the room to where she lay, and bent low to spread it gently over her.
For a long moment he knelt there, looking at her. She’d given him something last night. A couple of things. A chance to call up the cop that still lived deep inside him—the man he’d believed was long dead. A chance to prove to himself that he was still a human being, and maybe not an entirely bad one.
And her touch. Her embrace. Her warmth and her soothing voice.
He wondered if she would ever know how much those things had meant.
Finally, he turned away from her and crept out of the house. He had work to do. A long-buried truth to uncover. And he was damned if he even knew where to begin, but he supposed the first thing was to find a hideaway. A place to live, to sleep, to heal. And food. Damn, he needed food. And clothes to wear. Those would be today’s missions, he thought. Today, he would work on covering his basic human needs while the drugs worked their way out of his system.
After that, he’d begin digging into the secrets of his past.
So he walked—walked for hours over back roads, in search of an empty barn or hovel he where he could hole up—but he didn’t find anything. Giving that up, he walked to the very edge of town, thought about lingering in the laundromat until someone left some clothes unattended, and maybe snatching a pair of jeans or an outing shirt that would fit him. But he didn’t dare get any closer to town than that. He didn’t know if they were looking for him yet. And there was nowhere he’d be able to go where people in this town wouldn’t recognize him. His story had been a big one almost two years ago. God, had it really been that long? Retired NYPD cop goes bad. Everyone in town must have been talking about it.
Hell, he didn’t have a dime to his name. Nowhere to go. If his bloodstream wasn’t so clogged up with a year’s worth of psychotropic drugs, he might be able to come up with a way to scam a meal, but as it was, it was useless.
It’s not useless, dammit. I can do this. Hell, I have to do this.
Swallowing his uncertainty, he pulled the hood up over his head and walked into the town of Blackberry. He would do what he needed to do, make it fast and get back out of town as quickly as possible.
Dawn rose early, and crept through the house while everyone was still asleep. There were no guests at the inn this week. She had the place to herself. Bryan was sound asleep in his room, Beth and Joshua asleep in theirs. She’d been given the guest room of her choice, and she’d deliberately chosen one at the far end of the hall, away from everyone else. Aside from a few raised eyebrows, no one had commented on her pick. She needed privacy. She never knew when they would show up.
Nothing so far today. That was good. A day without them was a good day. As good a day as she got anymore.
She padded downstairs, into the kitchen in her gorilla slippers and plush powder-blue robe, made a pot of coffee and sat at the table to watch it brew. The sun was shining. That couldn’t be a bad thing.
When she heard footsteps, she thought someone else was up, and hoped it wasn’t Bryan. The two of them alone in the kitchen of the sleepy inn would be too intimate. He didn’t understand her withdrawal. How could he?
She stiffened her resolve—it wasn’t easy—as she filled a cup with the heavenly smelling brew, and turned to see who was about to join her in the kitchen.
He stood in the doorway, staring at her, and though he didn’t look the same way he had the last time she’d seen him, as he’d drawn his last breaths, she knew him. She knew his eyes. He had the most piercing, deep brown eyes she’d ever seen. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. He lifted a hand, took a single step toward her, and the cup fell from her boneless hand. The sound of it shattering seemed to break the paralysis, and her scream broke free of its prison in her chest.
She turned her back, covered her eyes. “No, no, no. I won’t see you, I don’t want you. Go away, dammit, go away!”
A hand fell on her shoulder, and she lurched away from it so fast she tumbled over a chair, tipping it sideways and landing on the floor beside it.
“Dawn, it’s okay. It’s okay, babe.”
Blinking through her tears, she looked up. It was Bryan, bending over her, looking terrified and sleepy and disheveled. And behind him, Beth and Josh came running into the kitchen, and Josh appeared ready for battle.
“What happened?” Beth asked. “Dawnie, are you okay?”
She blinked, looking past them, her gaze darting from one end of the kitchen to the other. But he wasn’t there. Mordecai Young, her father, wasn’t there. He was dead. Gone.
“I…I think I was sleepwalking,” she managed to say.
She saw them, saw them all looking from the broken cup and spilled coffee on the floor to the nearly full pot on the counter, to the robe and slippers she had put on. They didn’t believe her.
She didn’t blame them.
4
Jax sipped her coffee and actively resisted the temptation to revisit the platter of sausage links on her mother’s perfectly set kitchen table.
“Have some more, hon. You’re too thin.”
She smiled. Her mother would say she was too thin no matter what her current weight was. Though, in Jax’s considered opinion, her mom could use a few pounds of padding. The woman had the body of a thirty-year-old. Only her face showed the signs of her age—or, more likely, the stresses of her past. You didn’t see it in her blond hair. She kept it colored, cut and styled to perfection.
“I couldn’t eat another bite, Mom. Besides, I have to get into town. Don’t want to be late my first day.”
“Oh.” Mariah frowned. “Oh, well, then, never mind.”
Jax slanted a look from her mother to her father, who shook his head. “Don’t bother Cassie today, hon. I told you, I can take that stuff over for her and drop the other things off, as well.”
Frowning, and curious, Jax said, “What stuff?”
“Your mother has an ice chest packed full of food for you, is all,” her father said. “Thinks you might starve to death in a house without groceries, and a whole mile from the nearest store.” He pointed to a cooler in the corner of the room. It sat right beside a box of clothing.
Jax smiled, because he’d nailed her mom so well. “I can take it for you.”
“No, I won’t hear of it,” Ben said. “I’ve got to go into town anyway, take that box of castoffs to the Goodwill.”
An idea crept into her brain as she followed his gaze to the huge cardboard box that sat in the corner near the cooler. Piles of folded clothes filled it. She tried to ignore the notion, and couldn’t. “What sorts of castoffs?”
“Clothes. Shoes. Your mother didn’t throw a thing of mine out the entire time I was…away. Kept everything. Most of those don’t even fit me anymore. Came across them in the attic, when we were going through it looking for things you could use for the house.”
Mariah shot him a look. “Ben,
