Chapter Thirteen
NOON FOUND COLE once again leaning against his truck in the parking lot outside Hope Hill. He watched the facilities and the people hurrying between buildings, coming and going from lunch. None of them looked like a traitor. He needed progress. One damn clue. Anything. Those burner phones the traitor used had to be somewhere.
He had only three more offices to search, and seven patient rooms.
He’d gotten an eyeful when spying on the acupuncturist, but what he’d seen hadn’t exactly moved him forward.
Milo had had a young woman with him—maybe the girl was twenty, if that. They’d both been naked. Milo had been on the treatment table, acting out some fantasy, the woman’s lips moving up and down an impressive erection. But the sex act wasn’t what left Cole mentally scarred. What had him jerking his head back was the fact that Milo had about two dozen stainless-steel needles sticking out of his ball sack.
Like a freaking porcupine down there.
Who did that?
First thing this morning, Cole had canceled all his scheduled acupuncture treatments.
Since that left a hole in his schedule today, he’d gone swimming earlier than usual, and . . . Annie.
Her mad dive into the pool, the way his heart stopped, her see-through shirt, the way his heart stopped again—he didn’t know what to do with any of that. He knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to kiss her again.
He didn’t go to her morning feeding with her. He’d tracked her down and offered, but she’d said Detective Finnegan would be stopping by. The man had more questions and wanted to look at the house and yard again in the light of day.
Maybe he’d find footprints.
Instead of going with Annie, Cole had texted his mother, checking in—she was fine, other than some big drama at the knitting club. After she finally let him go—once he agreed that Letty was definitely copying her colors—he went for a run and bumped into Trevor on his way back. Trevor had been sitting in the courtyard with a sketch pad.
“Didn’t know you were an artist,” Cole said.
“Planning a new barn for my mother. She loves her horses.” He showed Cole his drawings. “I work on it every day. Takes my mind off other things. Kind of relaxing.”
Cole was glad to see the guy relaxed. He left Trev with a few encouraging words and went back to his room to text his CO with an update. They’d agreed on regular check-ins.
His CO texted back.
Msgs are still going to Yemen
2 in the past 3 days
And Cole thought, Shit.
Then noon rolled around, and Cole found himself in the parking lot once again.
“Need some company?” he asked when Annie showed up.
Her gaze hovered in the vicinity of his neck, and she wouldn’t look any higher. “Thanks, but I’m good. I have some errands to run. I won’t be back for a while.”
He shouldn’t have said anything about her nipples back at the pool. The sight of her clothes stuck to her body had poleaxed him. His body stirred at the memory.
“I’m going crazy in this place,” he said. “I need to get out for a while. You said we could be friends.”
After a moment, she gave a reluctant nod.
Relief loosened the tension in his shoulders. “Truck?”
“Car. I have to get groceries.”
He went around to the Prius’s passenger side.
“Finnegan have anything new?” he asked as he got in.
“Not yet.”
“I don’t like the idea of you going to the house alone.”
She didn’t tell him to mind his own business, but she looked as if the words were on the tip of her tongue.
Don’t think about her tongue.
They took care of the animals and bought groceries. They also stopped by the small PD so she could be fingerprinted, which took less than ten minutes.
When she drove by her house, he said, “You missed the driveway.”
“The food is for my grandfather.” The skin tightened around her eyes. “Sylvia, his housekeeper, has a bad back. She can’t carry heavy grocery bags anymore.”
Annie’s stiff posture said there was a story there somewhere about the grandfather. For one, Cole wondered for the first time, why wasn’t she staying with the grandfather instead of at Hope Hill?
Annie drove to the end of the block, turned right, drove past the cornfield, turned right again at the next stop sign. She pulled over in front of a hundred-year-old brick farmhouse. “You don’t have to come in.”
Cole was already reaching for the handle. “I don’t mind. I’ll help you carry the groceries.”
She was so clearly dreading the visit, he almost told her to stay in the car and he’d carry the bags in, but he had no right to interfere in her family business.
They found the eighty-something man alone, sitting in his striped blue pajamas in the kitchen, reading the paper. He didn’t smile at Annie, didn’t hug her, didn’t thank her for the food.
“Who’s that?” were the first words out of his mouth, his eyes slanting toward Cole.
Annie turned toward Cole as she responded. She hadn’t once forgotten, from their first session, that he needed to see her lips. “A friend from Hope Hill. His name is Cole.”
“One of the looneys?”
“He has trouble with hearing, so if you talk to him, you have to turn toward him. He needs to read your lips.”
Instead, the old man turned away, but not enough so Cole couldn’t read his next question. “You sleeping with him?”
He read the words almost as clearly as he read the disgust and censure on the old man’s face.
Annie’s expression tightened. She began putting food in the refrigerator while Cole hesitated, unsure how to defend her.
The guy was old and frail, his disapproval the strongest thing about him. A two-hundred-pound Navy SEAL mowing his ass down wouldn’t be right. And he was Annie’s grandfather. She clearly cared about him enough to help him.
She shot Cole a let-me-handle-it look.
So Cole stood there, fuming silently. He prayed the old geezer didn’t lay into Annie again, because Cole wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep from saying something he might regret later.
“Sorry about that,” Annie said when they were back in the car, her slim hand hesitating on the key in the ignition.
“You have nothing to apologize for.”
“We don’t get along.”
“Why?”
“When my mom was twenty, going to college at WCU, she got pregnant by an older guy in town. Turned out, he also got another woman pregnant at the same time. He chose the other woman and the other kid.”
Annie’s face was so studiously impassive, Cole knew the rejection still hurt her.
“So then my mom quit college to raise me. She went to work as a cashier at the grocery store. We spent the first eleven years of my life living with my grandfather. He called my mother a slut and a whore at least fifty times a day, until she couldn’t take it anymore. She got a new job in Delaware, and we moved there.”
Her expression had been closed and her muscles tight since they’d pulled into the driveway, but now the look in her eyes turned dark and bleak.
“What happened in Delaware, Annie?” Cole asked as softly as possible, and held his breath for the answer.
She stared past him, out the passenger side window as her lips formed a single word. “Randy.”
“Who is Randy?” Other than a man Cole needed to kill.
Her gaze snapped to him, as if she’d only now realized she’d spoken out loud.
“He was my mother’s boyfriend.” She drove away from the farmhouse. “Need to go anywhere before we go back to Hope Hill?”
She straightened her spine, filled her lungs, and turned her tight expression into a neutral one. From the way she was desperately avoiding looking at him, he was pretty sure no further questions on the subject would be answered.
He glanced at the clock on the dashboard. “I have PT in half an hour. I’d better get back.”
Even if what he really wanted to do was go wherever this Randy lived and ask the asshole what he’d done to put that look into Annie’s eyes.
She drove in silence.
“I’m going to your feedings with you from now on,” he said. “Until they catch the intruder, you shouldn’t go alone.”
He was aware that he wasn’t giving her a choice. He couldn’t. Her safety wasn’t up for negotiation.
He expected her to push back.
“Harper said the same thing. That I shouldn’t go alone,” she said instead. “OK. Thanks. I appreciate it.” And then she added, “Sorry about my grandfather.”
“You don’t have to be sorry on my account. But he should treat you better.”
He wondered if the old man put her down regularly like he’d done with that are-you-sleeping-with-him comment.
Yet Annie still took care of the man. She was not only courageous, but she was loyal too, another attribute Cole valued highly.
He wanted to protect her. He was going to go with her again at six and at midnight.
After that, he was going to search the three remaining offices. Hopefully without running into someone else with needles in his ball sack.