“Doesn’t Jonathon have a contact at the DMV who can handle this?”
“That’s illegal, remember?” she retorted.
“It happens.” David scowled at the bleak weather—and the fact that he was about to get involved in something he was better off avoiding. “Fine,” he said at length. “What’s the plate number?”
“I’ll drop it off with the notebook.”
“You do that.”
“Thanks, David,” she said.
He heard the smile in her voice and hung up before he could ask about seeing her tonight. Maybe she had too many emotional scars from Burke’s attack and was too obsessed with weapons to be an ideal mother for Jeremy, but he knew she’d be one hell of a lover. She was passionate about everything. He wanted to experience her intensity skin to skin, feel her arms around his neck as she offered him what he’d craved since he’d come to know her four years ago. Especially now, when every second seemed so precious.
He was going to be in trouble Saturday night….
Sheltering his phone beneath his jacket so it wouldn’t get wet, he ducked into the rain. Lynnette had slept with her date. That gave him license, didn’t it?
No. It wouldn’t be the same. If he ever made love with Skye, there’d be no going back. At least not to the life he’d known with his ex. Not for the sake of Lynnette’s health. Not for Jeremy’s sake. Not for anyone’s sake.
10
“You’ve known for almost a week and you didn’t call me?”
Wincing at the hurt in Jennifer’s voice, Skye adjusted the earpiece that let her use her cell phone in the car as she brought her Volvo to a stop at the intersection of Sunrise and Madison Avenue. The light had barely turned yellow—she could’ve made it through—but she wanted a few seconds to concentrate on the conversation instead of driving. She’d been meaning to call her family. Every morning since she’d heard the news about Burke, she’d gotten out of bed planning to contact them. But she always managed to find some excuse to put it off another day.
The main problem was that she didn’t really want to talk to her former stepfather. Although there’d never been any kind of impropriety or falling out, she felt uncomfortable around Joe Rumsey, as if they should mean more to each other than they did. How had they gone from being father and daughter to being…nothing? Or maybe “nothing” wasn’t the best way to describe the relationship. They were cordial. Casual friends. But friends seemed an odd label for the man she’d once called Daddy.
“I’ve been crazy busy,” she said. Which was true. Right now she was on her way to NSL Construction. She knew she’d be smarter to stay away, but since she’d started The Last Stand, keeping a low profile wasn’t on the agenda.
“Too busy to tell us about Burke?”
More or less. David had run the license plate number she’d given him and called her with information about the driver, which she’d passed to Jonathan. It was registered to a woman, but when Jonathan followed up he’d learned that the woman was the live-in lover of Sean’s boss at the jewelry store. More and more it seemed that Sean had been right all along—Tasha was having an affair. But there was still no sign of Sean himself.
“That news must’ve hit you hard, Skye,” Jennifer was saying. “You weren’t expecting him to get out for another five to seven years.”
The news had hit hard. She was still trying to grasp that he’d be circulating in Sacramento—her city—by tomorrow night. But she couldn’t admit her worries to Jennifer. That would only trigger an obligatory call from Skye’s former stepfather, who worked about twenty minutes from where Jennifer shared an apartment with two friends. Joe felt bad that Skye’s mother had died, leaving her virtually alone in the world, and occasionally attempted to include her. He’d invited her down for Christmas last month. But, regardless of his good intentions, he already had Jennifer and Brenna and a couple of younger children with his new wife. There wasn’t any room in his life for her. Skye appreciated his attempt to be generous, but she was also afraid to love him as a father for fear the gestures he made were merely that—gestures.
“It’s just the way things are,” she said, trying to sound matter-of-fact about the situation.
“Why do you always withdraw when something bad happens?” Jennifer asked.
“I’m not withdrawing. I’ve been busy, like I said.”
She was relieved when Jennifer didn’t pursue the accusation. It was an old argument, one she definitely didn’t want to rehash. “Is he coming back to Sacramento?” her stepsister asked instead.
The light turned green. Reluctant to arrive at the construction office before she could finish her conversation with Jennifer, Skye started out slowly enough to receive an impatient honk from the car behind her. “I’m going, I’m going,” she muttered.
“What’d you say?”
“Burke can’t practice dentistry anymore. But his wife still lives here, as well as the rest of his family.”
“Won’t he be too embarrassed to face them? If I were him, I’d rather crawl under a rock than go back home after being in prison for that kind of crime.”
“He’s not like you. For starters, he’s not taking responsibility for what he did. He insists he’s innocent, and there are people who believe him. We’ve had several incidents of vandalism at TLS, all aimed at me for what I supposedly did to a ‘good family man.’”
“His wife’s probably behind them.”
It was possible. Jane had sent enough nasty letters.
“I don’t know how she can believe in him,” Jennifer went on. “My God, he—”
She caught herself before she finished, and Skye was grateful. She didn’t need a reminder of what he’d done. She still had nightmares in which she felt Burke’s blade slicing into her neck. Nightmares in which she struggled beneath his weight only to wake and find that she’d been battling the covers. He must’ve eaten a mint immediately prior to the attack because she still associated the smell of peppermint with him. To this day she couldn’t even look at a candy cane. “He can go anywhere he wants,” she said. “He’ll be a free man.”
“Will you be able to find out where he settles?”
“He’s supposed to register as a sex offender, so anyone can keep track of him.” But whether he actually did was another story. Sacramento had only two detectives to follow up on more than 2,500 sex offenders.