Descended (The Red Blindfold Book 3) (21 page)

Maybe tonight was too
much. I’d thrown her into a black tie event and expected everything
to go just right, because that’s what I was used to now – things
going right, because I worked hard and wanted them to.

“I’m sorry about
Brooke,” I said. “I didn’t think she’d interrogate you like
that.”

Jane shook her head.
“It’s okay.”

“No, it isn’t. I
should have been there with you.”

“You had people to
talk to. It’s fine.” She smiled tightly and pushed back her
chair. “I’ll be right back.”

Getting up abruptly,
she walked off toward the restroom. Her slim, bare shoulders looked
pale against the glittering black of her dress. She glanced back at
me for a second, then turned left. I knew from many nights at Scott’s
house that the guest bathroom was to the right.

I didn’t know where
she was going, but I wasn’t about to lose sight of her.

“Excuse me,” I
said, and got up. Luckily, everyone at the table was absorbed in
conversation and hardly noticed that Jane and I were abandoning our
passion fruit soufflés.

By the time I caught up
with her, she was halfway out the front door. “Hey – where are
you going?”

“I need some air.”

She didn’t even break
stride. I followed her down the wide steps to the brick walk. Several
yards away, two valets stood talking by a podium hung with car keys.

I took Jane’s arm
gently. She shook me off and whipped around like a cornered lioness.

“Whoa,” I said,
backing off with my palms raised. “What’s with the attitude?”

“Attitude?” she
shot back. “I just need some space, that’s all.”

“Oh, that’s all?
You weren’t about to take off?”

She laughed. “Me?”
she said, spreading her arms wide. “As you’ll remember, I’m
completely under your thumb. I couldn’t take off if I wanted to. I
don’t even have two dollars for the bus.”

Here it was, the
shitstorm I’d been waiting for. “Why would you
want
to take the bus? Is there another place you’d rather be?”

“No. But there’s
another place I should be, and we both know that.”

“We don’t know
anything, Jane. You might have a family, or you might belong here
with me. That’s what we need to find out.”

She took three steps,
stopped, and turned around to face me. “Is this really worth
damaging your reputation? You have a public life, and public is the
last thing we need.”

Anxiety seethed in my
gut. “This isn’t about me and you know it. You’re the one
having doubts.”

Suddenly, tears were
streaming down her face. “Of course I’m having doubts. You saw
everyone in there with their families, their husbands and wives. How
do you think that makes me feel?”

I dropped my head back.
All I’d thought about was how proud I was to show Jane off. I
hadn’t thought about how it was affecting her.

I looked at her,
feeling as selfish as I ever had. And that was saying something. “I’m
sorry. I know it’s been tough.”

“You don’t know,”
she said sharply. “I haven’t even told you.”

“You haven’t told
me what?”

She threw her arms up.
“Everything. How much I try to keep from thinking and feeling. I
love being with you, but… it isn’t right, Drex. We can’t keep
going like this.”

My stomach bottomed out
and I wanted to throw something hard into something breakable. This
was how it always ended up. I gave and gave, and in the end I got
screwed. One thing I’d learned way too many times – sometimes it
was better not to give at all.

“It sounds like
you’ve made up your mind,” I said. “So what’s your plan?
Where are you going to go?”

“Drex…”

“No, really. I’d
like to know what you’re going to do. You want to be with me, but
you can’t because you might have a husband. But you don’t know
and you don’t want to find out. Which leaves us in total limbo.”

Her face twisted in
disbelief. “Us?”

“Yes, Jane, us.
You’re not alone in this anymore.”

With a long sigh, she
sat down on the curb in her dress. Chin propped in one hand, she
stared straight ahead.

I sat beside her and
took off my jacket. “Cold?”

“No,” she said.
“Thanks.”

Minutes passed. A group
of three came out, smoked cigarettes, and then went back into the
house.

I watched Jane’s
beautiful face until she finally spoke. “It’s time,” she said
in a resigned voice. “It’s been time for days, actually.”

I put my hand on her
shoulder. “What is it time for?” I asked.

