Talk Me Down (21 page)

So he went, and Molly called Lori anyway to cry and tell her what had happened, and then she went to sleep on the couch.

She woke to bright morning light and a granite stone rolling through her gut. Ben didn’t come back until nearly eleven, and then everything was as bad as she’d imagined.

Ben hadn’t wanted to go back to her house, despite his promise to come by when he was done. At the moment he was utterly exhausted, nowhere near his bed, and his relief that Molly was safe had begun to wear off hours ago.

Brenda had spewed bitter words about Molly’s stories, and given the first opportunity, he’d gone online to check them out. Yep, they were there. All sixteen of them (more than half now available in print!). The publisher touted her amazing reviews, her many awards and her bestselling numbers. The woman was a star. And Ben was the leading man in at least one of her novellas.

He hadn’t wanted to believe that part of it. If she’d just been a writer of naughty stories…Okay. Strange, but okay. But
Stolen Kisses
was undoubtedly about him. Hell, he could see that in just the two-page excerpt on the Web site. A small mountain town. A girl and her brother’s best friend. An apartment above a
feed store,
for God’s sake. It seemed that the only thing she’d changed were their names and ages. Oh, and if the description was correct, she’d drastically changed the outcome of that evening. Not that anyone else would know that.

His stomach burned with acid as he tapped on Molly’s door and hoped that she was still sleeping. No such luck. She opened the door looking fresh and innocent as a daffodil. Comfortable jeans and a yellow sweater and her hair in those braided pigtails that made his mouth water. Aside from the dark circles under her eyes, she looked like the teenager she’d once been.

“Sorry I’m so late,” he muttered.

Her gaze sharpened. She stared at him, studied his face until Ben looked down. Then she opened the door wider. “Come on in,” she offered with a wry politeness that set his teeth on edge. As if she knew what he’d come to say, but she didn’t. He had no idea what he was going to say.

“Brenda’s confessed to almost everything.” He stood there in the entry with his hat in hand, like he’d never been in her house, her bed. Molly crossed her arms and nodded.

“She claims she didn’t cut the lines on your car, but that could bring a charge of attempted murder, and no doubt she’s aware of that.”

“Smart girl.”

“But it’s clear she’s been the one breaking into your house, and she was up-front about it. She used the department’s equipment to break in.”

“Bad publicity.”

He raised an eyebrow, and Molly squeezed her arms tighter. For once, he was sure she wasn’t attempting to distract him.

“So what happens now?” she asked in a rush.

Maybe she was asking about their relationship, but Ben chose to take it another way. “The D.A. will review the case and decide what charges to file. Sometimes there’s more investigation to be done first, but this is pretty cut-and-dried. I wouldn’t be surprised if Brenda filed a plea soon thereafter. This could all be over quickly.” He flinched at his own words, and Molly’s eyes flashed cold.

“Oh, I’d imagine.”

He turned his hat over, straightened the brim. “Well, I’d better go. I’ve gotta grab a shower and lunch. The D.A. wants to meet at three. You’re doing okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“It was a traumatic night. Maybe you should go stay with your parents for a few days.”

“Let the furor die down?”

“Something like that.”

“Or,” she countered, smiling widely. “You could take me up to your cabin like we’d planned and we could recuperate together.”

“I, uh…” Shit. “I don’t think I can take the weekend off now. It’s gonna be pretty crazy around here. I’m sorry.”

“Sure. Of course. I’m sorry, too. I really am.”

“Molly…”

Offering a tight smile, she shook her head. “We both know this is about my books.”

His gut clenched to painful tightness. “I don’t have time for this right now.”

“Oh, I bet it won’t take long.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means,” she ground out, “that you want this to be over, and you don’t know how to end it. It wouldn’t really be appropriate to break up with your girlfriend the morning after someone tried to kill her, would it?”

“I can’t…You…” The tightness in his stomach finally unwound and let free a torrent of fury that surged through his muscles. He didn’t want to do this now, didn’t want to speak to her. “You…”

“Just say it, Ben.”

She looked so self-righteous he wanted to yell. So he did. “I never thought your dirty little secret had anything to do with
me!
You can keep the rest of your life locked up as tight as you want, but you had no right to keep that from me. No right to fucking drag me into it in the first place.”

She nodded as if the words rolled right off her back, but her face was tight and wooden. He was past the point of caring.

“How the hell did you justify keeping that from me?”

Molly shrugged and shook her head.

“How the hell did you justify climbing into my fucking bed without mentioning that you’d been writing
smut
about me?”

“It’s not smut,” she muttered.

“Oh, I’m sorry. You prefer the word porn? Or trash? Or perverted fantasy?”

“Screw you.”

“Well, I would,” he shot back, “but you’d probably write another story about it!”

