Cold Midnight by Joyce Lamb Read Free Book Online

jaw so hard he should have heard teeth grinding. “What are you trying to do here?”
    “My job.”
    “You were there.”
    His confusion must have shown on his face, because she repeated it. “You were there, with me, afterward. I shouldn’t have to tell you about it.”
    Oh. He swallowed hard, remembering in high-definition sitting by her bedside when she woke from that first, emergency surgery. She’d been so beautifully out of it, disoriented from the pain medication as she groped for his hand with a loopy smile, telling him she liked the way he smelled. Like coconuts, she’d said. Rough and hard on the outside, soft and sweet on the inside. Like you.
    He wasn’t feeling so soft and sweet on the inside at the moment. More like the middle of a compost heap. “I’m not talking about the aftermath,” he said tightly.
    “So, let me get this straight. You’re still bent out of shape that I wouldn’t open up to you about it back then, so you’re using your job as an excuse to force it out of me now. Is that it?”
    “If that’s the way you want to look at it. Either way, you need to tell me. From the beginning. In detail.”
    She didn’t respond for a long moment, as though debating her options. But he already knew she wouldn’t walk away. He’d issued a challenge that her competitive spirit, her drive to prove that she was A-OK, wouldn’t allow her to rebuff.
    Finally, she gestured toward the empty, paved track that circled the health club. “Can we walk?”
    He nodded and fell in step beside her, catching her scent on a shift in the wind. Cocoa butter and vanilla. It sparked a memory of being sprawled on the beach with her. The water had lapped at the sand near their bare feet. They’d been relaxed and happy, curling easily against each other. He hadn’t felt like that, like he’d been home, since. The very next day, while he sat in English class at Kendall Falls Community College, two fuckwads took her down with a blue aluminum baseball bat.
    She didn’t speak until they’d reached the first curve in the track, until the change in direction and the approaching thunderheads provided a cooling breeze. “You already know the basics. I was out for a run. Usual time. Usual place, on the path through the wooded area behind the Bat Cave.”
    He remembered that path like it led through his own back yard. They’d run it together a million times. He’d run it a million times since, catching himself still looking for clues, stopping sometimes to catch his breath at the spot . He remembered vividly what the area looked like after the attack—the plants, dead leaves and pine needles inside the circle of yellow crime-scene tape trampled flat and spattered with blood. Kylie’s blood.
    His own blood had ended up on the trunk of a nearby tree, which he’d mindlessly hammered with his fists the day she’d walked away from him.
    He glanced sideways as she put her sunglasses on, despite the growing darkness of impending rain. Tension bled off her like waves of heat, and his need to hear, in her words, what happened wavered. But he had to do his job.
    “Ky?”
    Her chin inched up, and her shoulders squared. An ingrained response. “There were two of them,” she said. “Both slim and wiry. Most likely teenage boys.”
    “Wearing?”
    “Blue jeans. Both of them. Ratty, with holes in the knees. The one . . . the leader wore a black T-shirt with some kind of red band insignia on it. Aerosmith, I think. The other one had on a gray T-shirt that had ‘XXL’ on the front, like a generic gym shirt.” She glanced quickly at him. “Not a Kendall Falls High shirt. Those are red and white.”
    He acknowledged that with a nod. “Neither was wearing the shirt we found with the bat. What else?”
    “Black ski masks. That was my first clue that I was in trouble. Funny, really. You’d think my first clue would have been the bat. The one in the black shirt was slapping it against his palm like . . .”
    Chase waited her