Chapter Twenty-Two
The apartment above Honor’s Edge Investigations Office
Cal paced his apartment with his cell phone cradled between his ear and his shoulder. He had been eating dinner. Now he was about ready to fly off the handle.
“You can’t push discovery back until next week.”
“I can. I did,” the prosecutor replied. “Have a problem with it? Take it up with Judge Smith.”
The line went dead. Cal narrowly resisted hurling the phone across the apartment. Instead, he clenched it hard in his hand and tried to breathe through his frustration.
Legalities were nearly always frustrating. Lawyers were assholes, and judges were worse most of the time. Any case was a slow and careful study in dealing with annoying people working at cross-purposes to each other.
But this took the cake. Discovery would allow him to know exactly what kind of evidence they thought they had against Nate. Which would allow him to poke holes in all of it. Pushing it back was tasking Nate with rotting in that cell for even longer.
He looked out the window, down at Main Street. Marietta, Montana. He’d grown up here, itched to get out, and now he couldn’t help but wonder why the hell he was back. This place was fucked. Particularly and maybe only if your last name was Bennet.
There was something in that, though, that felt like a challenge. You want to get rid of me? We’ll see.
His phone chimed, and he glanced down at the text. From Jill.
“Are you home?”
He stared at those three words for longer than he should. No doubt it was more stuff about the case, or maybe even her book. It wasn’t personal. It wasn’t unrelated to everything going on.
And he wanted it to be.
Which was real nice, considering his brother was sitting in a jail cell.
Disgusted with himself as much as everything else, he replied. “Be down in a minute.”
He didn’t bother with shoes. Just jogged down the stairs to the back door downstairs. He unlocked it and opened it for Jill.
It wasn’t full on dark yet, but back here the buildings and trees shaded the area from the setting sun, so she seemed only illuminated by the security light. Her dark hair shined under the weird yellow glow. Fresh-faced with apology in her eyes, she was the strangest breath of fresh air.
“Hi,” Jill offered. “I tried to call you, but it went to voicemail. And since I was, like, right here, I just thought … I’m probably overstepping, but this was too weird.”
Weird. Great.
“You’re not overstepping,” he said, moving out of the way so she could step into the back room of Honor’s Edge.
But she was already talking before he’d even gotten the sentence out.
“I still haven’t gotten that report, even though I should have according to the lady I ordered it from.
Every time I’ve called the police station, I get put on hold and basically given some weird runaround.
” She stepped inside, the faint smell of something floral following her.
“So, after I ran some errands this afternoon, I stopped into the station thinking maybe if I talked to an actual person, I’d get somewhere. ”
He closed the door behind her, and she turned to face him in this dimly lit backroom. Her gaze was direct, worried. She wore jeans and another chunky sweater that seemed too heavy for the spring weather, but he’d noticed she seemed to run cold.
The things he’d filed away about her were getting to be a little bit concerning. Because they were spending a lot more time together than usual, and he wasn’t getting his usual compartmentalize time. Especially with so much of his brain power going into Nate’s case.
“Cal, they said there was some kind of technical problem, and they no longer had access to the report.”
The words flat out didn’t make any sense. “A technical problem?”
“Yes. They’d had the report, had filed the order for it to be sent to me, but now it’s missing from their system.” She looked up at him earnestly. Worry in those dark brown eyes.
Cal let out a slow breath. Missing. They weren’t denying a report existed. They were denying they could find it. Which just … didn’t feel accidental. Maybe it was. Maybe he should believe it was.
But he didn’t.
What the absolute hell? “How?”
“She really didn’t know. She was so flustered. She said they had an email in with the IT company they use, but I might just be out of luck unless I knew who’d taken the report. Then I could talk to them and see if they remembered or had personal notes.”
“Out of luck?” When had any of them been in luck?
This was just another brick of weird, shitty things that made it harder to get Nate out of jail. He wanted to … punch something. Smash his fist into the concrete wall.
And he couldn’t. “There are too many weird things. Too many fucking obstacles.”
“I’m sorry,” Jill said, so gentle and genuine. “You’ve got so much on your plate. I hate adding to it. But I knew it’d be important.”
