He straightened and turned. “Believe me, Ms. Brewster, I wish I could ignore you.” His lips were twisted as if he found something amusing about the situation. “Here.”
He thrust out his hand, and she recoiled, realizing belatedly that he was handing her the paper sack he had in his hand. “What is it?”
“So suspicious,” he murmured. “It’s your glass.”
Feeling like a fool, she snatched the sack from him. The thin paper crinkled under her tight grasp. “That’s the pot calling the kettle black. You give suspicious new meaning.”
“I’m doing my job, Ms. Brewster.”
“Stop calling me that!” Her face flamed. She knew she was acting like an idiot, but there seemed nothing she could do about it. Outrageous words kept coming out of her mouth no matter how badly she wanted to contain them.
“All right. What would you prefer I call you?” He leaned back against the side of his truck and crossed his arms. Leisurely. As if they had all the time in the world.
Now the words stopped up in her throat.
He tilted his head slightly, watching her as if she were some kind of bug stuck on the end of a pin. “Maybe you’d prefer I use your real name,” he suggested softly.
Molly’s fingers tightened spasmodically, and the sack fell from her grasp. She stared as, almost in slow motion, it headed for the pavement. She couldn’t even bring herself to move as glass, definitely not in slow motion, exploded from the bag like a perfectly rounded firework.
She heard a stifled oath, then nearly screamed when hands closed tightly over her hips. “Leave me alone!”
“Be still. You’ve got glass all over your legs.”
He dumped her unceremoniously on the bench seat inside his truck and dropped his hand on her knee. When he leaned toward her, she sucked in a harsh breath and instinctively flattened herself back against the seat as far as she could go.
Holt went completely still. Panic rolled off her in waves strong enough to knock him flat, and a ball of fury formed inside him so rapidly that he felt sick to his stomach. Maybe Molly Brewster was secretive. Maybe she caused him no amount of personal consternation.
But he wanted to put his hands on whoever had hurt her and slowly choke the life out of him.
“I’m reaching for my flashlight,” he said after a moment, when he could be sure his voice would come out without betraying the red haze burning in his head. “So I can see if the glass cut you.” Moving slowly, he took his hand off her knee and stepped back a few inches. “It’s right under the seat.”
Her eyes were filled with shadows and bored into his face.
“Put your right hand down, Molly,” he said softly. “You can’t miss it. You’ll feel it.”
Her hands, clutched together at her waist, separated. She started to reach. Paused.
“It’s one of those long-handled kind. Metal. Makes a good weapon in a pinch.”
Her long lashes flickered. The pearly edge of her teeth caught her upper lip. And slowly, so slowly that he hurt inside from it, she slid her right hand down the seat. A moment later she’d pulled out the foot-long flashlight. She dragged her gaze from his face to study the thing.
God only knew what was running through her mind. He supposed if she felt the need to slam it into him, he might even let her. The way he felt at the realization that someone had hurt her, someone needed to get maimed. “Heavy sucker, isn’t it?”
She hefted it a little higher, pulling it up to her lap, knocking into the steering wheel as she did so. She jerked, and the flashlight rolled from her fingers.
He caught it and flicked it on, casually stepping back even more as he trained the light on her calves and ankles.
Dammit. She had several little pinpricks of blood right above the edge of her folded sock, which no longer looked white as snow as it had that afternoon. “You been out digging ditches?”
“What?” Her voice was barely audible.
“Your shoes and socks are muddy.”
She lifted her hand, touching her forehead with fingers that trembled. “I was, um, d-digging out a garden.”
“There’s a first-aid kit under the seat, too. Did you finish the garden?” He kept his voice low. Easy. She was beginning to relax and he didn’t want to jeopardize that.
“There’s hardly any yard.” She handed him the small white plastic box. “Left, I mean. I dug up so much.”
“You must wield a mean shovel. My grandfather would’ve loved you. Hold this so I can see what I’m doing.”
“You had a grandfather.”
His lips twisted a little as he hunkered down on his heels with the long tweezers from the kit and began fishing for tiny shards of glass. “Most people do,” he said. “Though I’ve been accused a time or two of springing from some sort of pod.” He gingerly plucked a tiny sliver from the taut skin of her slender shin. It was hard not to appreciate the shape of her limbs. They were about as perfect as legs could be.
“He had a place near Billings,” he forced himself to continue. Anything to get her to relax. And knowing that he was doing as much admiring as he was removing slivers of glass wasn’t going to get it. “I spent summers with him.” His grandfather had been an ornery old coot, a farmer of sorts who loved his bottle almost as much as he’d loved his land.
In comparison to Holt’s life in Los Angeles with his mother, who’d either been high on life and whatever man she’d brought home this time or high on something considerably more illegal, summers in Montana with that ornery old man had been as near to heaven as he’d figured he’d ever get.
“He’s the reason I ended up in Montana,” he told Molly. He sat back a bit. “Do you feel any glass in your legs still?”
She rotated her ankles. “I don’t think so. I didn’t to begin with. You, um, you came here from California, you said.”
“Banished was the term you used, I think.”
The flashlight’s beam wavered under her hold when she shifted. He looked up at her as he tore open another antiseptic pad.
“I shouldn’t have said that.”
“It’s what you thought.”
“It was cruel.” Her voice went even softer. “I’m not usually cruel.”
He dabbed at the cluster of tiny cuts on her leg. They oozed tiny droplets of blood and he tore open several plastic bandages. “Yeah, well, I bring that out in a lot of people.”
“There’s no excuse.”
“Honey, there is always an excuse.” His lips twisted. “And I’ve probably heard ’em all over the years.”
The toe of her shoe lifted slowly while he stuck the bandages in place. “Deputy?”
He looked up as he smoothed down the last bandage. “Yeah?”
“How did you know?”
He glanced down at her feet. They were still again. He wasn’t entirely sure he trusted them to stay that way and he had no particular desire to take a size-six tennis shoe in the face. But take it he would, before he’d lift a hand against her. “About your name?”
She nodded stiffly.