Throwing her shoulders back, she drew a deep breath as if to calm her anger. And what the hell did
she
have to be angry about?

“It’s not smut,” she said again. “I understand why you’d say that, but if you’d just read my work—”

“Me and every other damn person in this town?”

“I…I know it’s bad, but—”

“Bad. Yeah, I’d say it’s bad. Did I not make it clear to you just how determined I was not to involve my family in another sex scandal?”

“Yes—”

“You knew that from the moment you stepped back into this town.”

“I—”

Ben slapped his hat against his thigh to cut her off. “You knew that when you wrote that damned story in the first place.”

She clenched both of her fists into tight little balls. “I never thought the story would get published! I wasn’t thinking at all. And even when I got the contract…e-publishing was a brand-new business. I thought maybe a few hundred people would read it, and I’d make a few dollars, and it would be done. By the time I realized…”

“So you could’ve told me anytime in the past two weeks. Hell, anytime in the past ten years!”

“I couldn’t!”

He was so mad he could actually feel his muscles trembling. “Why the fuck not? And tell me the truth for once, Molly.”

She stepped back a little, letting her clenched hands loosen into a pleading gesture. Her eyes looked unnaturally bright, shiny with pain, as she pled silently for some little bit of mercy.

“Ben…I should’ve told you. I knew a long time ago that I should tell you, but I couldn’t. I liked you, I always have, and I couldn’t stand to let you read my personal fantasies.”

“You didn’t mind thousands of others doing it.”

“No one knew it was me! And nobody knew it was you. It’s not real, so it seemed—”

“How the hell am I supposed to convince my friends and family and
every person I’ve ever known
that it’s not real?”

“I’ll tell them!” she answered quickly.

“And they’ll believe
you?
”

“I guess…I guess they’d have no reason to.”

“No, they wouldn’t. It’s done, Molly.” He looked down to his hands, the fingers that had clenched the hat brim into a crooked mess. “It’s done. Over.”

He heard her deep sigh. “You mean we’re over. But this morning…This morning you said you loved me, and I thought we could try—”

“This morning I had no idea you’d betrayed me, that you had kept something from me you knew was damned important. This morning I had no idea that you were going to drag my name through the mud just because you were too much of a coward to tell me the truth. And none of this would have happened if you hadn’t let me fall for you, Molly. So no, we can’t
try.
”

Jesus, he’d known Molly was going to ruin him, and now, watching her wipe tears from her cheeks, he felt it starting. He’d been numb and angry and exhausted, but now he felt sheer pain stutter through him. He had told her he’d loved her, and he’d meant it, and now his heart was shredding itself to pieces.

“Okay,” she managed to say, nodding. “Okay. I’m sorry.”

It’s not okay,
he wanted to scream, but he couldn’t stand the tears on her face and the terrible need to lash out that boiled through him. So Ben just turned and reached for escape. He was out the door and back in his truck before he could say something he’d really regret. Something that would hurt her as much as he was hurting inside.

She was staring out the back window, watching a magpie hop around the empty bird feeder when the phone rang. Her heart jumped so hard she slapped a hand to her chest. Then she sprinted for the phone. Panting, she squinted down at her brand-spanking-new caller ID display.
Love’s Garage,
read the letters that floated by, and Molly slumped in despair. Not Ben, and she didn’t want to talk to anyone else.

When she found herself kneeling in front of the phone, sobbing her heart out into the caller ID display, she decided that perhaps bed was a good idea after all.

She didn’t get up for two days. Didn’t work. Hardly ate.

But the forty-eight hours of depression served her well. She thought about her life and her future. She thought about Ben and what he meant to her. There was something between them, something special and important, and they’d be fools to let that go. So how to convince Ben he was being a fool?

When she finally threw off those funky sheets, Molly Jennings was depressed, dirty and hungry. But she had a plan.

There was no need to ask what book he was reading. “
Et tu,
Frank?” Ben muttered as he backed out of the doorway and went back to his own office.

Un-fucking-believable.

After two weeks of gossip and giggling, things had just started to die down around Tumble Creek. Then Holly Summers’s new release had hit computer screens across the county. Ben had thought the good citizens of his town had been titillated by
Stolen Kisses.
Oh, they’d loved pouring over those details, debating whether or not Ben and Molly had really been an item back then or whether it had just been a dirty, wicked fling acted out on a hot summer night.

No one had believed his early explanations that there hadn’t been any fling, so Ben had shut up about it, theorizing that silence would help the furor die down. It had. Even Miles had lost interest about ten days in.

All in all, it hadn’t been a complete nightmare. He’d started to relax back into the normalcy of his life. Whatever normalcy he could scrape up, anyway. He’d been betrayed in the space of one night by the two women in town he’d been closest to. Those feelings were still raw enough that he made very sure not to touch them, but he was muddling through.

Then
The Wicked West
had debuted.

