Passion in Secret

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She slumped against the wall, defeated. “Why are you doing this, Jake?” she asked, raising her voice over the din from the jukebox. “What do you hope to accomplish?”

“I want to know why my wife made a habit of frequenting places like this while I was away on combat duty, and if you won’t tell me, I’ll find someone here who will.”

“You’re wasting your time. Penelope and I were here only once, and when I realized the kind of place it was, I insisted we leave.”

He scanned the room at large. On the other side of the dance floor, a woman much the worse for wear had climbed on a table and was gyrating lewdly to the applause of the patrons lining the bar. Swinging his gaze to Sally again, Jake asked, “Was it your idea to stop here to begin with?”

“Certainly not!” she snapped. Then, realizing how much she’d revealed with her indignation, added, “We’d decided to drive out to a country inn for dinner that night, it started snowing on the way home, the roads were even worse than they are tonight, and we were looking for a place to wait out the storm. Why is that so hard for you to believe?”

“It’s not, Sally. But nor does it explain what made you change your minds and venture back on the road anyway, before the weather improved. One look out the door, and you must have known you were taking your lives in your hands by getting back behind the wheel of a car.”

“I already told you. We didn’t like the…clientele here.”

The tattooed hulk returned just then. “Where’s your gal pal tonight?” he asked, sliding a tankard of beer across the table to Sally. “The regulars miss seein’ her around the joint. She knew how to party.”

“You know what they say,” Jake cut in, before Sally could answer, even assuming she could come up with anything plausible after having just been exposed as a blatant liar. “Three’s a crowd.”

The server’s face split in a grin. He had a scar running down one side of his massive neck and was missing three front teeth. Probably got the first from a knife wound, and lost the rest in a brawl. “Little old Penny-wise wouldn’t horn in on your date for long, dude. Plenty of guys around here’d be only too willing to take her off your hands.”

“I think,” Sally said, in a small, despairing voice, as the oaf lumbered off to collect their nachos, “I’m going to be sick.”

Unmoved, Jake knocked back half his beer. “That tends to happen when a person’s attempt to hide the truth blows up in her face. I’d bet my last dollar you’d feel a whole lot better if you’d spit out the load of rubbish you’ve been feeding me.”

“It would serve you right if I did!” she cried with surprising passion. “But since truth’s so all-fired important to you, try this on for size—I don’t know what happened to turn the boy I used to know into such a hard-nosed bully, but I do know I don’t like the man you’ve become.”

He didn’t much like it himself. Browbeating a woman—any woman—wasn’t his style. Traumatizing Sally to the point that she looked as bewildered as an innocent victim caught in enemy crossfire filled him with self-loathing. He hadn’t come home to continue the inhumane practices of war. He’d come looking for a little peace.

Trouble was, he was no closer to finding it here than he had been on the other side of the world, and it was eating him alive, though not for the reasons Sally might suppose.

Hardening his heart against her obvious distress, he said, “I’m not especially enamored of you, either. I’d hoped by now that you’d outgrown the habit of taking the easy way out of whatever tight spot you happen to find yourself in.”

She picked up her tankard of beer and, for a second, he thought she might fling it in his face. But at the last minute, she shoved it away and spat, “I resent that, and I refuse to sink to the level of the company in which I find myself. I might be all kinds of things, but I’ve never lied to you in the past.”

“Never, Sally? Not once? Not even to spare my feelings?”

She opened her mouth to reply, but at the last minute appeared to think better of it. Her eyes grew huge and haunted, and filled with tears.

He wanted to wipe them away. Wanted to take her in his arms and tell her he was sorry; that raking up the distant past wasn’t his intent because it didn’t matter—not any of it. He wanted to tell her that he could forgive her anything, if only she’d free him to live in the present and be able to face the future without guilt weighing him down and souring each new day. And the depth of his wanting staggered him.

His wife was barely cold in her grave, for Pete’s sake, and all his suspicions aside, common decency demanded he at least observe a token period of mourning.

Slamming the door on thoughts he couldn’t afford to entertain, he drained his beer. “I don’t know who it is you think you’re protecting, Sally,” he said, “but to prove I’m not completely heartless, I’ll make a deal with you. Instead of badgering you to betray secrets you obviously hold sacred, I’ll spell out what I believe happened, the night Penelope died. All I ask of you is that you tell me honestly whether or not I’m on the right track. Agree to those terms and, after tonight, I’ll never bring the subject up again.”

She moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue and stared stubbornly at her hands, but he could see she was wavering.

“I’ll give you some time to think about it,” he offered, levering himself away from the table and grabbing his cane, “but don’t take too long. I’ll only be gone a few minutes.”

