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“Yes.”
Okay. Well, her knees were a little shaky. Maybe her symptoms were more obvious than she’d thought. And it wasn’t as though he could do anything in the middle of the hall.
Granted the area was in a corner of the medical center. And not one soul had come or gone in the minutes she’d been there. But still, someone could. At any moment one of the other doors could open and someone could walk out.
Ellen sat.
“Shawna tells me you’re suffering from PTSD.”
Ellen had negotiated with Shawna and they had finally settled on her releasing only that information to him. It was all he needed to know to be able to treat her.
Stiff and ready to bolt, Ellen stared at him—as if he were a train wreck. She had to survey the damage. To see the suffering.
“You look too young to have been in the service.”
“I’m twenty-six.” Not young at all.
“Were you in the service?”
“No.”
His gaze made her uncomfortable. Could the man see the quaking inside her? Better that than having him see the dark shadows in her mind.
“The idea here is to teach your body that physical touch is nonthreatening. And to teach your mind that physical touch will bring you pleasure. To get you to the point where your automatic reaction is to welcome touch because you associate it with pleasure. To retrain you to expect it. Does that make sense?”
She wasn’t a moron.
And he wasn’t going to get her in that room.
“I’m going to start out with one hand. I’ll place it lightly where your right shoulder and neck meet. You naturally hold tension there and we want to relieve that tension.”
He was not getting her in that room.
“You ready?”
Ellen glared up at him. “What? Out here?”
“Yes.” He met her gaze head-on.
And the honesty, the understanding she saw there reached through her haze of panic.
“Just one hand?”
“Yes.”
“You promise?”
“Yes.”
“Only in the one spot?”
“Yes.”
He didn’t move.
She tried to prepare. To imagine his hand on her neck. To brace herself for how that would feel.
“Are you just going to lay your hand there, or what?”
“I’m going to start with three fingers. I’ll take them away then touch again. I’ll repeat that until your body accepts the contact.”
“How will you know that?”
“You’ll let me know.”
She had to do something? The butterflies were swarming fiercely.
“What if I don’t?” Did that mean he’d keep touching her? And claim that she hadn’t told him not to? Because she’d—
“You will. Your muscles will tense up—their way of responding to unwanted contact.”
Oh. Right. As a massage therapist, he knew all about muscles. Was probably trained to “listen” to them in ways Ellen didn’t even know about.
What else would he be able to understand about her if he touched her?
“That’s it then? You touch with three fingers—lightly—and that’s all?”
“Once your body accepts it, if we get to that point, I’ll apply light pressure—something meant to feel really good. I’ll give you plenty of warning before I change a process. That’s how this works. No surprises. And nothing without your explicit agreement. Okay?”
She wanted to date.
She didn’t want to sleep alone for the rest of her life.
She was not going to spend her life—even one aspect of it—hostage to what that bastard had done to her.
Josh needed her to be healthy.
Ellen nodded.
“Look at me please.”
She did.
“Okay?”
She nodded again.
“I need to hear you say it. This is totally your call.”
“Okay.” She tensed.
Black Leather waited then moved slowly to her side.
“Three fingers,” he said, holding them about a foot in front of her so she could see them. “I’m going to touch. On top of your hair. Ready?”
“Yes.”
She sensed more than heard his movement. “Touching now…”
Emotion exploded inside of Ellen, a volcano that rose from her stomach and took her breath away. Sight blinded by tears, she turned the corner of the hall before she even realized she was out of the chair.
And she didn’t stop. Not when people called her name. Not until she was in her car with the door locked. Not until she was driving down the road, heading toward…she had no idea where.
That hadn’t gone well.
CHAPTER FOUR
JAY HAD NEVER BEEN ONE to leave well enough alone. He had this cursed inability to turn his back and walk away. Even after the trait had landed him eighteen months in prison, he continued to let it drive his actions. And now he couldn’t leave Ellen Moore to handle the fallout of their afternoon session alone.
But she’d disappeared—had been out of the parking lot before he’d been able to grab the keys out of the locked drawer in his table. Although he’d driven around the entire town, he hadn’t spotted her.
Jay knew better than to ask people if they’d seen her. Or to hope they would direct him to her. She was a daughter of Shelter Valley. He was the outsider.
He called Shawna, knowing the counselor would have a hell of lot more luck at locating Ellen than he would, but reached her voice mail and left a message for her to phone him as soon as possible.
He had nothing to do this afternoon except wait for that call and tend to the one aspect of his life that he’d left completely alone.
His father had deserted him and his mother. The man was weak and irresponsible. He’d loved his mother enough to marry her, but not enough to stick around after she’d had Jay. And Jay had seen nothing worth pursuing in that situation.
Then Kelsey Johnson, now Kelsey MacDonald, had contacted him a month ago. They had known each other in college. He’d had sex with her. She’d married one of Jay’s ex-frat brothers. And twelve years later, she confessed he had a son.
