Cocky Secrets (Cocker Brothers #29)

72. Margaret

SEVENTY-TWO

Margaret

T he impulse to call in sick after what happened to me last night is weaker than the one to see him again. He might come back to the hotel and I don’t want to miss it.

I don’t know where he came from to save me at exactly the right moment, but it was heroic and I must talk to him again. I never got his name. I have no way of getting in touch with him. But if he was watching over me then he will return. Won’t he?

I dreamt about him last night.

It was a peaceful dream I didn’t want to wake from.

When Officers Tom Danner and Dave Truett arrived and answered my call for help – two men I’ve known since I was a girl – they carried the rapists to the back of their patrol car behind the security wall where prisoners belong. As I watched I could not stop shivering, only able to make out floppy shapes. That was more than I wanted to see, but I could not look away.

Tom and Dave told me the men were tourists. Their licenses were from Wisconsin, but after this they wouldn’t be allowed to leave California until they were tried for their crime. I hoped that was true. While the blistering wind swarmed around us I explained what happened. They wrote everything down.

When Tom asked who saved me I told him the truth, “I don’t know who he was.”

He delved deeper for a description.

I said, “Blonde, short hair, blue eyes, lanky, and tall.” He was none of those things. He was taller than me but not a giant by any means. Every other description I used, he was its opposite.

After what he’d done for me I longed to protect him. He was hiding from the police for a reason, but it had nothing to do with me.

In my eyes he had only done good.

He’d saved me.

And this was the least I could do in return.

Tom drove me home in my car while Dave followed us. I really didn’t like those guys seeing where I lived. They were unconscious but what if they were faking it?

“Now try and get some sleep, Margaret,” Tom smiled.

“I’ll try,” I told him with little conviction.

He watched me ascend the stairs of the small Victorian home my parents left me, and I waved to him before I locked myself inside.

As she propels herself to where I’m standing at the hotel’s front desk, Flo gushes, “How are you, Margaret? I heard what happened!”

In a small town everyone knows your business so the question comes as no shock to me.

“I’m pretty shaken up,” I admit, comforted by her kind expression.

“I can imagine!” she says, her eyes wide. She’s got a little too much blush on in a vain attempt to recapture her lost youth, but I’m used to it. Both of us are dressed in costume, and she surveys my black Victorian dress with a red-plaid sash, eyes finally resting on my black bonnet. “Appropriate to wear funereal attire today.”

Glancing down, my hand floats to the pearl choker I chose for its cherry-colored jewel center. “Oh, I didn’t plan that. I chose it because it made me feel better. This belonged to my great-grandmother.”

Flo eyes it. “Well, it’s lovely!”

The door unleashes a wave of voices from the festival outside. Hoping to see my hero, I cut an excited glance over but it’s just a lone woman who’s escaped her group to get warm. Ignoring us, she begins to peruse the old photographs and antique trinkets on display in cases throughout our foyer.

Flo clasps my hand before she rushes back to the bar it seems she’s tended since the hotel’s inception, 1861. She really does look that old.

I return to writing out the repairs needed, organizing the notes that were scrawled onto separate, dirty slips of paper by the overnight janitor, and compiling them onto one easy-to-read sheet. He’s been here for an eternity as well, and also operates as the hotel’s after-hours emergency line since he’s a retired handyman and can shut off a busted pipe before a room drowns from a leak, if need be.

The time does not pass quickly tonight. Every time the door swings open my head snaps to the sound, but my savior isn’t there. Just more tourists wanting a room, or to eat in the restaurant, or grab a drink at the bar and get warm inside and out.

Perhaps I should have stayed home.

No one would have faulted me for it.

But what would I have done?

Watched television with those men’s terrible, violent fingers haunting my every thought?

At half-past eight o’clock I decide a walk is needed. No more vacancies tonight and I’m tired of letting people down by telling them the bad news, especially when my spirits keep sinking as the minutes tick by with no sight of him.

What if he’s gone?

What if I never see him again?

The halls here don’t feel anything but soothing to me, though I can see why people believe there might be ghosts. When a building is more than a century old it whispers to you.

Wait, was that a real whisper?

With trepidation I whisper back, “Hello? Anyone there?”

“Don’t freak out,” a deep voice says from a good distance behind me.

I spin around and my eyes widen as they land on my hero standing at the end of the ancient second floor hallway.

“It’s you!”

His dark eyes narrow slightly as he cocks his head and asks, “Can you see me?”

“I’m wearing contacts.”

His shoulders shift a little and he jogs a thumb behind him. “I said hey, a second ago.”

“Oh, that’s what I heard.”

“Yeah.”

“Who are you?”

He stares at me in silence. It gives me a chance to drink him in. His body is intimidatingly powerful; thick with muscle. His leather biker jacket is bursting at the seams around his biceps. Those worn black jeans are straining against trunk-like thighs, and his steel-tipped, black motorcycle boots look as though they’ve carried him through countless years of traveling to places I’ve never been.

“Okay, so you won’t answer me,” I venture, inching closer. “You’re in a motorcycle club, aren’t you?”

He nods, licking his lips. “Yeah.”

“I haven’t seen one come in. We usually hear them coming.”

This elicits a smile in his eyes and another step closer from me as a result. He licks his lips again. Is he doing that as I get nearer to him? Because he’s attracted to me?

My heart starts to vibrate and I freeze, my hand floating to my choker again. His eyes drop to the motion, and my breath hitches as he watches me fingering the red jewel.

He’s so sexy hot that I shyly stammer, “Well, this was very interesting but I have to get back to work.”

He takes a step backward to give me room. As I pass him, a magnet electrifies the air between us as though I’m meant to turn into his arms and not head away.

I’m blinking hard and rapidly as I make my escape back to my post.

This isn’t fear. No, it isn’t that at all. What is it then? I think it’s nervous anticipation of something I don’t quite yet understand. That strange man is so intriguing, aspects of myself are waking up as though from a life-long sleep.

At the front desk I hear behind me dull thudding footsteps descending the stairs without hurry. I inhale sharply and turn my head to watch him walk down. His eyes are on me as he undoes his black hair from the bun, rakes his fingers through the wavy length of it, and then ties it back up again.

Did he do that to turn me on?

Because it did.

My lips part and he glances to them as he strolls past me. I read the letters on the back of his jacket one more time before he is gone.