Safe Haven Page 12

  George shoved his hands deep in the pockets of his coat until his hand wrapped around the gun that was hiding there. His palms sweating just holding it, but his finger itched to pull the trigger against his frustration.

  He’d been assured it was untraceable. He didn’t need that headache on top of the one he already had.

  As he approached Daria’s house, he heard a dog barking in the next yard and hoped it was one of those annoying dogs that barked all the time, annoying the hell out of the neighbors until they barely took notice of it at all.

  He saw the SUV sitting pretty by Daria’s mailbox, just as it had been the night before. Last night he didn’t dare come near the house. Even if Detective Gordon had nodded off while on his watch, George wasn’t going to take the chance of getting caught. Not again. He wouldn’t be as lucky a second time.

  George gripped the gun as if it were calling out to him to free it from the confines of his coat. If that cop continued to stake himself out in front of Daria’s house, it would make it impossible for him to get close to her. He needed to be careful. He just needed a few minutes. That was all and then he could end this nightmare.

  Bending his head low to keep his face hid, he moved slowly down the street, closer to where the truck was parked, and he cursed out loud. The SUV was sitting right at the curb, as usual, except this time it was empty. Was Detective Gordon walking a beat like a damned night watchman?

  George’s eyes darted from the house to the truck to a lit window on the first floor in the front of Daria’s house. What the… The son of a bitch was inside the house with his wife! His wife! Anger boiled inside him like liquid in a lidded pot ready to pour over the rim as he watched Daria lift her gentle hand to that scum of a cop’s head and brush her fingers across his forehead.

  They were snuggled together on the sofa in what was probably her living room. She’d moved the old bargain basement furniture they’d had when they’d first gotten married in there along with some other garage sale items that she’d said were dear to her. He’d offered to buy her new furniture after the divorce. He’d wanted to make her happy, figured if he’d made things easier for her she’d calm down and realize she’d made a hell of a mistake in leaving him. If he were patient, she would come home to him. He knew Daria and she loved him.

  Yeah, he’d been watching his wife longer than this bozo had. What did Detective Gordon think, that he was just going to let him walk right in and take over what was his? He should be the one sitting next to his wife. Daria should be touching him now instead of that low-life cop. Dammit!

  George felt the cold metal of the gun against his sweaty palm, wanted to pull it out and blow a hole right through the window. Right through Detective Gordon’s pretty boy face.

  But he couldn’t. It would ruin everything he’d planned. Someone would see him and call the police. They’d be able to ID him and God forbid they find the gun on him, they’d have his prints, too.

  There was no way he was spending his life in jail. He was the good one, the good seed. He couldn’t help the sins of the past, but he was damned sure he wasn’t going to pay for them rotting in a cell.

  No, he had to lay low. The best-laid plans were carried out with patience, not revenge. George was a patient man. He could wait for the perfect time.

  He turned and walked down the street toward the market. He’d have his chance on another day. Then Daria would forever be his. No one would be able to touch her again.

  Chapter Nine

  The steady sound of a drill penetrated his mind like a piece of wood splintering apart. Kevin opened his eyes to the shock of light blinding him. Confusion made him dizzy until his eyes focused enough to register his whereabouts.

  Shielding his eyes from the blazing light from the wrought iron lamp on the end table, he took in the room and remembered that he’d come in Daria’s house for dinner. A quick glance out the window showed that it was pitch-black outside. He knew it had still been light out when they’d arrived at the house.

  One foot was propped up on the coffee table. An open beer rested on a white napkin, saturated from dripping condensation. Daria was nowhere in sight.

  Rubbing his face, Kevin realized he must have dozed off. There was no use beating himself up over it. He’d feared it was only a matter of time before his body gave out from running on practically no sleep. He’d worked many double shifts on cases before, sat long hours on stakeouts, but nothing had drained his energy quite so much as this case.

  If he could call Daria a case. Somewhere the lines between cop and man had gone blurry on him and in some places rubbed completely clean.

  He put in the hours at work, diligently combing through files, checking on leads that would give him even the smallest nugget of information about George Carlisle, anything that could help nail him for contracting his ex-wife’s murder. And while he kept his mind focused on his duty, there was no doubt Kevin looked forward to the time when he could come back here to Daria’s house. If only just to see her smile.

  And how pathetic was that? It wasn’t as if they were lovers and he was coming home to a woman who welcomed him with open arms. Daria flat out didn’t want him here. She’d made that plain. Although he’d spent the day thinking of tonight and actually spending some real time with Daria, he had a good idea her invitation was to tell him to buzz off.

  And he’d fallen asleep. Good going, Gordon.

  As if his dreams had willed her back from wherever she’d been, Daria appeared at the doorway. The sweatshirt she was wearing had definitely seen better days. It must have adorned a college logo at one time or another, but constant wear and laundering had worn off most of the decal. In addition, stains were splattered down the front as if she’d opened a can of paint and had it spill on her. The black bike shorts that hugged her thighs were barely visible beneath the hem of the sweatshirt, giving Kevin ample view of the length of her creamy legs all the way down to the white socks that were now slouched around her ankle.

