The Marshal's Witness. Lena Diaz
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pursed her lips, determined not to let his latest city girl comment goad her. He flung the mantra around as if it were the worst insult he could think of. It made her want to ask him why he didn’t consider himself a city boy since he lived in New York, but that would require an actual conversation, and he wasn’t open to that—not about anything personal, anyway.
Her shoulders slumped. He was right. Living in the gatorfilled bayous of Louisiana would have been infinitely preferable to living in rural Tennessee.
Emphasis on rural.
He’d scrapped the original location, reasoning that her notoriety after the bombing would put her at risk in a big city. She was more inclined to believe he just wanted to punish her, especially since her new last name so clearly demonstrated his opinion of her.
Benedict.
As in Benedict Arnold.
“You’ll have plenty of privacy on this dead-end road.” He sounded like a Realtor trying to convince his client a house was cozy instead of cramped.
She glanced over at the only other house close enough to see, a cabin next to hers with about thirty feet separating the two. Its yard was well kept. Its porch had a collection of bleached-white rocking chairs and terra-cotta pots with purple cold-weather flowers spilling over the edge.
In the twenty-minute ride up the mountain, bumping and jarring over every pothole and rock on the gravel road, Jessica had only seen a handful of other houses. What were the odds that whoever lived next door would be her age, someone with the same likes and dislikes, someone she could be friends with? Knowing that Ryan had helped his boss choose this location for her, she figured the odds were just about zero. Ryan wouldn’t want to reward the woman he held responsible for his friends’ deaths.
“Who lives in the cabin next door?” she asked, bracing herself for the worst.
“Me.”
“What?” Her mouth dropped open in shock. When she’d braced herself for the worst, having Ryan living next door wasn’t even on the list of possibilities.
He opened the neon blue front door and rolled her suitcase inside. “For the next few weeks, I’ll be your neighbor. Just until you’re settled in.”
“Oh, sugar.”
The corner of Ryan’s mouth lifted into a grin. “What did you say?”
“Nothing.” Jessica wasn’t about to admit that she’d grown up swearing worse than most boys, and that her last foster mom had gone on a personal crusade to clean up Jessica’s language. She’d made Jessica say sugar instead of cussing, a habit that had become so ingrained, it had stuck with her. Ryan would jump all over that and tease her mercilessly.
She brushed past him through the foyer into the main room. When she saw the faded, baby blue sectional, the dark wood paneled walls, and orange shag carpet, she had to clamp her mouth shut to keep from saying sugar.
Or something worse.
Ryan joined her, his mouth twitching as he looked around.
Jessica curled her fingers into her palms and kept her face carefully blank.
“Nice fireplace,” Ryan said, not bothering to hide his grin.
Jessica raised her brow at the behemoth sitting in the corner of the room. Big. That’s the only word that came to mind when she stared at the soot-covered stonework that went from floor to ceiling. Okay, ugly came to mind, too, but that pretty much applied to the entire house.
Fighting back her despair, she followed Ryan to the left side of the house that contained two small bedrooms separated by a bathroom.
The bathroom was tiny but clean, with a soft peach color on the walls. She’d have to replace the shower curtain because the colors didn’t match anything else in the room, but other than that…wait, what was on the shower curtain? What she’d thought were little birdhouses, on closer inspection were outhouses, with red and blue cartoon cats crawling all over them.
Her gaze flew to Ryan’s. He returned her stare, silently daring her to complain, confirming her suspicion without saying a word. She didn’t know how he’d managed it, but somehow he was responsible for that hideous shower curtain. She wouldn’t put it past him to have ordered the thing online.
Beyond annoyed, she tried to shove past him to get out of the room, but all she managed to do was wedge herself against him in the doorway.
“Would you please move?” she said, her face flushing hot.
His brows raised and his eyes flicked down to where her breasts were crushed against him. She expected him to make some kind of rude comment, but instead he jerked to the side, breaking the contact between them and leaving the doorway clear. His mouth clamped shut as he stared at the oval mirror above the sink, waiting for her to leave.
She rushed from the tiny room, desperate to put some distance between her and Ryan. If he’d been any other man she would understand why her pulse was racing and her breasts were tingling after touching him. But this was Ryan, a man who despised her. How could she possibly respond to him that way?
What made her humiliation worse was the way he’d reacted. How could her traitorous body yearn for his touch when he was so disgusted by her that he couldn’t even look at her?
He caught up to her and silently led the way back to the front of the house to the garage. He opened the door, just off the foyer, revealing a wall of boxes that contained all of her belongings, and a white compact the government had leased for her. Neither of them spoke. She self-consciously fingered her shoulder-length hair, newly shortened as a concession to her new identity.
The tour ended at a round, café-style table in the right, back corner of the living room just off the end of the kitchen. Ryan placed his briefcase on the table and clicked it open.
Jessica was too numb to even react when she noticed the rows of hideous red and yellow roosters marching across the wallpaper in the kitchen. All she cared about right now was getting through the next few minutes with some of her dignity intact, so she could be alone in her misery.
Ryan tossed a ring of keys on the table. He spread out a map, the crisp pages crinkling as he drew a red circle around a dot marked “Providence,” the town they’d driven through at the bottom of the mountain.
He drew another circle a short distance away, and connected the two circles with a red line. “This is your house,” he said, pointing to one of the circles. “Take the road out front down the mountain to get to town. They have everything you need—a grocery store, gas station, hardware store. There’s a diner across from the hardware store that I’m told serves a decent breakfast. There are a couple of chain restaurants farther down Main Street, and a handful of specialty shops.”
He extended the red line past Providence, down the interstate and circled another black dot. “For serious shopping, take I-40 West to Sevierville.”
“Sevierville?” She remembered passing through that city on the way here. “Isn’t that about two hours away?”
“I did warn you this location was isolated.”
Saying Providence was isolated was like comparing a hurricane to a light, summer breeze.
Jessica’s shoulders slumped again. “When you described this place, I thought it would be like Gatlinburg, a tourist town with cabins clustered together all through the mountains. I didn’t think I’d be so…alone up here.” She stopped her nervous chatter, already dreading his next city girl comment.
The silence drew out and she glanced up to find him staring at her with an unreadable expression.
“You don’t have to stay here.” His voice sounded sincere for a change, without a hint of mockery.
She couldn’t remember one time when he’d expressed any real concern for her feelings, so she didn’t trust this new, unfamiliar side