The Protector (Lone Wolf, Book 1) (16 page)

He was just as tall as my father,
which meant that I felt a little dwarfed in that moment as I stared up at him.

“Mr. Grayson!” the man practically
boomed, holding out a hand for a shake.
 
“I’ll be damned—been seeing a lot of you lately.”

“Chief Potter,” said my father with
a wide smile, taking the man’s hand and shaking it briskly.
 
“Chief Potter, this is my daughter,
Elizabeth—she’s a violinist in the orchestra,” he said, pride dripping off
every word as he put a hand at the small of my back.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw
Layne striding down the corridor toward us, from the direction of the concert
hall.
 
She had her hands shoved deeply
into leather jacket pockets, and she was glowering fiercely, power radiating
off of her as she practically stalked down the hallway of bright lights, past
confused, milling groups of orchestra members and the families and friends of
the musicians who’d rushed backstage to congratulate us on a job well done…

To be confronted by all of this.

My father and the chief were
discussing something in low, muted voices, their heads bent together, and the
chief toying with a smart phone, flipping through brightly glowing screens and
obviously in the middle of a private conversation.
 
Tracy had gone to get a drink from the water cooler, situated
between the rest rooms, and was talking in low tones (and occasionally sobbing)
with a few more of our violinists.
 
I
cast a glance over my shoulder.

Mikagi Tasuki, who’d been with me
just a mere moment ago, was nowhere in sight.

Layne reached me, curling a hot
hand around my upper arm, her nostrils flaring as she stared down at me with
flashing eyes.

“Are you all right?” she asked hotly,
her voice low and aggressive enough to practically be a growl.
 
I shivered under her intense gaze and angry
tone, my brows furrowing.

“I’m all right,” I told her, my
voice low as I searched her face.
 
“…Are
you?”

She didn’t seem to be.
 
Layne, in fact, seemed incredibly agitated
as she shifted from foot to foot, leaning the weight back on the balls of her
feet as she scanned the milling orchestra members with a quick frown, taking a
deep breath, her head to the side a little, as if she could sniff out the
trouble that had caused all this.

“Yeah, yeah,” she said quickly,
waving her hand with dismissal before raking long fingers back through her
jet-black hair, upsetting her carefully gelled strands and causing a few of
them to stick straight up.
 
But she was
too distracted to notice as her eyes darted through the crowd, and she stepped
closer to me, her fingers tightening on my arm.
 

“…Thanks, chief,” said my father
with a broad smile as he took a backward step from the chief then, holding out
his arm to the both of us.
 
“We’ve been
cleared to go, Elizabeth, Layne, so let’s get a move on.”

“Cleared to go?
 
But I haven’t been questioned,” I began to
protest, but my father widened his eyes, shook his head almost imperceptibly as
Chief Potter turned from us and began to stride toward a milling group of
cellists.

“We’re cleared to go,” said my
father again, his brows up.
 
He had the
same look on his face that he always got when he was playing poker with me, and
he’d just bluffed terribly.
 

But I was too shaken up to argue,
and anyway—who really wants to be questioned by the police?
 
So, in a daze, my father and Layne helped me
hobble away from the blood-spattered steps and up through the concert hall, to
take the same exit as our audiences do.

The night outside was warm and
muggy and utterly devoid of stars.

And when I closed my eyes, all I
could see was the blood of my friend, his too-white hand falling out from under
the sheet the ambulance driver had tried to pull over him.

I couldn’t stop shaking.

–

My father wanted us all to go back
to the Grayson mansion, have a couple of cocktails to relax and order about two
tons worth of pizza.
 
Which, in theory,
sounded like a great idea, and was a very sweet offer, but I was too shaken to
eat anything (and, trust me, after witnessing so much blood, pizza sauce starts
to look a lot less appealing), and I needed some time after the performance to
wind down.

I needed some time by myself.

But, of course, “time by myself”
now meant “time with me and Layne.”
 
I
couldn’t be by myself, even if I wanted to.
 

