Someone to Watch Over Me (6 page)

She was on her knees in the dirt, pulling weeds, later that evening when Jax and Romeo came walking down the street.

Romeo had a brightly colored scarf tied around his neck, which he seemed to be enduring with much good humor, and Jax was wearing a pair of khaki pants and a wild, Hawaiian-print shirt in turquoise and maroon.

“Romeo and I are making a run for it,” he said. “We couldn’t take one more person telling us my mother’s in a better place and that we shouldn’t even be sad. If we’d stayed in that house, we’d have screamed at somebody, and my mother wouldn’t have liked that. So we left. We thought you might take pity on us.”

Romeo whined pitifully, as if to help plead their case, and then reached out and licked Gwen’s hand through the fence.

“Think we could hide out here for a few minutes?” Jax asked.

“Sure.” She walked to the front gate and opened it for them.

Romeo came trotting through, eyeing the pile of weeds she’d pulled and left discarded in the yard for the moment.

“Romeo?” Jax waited until the dog turned and looked at him. “No.”

Romeo whined again and sidled up to Gwen, until she found her open palm under his head. He sat down by her side and waited, for her to fuss over him, she supposed.

Gwen laughed. “He really is a flirt.”

“Yeah. He got kicked out of police academy for it.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“No. He really was. He was in training to be part of the K-9 squad, and he was great, really intelligent, willing to do the work, capable of understanding and remembering a great deal—until a woman walked by. Lost all concentration every time that happened.”

Gwen laughed again. Romeo gave her his poor-misunderstood-pup look, but he was grinning, too. She could see it.

“Yeah, if all crime victims and cops were men, Romeo would have been the greatest K-9 cop ever.”

“That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s true. Ask anybody at the station. The guys were all so sure they could break him of the habit, but nobody could. He could be in the middle of taking down a suspect and a good-looking woman would walk by, and off he’d go, trailing after her, like that was more important than anything else he could think of.”

Romeo gave a halfhearted growl at Jax, and then turned back to Gwen and grinned. She scratched behind his ears. “You sweet baby.”

Jax rolled his eyes and made a disgusted sound.

“And he looks so nice today,” Gwen said, straightening his bandanna, which was actually a silk scarf. Wrong thing
to say, she figured out as she looked up at Jax, who wasn’t grinning anymore. “Your mother’s?”

He nodded.

Romeo looked sad again.

Gwen wondered which one of them missed her more.

“Thanks for the flowers,” Jax said. “They were beautiful.”

“You’re welcome. I was worried I might have overstepped, going against her wishes. But they didn’t cost anything, and it sounded like that was her only objection.”

“I wanted her to have flowers,” he said. “Wanted her to have everything, including beating this disease, but…Sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

He stood there with his hands shoved deeply in his pockets and moisture glistening in his eyes. She’d heard people say that they knew his sisters would be fine because Jax would take care of them, that Jax would take care of everything. They’d even talked about how good he’d been with the girls when their father had died, when Jax was only eleven.

But Gwen had wondered, if he was so busy taking care of his sisters and everything else and had been since he was eleven, who took care of him? His mother probably had. He obviously loved her very much. But now she was gone, and he seemed so alone.

A very strong, capable man, but so alone.

People had always thought Gwen was so strong, too, so capable. She had thought so herself, but the truth was, she wasn’t. Life had gotten really hard, and she’d crumbled like a stale, dry cookie.

But surely Jax wasn’t as weak as her.

Still, she was starting to wonder about this thing called strength. If she’d stumbled through her whole life thinking she had it in abundance—until things got hard—she
wondered if other people did, too. Or if anyone was really that strong. If everyone didn’t need someone at one time or another.

“Want to have a seat on my front steps?” she asked. “I’d offer you a chair, but I don’t have one out here, and it’s too nice a day to be inside.”

“Sure.” He took the right side of the porch, easing himself down to sit on the base of the porch, his long legs stretching down the three steps to the ground from there.

Gwen sat down opposite him, her back against one of the beams holding up the porch, dusting the dirt off her knees and hands as best she could. Romeo flopped down belly-first onto the porch, his legs seeming to just go out from beneath him. With what sounded remarkably like a long-suffering sigh, he laid his soft head on her right thigh and gazed up at her with blue eyes, almost a perfect match for Jax’s.

“Why don’t you relax a bit, Romeo?” Jax said. “Make yourself at home.”

