AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I’m glad to hear it worked, Detective.” Constance rose from the bench and accepted his handshake.
“Call me Sean,” he said. “And yeah, it did. Thanks again.”
“Anytime.”
“Wait.” Rhett pointed at Constance. “You two know each other?”
“There are better ways to meet, but yes,” Sean said. “And it looks like her magic is working just as well on you as it did on me.” His gaze went from Constance to Rhett and back again. “I knew it.”
The room went quiet. Rhett’s eyebrows knitted.
“Sunny has had some trouble with the law,” Constance said quickly. “Between her and the neighbor, who has a puppy mill. But I think that’s been ironed out. Right, Detective?”
“Got a court order. Animal control did a preliminary last week and should be back over there any day.” Callahan smiled. “Now, as long as your sister behaves, all should be good.”
Rhett’s knitted brows slowly relaxed. He rubbed his chin as he looked at Sean, then slowly over to Constance.
“I’m going to warm up. You two carry on.” Sean walked off toward the rig, leaving Constance alone with Rhett, who was watching her with a curious glint in his eye.
“You guys get arrested for something?”
“It was nothing.” Constance waved a hand. But even as various excuses rolled through her mind, she knew that lying wasn’t an option. “What I said about Sunny and the neighbor is true. My sister has this little habit of taking the law into her own hands when animals are abused. That’s where Willy and Humphrey came from.”
“Dog bandits.” Rhett laughed under his breath.
Constance decided the rest of it needed to come out. If the detective was back at the gym, there was always the chance he’d say something he shouldn’t—like he had just now. Constance didn’t want anything popping out on Rhett when he wasn’t expecting it. He’d had too much of that in his life already. “I just want you to know that, a little while back, Sunny asked me for a favor. A favor from Sean, who would in turn do her the favor of getting the law in gear over the neighbor’s puppy mill.”
Rhett was silent, his face showing no emotion.
“Sean asked if I’d help you with your leg.” She nodded toward Rhett’s right thigh, which hadn’t been giving him any visible trouble today. “But it’s not like I planned it.” Constance scrambled to speak as she watched the light in Rhett’s eyes change. “Coincidentally, I had already met you. I had already worked on your leg, too. They just wanted me to keep helping you.” Constance shrugged. “Which I wanted to do, anyway.”
Rhett’s head drooped, and for a second, he looked a little like Humphrey. When he next raised his gaze, his hazel eyes were heavier on the green than the brown. “I was part of a bargain?”
“It wasn’t like that.” Constance nodded toward Sean. “They may have thought so. Though nobody meant anything bad by it. Everybody just wanted to help everybody else. But no, it wasn’t like that.”
“I see.”
“Rhett.” Everything drained away: the joy she’d felt at making it a third of the way up the rope, the arousal she’d felt when Rhett’s large, warm hands had run up her thighs and the anticipation of what he was going to say about Katrina and Humphrey. He’d come to trust her.
And now he didn’t.
The world became colorless and flat. “This is kind of like a huge coincidence,” Constance said. “We’d already met. I could have made up anything. Why would I tell you the truth if the truth was that I thought you were part of a bargain? It wasn’t like that for me. It never has been.”
People were starting to fill the gym. They walked by and greeted Rhett, then Constance, then headed over to warm up. Chatter filled the air, and it seemed out of place inside the heaviness that hung between them. “I don’t need anybody’s help,” Rhett said. “And I don’t like the idea of people I’m close to talking behind my back about how to fix me.”
The blood drained from her face. “It wasn’t like that.” Constance knew her words wouldn’t carry the weight she needed to convey, but she also knew that words weren’t going to fix this.
“I have to start setting up for class.” Rhett’s eyes were no longer fiery, but they held none of the joy from earlier. “You should go warm up.”
As he walked away, Constance bit back the burning that simmered behind her eyes. She gathered her things and slipped out while no one was looking.
