Authors: Shiloh Walker
Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Suspense, #Contemporary Women, #Contemporary
Deeper Than Need
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To Monique at SMP, for taking a chance on me, and Alexandra who has proven to be very patient with weird emails and crazy questions. To Irene and everybody at the Irene Goodman Literary Agency.
To my readers … I couldn’t do this without you.
To the people of Madison. It’s one of my favorite towns ever … really. As always, to my family. I love you so much. One of the greatest gifts God has given me. I can’t thank Him enough for you.
And finally … to all of those who run from demons … may you find peace.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’d like to thank Tyson Eblen of the Madison Police Depart-ment for his help while writing this. Any errors are mine. Just as the twisted story is mine. I also need to say thanks to Lynn Viehl, because she is always, always, always there to lend an ear when I need to figure out a plot … well, lend an e-mail that is.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Madison is a pretty little town perched on the banks of the Ohio River in southern Indiana. It’s also a very friendly place, despite the weird stuff that I have taking place in my series. This is all fiction, folks. Nothing more.
For the sake of my story, I did need to switch things up some. Locations are a little different and I put houses where there aren’t any, added a few churches that don’t exist and that sort of thing.
There are Amish who live in nearby Switzerland County and, to my knowledge, they are very traditional. However, for the purposes of the story, in ‘my’ version of Madison and nearby Switzerland County, there are actually two groups of Amish, one larger community that is very traditional and then a smaller community that isn’t traditional at all. The two groups were once part of a whole, but split due to a rift in the community.
If you’re at all familiar with the area or with the Amish, you will probably notice that I took some artistic liberties.
CONTENTS
Novellas Also by Shiloh Walker
CHAPTER ONE
Noah Benningfield was a man who understood temptation.
That’s all there was to it.
He’d spent a good seven years all but stuck inside a bottle, and when he wasn’t stuck inside a bottle he’d been happily trapped inside a woman.
Sometimes he’d done both. No,
often
he’d done both.
The demons that had chased after him were called guilt and grief and no amount of alcohol could silence their voices for long. No woman could ease the ache for any longer than it took to bring her to climax.
Nothing brought him any kind of peace during those dark, awful years.
Noah … just trust me.…
Those words whispered to him during the long, miserable nights and the only thing that silenced the voice of a girl long gone was another drink or sometimes the arms of whatever female was willing to let him crawl into bed with her.
Trust … that hadn’t ever been the problem. Trust. That was what had led him down this path. He’d trusted a girl, one he’d loved more than life itself. Trusted her … and twenty years later blood-drenched screams still haunted his dreams.
Trying to hide from those dreams sent him spiraling down a one-way road to nowhere, fueled by booze, losing himself in the arms of whichever female would take him. That had lasted seven years. By the time he pulled himself out of that hole, he’d already lived a lifetime of regrets.
Now, at thirty-seven, he still had to fight the demons of grief and guilt and he sometimes still woke from blood-drenched dreams, the sound of a desperate scream echoing in his ears. They weren’t as bad now. He could go days, sometimes even weeks, without the nightmares.
He’d settled into a blank, grey existence.
It was empty. It was easy. It was safe.
All until he’d taken this job.
A job that landed him in the middle of hell.
A job that landed him in the middle of Temptation City.
Both at the same time. The stress was something he didn’t need.
It wasn’t even eight o’clock, but he was already on the site for the biggest job he was currently dealing with. Rehabbing the old Frampton place.
Pulling to a stop in front of the old Frampton house, he tried to silence the whisper of her voice, dancing in the back of his mind.
Just trust me.…
It was a twist in the gut. The blistering, white-hot heat of the late summer sun beat down on him, but he felt chilled. A cold little bead of sweat rolled down his spine.
It had been twenty years since his girlfriend Lana had come out here. Nobody knew why. Not even him. Plenty of people had suspicions. Even he had some, although nobody in town would have believed him. Not that he cared.
All that really mattered, in the end, was that she was out here that night. And that was the last time anybody saw her, as she walked down this street, toward this very house. Inside, on one window, they found a set of her fingerprints, smeared and bloodied.
There were a few other sets of fingerprints—one belonging to David Sutter—and another partial, but it couldn’t be matched.
There was also blood. On the porch. In the kitchen.
A broken piece of jewelry—found near the stone wall that bordered the property. It had been a dog tag–styled necklace, belonging to David Sutter.
Not much evidence, but that was all anybody ever found.
Eying the looming shadow of the Frampton house, Noah blew out a breath and wondered if he could get done what needed to be done. Now.
Before …
The door opened and the breath was just knocked out of him.
Trinity Ewing. Mistress and ruler of Temptation City. Every muscle in his body clenched, while the blood in his brain started a slow, steady journey south. Hunger, hot and potent, punched through him as the woman saw him and smiled.
“Coward,” he muttered as he forced himself to climb out of the truck.
Trinity, the new owner of the old Frampton place, probably had no idea that she had taken the starring role in most of his dreams for the past week. The kind of dreams he hadn’t had in far too long. The first one had caught him off-guard—he didn’t dream about women, didn’t think about women, people in general, not in a personal sense.
