Karen Rose - Silent Scream

“Oh? Really?”

Olivia nodded. “He was a brown belt, practicing for his black-belt test. He also taught a class at the Y in Chicago, to kids. For free. I’d have thought he was lying, that nobody could be so perfect, but Mia had already told me he was a nice guy.”

“Wow.” Paige looked stunned. “I thought you’d only met him that one night.”

“Two, actually. We met at Mia’s rehearsal dinner. It was spring, and I guess I was wide open for getting swept off my feet. A weekend fling. How cliché.”

Paige frowned at her disparaging tone. “Liv. You’d gotten dumped by your ass of a fiancé just a few weeks before the wedding. I’d still like to use him for a punching bag for what he did to you. Going back to his old fiancée. Who was a ho.”

“I remember,” Olivia said dryly. “I was there.” Paige’s punching bag had been named Doug for quite some time after that.

“Then, not a week later, finding out the father you’d never known was dead? Then finding out you had two half sisters?”

“The cop and the con,” Olivia said affectionately. “Meeting Mia and Kelsey was the only good thing to come out of all that.”

Paige’s scowl relaxed a little. “I’m just saying that you’d been through a lot that winter. To fall under the spell of a sexy, nice Mr. Perfect could happen to any of us. He took advantage of you.”

Olivia shrugged. “Probably. The day of the rehearsal dinner, I was kind of a mess. I was late. I’d just come back from meeting Kelsey for the first time.”

“At the prison,” Paige murmured.

Where Olivia’s half sister was serving eight to twenty-five for armed robbery. “Yeah. The prison’s about an hour away from Chicago, and I hadn’t been able to get out there before then. I was kind of shaken up, meeting my sister that way, behind the glass. I got to the church late for the rehearsal and was running up to the steps on these stupid high heels, and then I saw him sitting there.”

“This David guy.”

“Yeah.” Olivia closed her eyes. “It was like getting kicked in the gut. I was mesmerized. His face… just, wow. He’s got this face, Paige. And the shoulders. And the rest of him… You can’t forget him. I was staring at his face when my heel hit a rock and I tripped. Flew right into his lap. I was too star struck to even be embarrassed.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever known you to be star struck,” Paige said quietly.

“I never was before. Not with Doug, not with anyone. I’d skinned my knee and he patched me up.” Her lips curved bitterly. “He had me at hello. It’s a wonder I got through the rehearsal and the dinner. All the women looked like they wanted to gouge my eyes out because he stayed with me. And we talked. We talked all night.”

“Did he know about Doug?”

“God, no. I didn’t want to look pathetic. I didn’t tell any of them. Mia didn’t even know. And frankly, sitting there with David, Doug was the last thing on my mind. He never took his eyes off my face. I felt… important. Sounds stupid now.”

Paige’s brow creased in sympathy. “It sounds normal to me.”

“I guess I really wanted to feel important to somebody, you know?”

Paige squeezed her hand. “Yeah, babe. I know.”

Olivia’s eyes stung and she willed back what would have been mortifying tears. “It wasn’t all bad, though. I told him about Kelsey. He’d known Mia for a long time, knew about our father. About the abuse. I was so sad to see Kelsey there, in prison like that, even if she did do the crime. David suggested volunteering with teen runaways, to help give them a chance. To help them not turn out like my sister.”

“And you do. It’s good work, Liv. You make a difference in those kids’ lives.”

“Thanks. So like I said, it wasn’t all bad. The rehearsal dinner was wonderful. It was the night after the wedding that went wrong.”

“After it went really well,” Paige said, brows lifted meaningfully and Olivia sighed.

“I wish I’d never met him, because I can’t imagine it ever being that good again.”

“But you didn’t…”

“Not all the way.” She sighed again. “But based on what did happen, I think all the way would have freaking killed me.”

Paige was quiet a moment. “Maybe he just lied about doing all that nice stuff. Maybe he’s really a colossal jerk.”

“I wish. Since he’s been here, he donates his time to charity. Habitat for Humanity, fixing stuff at the local shelters. Eve tells me about him all the time. She thinks David hung the moon. He really is a nice guy. He just… doesn’t want me.”

There. She’d said it out loud. I should be feeling better now. But she wasn’t.

“Liv, did it occur to you that maybe he’s waiting for you to make the first move?”

Olivia scoffed. “In my fantasies, sure.”

“Liv?” Paige waited until Olivia looked at her. “If I were a guy and we’d parted ways under the circumstances you described?”

“Only after you got me drunk,” Olivia interjected, frowning.

“Like you would have ever told me otherwise? Duh. Of course I got you drunk. But as I was saying, if I were Wedding-Guy, I’d be waiting for you to make the first move.”

Olivia remembered the tilt of David Hunter’s perfect chin before she’d driven away. It had felt like a challenge. But she also remembered that one night vividly. She remembered the one word, that one name he’d said, even more vividly. “No.”

“Why not?” Paige asked, exasperated. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

“The same thing that happened the last time,” Olivia said darkly, and her body throbbed in places that had nothing to do with her workout.

“And that would be a bad thing, how? You haven’t had anyone since. You’re under so much stress that you’re about to crack wide open. What’s the harm in a fling? So he used you. Use him back. What’s the worst that can happen?”

Olivia sat up and swiped at her neck with a towel. I become like you, she thought, with so many boyfriends I need a spreadsheet to keep track of them all. But of course she said nothing of the kind. Paige was her oldest friend. “I’ll think about it,” was what she said instead. “Let’s stretch. I have to catch a little sleep before morning meeting.”

Monday, September 20, 7:10 a.m.

“Whoa.” Jeff Zoellner stood on the condo’s first floor, staring up through the room-sized hole that went all the way up to the fourth floor. “You woulda felt that for sure.”

Grimly, David followed his gaze up, then looked down into the basement. The first floor had also been burned through. “Yeah. I guess I owe you one.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll think of something.” Jeff starting walking again, tapping the handle of his ax on the floor as he sounded for weak spots. David did the same with the end of his Halligan, and together they moved toward the back of the condo. Each of the six floors had six units, but the units on this side of the building had sustained the worst damage. “I think we’re solid from here on out,” Jeff said. “We can let Barlow in now.”

Micah waited in the doorway. He wore a hard hat and boots, but was otherwise dressed like a detective. The end of his yellow tie poked up from the pocket of his suit. He held a video camera in one hand and a light bar in the other, and had worked alongside them diligently but intelligently, treading in areas they’d declared safe.

And he hadn’t said another word about Olivia and for that David was grateful. There were too many dangers here to be thinking about anything else but the job.

Which is what David had told himself every time he caught himself thinking about her, wondering why Micah Barlow felt she was his business, wondering if the two of them had history, not wanting that picture in his head. David grimaced. Except now that he’d thought it, the picture existed, if only in his imagination. Taunting him.