“He’s fine.” Gwen laughed and scratched the dog’s head and wondered if Jax ever let anyone fuss over him at all. Surely there would have been any number of women willing to take on the task. The other thing she’d heard about him over the last few days was that Jackson Cassidy had a way with women, that they just adored him. Given the way he looked, his easy manner and the ease with which he carried himself, Gwen was sure it was true.

So where was the current woman in his life? She should be here by his side, keeping Gwen from wanting to take care of Jax, too.

“Oh, I meant to tell you—great shirt,” she said.

He grinned. “My mother’s orders. No black. You should have seen the crowd. Even the guys I work with on the police force and all those guys who knew my dad showed en
masse with no uniforms, just one loud shirt after another. We looked like we were gathering for a luau. I’d have brought leis if I’d thought of it in time.”

“Did it help?” she couldn’t help but ask. “The colors, I mean.”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I’m sure it didn’t hurt that we at least didn’t look grim. Which reminds me—you’ve done some work around here.”

“Not so grim?” she asked.

“That’s not what I said.”

“I know, but it’s true. The place looked neglected. I finally noticed and did something about it.” She’d brought some light and color into her home at least.

Which made her think of Jax’s mother. Which would be worse? she wondered. Mourning someone who’d been completely in love with life and very happily living it, or someone who’d closed herself off from everyone and was barely living at all? One had lost so much more than the other, but the latter seemed like such a waste.

She still worried about the wasted time, the way she’d seemed to just give up. To hear Jax tell the story, his mother had never given up. Not that it had made a difference in the end. She’d still died.

And Gwen hadn’t. She’d just lived for a while as if she had.

“You know,” Jax said, “you look about as sad as I feel.”

G
wen didn’t know what to say. She wouldn’t have wished this kind of sadness on her worst enemy, but it was certainly nice to think there was someone else in the world who understood how she felt. She believed he did.

“What did you mean the other day, when you said you’d almost lost yourself?” he asked. “If you don’t mind my asking. Because I don’t want to upset you—”

“I meant that, until the attack, nothing really bad had ever happened to me,” she blurted out. It wasn’t easy to talk about, but if he was in the same place she was, maybe there was something about her story that would help him, and she wanted to help. “My life was ordinary as could be. I mean, my father’s never really been around, but my mom and I were fine. We had lots of friends and life was good. I went to college, got a degree in business and a job handling corporate travel accounts. One of the perks was great deals on trips, and you won’t believe it, but I wasn’t scared of anything. I was going to see the whole world, just for fun, and when I was done, I’d get married, have my children, maybe do some writing on the side about all
the places I’d been. I had it all planned out, and I thought life would be a breeze, that nothing really bad would ever happen to me. You know?”

And then she remembered who she was talking to.

“Sorry. Of course you don’t know about that. You lost your father when you were so young.”

“Yeah, but after that, I thought I’d paid my dues. Bad times were over. Then my mom got cancer.”

“Oh. So you do know.” Gwen frowned. “Now I feel bad for having only one awful thing happen to me.”

“Yeah, guilt is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?” He almost grinned. “The gift that keeps on giving. I didn’t mean to make you feel bad, comparing my life to yours. I just feel like—”

“Like you’ve lost yourself?”

“Yeah.”

“Like the whole world shifted, and so many things you’d assumed about your life, you were wrong about, and you just want your old life back?”

“Exactly,” he said. “I have to go back to work. They’ve been really generous with leave time, but I can’t be out forever, and I have to find a new apartment, and wrap everything up with my mom and just…live. I have to get my life back. How do I do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“It seems different than when I lost my father. Harder, but how can that be?”

“You were a child. Nobody expected you to handle it well when you lost your father. But now…How old are you?”

“Thirty, just last month.”

Gwen nodded. “You’re not a child anymore. I wasn’t, either. I was all grown up, and I never thought anything would come along that could shake me up so completely.”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“This changes the way you look at yourself as an adult. It shows you that you’re not as strong as you thought you were. That maybe things will come along in this life that you can’t handle. At least, it was like that for me. I always thought I was so sensible and capable and strong, even. Last year showed me I didn’t even know I could be so afraid.”

She realized she was crying and hastily scrubbed away her tears with the back of her hands. But they were dirty. She saw the dirt on her fingers a second after she touched her hand to her face.

“Here,” Jax said, brushing her hands away before she could even try to fix the mess. “Let me.”

She gave up on doing it herself. She’d only get his hands dirty as well if she tried. He tugged on the ends of his shirt and used it to wipe away the tears and smears of dirt on her cheeks.

“I’m sorry. It’s just awful. I wish no one else in the world would ever have to feel like this.”

“Me, neither,” Jax said, his hands on her cheeks so gentle, he might well make her cry again.