There were so many unanswered
questions.
 
I’d gone my whole life
without witnessing or being the brunt of, much violence, and then in the span
of a couple of days, I’d been rammed from behind, held at gunpoint, and a friend
of mine had been brutally murdered (my father had told me the chief was
definitely considering it a homicide…it couldn’t have been a suicide, he’d
said).
 
I knew that, logically, none of
these horrific events were connected.
 
They were all just horrific, random acts of violence.

But didn’t it seem odd that they
had happened so close together?
 

Everything
about this seemed
odd.

So Dad went home, and Layne and I drove back to my
apartment, where she helped me up the stairs to my front door, through it and
then I immediately hobbled to my couch and collapsed on the old blue cushions,
lolling my head back against the pillows and staring at my perfectly neutral
tile ceiling that seemed so pristine, so calming after the terrible moments of
the night.

But when I blinked or closed my
eyes, I could still see the spatters of Bob’s blood, how dark they looked
against the cool gray of the concrete…

“Here,” said Layne, pressing
something cold and icy into my hands.
 
It was a bottle of craft beer she’d pulled from my fridge.
 
She was flipping the cap up into the air—had
she just pried it off with bare fingers before she’d handed it to me?
 
She seemed to be full of surprises.

“Thanks,” I muttered, and put the
cold mouth of the bottle to my lips.
 
This beer was supposed to taste a little like blueberries, and it
actually did.
 
I took a couple of gulps,
letting it fizz all the way down my throat and blossom coldly in my
stomach.
 
It made my thoughts,
dangerously looping on Bob’s body and blood, calm down just a little.

I watched as Layne sat down on the
couch beside me, sprawling backwards with her legs spread in front of her, one
foot propped up on my coffee table in the perfect picture of relaxation.
 
She had another craft beer in her hand,
and—as I watched—she flicked the cap off of the bottle off like it had just
been sitting there.
 
She took a very
long gulp of the beer, and with a long sigh, she leaned her head back against
the top of the couch, staring at my ceiling, too.

“I’m sorry about your friend,”
Layne told me then, in a low, husky tone.

I’d thought I was numbed to
everything, that I could feel nothing but that cool, detached numbness after
the image of Bob’s blood had been burned into my brain forever.
 
But the gentleness in Layne’s voice seemed
to open up a flood gate inside of me, and slowly, quietly, hot tears began to
trace down my cheeks, plunking softly against the fabric of my shirt as I took
another long sip of my beer, my heart opening up to a great ache that almost
made me double over with the sudden pain that seemed, at once, almost
unbearable.

I didn’t know how to respond to
her.
 
I didn’t have to—she wasn’t
waiting for me to make a great, big speech about Bob or even tell her
“thanks.”
 
I could have said nothing, but
I needed to speak, just then, or the ache inside of me would crush me.
 
“He was just a really good guy,” I said
simply then.
 
It seemed to encompass
everything I could ever have told her about Bob, anything I ever could have
come up with to eulogize him, and the sad, small words lingered between us,
sinking into silence.

“It’s been a hard couple of days,”
said Layne then, after clearing her throat.
 
“When’s your next…”
 
She spun the
hand not holding the bottle of beer in the air as she searched for a word.
 
“Practice?”

“Rehearsal,” I said automatically,
biting my lip as I picked at the edge of the beer’s label with my
thumbnail.
 
“We have rehearsal on Sunday
morning for the Sunday matinee concert.
 
Sometimes we get Saturdays off—‘free Saturdays,’ we call them—and
tomorrow’s a free Saturday.”

“Really?” asked Layne, her head to
the side.
 
I was suddenly aware that her
shoulder and arm were pressing against me, that her hip and thigh were against
mine, too, and that everywhere she touched me, my body tingled with her
warmth.
 

Somewhere, deep inside of me, I
felt warm feelings begin to circulate, too, slowly beginning to ease the
tremendous ache in my heart.
 
