TESS PUT ON a pot of coffee, checked her email, then let the dogs back inside. Two hours of sleep were not enough, but it’d be a while before she could try again. Her adrenaline was too high, her nerves too jangled by the unexpected call.
Sad, really, that an innocuous phone call from a neighbor could ruin a day.
Tess fed the dogs, dumping copious amounts of the ultrahealthy—and therefore ultraexpensive—food their former owner had fed them into two large stainless steel bowls. Mac dove in. Blossom hung back and waited for him to finish, even though she had her own dish.
“You’re setting a bad precedent,” Tess muttered to the dog as she went back into the bedroom to change into her work clothes, which were actually new, since she no longer fit into her old clothes.
The jeans she put on were just jeans, bought for a reasonable price online and delivered by mail. No fashionable fading, studs or strategically placed frayed areas. The T-shirt was equally plain. Long-sleeved, black and boxy with a crew neck. One hundred percent cotton without a hint of spandex. It hung loosely from her shoulders, even though she’d now gained fifteen pounds and was curvier than she’d been her entire life. The curves were part of her disguise, lame as it was, since there was no way she could disguise the scars across the left side of her face.
Her ex-lawyer and savior, William, had suggested gaining weight in addition to dying her dark red hair dark brown and buying glasses she didn’t need. She’d told William that the last thing she felt like doing was eating. Actually, for the first week after the attack, she couldn’t eat, but instead sipped tiny meals through a straw. And even if she did gain weight, she’d pointed out bitterly, it wasn’t like she could hide the scars.
No, William had agreed in his understated way, but overly skinny people stood out almost as much as redheads and after the attack she’d become alarmingly gaunt. He was too polite to say skeletal.
So during the six weeks she’d hidden out at William’s San Jose home after the attack, Tess focused on gaining weight—no easy task for a model who’d spent the past decade eating the bare minimum and feeling guilty about even that small amount. Depression and fear coupled with healing scar tissue hadn’t made eating any easier, but Tess persevered. Pasta, milkshakes, ice cream. Formerly forbidden foods were now her allies and she choked them down, wishing she could enjoy finally being able to eat whatever she wanted.
By the time the LLC had been formed and William had helped her lease-option and sparsely furnish this place in the Nevada outback—a place where Eddie would stand out like a sore thumb—Tess had, for the most part, outgrown her clothes. She’d celebrated with an online shopping spree since she was too paranoid to shop in stores, and didn’t care if the clothing fit right—which it didn’t. Not in her experience anyway.
The tops didn’t cling to her upper body, the jeans didn’t hug her legs. Everything was loose and comfortable—and made her feel invisible—or as invisible as a person could be with a ruined face.
When Tess came back into the kitchen, the oversize stovetop espresso maker began to gurgle and the dogs instantly ran to the back door to wait while Tess poured coffee into a tall travel mug and added a healthy dollop of cream. She’d fallen into a routine over the past week. Coffee—regardless of what time of day she woke up—a quick breakfast of cereal and milk followed by a protein shake, then several hours in the barn sanding the old oak furniture she’d found there. Not that she knew anything about refinishing furniture, but she had instructions she’d printed off the internet and time on her hands.
Too much time. But dwelling on it made her feel even more like the prisoner she essentially was, which in turn made her determined to fill the hours so she wouldn’t feel like a prisoner. Eddie had destroyed her looks and her livelihood, all because she wouldn’t give him something she didn’t have, something that probably no longer even existed. She wasn’t going to let him destroy what was left of her life. She would hang on to what she had and make what she could of it. Then maybe, once the bastard was caught, she could slip back into the mainstream. Rejoin the land of the living.
But first he had to be caught.
* * *
ZACH RETURNED TO the house about half an hour after the girls got home from school. He’d pulled the pump and managed to fix it with the extra parts he had in his shop and then hauled the clumsy cylinder back to the well and lowered it down the hole. It had obligingly sucked up water and spit it back out through the wheel lines in the field.
Sweet victory.
When he walked into the house, the television was on and the heat was off. The three girls were in the living room wrapped in the afghans Karen had made for each of them during her illness. Emma and Lizzie were watching TV, Darcy was doing her homework at the big oak desk he’d inherited from his grandpa, the dark blue crocheted blanket draped over her shoulders. It’d been an unseasonably cold spring day and the house felt like a tomb.
“Darcy, you need to remember to turn on the heat.” Zach pulled off his gloves and dropped them in the square willow basket next to the door that Lizzie called the mitten box. “I can almost see my breath.”
Darcy looked at him from over the top of her glasses. “The furnace is dead and you won’t let me build a fire.”
Damn. He crossed the room to check the thermostat. Dead as a doornail. “You can build all the fires you want while I’m here,” Zach said as he headed for the basement door.
“That doesn’t do us much good when you’re not here,” Darcy said.
“I guess that’s what afghans are for.” Zach snapped on the hanging light before going down the wooden steps to battle the furnace. One of his wife’s cardinal rules had been no fires, no sharp things without an adult in the house. Darcy had been nine when Karen died—old enough to use sharp things, but she hadn’t. As far as he knew she still abided by the rule three years later.
He spent as much time working on the furnace as he did on the tractors and fully expected another major fight, but for once it turned out to be an easy fix. He replaced the fuse then hit the reset button and the beast roared to life. That was two relatively easy fixes in one day. But they didn’t balance out losing his grazing.
“Way to go, Daddy,” Lizzie said as he came up the stairs. She was still wearing Darcy’s coat, which went past her knees. Zach smiled at his youngest daughter, the one with Karen’s fair coloring and strawberry-blond hair. “Thanks, kiddo.” He knelt in front of her, placed a big hand on each of her small shoulders and gave her an exaggerated once-over. “Where’s your coat, Lizzie?”
The six-year-old shifted her mouth sideways. Not a good sign.
“I put it somewhere. I guess.” She couldn’t quite meet his eyes.
“Any idea where?”
She shook her head. Zach glanced at Darcy, who watched the action from his desk. She instantly went back to her homework. Zach sensed conspiracy.
“I want you to find it.”
“What if I can’t?” Lizzie asked as she twisted a button on Darcy’s coat.
Excellent question. “We’ll worry about that later. Right now I want you to find your coat.”
Lizzie exhaled in a long-suffering way and walked out of the room, feet dragging.
“Where’s Lizzie’s coat?” he asked Darcy.
She met his eyes in her direct way. “Honestly, Dad, I have no idea where it is.”
“She hid it,” Emma said from behind him. “I don’t know where.”
“Why?”
“She doesn’t like it. She wanted a pink coat. Tia—” aka Beth Ann “—got her the red one because it was a better price.” Emma gave a philosophical shrug and then dismissively flipped one of her light brown braids over her shoulder. “You know how she hates red.”
Actually