He was close, too, probably closer than she’d been to any man since the attack, and she waited, wondering if that would scare her, the way it had when other men had gotten anywhere near her.

Not that there was anything remotely threatening in his presence, and it wasn’t even dark outside. Darkness was the worst.

“Okay, give me your hands,” Jax said, easing away ever so slightly.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said, looking straight ahead and finding her gaze on the open V of his shirt, staring at his throat and a bit of sun-browned skin, waiting again for nerves to take over.

“Hands, Gwen,” he demanded.

Obediently, she held out one.

He cupped the back of her hand in one of his, and she made herself stare at that same spot on his throat, not quite sure how she’d come to be in this place, sitting so close to him, talking to him about how horrible things could be and him cleaning her face and hands.

Life was so strange sometimes, but that shouldn’t surprise her anymore.

“Can you tell me about what happened to you?” he asked, as if he might have wanted to know what the weather was supposed to be like, and he didn’t look at her. He seemed completely absorbed in the task he’d set for himself.

The gentleness of his touch, of his voice, the way his presence was somehow soothing and unsettling at the same time…She didn’t know what to make of this man.

She’d met him three days ago, and already she felt as if he’d turned her life upside down. Her house was different. Her life was different. She’d been so alone, and now there was a warm, flesh-and-blood man sitting on her front steps cradling her hand in his, wiping away her tears and asking her to spill her soul out to him.

Gwen was thinking,
Do I really have to do this? Do I have to tell him every awful thing?
While another part of her was thinking that he was a policeman, after all. It wasn’t as if anything she had to say would come as a shock to him.

“I’ll start for you,” he offered. “It was a year ago.”

“Nearly.”

“And it was dark.”

“Yes.” If she closed her eyes, she could see the darkness again. The rain. The blur of the city streetlight, so far away. She wanted to tell Jax to stop, to go away. To not be kind
or understanding or sad for her. To give up on this idea of pushing her out of her shell, whether she was ready or not.

She felt like she was losing control of her life again, this time to a kind, terribly handsome, brokenhearted man and a flirtatious dog. It was one thing to do things because she’d decided she was ready, another to have him pushing this way and making her want to push herself.

“Come on, Gwen. It was a man,” Jax said, gently stroking her hand with his shirt. “I know it was a man.”

“Yes.” Gwen risked a glance up into his face. Kind, beautifully blue eyes stared back at her. Bleak eyes with sad, little, crinkly lines at the corners that spoke of sleepless nights and heartfelt pain, way too much understanding in his expression.

“And he hurt you. With his fists?”

“And a knife. He had a knife.” She didn’t really have to say it. She just turned her head to the right, and this close he could see the scar there on the side of her neck, where that man had cut her. “I thought he’d cut my throat. I mean…You know what I mean. He did, but it wasn’t deep. I didn’t know that, because I couldn’t see it. I just knew that it hurt, and I was bleeding, and…He was just trying to scare me. That’s what the policeman said later. I was hysterical and thought I couldn’t breathe and that I was bleeding to death, but…it wasn’t that bad.”

“Sounds pretty bad,” Jax said, his jaw gone tight. He put down one of her hands and she held out the other. If anything, his touch was even gentler than before as he bent over her hand and went to work cleaning it. “Gwen, did he rape you?”

“Not quite,” she said, still wondering whether it really mattered. The
not quite
part.

“You got away?”

“No, I got…lucky.” That’s what so many people had said.
Lucky.
“Someone came along.”

A couple of kids had walked into the dark alley. She’d heard them but never seen them. They hadn’t come to help her, but they had scared her attacker away. She’d stayed there, frozen, in the alley. Lying on the cold, wet pavement, bleeding, the rain running down her face and all down her body, and she’d kept hoping it would somehow wash everything away. That she’d wake up and nothing would have happened to her.

She looked up at Jax’s angry face, hoping he didn’t pity her and determined to finish this and never talk to him about it again.

“I was on a date,” she said. “A second date with a man I’d just met. We were downtown at the arts center. When we left, he wanted me to come home with him. When I told him that I wouldn’t, he got mad. I told him I’d find my own way home, didn’t think a thing about it. I planned just to get in a taxi. We hadn’t come that far from the theater, and there had been so many people there. But when I got out, it was so quiet. I guess I got turned around in the dark. Next thing I knew, somebody grabbed me and pulled me into a dark alley. It all happened so fast and I was so shocked, I didn’t even make a sound. It was all I could do to breathe. Can you imagine that? A woman about to be raped, and she can’t even make a sound.”

