street Riley had parked on earlier in an effort to avoid the cameras. As Riley stared at the fresh swarm of media, he added, "Relax. They're probably here because the word's out that you were attacked in your apartment tonight."

"Oh." In a way, that was a relief. She frowned, and started to say, Margaret would have called me, then bit back the words because in the nick of time she remembered that she'd popped the battery out of her phone, too.

That thought was quickly followed by another: Margaret will be going nuts.

"I have to go in." Riley looked worriedly at the gathering on the street.

"Yeah." Bradley was already parking, pulling over to the curb not far from the spot Riley had vacated earlier. He cut the engine and the lights. A house blocked their view of most of the activity in front of Margaret's house, but the glow of the lights was impossible to miss.

"Probably your best bet is to go in through the back door," Bradley said. He looked at her. "You up to cutting through some yards?"

Up to retracing the route by which she'd left Margaret's house?

But of course, he didn't know that-she didn't think.

"Yes."

He got out, retrieved her suitcase from the trunk, and joined her where she stood waiting beside the car. He handed her keys to her.

"Come on, I'll walk you," he said.

The knot of dread that had settled in her chest as she got out of the car was due to far more than the prospect of sneaking across a number of dark yards alone, but still his offer was welcome.

She nodded, and they started walking, staying in front yards to avoid fences, keeping close to the houses to make use of the denser darkness of the buildings' shadows. Instead of pulling her wheeled suitcase as she would have done, Bradley carried it by its handle as if it weighed nothing at all. His other hand curled around her upper arm. She was glad it was there, and not only because, with her knees still not being completely reliable, she needed the support.

The thing was, the feel of his warm, strong hand gripping her arm had become familiar by this time. Like his presence beside her in the dark, she found it comforting. She discovered that she hated the thought that he would shortly be going away.

The closer they got to Margaret's house, the more unnerved she became by the situation she knew she was walking into.