Dead Right (Stillwater Trilogy #3)(52)
Author: Brenda Novak

Hunter reached across the table to squeeze her elbow. “I was just thinking he might have some ideas about who did. He certainly knows more than we do about what happened twenty years ago. Of course, whether or not he’ll tell us is another story. But he might talk if it meant keeping you safe.”

Until today, Madeline had never felt personally threatened. “Can we talk about something else for a while?” she asked, using her fork to make little peaks in the whipped cream on her pie. She couldn’t think about her own situation anymore. If she didn’t figure it out soon, she’d be as depressed as her mother. And the mere thought of that terrified her. Never did she want to find herself so desperate.

Hunter stretched one arm across the back of the booth. “Like what?”

She put down her fork and pushed the rest of her pie away. “Like you.”

He hesitated briefly, then shrugged. “What about me?”

“How long have you been divorced?”

“Thirteen months.”

She’d guessed it had been recent. “So you were married for what, five or six years?”

He pulled her pie toward him and started to finish it. His own was already gone. “Twelve.”

That was unexpectedly high. “You got married young.”

“I was nineteen.”

“I thought you surfed through college.”

He paused to take a sip of coffee, then laughed dryly. “Only in my dreams.”

“Really?”

“There was no time. Besides, I didn’t even have a board.”

“You were working?”

His cup clinked against the saucer. “At night. During the day I went to school. I was working toward a business degree until I had to drop out.”

“What went wrong?”

“I had to get a second job.”

She remembered teasing him about spending his days at the beach and felt like an idiot for making such a snap judgment. It didn’t sound as if his life had been as easy as she’d envisioned. “Is that when you became a cop?”

“No, that’s when I became a bartender. It was another two years before I decided to join the force.”

“Did you like police work?”

“I did. But this is better. In many ways, I do basically the same work, but I set my own hours, pick my own clients and make more money.”

“Can’t beat that,” she said.

“Exactly.”

“Did you meet your wife in college, then?”

“Sort of. She wasn’t in school. I ran into her at an off-campus party.”

She added cream to her coffee. “If you were married nearly twelve years and you’ve been divorced for one, you must’ve been a sophomore?”

“A freshman.”

She whistled under her breath, feeling more like her old self. The change of subject seemed to make a difference. “Was it love at first sight?”

He chuckled. “That depends on what you mean by love. It was definitely my first crush.”

“What attracted you to her?”

“She was the entertainment at the party. I’d never seen anything like it before. I was completely captivated.”

She stirred her coffee. “She was a dancer of some sort, then?”

He laughed again. “Of some sort. She was a stripper.”

She held her cup halfway to her mouth. “I take it your father didn’t have Playboy lying around the house.”

“Absolutely not. I come from a religious family with very strict parents who sent me to an all-boys’ school.”

She took a sip, then set her cup down again. “Did you mind?”

“Not really. When I was in high school, I was more concerned with sports than girls.”

She liked that he was revealing more about himself. She suspected he was only doing it because he could see the distraction was helping her cope with her own problems, but she was interested all the same. “And?”

“And then I went away to college. Suddenly Dad wasn’t there to keep a bridle on me. It was my first brush with real freedom and I was off and running for broke.” He finished her pie and stacked the two plates on the edge of the table. “Those first few months were a lot of fun. But I was naïve and made some really stupid mistakes.”

“Like getting involved with a stripper?”

“Antoinette was…” He frowned and shook his head. “Have you ever seen Risky Business?”

“Several times.”

“What we had was like Tom Cruise and Rebecca DeMornay’s relationship in that movie. She was the first girl I’d ever slept with, but she was five years older and a lot more experienced.”

“Was she going to school, too?” Madeline asked in surprise.

“She said she was taking a few classes at the community college, but I soon found out it wasn’t true. She just gravitated toward the preppy crowd, liked the attention and the money she made dancing.”

“And you liked her.”

His eyes took on a faraway look. “Yes. I was so crazy about her I was actually stupid enough to bring her home to meet my folks.”

The waitress came around with the coffeepot. She collected the empty plates, but Madeline put up her hand to indicate she’d had plenty of coffee and Hunter did the same. “How did they like her?” Madeline asked.

A bitter smile curved his lips. “About as much as you’d expect.”

“They weren’t impressed.”

“No. They told me she was trash. That I needed to get rid of her.”

“Seems like a harsh judgment for your parents to make after just one meeting. Maybe she didn’t have a good family and had resorted to stripping because it was the only way she could earn a living.”

“They didn’t know she was stripping. I wasn’t about to tell them that. They didn’t like her because…” He tapped a finger against the rim of his cup as if he hadn’t decided whether or not to go on.

“What?” she prompted. “Lord knows you’re already familiar with all my dirty secrets.”

“That you waited until you were thirty-two to make love isn’t exactly a dirty secret,” he said.

She felt her cheeks warm. “And now there’s that…incident behind the trees.”

His smile was crooked. “I realize you don’t really want to face what happened. But can I say one thing?”

She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear it. “What?” she said tentatively.