A delinquent son. One her husband was tired of dealing with. Apparently, MacDonald had known all along that the boy wasn’t his. So out of the blue, Kelsey wanted Jay to take responsibility for Cole.
A man couldn’t very well expect to father a troubled teenager when he had his own father issues. Jay didn’t trust fathers. Or families.
He had no idea how to be the first. Or to be a part of the second.
To make matters worse, Jay, who knew what it was to be abandoned, had unwittingly put his own son in the very same position.
Damn Kelsey for putting him in this position.
The idea that he had a son was not sitting well with him. Despite having had four weeks to come to terms with the news, to make the plans that uprooted his entire footloose and fancy-free, lay-on-the-beach-whenever-he-wanted-to lifestyle, the existence of a boy with Jay’s blood in his veins still seemed completely unrealistic.
He sat at his computer, intent on searching various databases he had access to for any mention of Jay Billingsley, Sr.
He had a copy of his mother’s birth certificate and death certificate, which had been listed in her maiden name—his aunt’s doing. She’d wanted to eradicate any mention of the man who’d deserted her baby sister.
Jay had his own birth certificate, too. But he couldn’t connect Tammy Renee Walton to Billingsley. He couldn’t find any record of his father at all. Not even on his own birth certificate. Even though they had been married, his mother had chosen to list her maiden name and leave the father blank.
He knew the man’s name was Jay Billingsley. He knew he’d worked at a car dealership in Tucson—as a salesman his aunt had said—that had long since gone out of business.
With those three pieces of information, it should be easy enough to trace the guy. Jay had always thought he could find his father in a matter of hours if he’d really wanted to do so.
Apparently not.
This morning, when he’d attempted to access his mother’s marriage license, he’d been told there wasn’t one. The records clerk who had been helping him suggested that his parents might have been married in another state.
Just damned fine.
Like the majority of U.S. states, Arizona was a closed record state, which meant that without the man’s name on his birth certificate, Jay had no legal way of accessing his father’s records—other than those that were public such as birth date, marriage or death. He couldn’t find any public records for the man in Arizona.
For all he knew, Jay Billingsley, Sr. could have been born in another state, as well.
Maybe he’d died at some point, too.
Jay had other avenues to check. He hadn’t developed the reputation he had for ferreting out the most hard to find facts in order to solve cold cases without learning a few hundred tricks.
But he hadn’t expected to need them this time. He’d figured he’d make a few simple inquiries, do a stake-out—similar to the one he’d done that morning—then, depending on what he found, plan his next move.
Typing usernames and passwords on various internet public document reporting agencies Jay searched U.S. marriage, birth and death records.
Surprised as hell, Jay came up with another dead end. Jay Billingsley, Sr. had obviously lied to Tammy about his real name. That could explain why the man had taken off without a backward glance.
Had he been in trouble?
A member of the underworld?
Living a double life with a wife and family elsewhere?
Or simply a scumbag con man?
Trying a different tactic, Jay gathered the articles he’d located this morning. He opened a can of soda and sat back to spend the time before preparing his poolside dinner of grilled shrimp with news stories from the Tucson Citizen and the Arizona Daily Star dating back thirty-two years ago.
Maybe a birth announcement would shed some light on the latest irritation in his life. Or maybe a piece of school sports trivia would. He already had the few brief pieces that had been printed about his mother’s death before the records had been sealed from the press.
There was no mention of his father having been on the scene at any time. During his years-long investigation to find his mother’s killer, he’d looked for any mention of his father. The only family listed had been his mother’s sister—the aunt who had raised Jay. The same woman who had told him that his father had abandoned Jay and his mother before she’d been murdered.
It was conceivable the man might not even know about the heinous crime that had robbed Jay of any semblance of a normal life.
He’d known about Jay, though. That much was quite clear. Billingsley, Sr. had put it in writing, giving sole custody of his son to Tammy Walton Billingsley. Jay’s aunt had kept the letter in a lockbox. Jay had it now.
But just because his father wasn’t mentioned at the time of his mother’s death, didn’t mean that the man hadn’t made the news in some other fashion. Jay had done the obvious—searched for any mention of Jay Billingsley—so now he was going to do the more tedious part of an investigator’s job. Read through layers and layers of unrelated detail attempting to find that one piece of information that would click with something he already knew but didn’t yet know was pertinent.
The man had lived in Tucson. That much was certain. His aunt had also mentioned—let slip was more like it—that his father had had some later ties to Shelter Valley.
The sooner Jay found his father, the sooner he could contact Cole’s mother and determine exactly how the next phase of his own life would unfold. It wouldn’t be a white picket fence in a small town—or anywhere. He knew that much. But if Cole’s mother had her way, the kid could end up living with Jay.
He picked up a sheet of paper with a shrunken news paper page copied to it. He took in the details of reported life in Tucson, Arizona. On January 13 some thirty years ago, Dr. Paul Fugate, a botanist and park ranger, left his office to check out a nature trail and never returned. Thumbing through pages, Jay found many references to the search for the bearded National Park Service employee, but couldn’t find any reference to the man being found.
