Page 64 of Enticement
Okay, so that outburst had just undone everything she’d been painfully trying to avoid. There was enough doubt in her words for it to sound as if she believed in Kit’s guilt.
“Vanishing—that’s a good one!” The little bark of laughter Kit gave caused a knot to tighten in her guts. “It’s certainly the most complimentary way of putting it I’ve heard so far. Like I’m a stage magician and I’ve poofed her to some alternate dimension from which I can pluck her back for dramatic effect. Only, I don’t know where she is. It’d make life a hell of a lot easier if I had the answers everyone seems to think I have.” He turned on the spot and bolted out of the open front door.
Ross gawped at her. “Fucking hell, Evie! How bloody insensitive was that?” He ran after Kit.
“Wait!” Ross ran into the street. He caught up with Kit just as his lover was wrenching open the car door. “Wait! Where are you going?”
Kit clasped the top of the driver’s side door, his knuckles every bit as white as his face. “I can’t do this. I was a fool to come back and even think it would work. I can’t make it right for them, Ross. They’ll never forgive me.”
“Kit, most of them already have.”
“I should have walked her home. It’s my fault.”
Exasperated, Ross shoved Kit hard up against the metal chassis, oblivious of the neighbours and their twitching curtains. “Don’t say that. It’s no more your fault than mine.”
Kit struggled in Ross’s embrace a moment, his arms awkwardly pinned in the small of his back, while his stomach lay flush to the driver’s side window. Ross leaned in closer, holding him tight and refusing to let go. Kit had run out on him before. Destroyed what they had and flown to Japan, leaving him behind to deal with the mess, and to question everything he knew. He wasn’t letting it happen again.
Slowly, Kit stopped struggling. “She’ll never trust me now.”
“I doubt she trusts either of us at the moment. We should have told her what happened, instead of letting her hear all the crap on the rumour mill first. Me especially. I should have mentioned it before you came to stay, when it wasn’t such a contentious issue. She’d have listened, and we wouldn’t be saddled with this shit.”
Darkness continued to creep across Kit’s face so that worry lines creased his brows and formed crow’s feet around the corners of his mouth and eyes. He shoved his hands deep into his pockets so that he stood with his shoulders hunched, a far cry from his more familiar confident posture.
“I should have walked her home.”
“We all made choices that day, Kit. We have to live with them, because we sure as hell can’t turn back time.”
Kit made a noise deep in his throat that sounded suspiciously like a sob. Ross had never seen him cry. He’d seen him paled and shocked, angry even. Devastated, when the police knocked on the door with the news that Sammie was missing, but he’d never seen Kit cry over what had happened. That in itself was a mark against him in some eyes. Plenty of others had bawled over her disappearance. Folks like Tony, who’d elevated her onto a pedestal when she was neither martyr nor an angel, just a black and white image on a missing poster. Ross pulled Kit close again and felt the other man’s fists tighten upon his clothing.
“Where did she go, Ross? What the hell happened to screw everything up so badly?”
Ross shook his head. “I wish to god I knew, but we went over everything with the police. People go missing all the time. Some of them just wake up one morning and walk away, leave everything: families, kids, job, mortgage. They just can’t handle it any more so they wipe the slate clean and start over. It’s not so different to what you did, jetting off to Japan with no warning.”
“It is different. It’s very different. What if she came back and saw us, Ross?”
Ross had wondered that himself. He’d gone over and over it in the early days after her disappearance, when Kit had left him too. Sammie probably had returned and seen them there making out. Maybe that had been the last straw. Kit had been the only thing keeping her in the village. She hated the place, screamed for someplace with more of a heartbeat. Simply walking away was probably easier than fighting it out with the family and certainly easier than challenging him and Kit. Sammie had always been the mistress of the snap decision. “Come back inside,” he pleaded.
Kit shook his head. “You go and make your peace with Evie. You don’t need me standing over you making things more awkward.”
“What are you going to do?”
Kit shrugged, but the action was composed. “I might go up to the ruins, or I might just go home to bed.”
“Your bed is here with us.”
“Not tonight it isn’t.”
“Well, I’m going to come and find you in the morning.”
Kit squeezed Ross’s shoulder. Then surprisingly, he leaned forward and kissed him hard. “You do that.”
He pulled away, and Ross stood in the dark until the tail lights of Kit’s car faded into the distance.
Evie sat on the sofa cuddling Mimmy until Ross came back in. As much as she hated his lack of trust in her, she found some of her anger had faded. Truthfully, while Molly’s words had momentarily given her cause for reasonable doubt, she deep down she simply didn’t believe Kit was a killer. She needed to hear Ross’s version of events though to feel absolutely certain.
“Kit?” she asked, curiously relieved to find her boyfriend was alone.
He shook his head.