Ben dropped into his desk chair, then almost immediately rose to pace the small confines of his office. He felt restless and desperate, as if he might explode at any moment. And it was snowing like mad outside, keeping him from one of the long walks he’d been indulging in every day. He ran a rough hand through his hair, huffed out an impatient sigh.

Andrew suddenly stopped in Ben’s doorway, lost in his study of a thick report. His foot crossed the threshold before he glanced up and jerked to a stop.

“Chief!” he choked out. His chubby cheeks flashed to a sudden, bright pink. “I didn’t know you were here!” His gaze began to dart from the report in his hand to Ben’s desk, then to the floor and back again.

His own men couldn’t even look at him. A good reason he shouldn’t have come in four hours early, but he couldn’t stand sitting in his house, thinking. Couldn’t take it anymore.

“This storm wasn’t expected,” he muttered. “I thought you guys might get overloaded.”

“Oh. Yeah. Good thinking.” Andrew rushed forward to drop the file on Ben’s desk. “Here’s that info you requested from the sheriff. I mean, uh, from Creek County.”

Ben stood and grabbed his coat. “I’ll look it over later.” He couldn’t go for a walk, but there was no reason he couldn’t go on patrol. Andrew scrambled quickly out of the way, flush still firmly in place. Ben wondered what scene he was picturing. Probably the one involving knotted ropes and candle wax.

Christ.

Gritty snow blew straight into his eyes when he stepped outside. The wind burned through his skin, a needed counter to the hot weight pressing from the inside of his chest. He dashed to his truck, and the relative silence of his lonely SUV swallowed him up.

During her official police interview, Molly had made it clear that Brenda was wrong, that the new story wasn’t about Ben or Molly or anyone real. It was a story. Pure fiction. And it was. Ben had read it—closely—just two nights ago. He didn’t recognize himself in the coldhearted, hot-blooded sheriff. And Molly wasn’t anything like the defiant widow who distracted herself from her heartbreak with pain and sex.

He had expected to find some familiar phrases or remnants of his and Molly’s nights together. He’d expected that she’d been mining him like a damned gold strike, but there was nothing in that story that they’d ever done.

Not that anyone else knew that.

Fuming, Ben prowled the city until the snow stopped. After that he wasn’t patrolling for stranded motorists so much as he was stalking Lori in her snowplow. He crossed paths with her purple truck every other block or so, until she finally rolled down her window, waved him over, and ordered him to either go have a damn beer or get the hell over to Molly’s house to work it out.

“As if,” he muttered, feeling increasingly like the angry teenager he’d been long ago. Maybe he should just go home and sulk in his room.

That turned out to have been a better idea than he could’ve imagined. He should have just gone straight home. Instead, he drove around—avoiding Lori—for another fifteen minutes, then pulled up to the station an hour before his seven o’clock shift and sat in his truck, brooding. The parking space gave him the perfect vantage point to watch the spotty traffic on Main Street, not to mention a good view of The Bar’s lot. When an unfamiliar pickup pulled in, Ben watched with only a small amount of interest…until the passenger door opened.

Molly—
Molly!
Ben’s traitorous heart cried—jumped from the cab, all bundled up in her white coat and fuzzy pink hat. His heart groaned out its misery. That fucking pink hat was gonna kill him.

No, scratch that. The pink glove
resting on some other guy’s arm
was going to kill him.

Ben hadn’t even noticed the driver getting out, he’d been too busy watching Molly’s mouth curve into a smile. But there he was, some
man,
escorting her to the front door of The Bar. Ben angled over to the right, squinting, trying to get a better view. The guy glanced toward a passing car, and Ben felt his jaw drop.

Holy fucking shit, Molly was on a date with one of the deputies from Grand Valley! No. No, no, no. He was clearly mistaken. No way was she dating this soon. No way was she dating a fellow law enforcement officer.

Ben heard the steering wheel creak in warning and looked down to see his hands strangling the leather cover. He eased his hold and watched The Bar door close slowly on the scene within. What were they doing? Playing pool? Leaning into each other, flirting?

Maybe the guy was a relative. Did the Jennings family have any cousins in Grand Valley? Quinn would know. Maybe he was just a friend.

Molly’s words began flashing through his head. He’d vowed not to read any of her books, but it hadn’t taken more than three days for him to break. He’d read
Stolen Kisses
first, horrified, angry and completely turned-on by the fantasy scene she’d woven. In her version of that night, she’d secretly watched Ben finish his “date,” and then teased and taunted him until he’d let her have a turn. And that had just been the first three chapters.

In each of her following books, he’d noticed her craft improving, her words growing more poetic, her stories getting edgier. He’d been grudgingly impressed, and increasingly doubtful that he could have kept a girl like Holly Summers satisfied. But maybe that deputy—what the fuck was his name?—maybe he was less uptight. Maybe he didn’t worry what the neighbors would say. Maybe he liked it hot and scandalous and dangerous and public.

