Chapter 11
Chapter 11
“ W ell, they think I’m crazy,” Jordan declared.
Gaines laughed and shook his head. “Jordy, are you okay?”
“Okay for a crazy person, you mean?”
“No, I mean for a person who was awoken by someone in her room in the middle of the night and scared out of her wits.” He eased toward her.
“You don’t think I’m crazy?”
“I mean, you have questionable taste in movies and books and a disturbing amount of throw pillows on your bed. But do I think you’re making up an intruder for attention? No way.” He came to halt a foot away, which was an odd sort of distance. Too close to be casual, too far to be intimate. Jordan took a step away from the door, bringing her a tiny bit closer. His hand reached out and rested on her hip. They blinked at each other, both too surprised by the action to know what to do next. It was, without a doubt, the most intimate touch they’d ever exchanged.
He took a breath to speak and his phone beeped. “Hold on, that’s Ridge.” He dropped his hand as he pulled out his phone and swiped it.
“Are you with Jordan?” Ridge asked.
“Yes. How did you divine?”
“I had Blue set an alert on her house. I get a contact any time it comes up in an emergency.”
“Can you CC me on that?” Ribs asked.
“Yep. Everything okay?”
“Yes. She had an intruder in her room. The locals couldn’t find anything.”
“Did you find anything?”
“I haven’t looked yet, I’ll let you know.”
There was a pause, a significant one. “Maybe I better take a second look at Shimmer’s suicide.”
Ribs didn’t say anything, but he agreed. If someone was targeting Jordan, there was a high likelihood that it was because of Shimmer’s job. Otherwise why else?
They disconnected without saying goodbye and he shoved the phone back in his pocket.
“Does Cam think I’m crazy? Of course he does, dumb question,” Jordan said, clasping her hands together in renewed misery.
Ribs smiled at her and clasped one of her hands, using it to lead her to the couch. “Let’s sit and talk. You look all done in.”
Self-consciously, she touched her hair. Who didn’t look all done in in the middle of the night? Outside of Amelia and the supermodels he usually dated, that was.
They sat, side by side, thighs touching, her hand still firmly in his. His grasp was warm and reassuring and she shuddered, letting that reassurance wash over her and banish the last vestiges of fear. Noting the shudder, he switched her hand to his other one and used his newly free arm to slide around her shoulder, drawing her close.
“First of all no, Ridge does not think you’re crazy. We’ve known you for over a decade. People don’t suddenly start to make up phantom intruders.”
She relaxed and rested her head on his chest. “That’s nice.” Which part was nice? His reassurance? His warm embrace? His rock-solid chest? Probably all of it. “There might be a little bit of precedent, though.”
“How so?” he asked. His arm began to slide up and down her bicep and she lost the thread of the conversation for a few beats.
It’s the middle of the night and a pretty man is touching you. Of course it’s hard to think, she reassured herself. “A couple of weeks ago I thought I saw a man in my room.” He tensed and she pressed her palm to his chest, urging him to hold off and relax until she continued. “It ended up being the vacuum. And I keep waking up, hearing sounds.” She shook her head. “Maybe I really am losing it. I was so certain, though. I mean, I saw him, watched him walk out of my room. Didn’t I?” She leaned back to assess his expression as he processed the flow of new information.
The new position put them within a hairsbreadth of each other, face to face. How was it even possible for him to look so good upon waking up? And why? Why was life so unfair, that men could roll out of bed and look like a Bowflex commercial and women had to do the full makeup and hair routine, not to mention the puffy under eye bags she’d been sporting since Charlotte was born.
“Jordy,” he whispered. His finger reached out and began gently tracing her face.
“Mmm,” she said and, oh no, did her eyes slide closed? Yes, yes they did. And apparently they were staying that way because she seemed unable to pry them open again, betraying how incredibly good the touch felt. Any touch felt good now, deprived as she was, but this was especially gentle and soothing.
“Walk me through it,” Gaines said.
“Through what?”
“Tonight. What happened? What woke you?”
“Um,” her thoughts seemed scattered all over the room now, put there by his gentle touch. She attempted to collect them and be coherent. “I woke up and saw the man and thought it was the vacuum again.” Good job being coherent, stupid. “And then he walked out of the room.”
“What did he look like?”
“Um,” she said again, trying to remember. “It was dark, but I could tell it was a man because he was big.”
“As big as me?” he asked.
“No one’s as big as you,” she said.
She couldn’t see him, but somehow she knew he was smiling. “Short? Tall?”
“Tallish and kind of rounded somehow. Like not tall and broad shouldered like you and Jay. Tall and slumped. Maybe a tummy pooch.”
“Hair?”
“I don’t know if it had hair; he was wearing clothes.”
He snorted. “Not the pooch, on his head. Blond? Dark?”
