done something just for her. Was it only for her sake? Or was he just paying her back for the things she’d said earlier? Maybe he wanted to even the score. Or have her owe him.
Delia shifted in her seat, pulling her elbows tightly against her sides, her closed hands pressed against her hips below the table. He might have done something nice, but that didn’t mean she owed him.
She would never owe any man. Anything. Ever.
She drew in a ragged breath and let it out slowly. Now she was really being paranoid. If Ben did have an ulterior motive for directing attention to her, it was probably just to deflect some of it away from him. And who would blame him for that after the day he had just spent?
If only she didn’t always have to question people’s motives. Didn’t have to suspect that there was an evil grin lurking behind every smiling face. But she couldn’t help it. Some hard-learned lessons couldn’t be forgotten no matter how much she wished she could whitewash the gate guarding her memories.
She risked one more peek at him. One too many. He was looking back at her, watching so closely that he could have described each of her pores. Only this didn’t feel like an examination. More of a caress, really. One that smoothed from her temples to her baby toes. And from the heat building in her private places, that touch hadn’t missed any tourist stop along the way, either.
Hell, even her arches tingled.
Then it was over. Well, on his end, anyway. He turned away as if nothing had happened. She, on the other hand, was too shocked to do anything but hold herself perfectly still, as her frayed nerve endings still snapped with sparks. Obviously she was out of practice at reading signals from men, not that she’d been all that good at it when she was in practice. But her reaction now was not just inappropriate, it was downright indecent.
You know you wanted it.
She swallowed, ice water dousing the heat that had radiated along her skin. Those words and their speaker shouldn’t still have been able to reach out from the past to club her, but they could and had. The few bites she’d managed to swallow turned to acid in her stomach. Swirling. Clenching. She couldn’t go back there. If she allowed herself to slip down those shadowy halls and become lost in that maze of lies and blame, she might never find her way back.
“You okay, Delia?”
It took her a few seconds to decipher the concern creasing his brows. What had he seen? Had she given herself away? “Oh. Just a headache.” She rubbed her temples with her thumbs for effect. If only it were that easy to rub away those thoughts.
He indicated farther down the table with a tilt of his head. “Let Kelly know if you need something for it. She carries a whole pharmacy in that big bag of hers.”
“Hey, I resent that.” Trooper Roberts showed off a large lime-green purse without a bit of shame and then stowed it under the table.
Delia pushed around a piece of chicken on her salad. There was no way she’d be able to eat another bite. She wanted to believe that the past could no longer break her, but it was sure giving it the old college try.
At least Ben didn’t try to start another conversation because she couldn’t look him in the eye now. If she dared, she might do something unforgivable like melt into a puddle on the floor. Or, worse, tell him about her past. She squashed that thought immediately. That it had even crossed her mind was unacceptable. She would never again tell anyone. She’d shared her story once, and look where that had gotten her.
What was going on with her, anyway? For someone who prided herself on having an absolute immunity to men, she needed a booster shot where Ben Peterson was concerned. No, make that Lieutenant Peterson. Impersonal. Distant. The way it was supposed to be. Until she built up some resistance to this particular strain of male, she needed to avoid the exposure zone.
BEN STOMPED UP the front steps to the 1930s farmhouse his friends had deemed “the project.” To him it was just home. He grimaced as a loose floorboard creaked when he reached the wraparound porch. Something else to fix. Just like the mess he’d made at the Driftwood. As if things between him and a certain trooper hadn’t been awkward enough today, he’d just made them a whole lot worse.
His freezing hands fumbled with the keys, and they dropped to the snow-dusted wood with a thunk. It just figured he would have forgotten to leave the outside light on tonight. Why did he continually forget when he knew how dark it was out in the country? Grumbling, he crouched near the door and patted around him until his fingers closed over the keys. After several of his misdirected jabs, he finally slipped the key into the lock.
He pushed the door open, welcoming the rush of heat that struck his face even before he could reach inside to switch on the light. With the corncob-quality insulation in these walls, this would be the only time he felt warmth in this place all night. He kicked the door shut harder than he’d planned to and then braced for the sound of breaking glass. The near complete silence that only those who live outside of city limits ever experience filled the space instead.
As he rounded the corner into the formal living room, a collection of faces stared back at him, their photo frames askew but still clinging to the wall. Enlarged color snapshots featured a silver-headed couple with a boy at various ages, but most of the images were in black and white. A portrait of the great-grandparents he’d only known from their stories took the center spot in the display. They weren’t smiling, either.
“Your week must have been as bad as mine.”
As Ben hung his coat on the antique coat tree and zipped on the sweatshirt he always wore inside the house, his gaze followed the lines of the Victorian furniture that had been there for as long as he could remember. There probably wasn’t a single piece that had anything more than sentimental value, but they all had plenty of that to spare. Except for the goldfish bowl on the bookshelf, nothing in this room had changed in thirty years.
On his way through the house, Ben smoothed his hand along the dark wooden doorway molding. Admiring some of the woodwork he’d restored himself usually calmed him after a stressful shift, but there was nothing usual about this week. He braced himself for another onslaught of images he would never forget, shouts ringing again in his ears, the pungent scent of his own fear still fresh in his nostrils. He’d hated the stink of it, even then.
He shivered, telling himself it was only from the cold. He could lie to himself if he wanted to. The house felt chillier tonight, anyway. Bigger. And emptier. The hollow echoes of his own footsteps chased him on the creaky floors as he continued into the kitchen. As he’d done so many nights before, he washed vegetables, diced chicken and sprinkled spices. Only after the chicken in the wok had turned white and the pea pods and water chestnuts were sizzling in the sesame oil did he remember that he’d already eaten.
Slamming a plastic container on the countertop, he poured the meal inside it to refrigerate for later. He should have known better than to show up at the Driftwood tonight after his crazy day at work. And not just because of the pep session, either. If he’d known that Delia would be there, he would have headed straight home. Technically, she’d warned him that she planned to show up, but he’d had no reason to believe her. He could count on one hand the number of times she’d joined them at either of the haunts where the officers gathered after their shifts, so he couldn’t account for her presence any more than he could explain the spike of his pulse when he’d seen her there.
Even now, he wasn’t sure how he’d made it across the