He got through each day by just … easing through life. It was simple. It was easy. It was safe.
Noah had existed in a fog, a grey, colorless fog.
That grey fog no longer existed.
One look, that was all it had taken for the quiet, grey existence to just … disappear. It hadn’t evaporated. That was a slow thing, wasn’t it? No, this was like it sizzled away in a heated rush the second her misty grey eyes had connected with his.
Now everything was fused with hot, vibrant color and the world felt alive again.
He
felt alive, his body pulsing with needs he’d ignored for more years than he cared to recall. It was wonderful and it was awful and it was driving him nuts.
All the more reason for him to get this job done, so he could get his butt out of Temptation City.
That was the plan. It was a good plan, too.
“Mr. Noah!”
He watched as the door opened yet again and a pint-sized tornado with a head of messy yellow curls came tearing outside and down the sidewalk.
Despite himself, he grinned. He braced himself, shifting automatically so preparing for the brunt of Micah Ewing’s full-body tackle-hug on his hip. Once, he hadn’t been prepared. Once. Only once. It had been enough. The kid’s head was solid as a rock and right on level with a sensitive part of Noah’s anatomy. He wasted his time, though … this morning, Micah stopped a few feet away, eyes wide and locked on Noah’s face.
“Mama cussed this morning.”
Trinity scowled, a flush rising up her neck to paint her cheeks pink. “Micah, get your tail back inside and finish breakfast.”
Micah spun around and held up a mangled piece of toast. “I got it with me.” As if to prove he wasn’t going to waste that bit of bread, he shoved it in his mouth and then turned back around to stare at Noah as he chewed. “She’s going to yell at you, too.”
Noah ran a hand through his hair. “Well, I think I ate
my
breakfast … at the table, even.”
“Not about your breakfast. It’s about the water. I heard her in the bathroom, talking about the stupid shower—that’s what she called it—then the water came on and she screamed and started cussing.”
* * *
Trinity just wanted the ground to open up and swallow her. Right there.
Noah Benningfield, a man who was probably just about the sexiest creature she’d ever seen, stood there with Micah and he was grinning down at her precocious child like he’d never seen anybody so entertaining. The grin made the deep grooves in his cheeks even more apparent and he stood there, arms folded over a wide chest, the muscles in his arms bulging under the short sleeves of his faded blue T-shirt.
He was so mouthwatering, it hurt to look at him.
And the way he smiled at her son made her heart ache. Noah looked at Micah like he was the most amazing, amusing child he’d ever come across.
Trinity had to admit, Micah amused and amazed her often.
But did he
have
to mention the shower thing?
Naturally.
She might laugh about it. Later. She could remember Micah’s big eyes, peering around the door at her as she fought with the shower, trying not to get her boobs, her belly, every last inch of her, burned.
The damn shower had gone from lukewarm—
yuck
—to scalding her skin off in the blink of an eye.
Just
her luck, Micah had come in while she was wrestling with the shower, with trying to keep the towel wrapped around her, and she’d sat there explaining to him that
no,
she shouldn’t have said those words and absolutely he wasn’t allowed to say them.
She and Micah had reached a compromise—the one her dad had started using after Micah had picked up on
his
cussing. The swear jar.
Now she had a mason jar sitting on the counter with a quarter in it. Micah already wanted to use the quarter to buy bubble gum.
She’d forgotten Noah was coming out early today to check on the progress, and of course she looked like complete crap. If it was any other man, she wouldn’t even think twice about standing there talking to him—she’d made that promise to herself when she left New York, and her ex, behind.
But Noah Benningfield made her tongue stick to the roof of her mouth and her hands got all sweaty just thinking about him. They’d met just a few short weeks ago, saw each other in passing while he set up everything for the renovations on her house.
A few meetings here and there, a few phone calls. Not much, right? So why did she keep waking up hot and sweaty from all of those dreams? The hottest, dirtiest dreams, where he ran those rough, calloused hands over her, where he pressed his lips to her neck, skimmed them down, down, down …
Her mouth went dry as she thought about the most recent dream, the one that had sent her into the shower, seeking some sort of release. Instead, she’d gotten her boobs burned and her son had poked his head in when he heard her cussing.
Noah hadn’t done anything to encourage her. Well, except for being beautiful. Kind. The “beautiful” part she could probably handle. The “kind” part … that was a little harder. If he’d been an asshole, she could write him off.
Instead, he was decent and funny and he treated her son better than Micah’s own dad had treated him. Noah made her smile and he made her blood heat just by being in the same room with her. She didn’t even know how many months of this she had to look forward to, and she didn’t know if her libido could handle it.
She should have gone with the other general contractor the Realtor had mentioned. He’d had a picture on his Web site. He was in his sixties or thereabouts. He had a snowy white beard. If he wore red, he’d be mistaken for Santa Claus. She wouldn’t lie awake at night fantasizing about the slow, lazy way he talked or the slow, lazy way he moved. Or the way his hands looked as he gestured at this part of the house or that. The shade of those surreal blue eyes or the way they crinkled at the corners when he smiled.