sort of…” He held out his hands, palms up. “Keep you off the floor.”
She looked at him curiously, making him wonder just how descriptive this Lois person had been. Had she told Arden that he’d rested her head in the hollow where his rib cage divided, that his hands had cradled her shoulder blades while that younger woman coached her on breathing?
He remembered looking at the gray-haired lady to get her read on what was happening and receiving only a worried frown and a sad shake of her head.
That might have been when he’d slid his hand from beneath Arden’s back long enough to brush a silky, stray curl off her cheek. The sequence of events during that eternal wait for the ambulance ran together and blurred in his memory, but he remembered the feel of her hair. Too well.
“Lois told me that you attacked a man for taking my picture.”
“Attacked? No.”
“Verbally.”
“He was a jackal.”
It had been a crass invasion of Arden’s privacy for the guy to take her picture in those circumstances, but Ledge conceded that he might have overreacted. Unknowingly, the fellow had triggered a memory of Afghanistan. Pinned down and helpless to prevent it, Ledge had watched as men photographed soldiers already dead, their bodies butchered post-mortem, some American, some their own countrymen.
“No mercy for jackals,” he mumbled.
He could tell by Arden’s expression that she didn’t grasp the subtext, but she didn’t deviate from the subject. “You stayed in the store with Lois and a few others, waiting to find out…” She let the rest go unspoken.
“It seemed the decent thing to do.”
She was still regarding him in that curious, almost wary, manner. “Well, this explains how you recognized me yesterday when I came to your shop,” she said. “But it makes me wonder why you didn’t take credit for your involvement that day.”
“Because only a prick would take credit.”
“That’s the only reason?”
“Sensitive subject like that, I didn’t want to embarrass you.”
She nodded, but not like she wholeheartedly accepted that explanation. Shaking off the pensive demeanor, she drew herself up straighter. “My visitor drove past.”
“When?”
“A couple of hours ago.”
“Damn. I got here an hour too late.”
“You’ve been lying in wait?”
“Down there by the road, hoping I’d catch him at it.”
“That explains the camo getup.”
“For all the good it did me. Are you sure it was your regular?”
“Yes, I recognize the sound of the motor.”
“What’s it sound like?”
She gave a shrug of confusion. “A car. But it does have a distinctive sound.”
He tried to make sense of that, but it escaped him.
“Where’s your truck?”
“Parked in the cypress grove.” He thumbed in the general direction. “I used a road that brought me in from the west to the back of your property. I walked from there.”
“So I wouldn’t know you were here.”
“So he wouldn’t know.”
“I doubt he would have spotted you. Out there in the dark, you would have been well concealed.”
Had she put on that ungodly outfit to conceal herself from him? If so, she’d been too late. He’d gotten a tantalizing eyeful while she was waggling that nine-millimeter at him. Underneath her short nightgown, the dips and distentions had been impossible not to notice, and even more impossible to ignore. As was the disturbance they’d created below his belt.
“Well?”
He realized she had continued talking while his mind had drifted to shapely bare legs and a slipping shoulder strap. “I’m sorry, what?”
Exasperated, she said, “Did you come here tonight to see if the bogeyman was real or a figment of my imagination?”
“I believe he’s real.”
“Thank you for taking my word for it.”
“I didn’t. Animal instinct.”
“Oh, really? Is your animal instinct so reliable that you always act on it?”
He waited a beat. “Not always.” Another beat. “Bad as I want to.”
His suggestiveness wasn’t intentional. Or maybe it was. But in any case, the words caused a subtle but definite shift, not only a straying from the topic of discussion, but a change in the current between them, a thickening of the room’s atmosphere. He felt the increase of air pressure in every cell of his body. The ticking of the wall clock seemed to be keeping beat with something other than passing seconds.
She must have sensed it, too, because she didn’t say anything, or move, and her eyes stayed locked with his, as though any reaction might trigger something uncertain and unsafe.
Then her cell phone jangled, and she jumped like she’d been scalded.
She shuffled backward away from him and glanced down at the phone where it lay on the