When she looked at me, her eyes were
resigned. “To get in that Town Car and take it where it’s
probably never been before.”

I must have been having
the strangest dream of my life.

It was surreal to see
Jane, with the clothes and manner of a movie star, in a dingy police
station surrounded by cops. They were all in love with her, from the
skinny blonde rookie to the barrel-chested detective in his
mid-sixties with the gray handlebar mustache. It wasn’t just her
story, either. She could have been reading from a cereal box and
they’d have been standing in a circle around her, riveted to her
every soft-spoken word.

After he listened to
her, the detective brought us into a small, windowless room and asked
her some questions. A little while later, a petite woman wearing a
gray suit joined him. His name was Souter and hers Hughes.
Apparently, these detectives didn’t have first names, or they
weren’t telling us what they were.

I sat on a concrete
bench bouncing my leg, ready to crawl the walls. The police were just
as clueless as we were. How could nobody know anything, ten days into
this? How could an amazing woman drop into a Texas border town
without even a trace of a past?

But there it was again
– that powerful feeling of relief. She was still mine. And the
longer I had her, the harder it would be to let her go.

Jane answered their
questions with a patience I’d never had and never would. I sat
watching her, admiring how serene she was, even when the police
started digging and sounding suspicious.

What had happened in
the three days before I’d found her? How had she survived? Where
had she gone? Over and over again, the same questions posed twenty
different ways.

So this was why she’d
avoided the police. It wasn’t just her run-in with the trucker,
which she hadn’t mentioned and the detectives knew nothing about.
It was the way she was being treated right now.

She knew how the story
sounded. There were crazies out there who faked their own
disappearances and kidnappings. In some ways, memory loss seemed even
more far-fetched, like something that happened in crime novels and
overactive imaginations.

After an hour of
responding in a cool, even voice, her patience started to fray. It
was late and the lights were glaring in her face. If I hadn’t spent
the last week with her, I wouldn’t have known she was about to
snap. She wasn’t under arrest, so why did it feel like she was?

“Yes, for the third
time,” she said quietly, but her eyes were a venomous shade of
blue. They brought her water and a can of soda she didn’t touch.

“Usually in cases
like this, the family files a missing persons report,” Detective
Hughes said. “Sometimes with runaways and prostitutes, relatives
won’t know they’re gone for –”

“I’m not a
prostitute,” Jane broke in.

Hughes sat back and
sighed, her forehead wrinkling. “With all due respect, Ma’am, how
do you know?”

Jane gripped the edge
of the table with both hands. “I wasn’t dressed like one, to
start with.”

The detective shrugged.
“That’s not much to go on. Prostitutes dress pretty much like the
rest of us on their down time.”

Jane’s smile was
cold. “So let me get this straight. You’re saying no one’s
looking for me because I’m a hooker?”

“No. I’m saying
it’s a possibility we need to consider.”

“Well, it’s fucking
ridiculous,” I said. It was the first thing I’d said in half an
hour. They all turned their heads to stare at me. “I mean, isn’t
it? Look at her. Listen to her. She’s obviously not a whore who
works the truck stops.”

“And even if I were,”
Jane said, looking back at the detectives. “Does it make a
difference? I’m trying to find out who I am. If I’m somebody I
wish I weren’t, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Detective Souter laced
his thick fingers across his stomach. “We can send around your
photograph and description, but we can’t make somebody want to find
you. I’m sorry.”

“Could someone be
looking and we just don’t know?” Jane asked. “Maybe they went
to a rural police station, or no one would listen. There might be a
misplaced report on somebody’s desk.”

“Might be,” he
said, with a vague shrug that made my fist itch for contact with his
cheek. “We can’t rule anything out.”

“You know,”
Detective Hughes said, “you can always publicize this story
yourself. Every TV station in the country would pick it up. A woman
who looks the way you do? Reporters would run with it.”

Jane’s jaw tightened
and she started shaking her high-heeled foot. She couldn’t have
been signaling “no” more emphatically if she’d screamed it out
loud.

“That’s out of the
question,” I said. “We’re not going the tabloid route.”