“It happens when people get scared. It’s not unusual at all.”

“I hated myself for not even making a sound. When the prosecutor started talking to me about what it would be like at the trial, she said his attorney would say, ‘Did you tell him no? Did you tell him to stop?’ And I thought, how could anyone think a woman wanted a stranger to grab her off the streets and drag her into an alley and hold a knife to her throat? Was it only wrong if I told him I didn’t want him to do that?”

“I’m sorry, Gwen. I’m so sorry.”

She shrugged as best she could and blinked back fresh tears and looked off into the sky, because she couldn’t look at him.

“They convicted him of attempted rape?” Jax asked.

“Aggravated assault. We didn’t push on the attempted-rape charge,” she admitted. “The prosecutor said it could have gone either way. I never really got a clear look at his face, and the kids who stumbled into the alley ran right back out, so there were no witnesses, and he hadn’t really raped me.”

There had been bruises, torn clothes, a nick here and there from the knife, but even the cut on her neck hadn’t required more than a dozen stitches. She’d been
lucky,
after all.

Gwen looked up at Jax once again. “You think I’m a coward for not pressing on the attempted-rape charge?”

“No. The prosecutor was right. Could have gone either way, and with the knife wound, aggravated assault was a lock.”

“Yeah, I was lucky he cut my throat.” She tried not to sound so bitter. “The prosecutor said that. The guy pled guilty to the assault. We dropped the attempted-rape thing, and I never had to come face-to-face with him in court.”

“That’s understandable.”

“Well, some people didn’t understand.” They thought if it had really happened the way she said, the guy should have been convicted of attempted rape.

“Some people are idiots. You didn’t do anything wrong, Gwen.”

“I must have. Because if I didn’t…If this was just one of those things that happen, like a roll of the dice. My number just came up…. That’s crazy. What kind of world are we living in? Something just as lousy could be right
around the next corner, and who wants to live in a world like that?”

She paused long enough to take a breath, and felt more tears streaming down her face. Romeo made sympathetic sounds and nudged his nose against her shoulder, then her cheek, sniffing at her tears.

“Romeo, stop it,” Jax said.

“No, it’s okay. He’s sweet.” Gwen put her arm around the dog, buried her face in his warm neck and let more tears fall.

Jax’s arm settled, warm and soothing, around her shoulder. His hand pressed against the side of her face, urging it down against his shoulder, and then she somehow found her face buried against his neck, tears falling unchecked onto that crazy shirt he wore.

She curled her body into his, one hand slipping around his back and the other clutching his shirt. His hand stroked her hair, and the dog whined and tried to get closer, too.

“Romeo, give it a break,” Jax said. “I’ve got her.”

The dog obviously didn’t like that. He growled at Jax, and somehow Gwen started to laugh, surrounded by a big, warm, furry dog and a nice, broad-shouldered cop.

Much too soon, she forced herself to ease away from him, but he caught her with his arms, stopping her when they were nearly nose-to-nose.

When any man had gotten too close, something inside of her had curled up in fear. People had told her time would fix that, but she hadn’t believed that, either.

Was it time?

Or this man in particular?

It couldn’t be him, Gwen thought. Not the completely self-assured, completely comfortable around women, completely charming and gorgeous Jackson Cassidy.

He leaned in even closer, tilting his head to one side. His warm, soft lips settled ever so gently against her cheek, and one of his hands cupped her other cheek, brushing at the moisture there with his thumb.

It was the sweetest kiss, the kindest touch.

Part of her wanted to cry again, at feeling so alive. If she was the kind of woman who could be casually intimate with a man, he’d be great. But she wasn’t that kind of woman.

“I’m sorry,” he said, backing away. “No one deserves to be treated like that, Gwen. Don’t let anyone make you feel like you did anything wrong. And I’m sorry I made you talk about the attack.”

“No. It’s okay,” she insisted. “Maybe I need to. Not saying anything sure hasn’t done me any good. I think I’m still as much of a mess now as I was when it first happened.”

Jax was still close. She thought that maybe—just maybe—curled up in his arms, she wouldn’t be afraid at all.

What an amazing gift that would be.

She’d come to a point where she tried to stay on alert at all times, watching and waiting and fighting off the panic that someone was going to hurt her again, and she didn’t know how much longer she could do that. It took too much out of her, and yet she didn’t know how she could stop, either.

Was a man the answer? She’d never even considered that.

He was a nice man. If she asked, he’d probably just sit here and hold her for as long as she needed him to. Gwen wondered if any length of time would be enough. But she couldn’t ask him to do that.