Taken by Tuesday

Chapter Thirteen



Leaving the ICU and the hospital should have resulted in a little less attention as everyone’s lives returned to normal. This wasn’t the case in Judy’s life. She didn’t balk at staying at Zach and Karen’s house. It made sense in light of her recovery. Her muscles had grown incredibly lax while lying in the hospital bed. It didn’t help that she’d not managed much of an exercise routine since moving to Beverly Hills. Besides, Meg spent a lot of time at the Tarzana house, which would leave Judy alone. Being alone felt a little too much like the stupid girl going into the basement on a stormy night after the power went out. She couldn’t help but wonder if walking into any parking garage wasn’t going to give her the same uncomfortable feeling.

The fishbowl of the hospital didn’t compare to having her family hovering over her. Her father, who never took a lot of time away from his hardware store in Hilton, Utah, was going on nearly a week in California. Her mother hadn’t stopped fussing over her, making homemade soup and big roast dinners for everyone. Even Mike stuck around until Judy finally convinced Karen to call her brother’s personal assistant to push the man back to work.

Rick always made his way to Zach’s house before she retired, but there was a place setting for him at the table tonight in case he came earlier.

Exactly one week from the attack, during a large family meal, Judy found herself picking at the pot roast her mother had been cooking for the better part of the day. Her eyes settled on the bandage covering her right arm while the conversation around the table spoke of everything from the weather to the gossip in Hollywood and Hilton.

He carved into me. Marked me so even after I healed I’d always remember. Why?

She dropped the fork on her plate and picked at the bandage. Tape pulled at the hair on her arms, but she tugged on it anyway. She had avoided looking at the mess on her arm. The sutures were coming out the next day. She knew she’d no longer need the gauze to hide what the man had done to her.

“What are you doing?” she heard someone ask. Instead of responding, she fisted the gauze and ran her thumb over the coarse bits of synthetic string that held her skin together.

Slash marks. Spaced-out slash marks traveled down a narrow margin of her arm. She knew how close they were to arterial veins because of the trouble the doctor had in stitching her up.

“Judy?”

It would be easy . . . so f*ckin’ easy.

She picked at a bit of gauze stuck to a suture, grew frustrated with its desire to hold on.

“Judy?”

She picked harder. This should come off easy. So easy.

“Judy!”

“What?” she said much too loud to an entirely quiet room. Rick knelt beside her, placed a napkin over her bleeding arm.

Everyone stared at her.

Karen’s eyes were wet with unshed tears, Zach and her father shifted their gazes from her eyes to her arm. Her mom and Hannah let the tears flow, and Meg’s tight jaw showed nothing but anger. Even Devon and Dina were looking at her as if she’d grown horns.

So many eyes. There was blood under the fingernails of her left hand. Her arm burned under Rick’s hand and she realized she’d done more than pick at a piece of lint.

When she started to shake, Rick placed his arm around her and helped her to her feet. “C’mon, Utah. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

Her head spun the moment she stood and her legs lost their ability to hold her.

Rick swept her up and walked her out of the dining room as if he was taking the morning paper off the front step on the way to the mailbox.

He took the stairs in silence, kicked open the door to her room, and walked straight to the adjoining bathroom. Once the water flowed to a temperature Rick approved of, he removed the napkin from her arm and placed the mess under the flow.

“Did I do that?” A good inch of what should have been healed skin now bled, turning the water pink.

“Yeah,” Rick told her.

The supplies she’d been using to dress the wound sat on the end of the counter. Using one hand Rick pulled the box over, found what he wanted, and covered her skin with a tight dressing.

“What happened?” she asked him as if he’d have the answers.

He released a long sigh and kept wrapping her arm. “You lost it back there.”

“I did?”

“Yeah. It happens.” He used his teeth to remove a section of tape. Once the bandage was secure, he stood tall with her arm clasped in his firm grip. “What were you thinking about?”

She blinked. No one else wanted to talk about what happened. They skimmed the issue, redirected the conversation, stopped talking when she walked in a room . . . not Rick.

“Why? Why this? Why did he carve deep enough into my skin only to leave me alive?”

Rick’s Adam’s apple bobbed before he managed an answer. “Maybe he heard something and was scared off before he could do more.”

Judy shook her head. “No. It would be so easy. So f*ckin’ easy. He could have killed me, knew he had the advantage.” She met Rick’s green eyes and knew he’d already come to the same conclusion. “You already know that.”

“I don’t know anything, Judy.”

She slammed her free hand against his chest, taking him by surprise. “Don’t lie to me.”

He lifted his chin. “Fine. He could have killed you. Abused you more than he did.”
     



Good, he wasn’t lying, the same deductive thought met his eyes like when they’d first met and they were trying desperately to find Becky, who’d been abducted by her abusive parents.

“Instead he marked me. Made sure I’d always have a physical scar of his attack.”

“Which makes it personal.”

“I don’t know anyone that hateful.”

“Someone at your office. Someone who might have known about the project you were working on?”

Judy squeezed her eyes shut. “Ms. Miller spoke to me only minutes before the attack. No one knew about it.”

Rick brought her bandaged arm to her lap and gently held on to her while they spoke. “Hustle any pool since you’ve been in town?”

