Page 11 of Duke's Rescue
“My instinct’s been keeping men alive for twenty years. How about you?” I replied. Perhaps more abruptly than I meant to.
Angel looked at me. Held my gaze. I could see him weighing it, the way he weighed everything, with the steady, unhurried patience of a man who’d been making life-and-death calls during our time in the military and long after it too.
“We watch,” Angel said. “Hawk, eyes on the town. Rook, keep digging. I want to know everything about this man that isn’t on the campaign website. Duke, she’s yours. Keep her close.”
She’s yours. The words landed in my chest and sat there, heavy, warm, loaded with more than Angel probably intended. Or maybe exactly what he intended. Angel didn’t waste words, and he was no idiot.
Buck didn’t leave town like I’d hoped he would.
He checked into the motel on Route 12 and he stayed. Came back to Rosie’s the next morning, same stool, same eggs, same easy warmth. Tipped well. Talked to the regulars, and even talked to the sheriff’s deputy who stopped in for coffee on his rounds. By lunchtime he’d shaken hands with half the town in that practiced way he’d learned.
Trixie called me from the diner landline that evening. Her voice was flat in the way it went when she was trying to hold something together with both hands.
I needed to go to her. Up the back stairs of the diner, they were narrow and creaked on the third step. The door was locked, of course. I knocked.
“It’s me, Duke.”
The lock turned. The door opened. She was standing there with Ruby on her hip and her face stripped bare, every layer of composure she’d built in the last two weeks gone. Her eyes were wide, red-rimmed, and she was holding her daughter the way you hold something when you’re afraid someone’s going to take it.
“Hank told me I should hear him out,” she said. “This afternoon, while I was pouring his coffee. He said Buck seems real worried about me. That it might be worth hearing him out.” Her voice wavered. “Hank. The nicest man in this town thinks I’m being unfair to my husband.”
“Hank doesn’t know what you know.”
“He’s been here two days, Duke.” Her voice was tight, thin, the voice of a woman being squeezed from the outside in. “Two days and people are already looking at me differently.”
“Rosie doesn’t buy it. I don’t. Angel doesn’t.”
“Everyone else does.”
She looked at me. Ruby was quiet on her hip, her teddy pressed between them, her eyes moving between her mother’s face and mine with the particular focus of a child who understood more than she should.
“Maybe I overreacted,” Trixie said. Her voice was small. Careful. The voice of a woman trying on an old thought, seeing if it still fit. “He didn’t hit me. Not really. Not in a way anyone would... he just...”
“Don’t.”
She stopped. Looked at me.
“Don’t do that,” I said. I kept my voice even but something underneath it was shaking, something hot and dangerous thatI was keeping on a very short leash. “Don’t make yourself smaller so his version of things makes sense. You drove across state lines with everything you owned in a suitcase. You left everything behind for a reason. You showed up on a highway with nothing because staying with him was worse than that. You don’t overreact to a good marriage, Trixie. Nobody does.”
Her chin trembled. Just once, a single quiver she locked down before it could become anything else. Ruby pressed her face into her mother’s neck and Trixie’s arms tightened around her and the two of them stood there in that small apartment above the diner, holding on to each other, and the fury in my chest was so big I could taste it.
I wanted to go downstairs and put my hands on Buck Hawkins. Wanted to walk into Rosie’s and drag him off that stool and show him what it felt like to be afraid of a man who was bigger than him. Every instinct I had was screaming at me to go, to fix this, to be useful in the way I’d always been useful, with my hands, with force, with the blunt-instrument problem-solving that had defined my entire adult life.
I didn’t move. Because my hands couldn’t fix this. Buck operated in smiles, in systems, in the patient, methodical dismantling of a woman’s reality, and the only thing that would stop him was the work Rook did in the dark with a laptop and a list of questions nobody had thought to ask yet.
So I stayed. I sat down at the small table by the window, the only table in the apartment, two chairs tucked under it. Trixie put Ruby down and the kid walked straight to me, teddy and all, and climbed into my lap with the absolute certainty of a child who had decided where she was safe. She pressed her face against my chest and I put my arm around her and felt her breathing slow. I didn’t know quite what to do with this feeling, of being thrust into her orbit and wanting to nothing more thanprotect her and her mother. And right now, I wanted to hurt Buck in every possible way for doing this to them.
Trixie sat in the other chair. She watched her daughter curl into me and something in her face came apart, quietly, in the way of a woman who’d been alone for so long that seeing someone else hold her child undid her completely.
I reached across the table. Put my hand over hers. A small thing. The only thing I could give her right now that wasn’t a promise I couldn’t keep or a fight I couldn’t win.
Her fingers were cold. She turned her hand over, laced her fingers through mine, and held on. We sat there in the quiet with Ruby’s breathing soft between us and Buck Hawkins at the motel down the road, waiting with the patience of a man who’d always gotten what he wanted.
The want was still there. Underneath everything, the kiss on the mountain, the heat of her body against mine, the way she’d arched into my hand. Still there. The threat had sharpened it into something fiercer, something tangled up with the need to protect her, to keep her, to put myself between her and the man downstairs and never move. The two feelings fed each other, desire and protectiveness braiding together until I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.
She looked at me over Ruby’s sleeping head. Her eyes, red-rimmed, exhausted, afraid. And underneath the fear, the same heat. Banked, buried under everything that was happening, but alive. I could see it. The pull between us hadn’t dimmed. The threat had burned away everything around it and left the wanting exposed, raw, impossible to ignore.
I held her hand. She held mine.