He wove his way through the couples squirming up against each other on the dance floor, knowing she was watching him the entire time. The men’s room lay at the end of a long, badly lit corridor toward the rear of the building. A boy no more than eighteen swayed in the doorway, vacant-eyed and decidedly green about the gills. The squalor in the area beyond defied description.

Cripes! Jake had known his share of dives, but this one took some beating!

“Hey, pal,” he said, catching the kid just in time to stop him doing a face plant on the filthy floor, and propelling him toward the back exit. “How about a breath of fresh air?”

The snow had tapered off, and a few stars pricked the sky. A clump of pines bordering the parking lot glowed ghostly white in the dark. Somewhere across the open fields to the west, a pack of coyotes on the hunt howled in unison. Under different circumstances, it would have been a magical night, peaceful and quiet, except for nature’s music.

Propping the boy against the wall, Jake rubbed a handful of snow in his face. The poor guy gasped and shuddered. Doubled over. Recognizing the inevitable was about to occur, Jake stood well to one side.

“Feel better?” he asked, when the kid finally stopped retching.

“I guess.”

“What’s your name?”

He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “Eric.”

“You of legal age to be hanging around bars, Eric?”

“No,” he moaned miserably, sagging against the wall.

“Didn’t think so. You live far from here?”

“Down the road some.” He swallowed and grimaced. “A mile, maybe.”

Jake weighed the options. He had problems enough of his own, without taking on someone else’s. And a mile was no distance at all. The kid was young and strong; he could walk it in a quarter of an hour. Less, if he put his mind to it and didn’t get sidetracked by the next bar he passed along the way.

But the temperature had dropped well below freezing, and he wasn’t in the best shape. Jake’s playing Good Samaritan would take all of five minutes. He could be back before Sally had the chance to miss him.

More important, he’d be able to sleep that night with a clear conscience. He’d been young and stupid himself, at one time, and felt for the poor kid whose troubles had only just begun. By morning, he’d be nursing one mother of a hangover!

He zipped up his jacket and fished the car keys out of his pocket. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll drive you.”

“That’s okay. I can walk.”

“You can barely stand, you damn fool!”

The kid started to cry. “I don’t want my mom to see me fallin’-down drunk. She’s not gonna like it.”

“If you were my son, I wouldn’t like it, either.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the building behind. “But I’ll bet money she’d rather have you passing out at home, than winding up as roadkill when that lot in there decide to hit the highway.”

If she hadn’t been so preoccupied, she might have noticed the man sooner. But by the time she realized she’d become the object of his attention, he’d lurched onto the bench beside her and slung a sweaty arm around her shoulders. “Lookin’ for company, babe?”

“No,” she said, recoiling from the foul breath wafting in her face. “I’m with someone.”

He made a big production of swinging his head to the left and right, and then, with a drunken guffaw, peering under the table. “Don’t look that way to me,” he snickered, lifting his smelly T-shirt to scratch at the hairy expanse of blubber underneath. “Looks to me like you’re all on your little ol’ lonesome, and just waitin’ for Sid to show you a good time.”

“No, really! I’m with…my boyfriend. He’s just gone….” Where, exactly, that it was taking him so long?

“To take a leak?” Sid chortled and reached for her untouched beer.

Good grief, could the clientele possibly have sunk even lower than the last time she’d set foot in this place? Revolted, she shrank into the corner of the booth, as far away from him as she could get, and made no effort to disguise her abhorrence.

Big mistake! Sid’s eyes, close-set and mean enough to begin with, narrowed menacingly. He slid nearer, pressed his thigh against hers. “Wha’samatter, honey? Think you’re too good for a stud like me?”

“Not at all,” she said, averting her face. “I’m sure you’re a very nice man.”

“Better believe it, babe.” His hand clamped around her chin, and forced her to turn and look at him again. He shoved his face closer, licked his lips. The fingers of his other hand covered her knee. Began inching her skirt up her leg. “Better be real friendly with Sid, if you know what’s good for you.”

Oh, God! Where was Jake?

Sid’s fingers slid under the hem of her skirt. Crawled over her knee. Someone plugged another selection in the juke box: Patsy Cline singing “Crazy.”

How appropriate! Unable to help herself, Sally giggled hysterically.

Sid squeezed her thigh. “Tha’s better, babe! Treat me right, and I’ll make you feel real good.”

By then, so unnerved that she could barely breathe, she seized on the first escape possibility that occurred to her. “Dance with me,” she said, praying he wouldn’t hear the terror crowding her voice. Praying that he was too clumsily drunk to realize until it was too late that the only thing she wanted was to get out of the confining booth and put some distance between him and her.

“Sure thing, babe!” He grinned evilly and, with bone-crushing strength, hauled her bodily off the seat and into his arms, and pinned her like a butterfly against him.

