Fix You (29 page)

             
Hands curled tight, he picked her up like she weighed nothing and her legs went around his waist, arms looping behind his neck. He carried her to the window and set her on the sill, the glass panes cool against the back of her head, the grids digging into her spine. A sigh escaped her as his lips moved down her jaw, to her throat, teeth and tongue teasing at a bruise he’d left days before, one she’d been trying to cover with makeup much to Jo and Tam’s snickering delight.

             
Sex was an auditory thing. Above the thumping of her pulse and the rustle of fabric and the gliding of hands on skin, the soft sound of him sucking at her neck, Jess registered a creak of door hinges. Panic surged through her before she heard: “Mama?”

             
“Stop!” Jess put her palms on Chris’s chest and shoved him hard, only succeeding in bringing his head up. “Move!” she snapped as he gave her a curious look.

             
“Mama?” Tyler repeated, more fretful this time, and then Chris understood.

             
His eyes widened, hands falling away from her, straightening.

             
“
Get off me
,” Jess hissed, and climbed off the sill and ducked past him, thankful things hadn’t progressed any further and that Tyler had only seen them kissing. She felt guilty just for that, though, especially once she saw him standing just inside her bedroom, little brows knitted together, chin trembling.

             
“Tyler, sweetie,” she soothed as she walked to him. “I can explain,” she said, though she couldn’t. She reached him and put her hands on his quaking shoulders. “You see, Chris was –”

             
His eyes, glazed with tears, lifted to hers, his little chest heaving as he sucked in a deep breath. “There’s a man outside my window!” he exclaimed.

             
Her blood ran cold. She gathered his face in her palms and sucked in a deep breath. “There is?”

             
He nodded her hands away. “He’s looking at me!”

             
She turned, and Chris was already in motion. His gun, the nine millimeter that hadn’t been in sight a moment before, was in his hands and he checked the clip, held it down low along his thigh.

             
“Which window, kid?” he asked Tyler, striding toward the door. Jess recognized a softness in his voice, a concerted effort not to rile her child further: she appreciated it.

             
“T-the one,” Tyler sucked in a huge breath, “b-by my bed.”

             
“Okay.” Chris gave him a pat on top of the head. Then he looked at Jess, eyes dark, hard, and serious. “You two stay in here until I get back.”

             
She nodded and didn’t argue.

             
“You said there was no boogeyman,” Tyler accused, voice tinged with betrayal, as she led him over to the bed and they climbed on top.

             
Jess raked her nails through his hair and tried, unsuccessfully, to convince him that she hadn’t lied to him for the thirty minutes Chris was gone. The time dragged, the silence around them pregnant with worry and fear.

             
When the back steps finally creaked, Jess’s spine drew taut, strained nerves firing. Tyler had finally settled and laid beside her as she rubbed circles across his small back with the heel of her hand. She recognized the fall of Chris’s boots as he came in through the kitchen, but she was wired and waited for him to appear in the threshold with her breath held.

             
As he stepped into view, she was struck by the thought that whoever had been lurking outside would have been very stupid to tangle with him. His hair – extra spiky thanks to her finger-combing – stood up dark and sharp, his face harsh with aggression, his tall, muscled frame the lethal core of contained power brought about only by real life violence. He looked worldly and dangerous and intense, and it was an authentic projection unlike any she’d seen from gym rats and wannabes. If she hadn’t known just how gentle he could be, she would have been frightened.

             
“What?” she asked as he came and sat on the edge of the bed. Tyler propped up on an arm and rested his head on her thigh, watching their guard dog.

             
“I saw him going into the trees,” he said with disgust, “but I couldn’t catch him.”

             
Jess knew she was supposed to hide her own fear in front of Tyler, but she couldn’t. Her hand curled around her son’s shoulder; she swallowed hard. “This is ridiculous,” she said, and the fear seeped into her voice. “Why would anyone be peeking in our windows?”

             
His look was grim. “I don’t think it’s random.”

             
She mirrored his frown. “Do you think –”
Dylan
, she wondered?

             
“Yeah.”

             
She plucked at Tyler’s pajamas and fretted. She hated feeling helpless, unable to defend her baby. True, nothing had happened – they’d only been scared – but she felt they were being threatened, and that was something she couldn’t tolerate. A knot formed in her throat that she couldn’t swallow away.

             
Chris seemed to know. “I haven’t been serious enough about this,” he said, shaking his head and glancing toward the window.

             
“You’ve been here every night,” Jess said. “I think that’s above and beyond the call.”

             
The look he shot her told her that he wasn’t acting as her contractor, and he expected her to acknowledge that – to give him more credit than she was. “I need to get more proactive,” he said. “There’s no reason some punk-ass should be giving me the slip. It’s embarrassing.”

             
“What’re ya gonna do?” Tyler asked, voice thick with sleep.

             
“Catch the bastard so he quits scaring you and your mom.”

             
Jess frowned at the language, but Tyler seemed to accept the answer, settling against her. She raked a hand back along his head and watched his lashes flutter, knew that exhaustion would claim him in only moments and then she would try to lug him back to his own bed. She glanced up at Chris, who watched them. “I’m sorry you’ve gotten sucked into this.”

             
He shrugged. “Being a civilian can get kinda boring.” There was something else in his eyes though, something more earnest.

             
She looked away, swallowing again.

