Officer out of Uniform (Lock and Key Book 2) (11 page)

And he’d pulled that off by promising her a date – dinner at his place – which reminded him that he needed to get moving if he was going to deliver on that promise.

Unlike her, he was no chef, but he could pull something halfway decent together. As soon as he got inside, he spared a greeting for Wolf, pulled a package of chicken breasts out of the fridge and headed to the back yard, where he kept a small grill.

Wolf followed him, as usual, but something wasn’t right. Instead of plunking down by the grill to watch Henry’s every movement as he handled the meat, he trotted across the yard and started sniffing at a spot by the fence.

The hair on the back of Henry’s neck stood up. He didn’t know why, but he didn’t question it, either. He called Wolf to him, told him to stay by the back door and then approached the fence alone.

There was something in the grass, by the chain link. He grabbed the grill tongs and used them to pick up what looked like a wet, green sandwich. As he examined it, a sickly, familiar smell filled his lungs.

Antifreeze. The old kind they’d been making up until recently, without added bittering agents. The sandwich – or whatever it was – was dripping with it.

A cold, clenching feeling struck Henry in the gut. How long had the deadly temptation been there?

He rose and carried it inside, telling Wolf to follow.

He quadruple-bagged the poisoned food in Ziploc bags before throwing it in the trash and emptying the can, taking the bag out to the bin by the curb, where Wolf wouldn’t be exposed to it. By the time he returned to the house, his jaw ached and he could feel his pulse pounding in his temples like a war drum.

Five years ago, he’d brought Wolf home as a pup. His training had started that day, and Henry had thrown himself into it, teaching the dog the right way to act, the right way to do everything, from his first lessons walking on a leash to bite work.

It was the closest thing to therapy he’d ever embraced, after the obligatory sessions he’d been put through while still in the Marine Corps. Giving Wolf a carefully-constructed set of rules and expectations had helped him forget that without the Marine Corps, he hadn’t known how to live his own life.

One of the first things he’d taught Wolf, per the instructions in the guard dog training book he’d bought on the day he’d brought him home, had been not to eat or pick up strange objects. Not even discarded food or trash.

Now, Wolf sat on his haunches, staring at Henry.

“Good boy,” Henry said, reaching out and rubbing the soft fur on top of his head. The velvet-soft edges of Wolf’s ears slipped against his fingers, and the dog’s heavy tail thumped against the floor with rhythmic force. Henry couldn’t imagine the house they both called home without that sound.

After a few moments he retrieved the chicken he’d left in the back yard, his gaze drilling the tree line behind his house so hard it gave him a headache. Every muscle in his body was tense, primed to tear apart whoever had tried to kill his dog.

There was no one in sight though, and he had things to do before Sasha arrived. He changed out of his uniform and into jeans and a t-shirt, then climbed back into his truck, taking Wolf with him. There was a local hardware place where the owner wouldn’t mind Wolf coming inside. Besides, Henry only needed a few things in order to seal the dog door shut.

Wolf wouldn’t like not being able to come and go at his leisure while Henry was at work, but it’d be for his own good. Henry would make the alteration as soon as he got back to the house. He still needed to throw something together for dinner, but grilling was out now that he knew someone had been prowling his back yard.

He’d come up with something. Food was the least of his worries now. Anger and doubt plagued him – had he made a mistake by inviting Sasha to his home?

The thought gave him a chill that had nothing to do with the way he’d cranked up the truck’s air conditioning, and for a second he considered calling her and cancelling the whole evening.

He couldn’t do it, though. Not after the way she’d come to the door the other day. Alone in her apartment, she was at risk. And if someone had been watching him, they might already have seen her with him and identified her.

If someone had targeted his dog, they might very well target a person he cared about. Maybe the soggy sandwich had been the action of a cruel, unsupervised brat of a kid. Or maybe it had been something much worse. For now, there was no way to know.

Henry couldn’t shake the feeling that Sasha would be better off with him and Wolf for company, for protection. 

He glanced at his rearview mirror, searching for any signs that he was being followed.

Everything seemed normal, though a familiar sense of wariness – a sixth sense, really – told him that was an illusion.

* * * * *

It was dark. Sasha couldn’t say exactly when night had fallen; it had just happened at some point, slipping over the highway and the surrounding landscape like a thick blanket, glittering dully with stars that were dimmed by a haze of gauzy clouds.

She felt the silence of the night pressing down on the earth, despite the fact that the radio was on. With Raleigh hours behind her, she was deep into rural territory and there were few lights to illuminate the darkness. It occurred to her that the night her father had died had been like this one.

He’d been driving home from a night class at the college, the American Literature course he’d started teaching for the first time that summer semester. He’d probably never seen the truck coming into his lane until the last second, had probably been traveling toward home with thoughts of a late dinner on his mind, headlights cutting through a hot Carolina night, illuminating familiar scenery.

Much like Sasha was doing now. She was even thinking of dinner, but not because she was particularly hungry. No, she and her mother had had a big lunch, and it was the thought of seeing Henry that made her long for home.

An hour or so ago, he’d called and told her that she was welcome to spend the night. He’d said something about her being tired after so much driving, about not wanting her to have to worry about getting home after what was going to be a very late meal.

