Free One Good Man by Alison Kent Page A

job, or a chore. Like work.”
    What he was working on right now was keeping his hands wrapped around his glass of throat-searing whiskey and melting ice. He wanted so badly to touch her. “You don’t think relationships are work?”
    “I wouldn’t want to go into one thinking that, no.” She sat forward again, gesturing with her glass. “I mean, I watched my mother work her ass off to salvage what she had with my father. She wheeled and dealed and begged, even agreed to let him do his man-alone-with-nature thing while she took care of me. He left anyway. Just loaded up his truck and his horse trailer and drove off into the sunset.”
    Hmm. Was she basing her feelings about relationships on one couple? Her parents? She had to know that marriages rarely survived something so horrific as what had happened to their child. Or…wait. Was Jamie blaming herself for her father’s desertion?
    Kell looked over at the strands of hair blowing into her face, catching on her lips and lashes. He reached for them, brushed them back over her shoulder, but then he let his hand linger there, let his fingers drift softly over the skin beneath her ear.
    It was a big mistake, touching her, and even though he pulled away, he knew he’d done so too late. He’d crossed a line he shouldn’t have, and even if he’d wanted to he could never go back. “If your father didn’t work just as hard, then their marriage didn’t stand a chance. There are two people in a relationship, and if only one is working, it’s hard to imagine that it wouldn’t fail.”
    Jamie sat shaking her head, before pushing to her feet and walking to the center of the driveway, as if she’d reached her limit on sitting still. She wobbled a bit, swayed a bit more, found her footing and stood in profile, her hair lifting on the warm night wind.
    The moon bathed her; Kell could see the globes of her breasts, her nipples, the long line of her back to the gorgeous swell of her rump, the hint of her sex beneath the cotton of her pjs that was very very thin. Just like she wasn’t wearing a bra, she wasn’t wearing panties.
    “The problem with my parents’ relationship is that it grew to be about a third person, not just the two my father signed on for. The third, me,” she said again, this time her voice cracking like glass, “was what ended up tearing them apart.”
    Kell didn’t know the details, he had no right to assume or intrude. But Jamie’s state of mind was a crucial component in what he was hoping would be tomorrow’s success—though he knew what was going on here, tonight, between them had nothing to do with the case.
    “It wasn’t your fault, Jamie—”
    “Of course it was,” she shouted back, the sound like an explosive blast in the stillness.
    If she’d had neighbors living close, he would’ve expected lights in windows to come on, curtains to sweep aside, concerned eyes to peer out and see if she needed help. But her closest neighbor on Lamplighter Lane was half a block away, and the house remained quiet and still.
    Inside, Kell was anything but, his stomach and heart battling a surge of emotion, and he had to force his frustration into calm. “If your father left because of what happened to you, it was his problem, not yours. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s all.”
    “A wrong place he didn’t want me to be,” she said, and finished off her drink, heaving her glass toward the garage, where it shattered, the slivers and shards scattering on the pavement.
    Kell didn’t move. He waited—though he would stop her if she even thought about cleaning up the glass. She was barefoot, a little bit drunk, and it was dark in the shadow of the garage.
    She stayed where she was, however, dropping down and wrapping her arms around her knees, rocking back and forth, her back and shoulders arched like a turtle’s protective shell.
    So her father hadn’t wanted her to work at the Sonora Nites Diner? Because of the late hours?