“Dunno. Too dark to see. All I had were impressions. Bigger, roundish, hunched, and then he walked out.”
“How long between when he walked out and when you checked the kids’ rooms?”
“Maybe a minute? I called the police and then ran into their rooms. The doors were open, though. I always close them.”
His finger stilled, his body tensed. “You’re sure they’re okay?”
“Positive. I laid my hand on their chests and made sure I felt the steady rise and fall.”
“Okay. I’m going to do my own perimeter sweep.”
Her face creased into a smile.
“What?” he asked, preemptively smiling, too.
“You said ‘perimeter.’ Cop speak.”
“Also spy speak,” he reminded her. “Are you going to be okay here?”
“Fine,” she assured him, eyes still closed.
“You’re going to fall asleep, aren’t you?” he guessed.
“I’m already there, dream fairy SEAL,” she murmured.
With a chuckle, he withdrew his finger and went to check the house.
H e expected to find something. Not that he didn’t have faith in the locals, because he did. But they were trained for different things. The police dealt with run of the mill morons who were stupid enough to rob someone in a snowstorm and leave tracks leading directly to their hideout. Ribs dealt with people who had fused off their fingerprints and wore cooling clothes to cloak their infrared signal. Even so, he found nothing.
His inspection of the perimeter was meticulous, but it didn’t matter because there was nothing, not a whisper or hint that anyone had been there. He crouched beside Jordan’s bedroom window, thinking.
As he saw it, there were three possibilities: Jordan, half-asleep and in a state of perpetual grief and stress, imagined an intruder. There was an intruder who made his entry and exit through the front door without leaving a trace and locking it behind him. Or there was an intruder, but he was so good at covering his tracks not even Ribs or the locals had caught a whiff. Absolutely none of those possibilities was a best-case scenario. As much as he didn’t want to believe Jordan had a sophisticated intruder, he also didn’t want to believe Jordan was delusional. Not for a minute did he believe she was making it up for attention, as the cops seemed inclined. He knew her too well, had known her too long to believe she would do anything like that. She was not now, nor had she ever been, the sort of person to seek attention. In fact being in the spotlight made her feel flustered, to the point where she became adorably awkward and clumsy.
Ribs realized he was still crouched and now grinning into the middle distance like a creepy psycho. He made himself stand and go back inside the house. Jordan was predictably asleep, slumped over on the couch in what had to be a miserable position. There was no use trying to wake her, however. Once she was out, she was out. Seemingly the only thing that could wake her was her kids, and both of them were silent. Ribs picked her up and carried her to her room. He laid her in the bed and tucked the covers over her. She curled into a little ball and, unable to resist, he reached out and smoothed his hand over her hair, smiling when she gave an annoyed little huff and shimmied into a tighter ball.
He eased out of the room and checked on both kids, pausing at the entry to their rooms to let his eyes scan. Everything seemed as it should be, but he still felt uneasy, like something was off. Then again everything had felt off since Shimmer’s death, so perhaps it was merely that same pervading sense of wrongness and not something more.
Reassured that at least the kids were well and truly asleep, he went to the living room and stared at the couch, frowning. It felt far, too far, from Jordan. Though his mind told him she was fine, he didn’t feel like being separated. So he tugged the afghan from the back of the sofa, went back to Jordan’s bedroom, lay down on the floor, and fell immediately asleep.
J ordan woke with a start, as she had been doing since Jay’s passing. Adrenaline slammed through her and she couldn’t remember why, and then it came flooding back. She had woken already this night, to an intruder in her room. But before the fear and terror could take root, a new sort of peace washed over her because somehow she knew Gaines was still in the house. And if Gaines was in the house, she was safe.
It was so sudden and complete, that feeling of safety, that Jordan almost wept, not only with the shock of it but with the absolute relief of not being the one in charge, of not having to take care of anything for a little while. She might have fallen back into an exhausted sleep, except that now her bladder was awake and demanding attention.
Could she put it off?
No, she could not. The harder she tried to ignore it, the more urgent it became. There was no help for it; she would have to slog to the potty and would probably stay awake the rest of the night. I’ll sleep again when the children are grown, she assured herself. It had become her survival mantra. I’ll go for dental and vision checkups when the children are grown. I’ll figure out what makeup color I should be wearing when the kids are grown. I’ll go shopping and find clothes that fit well when the kids are grown. I’ll take a shower or bath by myself when the kids are grown. I’ll be able to sit down and eat an entire meal when the kids are grown. My car will not look like a hoarder’s paradise when the kids are grown. She would do all the things other functioning adults did, someday when the kids were grown.
For instance, she would learn how to walk across the floor and not trip, as she did now, going down, down, down as the floor rushed gladly up to greet her.