A Method to His Madness
Chapter 1
CHAPTER 1
Caleb
The woman staring at the jars of pickles stops me in my tracks.
Around me, the squeaks and muffled mutterings of the supermarket flatline and a loud ringing in my ears begins. I can no longer feel the red plastic basket in my hand.
It is an indisputable fact that she is beautiful, even with her blonde hair pulled back in a severe braid. Her shirt collar is tight, buttoned up and nearly reaching her delicate chin. She wears thick rimmed glasses. Loose pants. Everything about her attire is designed to draw the least amount of attention, yet I’m arrested in time, my steps faltering as if the air has grown sticky around me.
And she continues to stare at the pickles.
It occurs to me after a moment that she is not really seeing them. She’s dazed.
Numb.
There is an entire world turning behind her eyes. The pickles are just bystanders. Though, after approximately thirty seconds, she visibly shakes herself, selects one of the jars and returns it, something on the top shelf catching her eye, instead.
When she reaches for the item and her outstretched fingers don’t even come close, I begin to move in her direction, intending to help, though I would be a bald-faced liar if I didn’t acknowledge my body thrumming, my heart beating double time in my chest, some unknown part of me demanding to get closer to her.
I’m still ten yards away when she steps on the bottom shelf to boost herself, one elegant hand wrapping around a jar of tapenade—the sole of her sneakers yelping as she slips. The woman clutches the glass to her chest with one arm, her other one reaching uselessly for purchase, as there is nothing to grab but breakable items. It’s clear she’s going to stumble and possibly fall. But he doesn’t, because her back lands against my chest, instead, my left hand a steadying presence at her waist.
It's the only steady part of me as soon as I’ve touched her.
As soon as her scent invades my head.
Once, in an orange grove in California, I plucked an orange off a tree, peeled it and bit into it whole. That’s what she smells like. Sun heated, natural. Juicy.
I look down at the soft sweep of her neck and wonder what I’d need to do to sink my teeth into her. Unfortunately, I don’t get the chance to ponder the answer for long, because she turns pissed off green eyes on me and raises the glass jar, obviously prepared to break the vessel of tapenade over my fucking head.
“Get your hands off me or I’ll crack your skull open,” she says haltingly.
Fearfully.
“Easy,” I say quietly, making sure she’s steady, then backing up a pace, despite wanting more contact. More. My pulse is erratic, regardless of my calming tone, thanks to her hushed honey voice. The supple glow of her cheeks. The mixture of violence and trepidation in her incredible eyes. I’m…captured.
Who the hell is this woman?
“There’s nothing easy about me,” she says, flipping the glass jar over in her hand. “Would you like a demonstration?”
Yes.
I would, in fact, love her to show me anything about herself, because she presents such an enigma, and I’m not used to being confused. I’m a therapist who can diagnose people at forty paces. Disruptive behavior disorders. Depression. Disassociation. Anxiety.
This woman is not straightforward. She contains multitudes.
A moment ago, she appeared lost in a pickle-induced fog.
Now she would very much enjoy killing me in aisle five.
And one thing is for certain. She does not appreciate being touched by a stranger. Frankly, I’ve never met a woman who does. This is something I can confidently address.
“You were falling,” I point out. “I didn’t mean to startle you. It was a reflex.”
“Sort of like me clocking you with this heavy object?”
My lips twitch. “Sort of like that, yes.”
“Well.” She gives me a once-over that can only be coined downright disrespectful. “Aren’t you going to complain that I should be thanking you?” Slowly, she sets the tapenade back on the wrong shelf behind her, though she’s careful to keep one green eye trained on me, as if I might attack her in the middle of the supermarket. “Aren’t you going to try and make me feel crazy for threatening you over a harmless little touch?”
“No. I’m not.”
“It’s not harmless to me,” she says, somewhat choppily.
“I can see that.” That is an understatement. She’s…haunted. There’s trauma here and I’ve haplessly unearthed it with one touch. “I’m sorry.”
Slowly, her brow knits together, this gorgeous woman who is trying to disguise her beauty to no avail, her gaze attempting to collect information about me. “You actually seem sorry.”
“And that’s hard for you to believe?”
“Yes.”
If I had my clipboard in front of me, I would have filled three full pages of notes by now and there would be no end in sight. “Why?”
She starts to respond, but checks herself, pressing her lush lips in a line as a woman trundles past with a baby tucked into the front of her shopping cart. “This isn’t really grocery store conversation.”
“No, it’s not.” I’m careful to keep an appropriate distance from her when I say the next part, because it could easily be interpreted as a come on. I tell myself it isn’t one, though my body’s reaction to her calls me a liar. “We could have it in my office, instead.”
Before I can stop myself, remind myself that I’m a strict professional for a reason , the moving image is there. Me fucking this fiercely beautiful woman face down over my desk, her hair loose and wrapped around my fist, her ass cheeks plumping, plumping, plumping against my stomach, her fingernails digging lines into wood, both of us moaning.
“Oh, could we?” she laughs, sarcastically, reaching for the jar once again.
“I’m a therapist.”
That gives her brief pause. Brief being the operative word. “Your profession doesn’t preclude you from being a creep.” Almost reluctantly, she drags her gaze along the breadth of my shoulders. “You don’t look like a therapist.”
It’s an even steeper struggle not to step closer to her after that. She’s noticed my body. Analyzed and considered it. “What does a therapist look like?”
“Pale. Bored. Like they sit in an office all day.”
I wrestle back a surge of amusement. “And what do I look like…?”
“Ashley,” she murmurs, seeming surprised at herself for revealing her name. A name I already know I will never forget. “I don’t know, um…” She seems to hate…and enjoy looking at me. In equal measure. Interesting. “A secret service agent, maybe.”
Clever girl. “In my past life, I was something similar.”
Ashley looks so deeply inside of me, I feel an alarming shift. A rock formation loosening, preparing to cause a landslide. “How many lives have you led?”
“Too many,” I mutter, breaking my rule. Allowing information about myself to enter the conversation. Technically, we’re not in the middle of a session, but she’s disarmed me enough to forget where my barriers lie. Ten feet high. Impenetrable. The patient is the focus, not me. Never me. There is too much to dissect there.
I left my job as a homicide detective and became a therapist out of an urgent need to understand what makes a person hurt others. Emotionally and physically. How someone capable of violence hides in plain sight, the way my partner on the force did. My affable, goofy partner who didn’t come to work on day, because he’d been arrested for killing his wife. The human brain became a fascinating and scary place to me that dark day, perhaps because behavioral science is easier to understand than grief. Rage.
A man appears to the right of Ashley…
…and grabs her wrist. Hard . Yanking her sideways, in his direction.
The way he pulls her sleeve renders the collar of her shirt askew…and I see it.
A bruise.
My vision is suddenly coated in such a thick, syrupy red, the man is almost obscured by the rageful color, but I see him out of necessity, because I’m about to choke him out with my bare hands. Trucker hat, unkempt beard. A starchy, short sleeved button-down shirt. A violent man like my partner, but far more obvious about the monster inside of him. I’m reaching for his throat when he says, “Thanks for finding my wife for me.” He gives Ashley a look of veiled anger. “Sooner or later, you’re going to learn to stay where I put you.”