“That’s absurd. I don’t hustle. I play and Meg is always right there to tell anyone that I’m good. Other than you, I’ve only ever played for twenty bucks at a time.”

“Someone from Seattle?”

“I’ve thought about that. I know it sounds lily-white but I don’t make enemies. I didn’t steal anyone’s boyfriend or rat on anyone for cheating. Meg and I were loners most of our senior year. We’d go out, play pool, do a little partying, but there weren’t any casualties along the way.”

“You think this was random?”

She shook her head before she uttered any words.

“Me either.”

Her head hurt. Judy hated how much her head hurt the past week. “I should eat something.” Her entire dinner was sitting on a plate surrounded by her family.

“Do you want to go back downstairs?”

“No. Please, I can’t take one more sympathetic look, one more tear.”

Rick lifted one side of his lips in a half smile. “I’ll go get us both something to eat. So long as it’s OK that I’m exempt from the masses.”

She was much steadier on her feet when he led her into her room and tucked a few pillows behind her on the bed.

Rick returned less than ten minutes later with a tray filled with food for the both of them. He didn’t let anyone else in the room even though he struggled with the laden tray, nearly spilling it on the floor more than once.

“This smells amazing.”

“My mom’s a good cook. Lots of practice when the town you live in doesn’t have that many restaurants.”

Rick placed the food in the center of the bed, lay at the foot, and kicked off his shoes.

Judy tucked her feet under her, sat Indian style, and picked up a fork. Her stomach growled with happiness with the first bite. “I’ve missed this.”

He hummed around his food with appreciation.

She pulled up another forkful. “They want me to go back to Utah.”

Rick’s fork hesitated before he took a bite. “Is that what you want?”

“No. I know it’s going to be hard. The thought of walking back in that garage makes me physically sick. Going back to Utah now would be hiding. And who’s to say if this man is somehow after me that he wouldn’t follow me there?”

Rick swallowed, chased his food with a drink of water. “That’s a long way to travel for a criminal to seek a victim.”

She kept eating, trying hard to remove her name as the victim in their conversation. “And lightning doesn’t strike in the same place twice.”

“You’re a strong woman, babe. I knew that the first time we met.”

There was an actual smile on her face. “We’re back to the babe thing?”

“Yeah, well . . . I put off the Getty for a little while. We still haven’t been on a date.”

“Dinner in bed doesn’t count?” She motioned toward the half-eaten food.

He shook his head. “Nor does breakfast in the hospital.” He shoveled in more food, swallowed quickly, and loaded his fork again. “A date requires a shower, dinner with wine or at the very least an adult beverage, and shoes.” He leaned over and tickled her bare toes.

She laughed, really laughed for the first time in over a week. Rick seemed just as pleased with the sound coming from her lips as she did.

They finished their meal in quiet conversation about almost nothing. When Judy had enough, Rick polished off her plate. He set the tray aside and leaned against the bedpost facing her.

“I need everyone to go home,” she said with a heavy sigh.

“Me?”

She smiled, laid a hand on his lower leg as if to prove he was not part of the everyone.

“Not you. My parents, Hannah. Zach needs to get back to work. Karen hasn’t even been to the Boys and Girls Club since last week. Thank goodness Mike listened and left. Now if I can just get everyone else to follow his lead. It’s like everyone put their lives on hold.”

“Family does that.”

“I know. And I appreciate it but it feels like everyone is staring at me, waiting for me to break.”

Rick ran his thumb over her instep with gentle strokes. “Kinda like you did tonight at dinner?”

“Is that what I did?”

“It is. Being alone when it happens again might require more than a bandage.”

She knew enough about post-traumatic stress syndrome to understand she wasn’t exempt from harboring unhealthy emotions. It had only been a week and the truth was she wasn’t sleeping well. Seemed she wasn’t often hungry . . . well, except when Rick was close by.

“I don’t want to be alone.” She shivered. “I just don’t want to be the quicksand that keeps everyone from their lives.”

He picked up her other foot, rubbed it. “I’m happy to hear you don’t want to be alone.”

The foot rub nearly made her miss his next words.

“When you’re ready to go back to work, either myself or someone from our team will drive you and pick you up. One of us will be at Michael’s home twenty-four/seven.”

Twenty-four/seven? “What?” She opened her eyes, blinked a few times.

“Until this guy is caught, you won’t be completely alone.”

“I told you I was tired of the fishbowl.”

“There won’t be a fishbowl. The security detail is to keep you safe, not make you home-cooked meals.”

“But—”

“Look me in the eye and tell me you believe with all your soul this man isn’t coming back. He took your purse, didn’t kill you when he could have, went through some serious effort to go in and out of that garage to corner you alone. Look me in the eye, Judy, and tell me he won’t be back.”

His words scared her. Primarily because he was right.

She leaned against the bed again, and pulled his foot closer to rub. She wasn’t sure why he was working so hard to protect her. He didn’t owe her. Hell, they weren’t technically even dating. A few stolen kisses and some seriously heavy flirting summed up their relationship. Still, there wouldn’t be any complaints from her lips.

“When I do go back to the office . . . that first day . . . can you be the one who takes me?”

The dimples on his face managed to grin even if his lips didn’t. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”