Patricia Briggs - Night Broken

“So,” Warren said, putting his silverware on his empty plate. “If you are through eating, I’ve got some questions about this ex-boyfriend of yours.”

“She’s hurt and tired,” said Mary Jo. “Can’t questions wait until she’s had a chance to recover?”

“No,” said Adam. “We need to deal with him, so Christy can go back to Eugene and get on with her life.”

Christy turned her wet blue eyes on my husband, and said, “I’ve been thinking of moving back home.”

The food I had just swallowed went down wrong and sent me off in a paroxysm of coughing.

“Well, now,” said Warren over the top of my coughing, Texas thick in his voice. “I don’t know ’bout all that, Miss Christy. Where you live is up to you. But the sooner we get rid of the man who is scaring you, the safer you are going to be. So I’m going to ask you to tell me how you met him and everything you can remember about him.”

Christy’s eyes got bigger at the solid authority in his voice, and she looked as though she were sixteen instead of the over forty I was sure of. “Okay,” she said.

He reached behind him and grabbed the notebook he’d tossed on the floor when we’d sat down, and said, “Let’s start with the first meeting. When and where?”

“A couple of months ago—early February, I can check for the exact date. My girlfriends and I were out gambling, a weekend in Reno. We’d gone to a show and were finishing up the night with dinner in one of the casinos. There were a lot of people around, and since we do this once a month, there were even a lot of people we knew.” She played with her plate. “This man came up to our table. He was beautiful—younger than me, in a suit that … You know that blue-gray suit you had that was so expensive?”

Adam nodded, and I found that I was jealous of her memory of seeing him in a suit, even though he wore suits a lot. But I’d never seen him in the blue-gray suit that she was talking about.

She kept her eyes on my husband as she continued. “It reminded me of that, not in color, but in the way it was shaped. He looked … expensive, but not in a ‘kept man’ or ‘I’m going to impress you’ kind of way. His eyes were bright, and he ignored the others, just looked at me. Tall, golden hair, swarthy skin—not the warm tones you usually see with South American Hispanics. More like Mediterranean dark. He was big.”

“How big?”

She looked at Warren. “Taller than you. Heavier—but all muscle. Like a bodybuilder.” Her eyes strayed to Adam. “He must spend a lot of time in the gym because the only other man I’ve seen quite that muscular is Adam. And when he looked at me, he saw me. Intense.”

She looked down and pulled her hands away from her plate. “It was intoxicating, flattering—to be the focus of such power—especially at my age.” She smiled tightly, glanced at me, then away. “I’m not eighteen anymore, and he didn’t look a lot older than that.” She’d met Adam when she was eighteen. He’d been older than that, a werewolf already. “He introduced himself, Juan Flores, though he didn’t have a Spanish or Mexican accent.”

“What kind of accent did he have?” asked Warren.

She jerked her attention back to him. “European. Not French, Italian, or German. I didn’t know it.”

“That’s not a crime,” said Mary Jo, because Christy had sounded like she thought that she ought to have known.

“Maybe it was a fake accent,” said Christy. “I’ve spent time in Europe, and I just couldn’t pinpoint it. He had a little British crisp in his English, like he’d learned it in Great Britain. I thought that was why I couldn’t pick it out. I didn’t even ask before I hopped into bed with him. I am so stupid.”

“Don’t blame the victim,” I told her with, I admit, a little of the irritation I was feeling. “Not your fault you didn’t recognize his accent. Not your fault he singled you out.”

“Adam told me that some of your friends knew him. That’s why you felt safe with him,” Warren said.

She nodded. “He’d done some business with Jacqui, one of my friends. She’s a financial officer at Nation First Bank, works their corporate and international accounts.”

“Her phone number?”

She blinked and rattled it off. At Warren’s urging, she also managed a better description of Juan. He coaxed her into remembering details about his habits of speech and dress. That he liked dogs and had two hulking dogs that looked enough alike that they must have been a breed, though she didn’t know what. He’d been impressed that she wasn’t afraid of them—it was at that point that his desire for a little fun had changed to something more possessive. He’d insisted that she stay an extra day at his expense.

“I was flattered at first,” she told us. “Who wouldn’t be? A rich, beautiful, younger man who appeared passionately attracted to me.”

“What changed?” I asked.

“I work,” she said a little defensively.

She did, though Adam supported her. He paid the bills for her condo, her car, her insurance, and her phone bills. He told me, once, that he felt he owed it to her. I’d told him that was between the two of them and promised (hand over heart) that I’d never fuss about anything he felt necessary.

She worked part-time at a travel agency that allowed her to travel more than she would otherwise have been able to. She put together tours and business meetings, and from what Jesse had told me, she was good at her job.

“I had some extra vacation I could take, but I didn’t want to use it all. When I told him that I had to go home … he was weird about it. Weird enough that I pretended to agree with him—and while he was in the shower, I left my suitcase, grabbed my purse, and ran. Took a taxi to the airport, where I rented a car and drove home to Eugene.”

“Did he just show up at your condo after that?” asked Adam.

“No,” she said. “He started calling me. I answered the first one—I didn’t know it was him. I said too much. But that was the only one of his calls I took until he changed his number. After that time, I only answered calls from people I knew.”

“I’ll need the phone numbers he used,” Warren said.

She nodded. “I have them on my phone. He sent e-mails, too. I read up on stalkers and all the advice I found said that I shouldn’t respond in any way at all. So I didn’t.” She took a deep breath. “Then the presents started to arrive. I order a lot of things online. The first one I thought was a misorder—a red silk scarf. I called the place that had sent it and found out that someone had purchased it in person and had it sent to me. They wouldn’t give me the name.”

“They’ll give it to me,” said Warren. “Do you still have the address?”

She nodded. “On my laptop. I’ll go get it.” She pushed away from the table and made an escape. Up the stairs.

I looked at the stairway thoughtfully, then looked at Adam. “I thought she’d be using the guest suite.”

“She was afraid to be on the ground floor,” he said, and I could tell by the way he said it that I wasn’t going to be happy about which upstairs room she’d taken. Warren gave him a guy look, the one that said, I wouldn’t be you in a million years, but good luck .

“She likes the peach room,” I said. It was the bedroom next to ours.

“Blue makes her sad,” he told me. The blue guest room was across the hall and next to Jesse’s room.

There was nothing to say that needed saying. I stood up, collecting as many dirty plates and silverware as I could. Adam touched my arm.

“Mary Jo,” he said. “If you’ll help Mercy clear the table, I’ll grab the tablecloth and toss it in the laundry.”