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As I turned Ford’s face slowly so I could see the left side, he kept his eyes lowered.
Well, eye.
Because I could only actually see his right eye since his left was so black and blue and swollen that the lid was completely closed.
I knew what Ford looked like normally… I’d practically memorized his features after that first day meeting him on a quiet Pelican Bay side street. He was young – only twenty-five – and had a rich shade of dark brown hair. His barely there beard shadowed full, pink lips and covered only a portion of his lower jawline. His eyes were an intense sapphire color that always made me feel like I was drowning on the few occasions that he actually looked directly at me. He wasn’t tall – maybe five ten at the most – but his body was tight and hard and I could see the bulge of muscles beneath the thin shirts he wore.
In short, Ford Cornell was beautiful… there was just no other word for it.
But he was also so very broken.
And today, he looked as broken on the outside as I was certain he felt on the inside.
“Did he do this to you, Ford?” I asked before I could stop myself. The question wasn’t at all professional, but I couldn’t find myself wanting to call it back. I was still touching his face and it was all I could do not to run my fingers along his jaw and to his cheek. His neck had some fresh bruising on it, but compared to his eye, it was almost nothing. I found myself taking a step closer to him so that only inches separated our bodies.
Ford didn’t respond at first and I swore I actually felt him lean toward me a little before he stiffened and then pulled his face free of my hold. He wrapped his arms around himself. “Did I do something wrong, Sheriff?”
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him to call me Cam when I managed to catch myself.
“Mr. Pascal said he heard yelling and what sounded like glass breaking,” I said as I made myself take a step back, then another.
“Oh, um, yeah, I was moving a mirror and it fell and broke. I, um… I yelled because it um, hit me in the face.”
The explanation was so ridiculous I actually found myself unable to respond.
“I’ll apologize to Mr. Pascal,” Ford said quickly as he finally looked up at me. My heart nearly punched out of my chest as I saw the unspoken message in his one good eye.
Please…
But I knew he wasn’t silently asking me for help. He was asking me for something that was so much fucking harder to give him.
“Mr. Pascal seems very fond of you,” I said, since I was having so much trouble doing what he really wanted. “He says you shovel his driveway every time it snows and you run errands for him when his nurse isn’t able to do it.”
Ford didn’t respond, but he did look over at Mr. Pascal’s house, which was right next to the Sullivan house. Finally, he said, “I like listening to his stories. He’s a war hero, you know.”
I did know. I’d had a chance to chat with the Vietnam veteran myself a few times. At seventy-nine, Walter Pascal was as spry as they came and he could talk your ear off about his days in the military, as well as the fifty-plus years he’d worked as a drycleaner. Whether it was talking about battling the Viet Cong or grease stains, the man was a firecracker. And he clearly had a soft spot for Ford, because he’d taken to calling the station directly every time he even heard raised voices at the Sullivan house. I suspected if the man hadn’t been practically homebound, he would have stormed over to the house himself, oxygen tank under one arm and his little dog, Puddles, under the other, and taken Jimmy Cornell on himself.
“So I’ve heard,” I said softly. My eyes held Ford’s, but not surprisingly, he looked away.
“Was there anything else, Sheriff?” he asked quietly as he stared at the ground. “I’ll try to be more careful. I’m very clumsy.”
I didn’t believe that shit for a second, but my hands were tied. And I knew in my gut he was done talking. I’d seen the behavior hundreds of times with victims of domestic violence, though admittedly, I’d only experienced it with women and their spouses or boyfriends. But I suspected it didn’t matter that Ford was a man or that his abuser was his brother – the end result was the same. The mental scars ran so much deeper than the physical ones.
I sighed and reached into my pocket for one of my business cards. I glanced up at the house to make sure no one was watching. One of the curtains by the front window shifted and fell back into place, but I wasn’t sure who’d been spying on us. Fortunately, the winter weather meant the windows were closed and there was no chance anyone had overheard our conversation.
