The Promise He Made Her (4 page)

He hadn't been smiling. His expression still fell.

“What...”

“...I will be the provocation used to drive Kenneth Freelander to his rewards.”

There was no other option.

 

CHAPTER FIVE

S
AM
DIDN
'
T
LIKE
misleading her. And he damned straight wasn't going to lie to her. He'd tell her the truth—that there was no way he was letting her get anywhere near that bastard ex-husband of hers again—as soon as he had her safely out of that house.

He made the promise to himself, and silently to her, Sunday afternoon during the entire fifteen minutes it took him to get from the foot of his dirt drive to the fancy winding street that housed the two-acre beach lots where Freelander had brought her to live. With a stop at the room he'd rented to drop off Lucy.

The girl had not been pleased with him. At all. Hadn't cared a whit about the meaty bone he'd left her. No, she'd been 100 percent into the guilt. Giving him that big brown-eyed stare, the drooped ears and lips.

Just like a female...

Sam shook his head. Lucy was the best. Loyal. A great companion. And best of all...forgiving.

She might be displeased with him at the moment, but she'd be as thrilled as hell when he got back. And she didn't hold a grudge.

Bloom was not outside waiting for him. Her car wasn't in the driveway.

In his usual cotton dress pants, shirt and loafers, he stepped out of the car, straightening his tie as he prepared for battle.

When he knocked, she had to unlock the front door to let him in. But she did so. And stood there looking more gorgeous than ever with her long legs mostly covered by the calf-length, short-sleeved, multicolored T-shirt-style dress she was wearing. With sandals.

She'd pulled her hair back, loosely. Was wearing no earrings—though he noted a second piercing in both of her ears—and stepped back to let him in.

He'd have told her he liked what she'd done with the place, except that she'd thrown white sheets over everything minus the shiny wood floors.

“You have bags for me to carry?” He wanted to get this done. With as little conversation—and chance for something to go backward on him—as possible.

“They're out in my car. And before you tell me I have to leave that, too, I'm telling you right now, I'm not going to.”

The damned Jaguar. “Why you hang on to a car he bought you, I have no idea.” Sam shut his mouth so fast he almost bit his tongue. See, these were the things that could go wrong, he reminded himself.

“Make no mistake, Detective...”

He didn't like the formality one bit.

“...I paid for that car. Dearly.”

Still, who held on to anything that was a part of, or came from, someone who'd brutalized you so cruelly...

Unless, in spite of everything, she wasn't really over Kenneth Freelander. Was possibly even still in love with him. It happened. He knew only too well from his work with the High Risk Team.

And if she did still hold feelings for her ex...his job just got that much more difficult.

“I didn't ever intend for you to give up your car,” he said now, hoping he could backpedal enough to get her safely ensconced in his home.

His temporary ex-home. For as long as this took.

“I just figured you'd need to put some things in my SUV. It's bigger.”

“I've got what I need.”

Had she understood? “You won't be coming back here. Not even to pick things up.”

“Unless the laws have changed overnight, or I'm under arrest, I can go anywhere I please. Whenever I please.”

True. But...

“However, I've agreed to be under protection, with the understanding that I am your bait, dangled in front of my ex-husband under your auspices, not his. And I'm good for my word. I expect, if Kenneth really is out to get me, he'll take our bait fairly quickly and this will all be over. If not, it will be over anyway because I won't be in any danger.”

“I don't expect him to jump on you the second he's out, Bloom. You know him better than I do, but from what I've gleaned, he's a man who plans carefully before he brushes his teeth in the morning.”

A bit of an exaggeration. But not much.

“That's true,” she said, eyeing him with something that looked a little bit like respect. It was the first time she'd met his gaze since she'd let him in the door.

“So...if I find I need something I've left behind, I'll let you know and you can come get it for me. How does that work?”

He could live with that. And wanted to leave it alone from there. But...