It was important. He wished he didn’t know it anyway. Wished something was straightforward, instead of another point of maybe conspiracy or maybe just police incompetence.
“Are you okay?”
The question was so nice. Honestly worried for him.
And he felt a strange and compelling desire to say, No.
No, I am not okay. Let me tell you all the ways I am not okay.
Not because he wanted to scare her off—though he should—but because it seemed like unburdening himself to her would just be a comfort.
Since when do you deserve that? “Thanks for coming by and letting me know,” he said, sounding stiff even to his own ears.
But it was the only defense he had against this heady desire to communicate, connect.
“Right. Of course.” She nodded, and she was clearly trying to hide the fact his curt tone had hurt her feelings. “I’ll just get out of your hair.”
She started to move toward the door and all he could think was … God, he wanted her in his hair. There was just something about her … presence. It made him feel so damn normal. And he wasn’t, God knew, but it was a nice fleeting feeling, and he hated when it went away.
“Wait.” He said it without quite knowing why or what he planned to do with that wait.
She stopped at the door, turned to face him expectantly.
He didn’t have any quick excuses. Any bright ideas to keep her here. He had no words.
She was just so damn pretty. And earnest. Stopping by to try to help him. But it never felt like she pitied him. Maybe it was the relationship with her grandmother. She understood trauma better than a lot of people who’d never suffered it.
He didn’t want her to look at him and think of trauma, but there was no choice there. He couldn’t hide it. She’d already seen it.
Maybe that was why she felt so different.
“I just…” He always knew what to say.
Whether it be to a woman, his family, in a courtroom. He always had the words. To make any moment exactly what he wanted to be, even if it was ill-advised.
He didn’t right now. He just wanted to know what it would be like.
To forget all the shoulds and shouldn’ts and litany of things holding him back and just engage in what he wanted.
Which was her.
He inhaled, the admission of that in his head was doing a lot of damage to all those walls he kept so firmly in place. Because now, admitting it, all he could think was…
What was the worst thing that would happen if he just kissed her now? He kept living in all the worst things that could happen, so why not just go for broke on that score?
Before he could make a move, his phone trilled.
A reminder from the universe that he had no business thinking such things. He pulled the phone out of his pocket, surreptitiously putting some space between himself and Jill as he glanced at the screen.
“It’s Sam. Just give me a second.”
*
Jill’s heart beat erratically as she stood all but pressed to the door behind her. She knew she was being … something. Something not smart. Maybe delusional.
Whatever that moment had been … well, it had to be one-sided. She’d imagined something he hadn’t intended. She was certain of it.
She was almost certain of it.
Cal had bigger things to worry about than…
Well.
She could hear his side of the conversation with Sam, but she couldn’t make much sense of it. Except Cal was pissed. Even more pissed than he’d been about the missing report.
She blew out a careful breath, reminding herself again that she’d been imagining things. Because this man had way too much on his plate to be thinking about kissing her.
He ended the phone call, but he didn’t immediately turn to look at her. He didn’t immediately say anything. He stood there, a tense, tight man clearly on the precipice of something he was fighting back.
He was always fighting something. Pretending he was at ease, or a mess, or whatever suited him when the truth of the matter was he …
he was the captain of whatever strange ship they were all on together.
The leader. And as part of that, he took too much responsibility on himself. Too much blame and stress.
She just wanted to take some of that weight off his shoulders. He was so sharp and interesting when he wasn’t weighed down.
Then he turned, faced her down with that lawyer look. All direct and certain and, yes, angry, but with a purpose behind it.
“When Jake told you he had physical evidence, did he make it sound like there was a lot of physical evidence?”
“I…” Jill tried to think back, tried to engage her brain enough to think back.
“I guess I’m not sure. It wasn’t my interpretation that there was a lot.
Just … enough. But I could be misremembering.
” She stepped closer, narrowly resisting reaching out to touch him.
To find some way to comfort him. “Cal, what is it?”
“Jake told Sam one of the main pieces of evidence against Nate was one of those Bennet pocketknives found at the scene.”
She let out a breath of surprise. “Nate’s?”