Ben pictured hot wax and began to wheeze. His vision was just starting to darken, or maybe that was the sun setting, when The Bar door opened again and Juan slipped out with an unlit cigarette already in hand. Ben snapped to attention and rolled down his window.

“Juan!” he yelled as softly as he could.

The bartender’s head popped up and he responded to Ben’s wave by trotting across the street.

“Hey, Chief. What’s up?”

“Not much,” Ben lied. “What’s going on?”

“Just, uh…” He gestured with the cigarette. “You mind?”

“Go right ahead. Slow day?”

“You’d think.” He took a deep, happy drag. “But that storm blew in and kept the dinner stragglers on their stools.”

“Mmm. Yeah.” How the hell was he supposed to be subtle about this? “I thought I saw one of McTeague’s deputies go in a few minutes ago.”

Juan’s eyes went wide. So much for subtlety. “Uh…Sure. Griffin? I think I saw him.”

“He come in very often?”

“No,” he answered quickly, then winced when Ben narrowed his eyes in frustration. “Okay, look. He’s in there with Molly Jennings, but I’ve never seen her with him before.”

“The girls still coming in a couple times a week?”

“Er…Sure. Yeah.”

His tone was off. There was more information to be had. Info Juan was sure Ben didn’t want to hear. “Juan, you want me to beg for it or something?”

He realized that he’d quoted nearly word for word a line from Molly’s ninth book and fought the urge to bang his head on the steering wheel. Luckily, Juan must have been the one person in town who hadn’t downloaded her whole backlist. He didn’t even blink.

“Sorry, Chief. It’s just that…She had a date last Thursday, too. That sculptor who lives in the valley. James Something-or-other.”

“The
sculptor?
” Oh, she’d probably really gone for that sensitive, I-work-with-my-hands shit. “What kind of man brings a woman to The Bar for a first date? Jesus! No offense, Juan.”

“None taken.” But the poor guy was squirming now, desperate to get away.

“Never mind, Juan. Hey, how’s it going with Helen?”

He did blush then, shuffling his feet and mumbling an answer that Ben couldn’t quite work out, so he let Juan off the hook and waved him on his way before slouching down in the driver’s seat.

Molly was officially dating, damn her pink-capped head. What the hell was he supposed to do with
that?

It had been hard enough seeing her around town these past weeks. At the grocery store, the post office, sauntering down the street. They never spoke, but she
looked
at him, made it obvious, challenged him with her hazel eyes.
Get over yourself,
that gaze said.
Take me on, big guy.

Those eyes never once apologized or looked ashamed or begged for forgiveness. In fact, they’d been shouting to him that she was going to start dating again, and he had ignored the warning, so here he was hiding in his truck, spying on the pickup across the street. It mocked him with its tinted windows and double-deep cab. There was probably no computer equipment between those seats. A man could really stretch out and enjoy himself while—

“Somebody just kill me,” Ben groaned aloud. He was doomed. He’d known from the start that this would end in disaster, but he hadn’t anticipated that he’d know just what Molly was thinking when she touched a man or took him inside her. He hadn’t anticipated that she was an author who’d continue writing books, stories about the man she’d invited to her bed that year or month or week. Stories
not
about him.

How the hell could that actually be
worse
than everyone reading the details of Ben’s sex life? Impossible, but he suddenly saw that it would be worse. Much, much worse if they were whispering about Griffin the Perverted Deputy instead of Ben the Hot-Blooded Sheriff.

“Damn,” he breathed out, hardly able to put any force behind the word because he couldn’t get his lungs to expand.
“Damn.”

He’d thought the pressure in his chest unbearable before, but it was only getting worse. Pressing in on him, squeezing him into some shape he feared he wouldn’t recognize. For the first time in his career, he didn’t want to go into work, didn’t want to face his officers. He could take a personal day. They’d understand. Hell, they couldn’t stand looking at him anyway.

His head suddenly exploded with a high-pitched blast. Ben actually grabbed his temples before he looked around, but when he spotted Lori in her truck, laughing her ass off, he dropped his hands and glared. After conquering the brief impulse to walk over and put a bullet through that damned air-horn of hers, Ben gave her the finger and slammed out of his truck.

She’d saved him from being a complete pussy and calling in sick to work, anyway. For that alone he wouldn’t give her a ticket for disturbing the peace.

“You didn’t have that beer, did you?” she yelled at his back. “You know, you could just go see her!”

Ben heard the snap of a camera just as he gave Lori the finger again. Miles Webster’s chuckle carried easily across the street.

But Ben had noticed just this morning that Miles’s tags had expired three weeks before, so he was smiling as he slammed the station door.
Screw you, old man.