Or attraction?
No. He did not find the woman seated next to him attractive. Exasperating, maybe. Frustrating, i
nfuriating…intelligent, admirable…stubborn, domineering…sassy, strong, loyal…
His eyes firmly facing front again, he concentrated on the dread. Which was how he felt about the next couple of hours. He’d planned never to return to these places.
“DAVID MARKS! I’ll be damned. Never thought we’d see you around here again.”
“Life has a way of doing that, Jen,” David told the overly made-up and underdressed woman who was sitting on a stoop outside an apartment building in a part of town Martha would never, ever, have entered by herself. The woman was probably in her thirties, but her face looked as if life had taken its toll.
“Are you sure we’re safe here?” she whispered. There were very few people out and what businesses there were—an auto-repair place, a hairdresser, some kind of small grocery—apparently closed on Sunday afternoons. They’d parked the Explorer behind an abandoned gas station a couple of blocks over and were walking the rest of the way to wherever they were going.
“Relatively safe.”
His answer was not what she’d hoped to hear. Nor was she eager to hear about how that thirty-year-old tart had known the new preacher in Shelter Valley. Idealistic as he was, he’d probably tell Martha he’d volunteered at the soup kitchen down the road and these people were all deserving of love and trust.
He was going to get hurt, believing stuff like that.
To say the area was a neighborhood was a kindness. It was a series of haphazard buildings, some commercial, some not, sitting behind cracked sidewalks and broken-down streets. Apparently, the city taxpayers’ money didn’t extend to road upkeep in these parts.
“Maybe we should—”
“You asked to come,” he interrupted. “This was your idea, not mine.”
He was right, of course, Martha conceded, marching silently beside him. He was also just a bit intimidating. He’d lost that gentleness with which he always addressed her.
“Remember, I do the talking. You keep your mouth shut no matter what.”
She nodded. He didn’t have to worry there.
“David, my man, I knew you’d be back.”
Looking at the slimy grin on the face of the middle-aged man leaning on a beat-up mailbox on the next corner, Martha decided she’d rather they’d stayed with the hookers. This guy was too slick. In the way he looked at her. His hand on David’s shoulder. His flashy slacks and jacket.
“You here to do business?”
“Nope.” David, hands in the pockets of his jeans, glanced up the street over the other man’s shoulder. And then said, “Could I do it if I were?”
The guy’s stare moved slowly toward and then past Martha. “Who’s the broad?”
“A mother trying to protect her kid.”
The guy’s eyes might have softened. Martha didn’t really think so, but she’d seen something. “Girl or boy?”
“Girl.” David sounded tough, authoritative, more like somebody’s bodyguard than a minister.
Uneasy, she turned to him. How had he learned to do that? Why?
And why did she like it?
More to the point, the preacher thought this guy could help them? He smelled like he hadn’t had a bath in far too long. The man gave her the creeps.
“You think she’s here?”
Could this disgusting piece of humanity have had something to do with Ellen’s attack? Oh God, she hoped not.
“I’m just here to see if things are as I remembered them.”