sorry! Goddamn it, I’m sorry, okay?”
She licked dry lips. “Thank you for saying it. That’s better than not saying it. But no. It’s not okay.”
“You love me. I know you do.” He took a couple more steps toward her, his voice now low and persuasive. Warm, affectionate. “Jesus, Cait. I’ve gotten your message, loud and clear. I swear I won’t do anything like that again. Why won’t you believe me?”
“Maybe because you swore two other times that you wouldn’t hit me again? And, oh gee, you did?” Making a decision, she yanked her phone out and dialed 911 really fast.
“You knew you were pissing me off!” The guttural, furious note was back. He seemed oblivious to the phone.
In the yellow light of the overhead lamps, she saw that his hands had knotted into fists. The sight made her pulse rocket. She slid one foot back, then the other. Please, please, please, let somebody come outside. A car pull in.
If she said no often enough, he’d eventually have to believe her, wouldn’t he?
“I don’t love you anymore. You killed what I felt for you. You need to accept that.” Cait brandished the phone so he couldn’t miss it. “If you don’t leave right now, I’m calling the police. If I have to scream, a dozen people will come running out of the health club.”
His face was ugly, transformed by shock and rage. She was shaking, and she hated knowing he could make her so afraid.
I should run.
He’d be on her before she could round the corner of the building.
She was still frozen with indecision when he snarled an invective and turned to her small car, then kicked the bumper until the car rocked.
“You bitch!” he yelled, and used his booted foot to crumple the fender. As she watched in shock, he circled the car, kicking, smashing, doing to it what he wanted to do to her.
Backing away, gasping for breath, she tore her gaze from him long enough to look down at the phone. Just as she reached the corner of the building, she pressed Send.
At that very moment, he went still and stared at her across the distance separating them. His voice floated to her, quiet compared to the invectives. “I will never accept that you’re not mine.”
Terrified now, Cait ran for the lighted front of the health club.
* * *
“TODAY’S MAIL,” RUTH LANG announced and plopped a pile in front of Noah. Of course, she’d already slit each piece of mail open and paper-clipped the correspondence to the envelope.
He grimaced. “Thanks, Ruth.”
His assistant’s predecessor had retired when Mayor Linarelli lost the election. In the first week after he’d taken office, Noah had chosen Ruth, middle-aged, brisk and efficient, from internal applications. There’d never been a moment of regret. Choosing the right personnel was one of his strengths, although he was beginning to realize that hiring a bartender wasn’t quite the same as hiring a city engineer or attorney. He’d been glad to have the chance to do both, but there were days he thought all he did was hire. Half the long-timers had decided to retire when they saw the way the wind blew with Linarelli gone.
Ruth smiled sympathetically. “That’s what you get for advertising two jobs at once.”
Yeah, it was. He wanted to get somebody competent in the job of city recorder, but his real interest was in filling the position of director of community development. Angel Butte had stagnated compared to comparable towns within a three-county area. The only significant move to alter that before his tenure had been the annexation that doubled the size of the city while leaving it struggling to provide expected services. Like too many city employees, the former head of planning had been an old crony, unimaginative and more interested in hanging on to the way things had always been done than he was in new trends in the field. Noah had been hoping that, at sixty-two, he was starting to think retirement. What happened instead was a heart attack. The guy had survived, but he’d admitted to Noah that his wife had put her foot down and refused to hear about him returning to work.
Noah had hoped for more applications than he’d received so far. He supposed Angel Butte seemed isolated to most potential applicants, a backwater with a lousy climate. But the area was booming economically thanks to tourism. It was beautiful, and there had to be some people in the field who loved to ski or hike or fish. Or, hell, just wanted to breathe air that wasn’t yellow with smog, or commute five minutes to work instead of spending two hours a day crawling in heavy traffic on the freeway.
He’d already received three online applications that morning. Now, he flipped through the day’s mail, which included several more résumés for people interested in the city recorder job and five for the community development one. Two of those he tossed in the recycling bin after barely a skim. Two were possibles, but not exciting. The fifth... He couldn’t quite decide. In one way, she was overqualified, apparently only months from receiving an interdisciplinary PhD in urban design and planning. Actual work experience was somewhat scantier—after getting her master’s degree in urban planning from the University of Washington, she’d worked as a planner in community development in Kitsap County, on the other side of Puget Sound from Seattle. From there she’d gone to Spokane, where she’d spent a year completing a special position as parks project manager, preparing an updated plan for the city’s parks and open spaces. She’d included excellent letters of recommendation, as well as one from her dissertation adviser at the UW. Noah had advertised for someone with a minimum of four years’ experience in a position of comparable seniority to the one in Angel Butte. This woman didn’t quite have that—although close if he added in her various internships—but she shone if he wanted someone with cutting-edge knowledge of the field.
He glanced again at her name. Caitlyn McAllister. As it registered, a frown gathered on his forehead. The last name had to be coincidence. Didn’t it? He went back to the first page of the résumé to see when she’d received her degrees. BA in political science from Whitman College... The date of graduation likely put her in her late twenties now. Thirty at most, if she’d been a slow bloomer.
He had no idea whether police captain Colin McAllister had a sister. If this Cait was related to him, that might explain why someone of her education was interested in a town so off the beaten path. On the other hand—as pissed as McAllister was, as undecided as he was about his future in Angel Butte—surely his sister wouldn’t have applied to work closely with his sworn enemy, the man who had in his eyes betrayed him.
Damn it, if she was related to McAllister, did he even want to consider hiring her?
Noah read her qualifications again and, impressed, thought, Why not? By the time they reached the interview stage, he might have half a dozen other strong candidates. So far, though, she was the cream of the crop.
He reached for his telephone.
* * *
CAIT’S EYE CAUGHT the blue-and-white roadside sign. Entering the City of Angel Butte, Population 38,312.
Oh, boy. She hadn’t expected to be so nervous. She didn’t even know why she was. Some of her memories of the years before her mother had taken her away weren’t so good, but she also had happy ones. So it wasn’t the town, per se.
Seeing her brother, maybe? The farther she’d gotten down the road, the more she wished
