Goes down easy(14)

She couldn’t help it. He’d looked so…scholarly, so Indiana Jones, what with the touch of gray at his temple, frowning at his screen as he read and jotting illegible notes onto a yellow legal pad. But then she’d taken in the rest of him and realized what a contradiction he was.

She’d been at work when he’d cleaned up and changed in Della’s little-used first floor shower. He still wore his Reeboks, today with a pair of black jeans, and instead of yesterday’s hoodie, he’d warded off the cold with a bomber jacket over nothing heavier than a T-shirt.

It was that T-shirt that had finally gotten to her. He’d sat there beneath the dining room’s low-hanging light fixture, reading, eating, taking notes, his movements economical and concise, but still drawing her gaze.

She’d watched the flexing of his biceps beneath the tight cotton sleeves, watched the binding of the fabric over the balls of his shoulders and the pull over his chest when he stretched.

She’d seen it all earlier when he’d been working on Della’s door, but she hadn’t been this close, and it hadn’t been dark, and they hadn’t been alone. Looking away and focusing on her food had put a huge strain on her minimal willpower.

She’d been too aware of having him there. Of what a calming presence he was. Of how easily he’d made himself at home.

Not once in her life had she felt the need to have a man around to provide security or a sense of safety, or to make her complete. But Jack being there, just…being there, had seemed right in more ways than she had fingers to count.

He’d come out of nowhere, bulldozed into her life with a hailstorm of demands, then turned around and in the next breath was so much a part of her existence she didn’t remember what the day before had been like without him around. And it was that realization as much as exhaustion that had finally sent her to her room.

In much the same way it had her jolting awake now.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed and eased to her feet. She’d slept deeply, though not long. The bedside clock read 1:00 a.m., and she’d climbed between the sheets at ten.

After a bathroom stop—one that included brushing her teeth and a quick fluff of her bed-head hair—she made her way down the hall, pausing at the living room door.

The main room was dark, but the light was still on in the dining nook. And Jack still sat at the table, jotting notes, glasses perched on the end of his nose.

“Hi,” she said, as she walked up behind him and circled the table, sitting in the same chair as before. “Any progress?”

For several seconds, he stared at her over the rims of his glasses, his eyes red, his exhaustion evident. Then he took them off and tossed them onto the table. “What time is it?”

He had a clock on his computer, so surely he knew. “A little after one,” she answered, watching as he scrubbed both hands down his face. “Why are you still up?”

He laughed, the sound more snort than chuckle, and seemingly directed at himself. “You stay up long enough, you forget you’re supposed to sleep.”

She remembered finding him awake in the kitchen almost twenty-four hours earlier. “You didn’t sleep at all last night, did you?”

Leaning back in his chair, his hands covering his face, he shook his head. “Maybe thirty minutes. And I drove in from Austin that morning.”

“So you’ve been without sleep for—” she glanced up at the wall clock, too tired to calculate the time “—how long now?”

“God, I have no idea.” He sat forward then, forearms on the table’s edge, taking her in with a gaze that was too sharply wired for a man as exhausted as he was. “I have a bad habit of not sleeping when I need to.”

She laced her hands together on the table. “I think you need to very soon.”

“I know.” He picked up his pencil, bounced the eraser end on the corner of his laptop. “I’ve been thinking for a while about hitting the couch.”

“But you haven’t, because…?”

He shrugged, ran his fingers up and down the pencil’s length. “I kept thinking I’d find a connection between Dawn Taylor and Dayton Eckhardt.”

Nerves fluttered in Perry’s stomach. “So you did find something.”

This time when Jack looked up, his excitement snagged her gaze and held. “Her husband used to work for Eckton Computing.”

“And?”

“When he couldn’t find work after Eckton left New Orleans, he took a short walk off the Causeway Bridge and killed himself.”





7





“DO YOU THINK Dawn’s involved in the kidnapping?” Perry asked as Jack returned to the table.

His announcement of Taylor’s suicide had left Perry momentarily lost in thought. He’d used the time to carry his cup and the empty coffee carafe back to the kitchen.

After Perry had cleared their dinner dishes and gone to bed, he’d started nodding off. A combination of exhaustion and pasta. Without a mega dose of caffeine, he’d known there was no way he’d make it through even an hour of his online fact-finding mission.

And as much as he was enjoying Perry’s company, as much as he’d like to enjoy even more, she wasn’t the reason he was here. He couldn’t let go of his focus, couldn’t let himself lose sight of his priorities or his purpose.

The Eckhardt family had placed their trust in him, their faith. Their hope that he’d be able to succeed where law enforcement had failed.

They knew his reputation for finding the people he was hired to find. What they didn’t know was the road he’d traveled from special ops to private investigation.

“That I’m not sure about,” he said, answering Perry’s question as he settled back into his seat. “But I am certain that she’s not the least bit unhappy that he’s missing.”

“Wonder what she’d think about him being dead,” Perry said, reminding him of Della’s last vision of Dayton Eckhardt.

Jack wasn’t ready to go there. Not now. Not yet. “I have to operate on the assumption that he’s alive and at least marginally well.”

“I didn’t think you’d do anything else.”

He looked up in time to catch her hiding a smile behind her fingertips. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

“The obvious.” She fluttered the hand she’d had at her mouth, wrapped her other arm around her middle. “You’re a ‘just-the-facts’ kind of guy. You have to see for yourself before you’ll believe. And even then I’m guessing you need to get your hands on whatever it is before you’re one-hundred percent convinced.”

She’d pegged him pretty damn well. “Some people talk with their hands. I think with mine.”

“Then it shouldn’t be too hard for you to understand that there are times Della can see things with hers.”

Yeah, right. He wasn’t going there, either.

“If you’d rather not talk about it, I’ll understand. But I am curious.” She returned her laced hands to the tabletop. “And eventually, I’ll get Della to tell me.”

“Tell you what?” Jack asked, fighting the fist that had slammed into his stomach.

“What she saw when she touched you,” Perry said, meeting his gaze, refusing to look away when he glared.

He did not want Perry knowing about his failures, or about the mess he’d made of his life. “Don’t psychics have a code of ethics? A doctor-patient confidentiality thing?”

“Whatever goes on between Della and her clients during a reading remains private, yes.”

“What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas?” he mused, not liking the bit of smugness in her smile.

“That’s a workable analogy.” She lifted a brow. “Except it only applies when it comes to closed sessions.”

“Making the rest of us open books, whether we like it or not.” He didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all.

“Well…” she said, then let the thought trail.

“Go ahead. Enjoy a big fat laugh at my expense.” He flicked his pencil across the table. “I’ll be gone soon, anyway.”

At that, she looked away, picking at a mark on the wooden surface of the table with her thumbnail. “When do you think you’ll be leaving?”

“I don’t know. Look, I’m sorry. I’m beat, and if this lead with Taylor doesn’t pan out I’m stuck with nothing else tangible to go on.”

Not to mention that his wanting to get to know her wasn’t going so well. Wrong time, wrong place, and all that. Though right now, he wouldn’t say no if she offered.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” she asked. “Anything I can look up or print out, or local numbers you need?”

Actually, he had an idea—one that went against his grain. But with the chips down and the weirdness of the last two days starting to make a twisted sort of sense, he wasn’t above looking like a fool if doing so resulted in answers.

So he started to tell Perry everything. But when he focused again on her face, her expression had him forgetting what he was going to say.

Her dark eyes were wide, the brows above raised while she waited for him to answer. She’d washed away what little makeup she’d been wearing before. And as much as he liked the natural look, what he really liked was that she let him see her face.