She’d agreed. She
did
have a spare change of clothing in her overnight bag, after all. And she couldn’t help but think that maybe he regretted holding out the night before and wanted to make up for lost time. The thought made her heart skip a beat.

What he’d done for her the night before had been good, but there was no such thing as an adequate substitute for having him inside her, for running her hands over his body and feeling every muscle tense and tighten as he drove himself deep into her. She relished the thought of experiencing that again, but most of all, she longed just to see him.

A day devoted to remembering her father had gone much as she’d expected it to. She’d cherished the memories they had, regretting at the same time that there hadn’t been more. Finite and precious, she held onto all the good times they’d shared like treasured possessions. Of course, she valued them more now than she had before she’d lost him.

It was a sad truth, but wasn’t that always how it went?

The thought inspired a deep heartache. She was lucky to have people she cared about, and knew death would eventually separate her from all of them. With an old sense of loss rekindled by the anniversary of her father’s death, she was desperate not to make the same mistake again. She’d only have a certain number of moments with each person in her life, and she wanted to make the most of them. Who knew which one would be the last?

She was afraid of losing the people she loved, but most of all, she was afraid of not loving them enough while she still had them.

The thought applied to everyone she cared about: her mother and her best friends, Kerry and Alicia. And Henry. He stood out particularly clearly in her mind – no surprise, considering that she was on her way to see him.

Bold emotion gripped her, and she knew with certainty that what she felt for him was something worth holding onto, something worth cultivating. She couldn’t try to hide it any longer. He was someone she could love. He was someone she
wanted
to love.

There was no way she could be content with just a summer fling.

* * * * *

All the air was inexplicably knocked out of Henry’s lungs when Sasha pulled up in his driveway. He’d been expecting her – watching for her.

Meanwhile, he’d thrown together a modest dinner while listening to his police scanner. No news on the warden’s murderer, no mention of Randy Levinson. With a crescent moon hanging thin and dull in the sky, the outskirts of Cypress were dark and it was easy to imagine a fresh crime scene cropping up.

He escorted her into the house quickly, carrying her overnight bag, letting his fingers rest on the small of her back. It was a relief when they were inside and the door was locked behind them.

“How was your trip?” he asked, his mind still crackling with the sound of radio static. How was it that the police still hadn’t acted on the obvious: the fact that Randy Levinson was back?

“Good,” she said, and that was all. Uncharacteristic, for her.

“Was it a special occasion?”

She nodded. “It’s the anniversary of my dad’s death. We always spend it together, and lay flowers on his grave.”

“Sorry. I didn’t know.”

“I know you didn’t.”

Her full mouth turned down a little at the corners, going a shade beyond her usual sexy pout, leaving her looking sad.

“Has he been gone long?”

Henry asked because that’s what he would’ve wanted. Some people might’ve steered away from the subject, but he knew treating any mention of the dead as taboo only made the pain of losing them worse. Thinking about someone you couldn’t talk about was isolating, and it wore you down over time. It’d taken him a while to accept that, but it was true.

He’d know. He had good and bad memories of those he’d lost. In the privacy of his own mind, the bad ones usually won out. He couldn’t talk about those though, and the good ones were different. After years of resistance, he could now relive those out loud, if he had the chance. And that shed a little light into the dark corners where the bad ones lurked.

“He died when I was sixteen, in a car accident.” Sasha sighed. “Sometimes it seems like a lifetime ago, and other times it feels like it was just the other day. I guess it really has been too long for me to be making a big deal out of it now, though.”

“Don’t say that. He was your father – that is a big deal.”

Self-consciousness had flickered in her eyes before she’d cut herself short, and he didn’t want her to feel like she had to mask her true feelings just because a certain number of years had gone by. There was no magic number that dissolved the bonds of grief. When you lost someone, that changed you forever.

“You’re right. I guess I just didn’t expect you to see it that way. When my dad died, we lived in a small town and it seemed like everyone came to his funeral. My mom and I were practically buried alive in casseroles … for the first week. By the time I graduated from high school two years later though, it felt like everyone had forgotten except me and my mom. Everyone else seemed to be over it.”

“People are like that,” Henry said. “They don’t remember what they don’t feel themselves. It’s human nature – they were over it from the second it happened, and their sympathy was exhausted shortly thereafter.”

Sasha’s eyes widened a little. “That’s exactly right – I mean, that’s exactly how it felt. By the time I graduated school, I was so upset with everyone for forgetting that I decided to leave the state.

“I went to culinary school in Louisiana. Nobody there had ever known my dad, so there was no reason to be upset with them for not knowing, let alone caring. Eventually I came back to North Carolina, but never to my hometown.”

Her confession slid between his ribs like an arrow and pierced a sympathetic vein. He’d done the same thing – moved to a new town, started a new life. After electing not to re-enlist after the end of his contract and being discharged from the Marine Corps, he hadn’t been interested in returning home.

He wasn’t the same person he’d been when he’d left, and going back would’ve meant constantly being reminded of that, always running into people who didn’t understand.

He’d been stationed at Camp LeJeune before his discharge, and had lingered in North Carolina, taking a job at Riley a couple months later, ready to start something new – something that wasn’t a constant reminder of what he’d lost, or who he’d been before that. He was hours from the small town in Georgia where he’d grown up. Like Sasha, he had no plans to return.

She stood still and quiet now, studying him as she frowned, her sadness etched into her face.