“Do you at least have everything that means something to you?” he pressed. “As in, if this house were to burn down, you'd have everything that was irreplaceable?”

Freelander had threatened to burn down the place. But he could just as easily trash it, or anything that mattered to her, depending on his mood.

“Most of what I can't live without, along with my will and all important papers, are locked in a safe in my office.” She'd surprised him again. Wasn't nearly as naive as she'd been when he'd known her before. But then, she wasn't drugged anymore, either.

He made a mental note not to underestimate her again.

“I've got the rest in the car.”

Picturing the backseat of the Jaguar, he wondered what she'd put there. Wanted to know what she couldn't live without.

Crazy. Other than Lucy, he wasn't even sure what
he
couldn't live without.

“You ready, then?” He didn't want to admit to a case of nerves. You had to have nerves to get nervous. But there was no kidding himself. Getting her out of there was the easy part of this day.

“I'll follow you,” she told him. She had to follow him. She couldn't very well lead when she didn't know where he was going.

And she could turn off at any point, which was why Chantel was a half block down, waiting to follow Bloom in the old Mustang Chantel insisted on driving even now that she was engaged to a millionaire. Chantel was as adamant as Sam that Bloom get moved to a safe house.

Sam always had a backup plan. It was the only way to stay alive in his business.

* * *

B
LOOM
WASN
'
T
AS
unsettled as she probably should have been. Leaving the home she loved...

She'd return soon enough. And appreciate it all the more. Absence made the heart grow fonder.

“I'm having an adventure,” she said aloud to the Jaguar's interior. And wondered if, in the spirit of adventure, when she got back, she should get a bird. Something that would talk back to her on occasion.

Probably not, though. A bird would need care and company and Bloom gave everything she had to her job.

Keeping the detective in sight was proving a bit more difficult than it could have been. There was no way she was going more than five miles above the speed limit—being led by a cop or not. The law was the law.

She'd have expected him to be a bit more thoughtful, though. To be aware that if the light was soon to turn yellow, he should stop, because she'd have to do so. Or wait until there was enough of a clearing in the traffic for both of them before making a turn.

He got better at it, though. After he'd twice had to pull over to wait for her. She almost smiled, but then worried that he'd see her in the rearview mirror and find her odd, smiling alone in her car.

She didn't really care what he thought about her.

Ah...ah...ah.
Her internal companion butted in. So yeah, okay, she cared a little bit. She was entrusting herself to his care for the next brief window in time. And would be trusting him with her life when she became Ken bait.

The idea didn't scare her as she'd have assumed it would. Pausing in the thought, Bloom waited for the small voice inside of her to chime in. Surprised when she was met with only silence. She really wasn't afraid of Ken as much as she was driven to take this step. To stand up to him. Free herself of any power he'd ever had over her, free her heart from that last vestige of tenderness for having once loved the man so completely.

With the help of Sam Larson.
That internal voice of honesty that was what she placed her trust in now added to her thought.

And she knew it was right. Without Sam Larson's backup, his protection, his willingness to do what it took to get Ken back in jail, his drive to make Ken pay for his crimes, she wouldn't be able to face Ken and succeed.

Not because she thought she'd cave in. But because she wasn't powerful enough. Ken had the superior physical strength. Friends in low places. And he had friends in high places where the court was concerned, as well.

Not high enough to defeat the law, though. Or a detective set on upholding the law. Especially not in Santa Raquel. While Ken was busy building an army of thugs in prison, the Santa Raquel police force had been cleaning up house. Some people with money had been getting favors, to the point of a privileged son getting away with rape and, with the help of an undercover beat cop, a way of life that had been going on for decades had been stopped. The commissioner had been exposed. A rapist was awaiting trial. And Chantel Harris, the cop, was now a detective.

Like everyone else in Santa Raquel, Bloom had followed the whole thing on the news. Perhaps not everyone had followed as closely as she had. The rape hadn't been the only cover-up. A powerful man had been getting away with raping women within his society. One of them was now one of Bloom's patients.