I
shouldn’t have felt anything but sadness right then, I knew, but she was so
warm, so close, her muscles so sculpted beneath the thin fabric of her t-shirt…

I was beginning to realize that I
couldn’t help some of the ways that my body reacted being so close to Layne
O’Connell.
 
It was all pure instinct.

“…did you have plans for tomorrow?”
asked Layne, and I realized I hadn’t been paying attention to what she was
saying, only paying attention to her body and all of the places it touched
mine.
 
I swallowed, trying to focus,
realizing my face was hot and flushed, my cheeks especially too warm.
 
I took another pull at the beer, trying to
clear my head from the cobweb wisps of desire that had begun to form in me so
quickly.
 

Honestly, it usually takes more
than half a beer to get me drunk.
 
What
was wrong with me?
 
I sighed.
 

“Did you have plans for tomorrow?”
Layne repeated, grinning sidelong at me as she turned the beer cap over and
over in her long fingers, like she was running a coin over her knuckles.
 
I shook my head as I took another sip.

“No, nothing,” I told her, one brow
up.
 
What was she getting at?

“Well,” Layne said then, drawing
out the word long and low as she worked her jaw to the side and stared at the
ceiling again, leaning her head back against the couch.
 
“You’ve been through quite a lot these past
few days.
 
It’s kind of been a rough
week.
 
So how would you like a day off?”

I chuckled dryly at that, shook my
head a little.
 
“Don’t you know anything
about musicians?” I found myself teasing.
 
“We
never
take a day off.
 
It’s in the contract—practice from sunup to sundown.”

“All right, all right, suit
yourself,” Layne said, flipping the cap up into the air with a smirk.
 
“But all work and no play…”
 
She trailed off into silence as she took a
drink.

My curiosity got the better of me,
which she obviously knew it would from her cat-who-ate-the-canary grin.
 
“Why do you ask?” I finally said.

“Because I thought you’d like to
get out of the city for a day,” she said mildly, brows up.
 
“You know, it’s
spring
in
Massachusetts
.
 
Aside from fall,
obviously
,” she
grinned widely, “it just so happens to be the prettiest time of the year around
here.
 
And I thought you might like to
get out, take in the scenery or something.
 
You know…have a little fun.”

My brows were up too as I stared at
her.
 
“Well…what exactly did you have in
mind?”

She leaned forward a little, her
head to the side as she turned to consider me.
 
My heart began to beat a staccato rhythm against my ribs.
 
“Do you trust me?” she said with a soft,
velvet smile.

I nodded, trying to remember how to
breathe.
 
Her face was so close to mine
that if I leaned forward just a little, too, then I could kiss her.

Did I want to kiss her?

Oh, God…I think I wanted to kiss
her.

In one smooth motion, she folded
herself upright, her beer bottle at her lips again as she drank down the last
of it.
 
“Good,” she said with a wink,
and a stretch overhead.
 
“If you trust
me…then you’ll see what I have planned for tomorrow.
 
Goodnight, Elizabeth,” she told me, and then she turned on her
heel and—without looking back—stalked toward her bedroom with long strides.

I sat alone on the couch with my
half-finished beer, trying to calm down my heart.

And trying not to be desperately
disappointed that she’d gone.

And I hadn’t had the time to work
up the courage to kiss her.

Chapter 9:
 
In the Wild

“Realize that I’m on crutches,” I
reminded Layne for, possibly, the tenth time that morning.
 
And what a morning it was.

It had dawned uncharacteristically
gray, with looming, angry-looking storm clouds along the horizon, up and over
the ocean.
 
But even with the threat of
rain (or, rather, the threat of torrential downpour) we’d still gotten up,
showered and gotten dressed (“wear something comfortable and outdoors-y,” Layne
had warned), and we were now on the road anyway, heading north up the
coast.
 
Well, after we’d stopped at a
Starbucks for coffee and coffee cake (it
was
my day off), and then we’d
driven along the coastline, keeping the ocean to our right.