**

              Chris woke the next morning with cramps knotting the back of his bad leg. His eyes sliced open against a warm bath of sunlight and fell across the bed that stretched before him. He’d slept at the foot, half curled, one arm hanging off the edge, uncomfortable as hell. Jess and Tyler were tucked up against the pillows; she’d slept with an arm around her kid, her chin resting against the back of his head. For a moment, he was startled.

             
He’d had every intention of unrolling his sleeping bag and crashing on the floor. But at some point after Tyler’s second nightmare and Jess’s efforts to comfort him, he’d passed out across the foot of the bed.

             
So this was what it was like – waking up to a family. Waking up with responsibilities. Jess looked troubled, even in sleep, and she and Tyler seemed about as breakable as little birds cuddled together. They had belonged to someone – been some other man’s family – and they’d been given up. Turned loose. Rejected.

             
In the army, he’d defended himself – his country and his fellow soldiers – but he’d never been afraid for himself. He’d never been riled and furious about his own safety. This was new and shocking and twisted: his personal need for violence.

             
After he caught whoever was playing peeping tom outside their windows, he thought he might just have to pay Dylan Beaumont a visit. He’d never wanted to hit someone so badly in his life.

22

             
S
eptember had brought a snatch of crispness to the air, a hint of cold settling between the trunks of trees and along the leaf-littered ground. Summer’s humidity was gone, and tonight, in the dark, the air was dry and charged. At least, it seemed that way. Chris was a bundle of expectant nerves – the good kind that kept him alert and watchful. He’d spent all day devising a plan while he worked, and he was proud of it, whether it worked or not.

             
Jess had fried chicken for dinner and they’d eaten by twilight and a Coleman lantern at the picnic table outside the cottage, Tam and Jo and kids with them. The big family dinner. Cozy and obvious. Noisy. After, they’d turned on all the lights in the house that worked, blinds open, drapes pulled back. Chris’s eyes went to Jess’s bedroom window now and he saw her pass in front of it, illuminated by both her lamp and the overhead fan light, playing with the hem of her shirt like she intended to start taking her clothes off. She’d already smilingly unbuttoned her sweater and slipped it off her shoulders, talking to no one, pretending he was in the room with her and that they were getting ready for bed. Before he’d left her and slipped out the front door, he’d kissed her in front of the window. Careful and silent, he’d crept along the edge of the tree line until he’d reached the place where he crouched now, behind a screen of hollies. With the hood of his black sweatshirt pulled up, he waited.

             
Tam was lurking out here somewhere, too. Chris didn’t like the idea, but so far, the guy had proved quiet. And he had refused to sit inside “like some kinda pussy” when his girls could be in danger. Chris had to give him props for being protective.

             
Cicadas and crickets chorused around him. In the window, Jess rolled her fists into her tank top and flashed him – and whoever was watching – a glimpse of lean stomach. And in the underbrush off to his right, something rustled.

             
Showtime.

             
With painful slowness, the rustle turned into a crunch, and then another: leaves breaking underfoot. In basic, before he’d been shipped out, Chris had worked through more training exercises than he could count. In the woods of Virginia, he'd come to learn that a fox didn’t sound like a deer didn’t sound like a raccoon didn’t sound like a human. Quadrupeds distributed their weight in a way that humans couldn’t. No matter how careful or how surefooted, a man made noise when he walked on last year’s leaf litter, and his tread was nothing like that of any forest creature.

             
Chris breathed in slow, shallow draws, straining to hear, plotting the stalker’s route in his mind. He was about ten yards from the hollies, he decided, and was going to take the most direct path up to the house, straight through the yard. Jess and her midriff had proved too great a temptation, apparently. 

             
The moon was a weak crescent, and its light a glimmer of silver that limned the shadow of the house. Chris stretched his neck up over the brush in front of him and waited, watching, eyes already well adjusted to the dark. His target appeared a little at a time: a silhouette of a hooked nose, a rounded head, a hand, another hand – something boxy held within it. A camera, Chris guessed, and his jaw flexed. Like a little sandpiper on the beach, the man stalked into the yard on curled, twitchy legs, then burst across to the house, slipping into its shadow.

             
Chris untangled himself from the hollies with the barest of sounds, and, as calm as if it were daylight and he was striding up to the house with a toolbox in his hand, he followed.

             
Jess wasn’t in the window anymore, but the man had stopped outside of it, just close enough that the glow from within touched on his unremarkable features. He was maybe five-ten, balding, big-nosed but plain otherwise. His clothes were dark and the camera he raised to his face looked expensive. So concentrated on the gorgeous blonde beyond the glass, the guy didn’t see or hear Chris approach.

             
Chris had a fleeting thought of destroying the camera, then refocused. He cocked back his fist and snapped out a punch…

             
That didn’t land. “Oh my God!” Jess’s startled gasp was loud enough to come through the window and the man jumped back. Chris hit him not in the temple as he’d planned, but against the side of his nose. He staggered – startled, frightened, and now hurt – and ducked away, into the shadows.

             
Chris followed, throwing out a hand, grabbing the back of the guy’s flapping windbreaker. He yanked and sent the man-shaped shadow down to the grass. He went after him, grappling in the dark for a wrist or collar or something he could take a better hold of. He tightened his fist in the windbreaker and fought the twisting, writhing stalker, pinning him down…

             
The jacket went slack, its owner wriggling out of it and scrambling to his feet.