  He felt a stirring in his groin. Good Lord, what a thing to wake up to. It was as if Heaven had rained down on him to fulfill his wildest fantasies of Daria. And in the short time he’d known her, he’d had plenty.

  “You can’t keep this up, you know. Even you have to see that,” Daria said, lifting her chin as if she’d been preparing a speech for him all day.

  Daria must have thrown an afghan over him while he slept. As Kevin lifted himself to a seated position on the sofa, it fell and was now half on the sofa and half on the floor. He picked it up, taking in the scent of it. It smelled like Daria. He wondered if she’d been the one to knit it.

  He made a tired attempt to fold the blanket and set it next to him, but it ended up looking like a crumpled ball. “I just needed a cat-nap.”

  Leaning against the doorjamb, she sighed. “If you say so. I kept dinner warm. I figured you’d wake up at some point and be famished.”

  He scrubbed his hand over his face. “What time is it?”

  “Around ten-thirty or so. Maybe later. I got a little side-tracked working on the bathroom.”

  Kevin looked at her quickly and blinked. “I’ve been asleep for four hours?”

  “You were exhausted. I’ll get you a plate.”

  Daria scuffed her stocking feet against the floor as she made her way to the kitchen. Kevin followed on her heels. He couldn’t do anything about the slight guilt that crept through him for interrupting her evening. She’d probably had the night planned out. Dinner at seven, talk at seven-thirty, drill in hand by eight. He’d messed up her plans.

  Yeah, he’d been doing that a lot lately. But he wasn’t going to feel guilty about it.

  *

  Daria couldn’t help the feeling of relief that washed over her. Now that Kevin was awake, the wild fantasies that had been rolling around her head, taunting her, could end. Keeping busy drilling holes in her bathroom wall so she could repair them didn’t help as she’d hoped.

  She’d liked seeing him asleep, but liked even mor
e when he was awake and she could gaze into his expressive eyes. She loved his eyes, their depth and color, and the light that danced in them when he looked back at her.

  Shaking off the feeling enveloping her, she pulled the plate out of the oven with her oven mitt and turned around to find him standing in the doorway. Her breath hitched at the site of him. His hair was still pulled back in a ponytail, but in his sleep, strands of gold and brown had pulled from the hair band and fallen forward, giving him a rumpled look.

  She wondered if this is what he looked like in the morning after a full night sleep had rested him. Or after he made love to a woman. She loved his hair and her fingers itched to comb through those golden strands to feel the softness.

  “We can relax in the living room,” she said.

  Without a word, Kevin went back into the living room and sat on the sofa. She placed the dish in front of him and then sat down.

  He glanced at her hands and said, “Aren’t you going to eat?”

  “I ate earlier while you were sleeping.” If he’d only seen how she’d sat on the end of the sofa with a dish in her hand and watched him sleep while she ate. He looked so peaceful, as if he belonged there.

  There were a million things Daria could have done to pass the time. She didn’t have to just sit on the sofa and watch Kevin sleep. This old house had a long list of projects just waiting for her attention, not the least of which was that sticky back door lock. There weren’t enough hours in a day to finish them all.

  But Daria liked looking at Kevin, seeing his chest rise and fall with each breath he took, watch his lips move ever so slightly as he dreamed. She’d wondered what those dreams were.

  Daria had dreams too. Not just the ones that snuck into her subconscious mind in the middle of the night. She’d dreamed of this house since she’d been a child. Fantasized about how she’d fill it with a loving family.

  Funny how in the last six months, she hadn’t felt alone here. It wasn’t nearly complete and Daria was the only person who called this address home, but this last week since Kevin had been sitting outside watching while she was inside the house had felt cold and lonely. Tonight, that loneliness disappeared.

  “What made you decide to buy this beat up old place?”

  She lifted an eyebrow in challenge. “Why? You don’t like it?”

  Kevin chuckled. “I can see I’m going to have to tread lightly on this subject. All I meant is there is a lot of work here for one person.”

  “You don’t think I can handle it.”

  “Oh, I think you can handle pretty damn near anything you put your mind to. I just can’t figure out why you’d want to bother.”

  She looked at him wistful. “There’s something about getting your hands dirty, building your own space to call home. I’ve lived in so many places and have been hampered by so many landlord rules about not painting walls or doing anything to make my space mine, that it’s nice to just let my imagination take over. If it doesn’t come out the way I want, I can always change it, provided there are funds in my bank account,” she added with a chuckle.

  “Of course.”

  “It may not look like much now, but it’s shaping up to be a nice home. I want this to be my permanent address for the rest of my life.”

  He nodded. “At most I think I’ve lived in three different places my whole life. And the first one had no space at all. When I was real little, I shared a room that was about the size of a broom closet with my sister, Judy, for the longest time.”

  “You must have hated that.”

  He shrugged. “You have no idea. It wasn’t so much sharing space as fighting for it. Between my sister’s mountain of stuffed animals and her endless supply of perfume and girlie things, I barely had an inch of space to my name. I still don’t know what half of that stuff was.”

  “We girls do tend to collect things. I always had an argument with my parents every time we moved because they wanted to lessen the load by donating my toys or stuffed animals to the neighborhood poor.”