Bloom wasn't Sam Larson's compliant, needy charge anymore, though. She wasn't going to sit back and let him take care of her as she had in the past. Which was why she wasn't telling him about the number that had shown up on her caller ID that morning. The call she hadn't answered.

Ken had called her a few times from prison. The first time she'd taken the call because she hadn't recognized the number. The second time, she'd taken it because she'd still been under his manipulative influence. And probably still a bit in love with the man she'd thought him to be.

She hadn't actually spoken with him, other than that first time. After that she'd just answered the calls and as soon as she'd heard his voice she'd hung up.

This most recent time she'd just let it ring. He hadn't left a message.

And Bloom wasn't telling Sam. The detective already believed that Ken was a threat to her. That he wanted her. And she was giving him no reason, no excuse, not to use her as the bait that would reel him in.

Sam Larson turned his nondescript SUV. Bloom turned the Jaguar. They weren't far from her house. A few miles, maybe. But the meticulously manicured landscape that stretched along all of the roads around her part of town had disappeared, giving way to tangled growth, underbrush with thorns, weeds and as much roadside trash as there ever was anywhere in Santa Raquel city limits. Because this area, on the outskirts to the north of town, was last on the day's cleanup schedule.

Curiosity rose inside her. Maybe even a hint of excitement. She was a thinker. And like Ken—worse than Ken—a planner. Her mind never rested.

Which left very little room for anything akin to adventure.

Still, north of town? With beaches that were more rocky than sandy and cliffs that prevented easy access to the water, the area was only popular with those who could afford no better.

On the coastal road, she sped up as the speed limit increased, thinking about pushing the button on the steering wheel that would allow her to make a call and find out just where Detective Larson was taking her.

She'd stressed to him her working hours. Her need to be close to the office. And as far as she knew, there were no other habitable places in this direction until they came to the next town, more than ten miles away. She saw nothing but roadway ahead, lined on the right by brush and trees and on the left, hills and cliff face that fronted the ocean down below. He signaled a left turn.

There was no road to the left. He slowed, anyway. Almost to a stop. Heart pounding, Bloom wondered what was wrong. And wondered why she was overreacting so much since she wasn't afraid.

She saw the two dirt tire track paths as he turned onto them. And because he was Detective Sam Larson, the man who'd saved her life, figuratively if not literally, she followed him. The track wound back and forth up the hill beneath a thick canopy of trees that were growing so close to the track that branches scraped against her car.

Clearly the detective hadn't driven a Jaguar lately. He should have warned her that getting where they were going could scratch the paint job on a vehicle she couldn't afford to purchase a second time. If she was going to drive her dream car—a Jaguar—this was it.

She worried about the car so that she didn't have to think about where they might end up. He'd said the house had private beach access. Or rather, what he'd said was that there was a single path down to the water and that the property was fenced off.

They hadn't driven through a fence. Anyone could access the road from down below. They wouldn't be able to hang out down there, though. The busy highway didn't have enough shoulder to allow anyone to hang out without being noticed. And in the way.

Almost as though he'd read her mind, Larson pulled to a stop, and when she crept up as close to his bumper as she could get without hitting him, she saw the newish-looking double-story gate that had prevented him from going any farther. The iron bars were slowly opening.

Looking to the right and left of that gate, she also saw the ten-foot-high fencing that went as far as she could see. Iron poles that were cemented into the ground, placed only an inch apart, crisscrossing at the top. No way for anyone to climb the fence, or shimmy up a pole, either, since there wasn't enough room in between them to wrap an arm around.

Holy crap, she thought. He hadn't been kidding about getting her someplace safe. He'd lied to her when he'd promised her that, if she testified, she'd never have to deal with Ken Freelander again. Not that a crooked prosecuting attorney was anything he could have predicted or prevented.