LOVING HER SOUL MATE (11 page)

Although their divorce was final
nearly four months ago, he agreed in the divorce settlement to pay the mortgage
on a condo she jumped up and purchased just before the divorce.
 
In exchange for him getting to keep the
house, he agreed to pay the condo’s mortgage for one year only.
 
Until, as her lawyers put it, she can regroup
and get back on her feet.
 
John had
snorted even then.
 
The only time that
bitch was ever off her feet was when she was fucking another one of those young
muscle heads she loved to screw.
 
And she
loved to rub it in while she was doing it too, hoping he’d get jealous.
 
When he didn’t, and he never did, she’d call him
late at night crying about how much she loved him and still wanted to be with
him.

He’d hang up in her face.

But whenever she truly needed him,
and it wasn’t bullshit-related, John would be there.
 
When her mother died and it looked as if she
would go to pieces, he was right by her side, helping her get through it.
 
When she had her gall bladder surgery, he was
right there.
 
He couldn’t even verbalize
why he hadn’t severed all ties with Blair.
 
It certainly wasn’t because of any love he still held for her.
 
Before he filed for divorce, and they were
still trying to work out their differences, he found out she was fooling around
with yet another body building brainless turd.
 
That pretty much killed the love as far as he was concerned.
 

But he did love her once, and
cared deeply for her.
 
But they should
have never gotten married.
 
Neither one
of them were the commitment types.
 
Things happened, tragic things that were ultimately his fault, but she
started behaving as if it gave her a license to do whatever the hell she wanted
to do.
 
In less than half a year after
their honeymoon, she was sleeping around.
 
And not long after that he couldn’t seem to keep his dick in his pants,
either.
 
It was a nightmare.
  
They kept trying, though, year after year,
recommitting and recommitting until even the idea of either one of them ever
committing to each other was beginning to seem absurd to John.
 
The final straw was when he finally agreed to
get marriage counseling with their church pastor.
 
Something he never, in a million years, would
have envisioned doing.
 
Then to find out
she was still sleeping around even after they had begun the sessions.
 
That was the outside of enough for John.
 
He filed for divorce.
 

“Well?” Blair asked.
 
“Are you going to pay it now or what?”

“I’m going to pay it when it’s
due, Blair.”

“
Which is right
now.
 
Or at
least in a couple days.
 
But I
don’t want to go out of town without knowing if you’ve taken care of it.”

John shook his head.
 
Sometimes he truly believed his wife was
certifiable.
 
What in the world did her
going out of town have to do with his paying the mortgage on that crappy
condo?
 
Especially when the mortgage
wasn’t even due yet!

But she kept on.
 
“Why can’t you just step up to the plate like
a man and take care of it, John?
 
Why do
you have to always wait until the last second to do everything?
 
I’m so sick and tired of your nastiness
towards me, I declare sometimes I want to throw my hands in the air and have
nothing more to do with you.
 
All I’ve
ever tried to be was a good wife to you, and now a good ex-wife, and this is
the thanks I get.
 
I love you, and you
know I love you, but it’s getting harder and harder for me, John.
 
You’ve got to show me some signs.
 
All I’m asking you to do is pay the mortgage
now, that’s all I’m asking, and you can’t even do that for me.”

“I will pay it when it’s due,
Blair, and not a second before.”

“But why can’t you just pay it
now?
 
I want it paid now!”

“Then pay it yourself,” John shot
back, finding the entire conversation insane.
 
But he could barely recall a phone conversation he’d had with Blair that
didn’t border on sheer lunacy.

She, however, took offense to his
snide remark.
 
“What did you say to me?”
she said to him.

“I said if you want it paid so
quickly then pay it your
got
damn
self,” John said even clearer.
 
“Or
better still get that muscle-headed boyfriend of yours to pay it!”
 
John said this and killed the call, and then
slung the phone back onto the passenger seat.
 
He hit his hand against the steering wheel as he drove.
 
She seemed to relish in unnerving him.
 
And after being married for nearly six years
to a bitch like her they wonder why he bounced from woman to woman now?
 
He smiled a tight, bitter smile, shook his
head, and then blew through another intersection.

Shay sat at her desk still stunned
by the call.
 
The idea that the cop who
was considered Chief McNamara’s right hand man would want to give intel to an
outsider like her, especially since he already knew she was off of the case,
was
 
kind of weird to her.
 
Then she began to get suspicious.
 
Just why, she wondered, would he single her
out?
 
She wasn’t even considered a good
reporter, not by her boss back in Birmingham, not by her boss here in Brady.

She leaned back in her chair.
 
Was
this get
together all about the Dodge murders as he had said, or would it be yet another
attempt by him to get in her pants once again?
 
She was beginning to feel a kind of nervousness, a kind of queasy
hesitation she always felt whenever a man tried to crack her shell.
  

But was she reading too much into
this?
 
Was he really interested in
cracking her shell, or cracking his case?
 
Then she smiled and shook her head.

“Get a grip,” she silently said to
herself, and then got back to work.