At least, though, his hand was no longer creeping up her thigh! At least she stood a better chance of distracting him long enough to wriggle free. And if that didn’t work, she could scream for help and stand a reasonable chance of being heard by the other bodies crammed on the dance floor.

“Start enjoyin’, babe,” Sid grated. “Ain’t no fun dancin’ with a corpse.”

If he’d left it at that, she might have survived unscathed. But as added inducement, he stuck his tongue in her ear. Repelled beyond endurance and unmindful of the consequences of her action, she responded by lifting her knee and ramming it full force in his groin at the same time that she raked her fingernails down his face.

He roared like a wounded bear, reared back and landed a vicious slap to the side of her head. The grimy silver ball rotating from the ceiling swung crazily in her line of vision. The faces of the people around her tilted; their voices merged with coarse laughter into a cacophony of unintelligible sound.

Dazed, she lifted her head and saw his fist coming at her again. Pain cracked against her cheek in a burst of fire. She crumbled to her hands and knees on the filthy floor. Tasted blood, warm and salty on her tongue. Felt him grab her by the hair. Savagely yank her to her feet again.

Then, as suddenly as he’d latched on to her, he backed away, felled by a blow from behind. Jake, his face a distorted mask of white fury, his eyes blazing, swam into view.

A woman nearby screamed, someone else swore. Needing no better excuse to start a fight, half the men in the room joined in the fray, indiscriminately landing punches on whoever happened to be handy. But they gave Jake a wide berth. Drunken hoodlums though they might be, they had no wish to tangle with a man wielding a cane like a shillelagh and clearly willing to crack the skull of anyone foolish enough to challenge him.

Weaving his way to her through the pandemonium, he reached an arm around her waist and pulled her against him. Up to that point, she’d been too focused on defending herself to give in to the terror screaming along her nerves. Surviving the moment had been the only thing of import. But at his touch, at the cold, clean scent of him and the solid reassurance of his body shielding hers, she fell apart completely.

“I thought he was going to kill me!” she sobbed, burying her face against his neck.

He stroked her hair, murmured her name, and oh, it felt so good to be held by him again. So good to hear the old tenderness creep into his voice. Despite all the chaos and din pulsing around them, he created a tiny haven of safety she never wanted to leave.

He was of a more practical turn of mind. “Let’s get out of here while we still can,” he muttered, hustling her toward the door. “Things are going to get uglier before the night’s over.”

Just as they reached it, though, the door flew open and half a dozen police burst into the room, making escape impossible. “Hold it right there. Nobody leaves until I say so,” the officer leading the pack ordered, and even in her shocked state, Sally recognized him as one of those who’d been first on the scene, the night Penelope had died.

He recognized her, too, which was hardly surprising, given the amount of publicity the accident had received in the local news. “Not you again!” he said, on an exasperated breath, as his colleagues set about restoring order. “Gee, lady, how many times does it take before you learn your lesson and stay away from places like this?”

“Never mind the clever remarks,” Jake said. “She needs to see a doctor right away.”

The officer eyed her appraisingly. “As long as she’s still on her feet and able to walk, it’ll have to wait,” he finally decided. “I’m taking you both in, along with every other yahoo in the place.”

“I’m the one who called you to begin with, you fool!” Jake snapped. “If you want to harass someone, go after the guy behind the bar who makes a habit of serving liquor to minors. Or the lout over there, with the bloody nose, who gets his kicks out of beating up women half his size. We’ll be pressing assault charges against him, in case you’re interested, but not before the morning.”

“You’ll do it now, and keep a lid on your temper while you’re at it,” the other man cautioned. “I’m ticked off enough as it is.”

“It’s all right, Jake,” Sally said, sensing the anger simmering in him. “I don’t mind going down to the station and making a statement. I’ve done nothing wrong.”

The patrolman rolled his eyes wearily. “That’s what they all say.”

“Maybe they all do, but in my case, Officer,” she told him, staring him down with as much dignity as she could drum up, considering one eye was swollen half-shut, “it happens to be the truth.”

Jake touched his finger lightly to her cheek. “All it’ll take is a phone call to my lawyer to have things postponed until morning, Sally. You’ve been through enough for one night.”

And she’d have done it all again if, at the end of it all, he looked at her as if she held his heart in her hands, and cushioned her next to him, prepared to defend her to the death, if need be. It made her wonder if she was hurt more than she realized, had even suffered minor brain damage, that she was so ready to forget the terrible price she’d paid for loving Jake in the past.

Steeling herself not to weaken, she said, “I’d rather get it over with, if you don’t mind.”

He shrugged. “Wait here, then, while I collect your coat, and we’ll be on our way.” He tipped a glance at the police officer. “Is it okay if I drive us in my own vehicle, or are you going to insist we get carted off in the paddy wagon?”