  “When Mom married my stepdad we moved into a house in a neighborhood a lot like this one. I was about eleven then. It’s actually not all that far from here.”

  “Do your parents still live there?”

  “No. They moved Down South. Dad couldn’t take the cold anymore and he likes his fishing. He can do that year round in Florida.”

  “You mentioned your stepfather before.”

  He had. The morning he came to warn Daria about George.

  “Like I said, he married Mom when I was eleven. My biological father took off before I can even remember. I wasn’t too happy about some guy stepping into that role at the time. In fact, I made his life pretty miserable for a while. I figured I’d lived without a father my whole life to that point, why bother having one at all. He’s my stepdad, but he’s really my dad in my heart. He raised me. He’s the only father I know.”

  “You get along good with him?”

  “Now I do. Not in the beginning though. Making us a family was a hard job for my mom, but she did it. It took a while. I sort of felt a little left out when Mom got remarried. But I think Dad knew that.”

  “What changed things?”

  “Sailing,” he said, a smile splitting his face. “Have you ever gone?”

  Daria shook her head.

  “Ah, that’s too bad. You really should some time. There’s nothing like catching the wind and flying with it. I remember one day a few months after we moved to the new house, I was sitting in my new room with all this space I wasn’t used to having all to myself and feeling pretty pitiful. I heard my dad pull into the driveway. He was towing a small dingy. Nothing special. They’d just bought the house and it was all he could afford. I’ll never forget the look on his face though. It was if he’d just bought the Queen Elizabeth II.

  “Mom was pretty ticked off he’d spent the money on the boat since she’d been eyeing some new furniture. Judy couldn’t have cared less about taking a sail, but me, I just about jumped on the back of that thing. I would have ridden all the way to the boat ramp sitting in the back of that boat if I could have.”

  Kevin laughed at the memory. “It was the first time me and my dad ever spent any real time together. Before that I was mostly afraid of him. He yelled a lot, and had a short fuse where kids were concerned.”

  But his dad loved them. That much Kevin knew without a doubt even if he hadn’t known it then.

  “I’m talking up a storm and you said you wanted to talk to me tonight about some plan?”

  Daria shook her head. “It fell through.”

  “What?”

  With a slow sigh, she shrugged. “I’m tapped out. The house has no equity. My truck isn’t worth much more than that money it takes to fill the gas tank. And my bank account is dry. The bank won’t give me a loan.”

  “A loan for what?”

  “To leave for a while. It’s really the only way I can do this. I don’t have enough vacation time left because I’ve already taken time off to work on the house. So if I left, it would be unpaid time. I need money to live on and to continue paying my bills here. My salary is good enough and I don’t have lots of credit cards, but the ones I do have I have been using for the house so the bank refused to give me a loan.”

  “I’m sorry it didn’t work out. I appreciate that you’re trying to find a solution to this situation.”

  “For both of us.”

  He offered her a weak smile. “Then my bank account thanks you, too. Have you given any thought to what I said this morning?”

  “About George’s dealings?”

  He nodded.

  She sighed. “I really haven’t had much time. And honestly, he didn’t talk much about work. I found out about the loan shark quite by accident when someone in the building we were living in recognized him. George would have cut off his own tongue rather than confess it to me after I’d been hoarding penn
ies for so long. But he’d been acting strange, a mixture of being short with me and unusually sweet. So I knew something was up.”

  “Did he tell you how much money he owed or what it was for?”

  “No, he said he didn’t want me to get too involved in the whole thing, that he was protecting me.”

  “Protecting you? From what?”

  “He wouldn’t say. But I gave him what I had saved for the house and he used that. It was almost twenty thousand dollars at that point.”

  Kevin whistled in surprise.

  “I know. I’d been saving for a while. I wish I had that money now.” She shrugged off the memory. “We were married. Of course what was mine was his. But even after all this time I have to sometimes fight to keep from getting angry over the whole thing.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “This is angry for you?”

  She chuckled and he liked the sound of it. He liked the way it filled the room. She was right. This house was her. She could dress up in expensive clothes for work, but she still looked completely at home in a room with woodwork that needed cleaning and walls that needed repair and paint.

  Kevin looked at Daria, taking in the essence of her and knew he had to get out of there. The tired look on her face told him he’d overstayed his welcome. His only solace was knowing he hadn’t given her a chance to tell him to get lost.

  He got up from the sofa, collected his plate and his empty beer bottle

  “I can get that,” she said.

  “You’ve done enough.”

  “I have it,” she insisted, and took the items from his hands.

  Swinging around, he glanced at her. Good God, she was pretty. Now that he was awake and fed, his male instinct couldn’t help but kick in. He wanted to kiss her, feel her come undone in his arms as his mouth claimed hers. He wanted it.

  He reached for her despite everything in him knowing it was wrong. He just wanted to breathe her in and feel the soft flesh of her cheek against his lips. But she lifted her face to him and he knew she wanted more. She wanted him to kiss her as much as he wanted it. As he bent his head, he heard a noise outside. Daria must have as well because she turned her head away from his waiting lips to the front window where he’d heard…something.