“Damn it, no!” His sharpness had them all staring. Faith quit rocking. “He was angry this time, too. He came to kill you, Faith. You saved your life, and maybe your father’s, too.”
He could tell she hadn’t considered what Hardesty would have done if Don Russell had confronted him when he came down the stairs.
As if the words were wrenched from her, she said, “I never really believed …”
“You’d have to use the gun?”
She nodded.
Again, there might as well have been no one else in the room. They only looked at each other. “Didn’t you?”
“I did,” she whispered brokenly. “But I didn’t.”
Ben would have given anything to hold her right now, but instead he stayed where he was, squatting in front of her. “You did the right thing,” he repeated.
But God almighty, he wished she hadn’t had to.
After a minute he took his hand back from her knee and scrubbed it over his face. He rose to his feet and looked at Gray.
“Can you take Faith and Don home with you?”
“I planned to,” the other man said, in a way that told Ben exactly nothing about what he was thinking.
From the doorway behind them, someone said, “Chief Wheeler?”
He turned his head. The medical examiner, whom he had met only a couple of times since he’d taken over as police chief in West Fork. “Just a minute,” he said, then told Gray, “Watch her for symptoms of shock. She needs to be kept warm.”
Gray surprised him then by reaching out and gripping his forearm. One hard squeeze that felt like … sympathy. He’d seen too much, Ben realized.
“We’ll take care of her. I assume you’ll be by in the morning?” Gray asked.
“Count on it.”
“Don’t worry about Faith,” Gray said. “Do what you have to do.”
Ben nodded, allowed himself one more look at Faith’s face, white and shell-shocked, and made himself turn and walk out of the room.
CHAPTER FOUR
“I’LL STAY WITH YOU,” Char offered, hovering beside the blown-up air mattress in Gray’s library. She offered a wavering smile. “Sleepover.”
Charlotte had demanded her own bedroom when the twins were ten years old. In the years after that, however, sometimes one sister or the other desperately needed to talk or just to have this one person in all the world close. “Sleepover?” she’d suggest, and they would share a double bed the way they had when they were young. In the trauma of the past couple of months, they’d done that a couple of times. Just the soft sound of Char breathing beside her was a comfort to Faith.
Tonight, Faith wanted no one.
An image of Ben flashed into her mind, and she remembered the way he’d held her cradled on his lap, his hand on her nape, pressing her face against his shoulder. His throat had been so temptingly close, she’d inched her face over to warm her cold nose against his skin and breathe in his scent, soap and sweat and man.
No. She didn’t want him, either. But a stricken feeling inside told Faith that she might not have been able to resist him if he’d actually been here.
Faith shook her head. “No, please. I’m not sure I can sleep, and … I need to be alone.”
“Are you sure?” Char kept hovering.
“Yes. Please,” Faith repeated.
Wearing a pair of flannel pajamas borrowed from Gray, cuffs and sleeves rolled, she sat on the edge of the bed. Despite the hot, sweet tea Char had plied her with, Faith was still cold. She felt chilled to her marrow.
At last her sister nodded reluctantly and hugged her. “Wake me up if you want me, Faith. I mean it.
Okay?”
Faith nodded because it was expected of her. “Good night.”
Gray, she saw, waited in the hall. He looked as worried as Char did. Faith wondered vaguely what they saw that scared them so. Dad, thank goodness, must have already gone to bed in the guest room. Still recovering from his injuries, he’d needed the better bed.
It was a huge relief when Gray and Char withdrew, turning off the overhead light. She heard them go down the hall to their own bedroom, but there was no click of a door closing—they wanted to be able to hear her. She should have felt reassured, but she didn’t. She didn’t feel much at all, or at least nothing … normal. There was a hollow place inside her that was new. It was like an ice cave, terribly cold, a place where her breath might freeze.
When Faith lay back on the mattress and pulled the covers over herself, she left the bedside lamp burning. She’d never minded the dark before, but she had a feeling it would be a long time before it would seem comforting to her again.
If ever.
Despite the comforter and the blanket Char had added, Faith shivered. I’m so cold.
She couldn’t seem to tear her eyes from the open door to the hall. When she closed her eyes, she saw the dark rectangle of the doorway to her own bedroom, and then the deeper shadow of a man within it. Her eyes snapped open again.
At last she got up and shut the door. After a minute, she dragged a chair away from the desk and braced it at an angle under the knob. At least nobody could get in without making a lot of noise. She hoped Char wouldn’t try and become alarmed.
Back in bed, she pulled the heavy weight of covers up to her chin and lay still, listening to the silence. Gray’s house, which he’d designed himself, was new and lacked the old farmhouse’s sounds of settling. The silence seemed even denser because the multilayered house was built literally into the bluff, so that this lower floor not only had earth beneath it but behind it. The highway was too far away for her to hear the scant evening traffic. Houses on the river bluff were set far apart, all on at least five acres, with woods in between to muffle any sound of barking dogs, voices or cars coming and going. Faith couldn’t decide if the quiet would be soothing or unsettling long-term.
Not that she’d be here for very long. She had to go home soon. Preferably tomorrow. If she put it off, she might lose her nerve. Faith wasn’t sure she could ever sleep in her bedroom again, though. She thought she might move into Char’s. Char had only been spending the occasional night anyway, and then only because she was anxious about Faith.
For better or worse, Char could quit worrying about Rory.
A shudder gripped Faith, one that rattled her bones.
Oh, God. I killed him. I pulled the trigger.
Even though her eyes were open, she saw his face in that moment, rage transformed into astonishment at the sight of the gun leveled at his chest. And then … and then, fear and pain. Blood blossoming. Him stumbling. Because his momentum continued to drive him forward, she’d shot again. And again, she thought. At least three times. Her ears rang with the crack, crack, crack.
Her fingernails bit into her palms as she felt the gun jump in her hands again. So powerful. So lethal. So much more terrible even than she had imagined. Death dealing. Like a movie, images kept running through her mind, inescapable. Blood spurting. The light going out of his eyes even as he stopped abruptly, then dropped, shaking the bed as he toppled against it. Thump. The heaviest, darkest sound she’d ever heard.
Faith gasped, shook, clutched the bedcovers with desperate hands. She stared blindly and thought, What if he came only to threaten me? To try to frighten me into going back to him?
What if he had never intended to kill her?
She couldn’t imagine