FIVE

As soon as John walked into Shay’s
small house, he once again knew he was dealing with a different kind of
lady.
 
He had expected her home to be
immaculate when he arrived.
 
Expected to
smell that just-cleaned scent and see fresh bouquet of roses and trays of
potpourri all over the place.
 
Expected her to pull out all the stops.
 
That was usually the case whenever he had a
scheduled visit with a female, even on an official capacity.
 
They seemed to enjoy impressing him.

But when he stepped across the
threshold of Shay Turner’s home, he quickly realized that she had no interest
whatsoever in impressing him.
 
Her home,
in fact, had that
take it or leave it
because impressing you is not what I do
vibe all over it.
 
Which made John smile.
 
He had decided to give his info to young Shay
based on instinct alone.
 
He didn’t even
consider their previous relationship because this was business.
 
She seemed to him to be a person who wasn’t
an ass-kisser and wouldn’t fall for the okey-doke McNamara and his boys were
sure to throw her way.
 
And now, as he
looked around her home and realized she wasn’t trying to kiss up to him,
either, he believed his instinct was dead on.

Just as it was the first time he
entered her home, it was a clean house, but it was an untidy one.
 
Books and newspapers littered the place, from
the sofa to the coffee table to the dining table at the back of the room.
 
Shay, in fact, answered the door with reading
glasses on her face and a book in her hand.
 
And she didn’t try to remove the glasses when she saw him, either.
 
Didn’t try to smooth down
her long hair that she wore in a gorgeously rumpled ponytail, or put on any
makeup.
 
Vanity didn’t seem to be
on this chick’s radar screen.
 
And the
clothes she wore, a well-worn UAB Blazers t-shirt and a pair of loose-fitting
athletic shorts, was even more evidence to John that unlike those other females
who went to great lengths to please him, she wasn’t jumping through any hoops
whatsoever on his behalf.
 

It was downright refreshing to
him.

As he entered her small home,
filling it with his larger-than-life presence as soon as he walked in, Shay
could feel the mood of the room shift and take on an almost sexual charge.
 
He had changed out of the suit he wore at the
press conference that morning, and into a pair of jeans and a tucked-in white
polo shirt.
 
He was all biceps and thighs
as he walked in.
 
And the mere scent of
him, that fresh, cologne scent that met her nostrils, was enough to make his
masculinity become as much a presence in her home as he was.
 
This was supposed to be a normal meeting with
a source, but it was already feeling like something completely different.
 

And as she closed the door and
escorted him to the sofa further into her living room, moving ahead to clear
the books and papers that covered the seat, she knew she had to get it
together.
 
Because if she didn’t, she
would be behaving as if she was the lousy reporter some at the Tribune and even
Chief McNamara predicted she was going to be.
 
She knew she had to forget the fact that the guy was gorgeous.
 
Forget the fact that virility and sensuality
cloaked him like a strait jacket, and just do her job.

John knew he had a job to do, too,
but that didn’t stop him from checking out her long dark neck, her straight
back,
her
smooth, curvy legs as she led him to her
sofa.
 
And when she bent over to remove
stacks of books and papers that clogged the seat, and he got an unobstructed
view of that same firm bottom he could still visualize, his penis began to
throb.
 

She turned him on.
 
He, in fact, was turned on the first time he
saw her.
 
At first it was all physical
for John.
 
It was her nice, curvy figure,
her style, the innocence in her pretty eyes.
 
And although he knew he could find a woman with a better looking body
and a nicer looking face any day of the week around Brady, there was something
about
her
face, and
her
body that made him almost anxious to
get her naked and in his bed.
 

But most striking to John was his
emotional reaction to her that day three months ago, and the way she stared at
him with such intensity that day.
 
She
stared as if she could see right through his bullshit.
 
That look of hers was so fine-tuned, so
precision dead-on that she made him feel exposed.
 
He was a burned-out, shell of a man, not the
tough-as-nails hero the newspapers always made him out to be, and she knew it,
that look said to him.
 
It spoke so
loudly, in fact, that after their second encounter in his office, he avoided
her gaze ever since.
 
He would ask about
her, whenever he ran into Ronnie Burk, and Ronnie even chided John once about
how he never inquired about any of the male reporters they had on staff.
 

But John, for a minute, had been a
little smitten with Shay Turner.
 
Found
something remarkably different about her.
 
But time was a powerful antidote and he soon moved on, to cases that
required his undivided attention, to women who gave him what he needed without
any demands or expectations.
 
And he no
longer gave much thought about the young black reporter with the expressive
golden brown eyes.
 
Until he saw her
again this morning, at Chief McNamara’s press conference.
 

“You aren’t exactly little Miss
Martha Stewart are you?” he asked as he sat down on her sofa.

Shay was at first surprised by his
honesty.
 
Then decided
that she liked it.
 
“I do my
housecleaning on the weekends,” she said with a smile.

“Yeah, right,” John said
snidely.
 
“Me too.”
 
And they both laughed.