“Don’t be so quick
to say no,” Hughes said. “It just might work.”

“It might. And it
would be a nightmare, no doubt.”

Jane slid her eyes from
one detective to the other. “So, publicize my story. That’s all
you can offer me.”

Souter shook his head
slowly, as if Jane just weren’t getting it. “Look, we’ve found
bodies that nobody’s ever claimed. A few of them kids. Still breaks
my heart when I think about it. You’re lucky to be alive given what
you’ve told us tonight. I know it’s tough, but try to see the
upside if you can.”

She glanced at me and
in that split second, our intense connection crackled and burned in
the air. This was the upside – us.

It might be all we had,
but it mattered. A lot.

It was dangerous and
risky and neither of us knew how it would turn out. And maybe that’s
why I liked it so much. I’d left everything reckless behind years
ago, and now I had a taste of it again. A piece of the impulsive,
live-by-my-wits shark I’d thrown aside when I became a respectable
businessman.

I’d forgotten how
much I liked living on the edge. And the edge was even more exciting
with Jane by my side.

Eventually, they ran
out of repeated questions and garbage advice. Detective Hughes left
and Jane went to the restroom, leaving me alone with Detective
Souter.

“Funny how you met
her,” he said, closing the file in front of him. Jane’s file.

“Yeah,” I said.
“Not something that happens every day.”

He scraped back his
chair and stood up. “She really saw a doctor?”

“Yes. Twice.”

“And they found
nothing at all, huh? Weird.” Shifting from foot to foot, he dropped
his voice. “Listen, uh – does her account of things sound
credible to you?”

I took a step toward
him. “Credible?”

“You’re the one who
found her. You’ve spent what, ten or twelve days with her?”

“Yup. About that.”

“And I gather the
relationship has been… romantic?”

“What gave you that
impression?”

“I read folks for a
living, and you two aren’t fooling anybody.”

“We’re not trying
to,” I said flatly. “And to answer your question, yes, she sounds
credible. You didn’t see her walking down the street in Chimayo,
the way she looked. You can’t fake something like that.”

He gave me a hard
little shrug. “You’d be amazed how easy it is for some people.”

If he implied she was
lying one more time, I was going to fuck him up. “I’m sure it is.
That’s not what’s going on here.”

“Funny, no problems
at all with her short-term memory. Just the memory that lets her play
little-girl-lost with one of the richest guys in the state.”

“She’s not playing
anything, especially me.”

Souter gave me a
doubtful smirk. “You sound awfully confident, considering you
haven’t even known her two weeks.”

“What can I say. I’m
pretty good at reading people, too.”

He grinned. “I bet
you are, successful guy like you. I’ve read about you in the
papers. You got a real empire, don’t you?”

His slimy tone more
than pissed me off. It made me want to throw him to the concrete
floor and rub his face in all the shitty, cynical ways he was wrong
about Jane.

“It’s a business
like any other,” I said.

“Is it really?
Imagine that.” He gave me a clammy handshake and walked off, cowboy
hat tipped back. Someday, I hoped to hell I got the chance to knock
it off his head.

The shark didn’t
retreat when Jane and I got home. He was hungrier and hornier than
ever, and the last two hours had only inflamed it.

It wasn’t just that I
wanted to give her pleasure, I had to show her how much she was
wanted. Goddamnit, she wasn’t alone in the world as long as she had
me.

I pulled off my tux
jacket and tie, leaving on the shirt and pants. I’d never wanted to
lick a woman so badly. After the tease of tasting her earlier in the
bathroom, I had to go down on her. I had to make her climax very
loudly in my mouth at least once or I’d never sleep. Of course,
turned on as I was, I probably wouldn’t sleep anyway.

“Come here,” I
said, patting the edge of the bed. “Now.”

She sat. In her slinky
dress and stilettos, she’d never looked better, even if she had
just spent two hours in a police station. The second our eyes locked,
I felt it – that serious spark that flamed in my gut. I didn’t
feel this way for anybody. Anybody except Jane.

She was strong, smart,
beautiful, and she needed me. The thought made me so achingly hard I
almost groaned out loud.