The Time in Between by Kristen Ashley
I stared at it, and even though it had no window, the gate was closed so I knew who was behind it.
I wanted to ignore it and as I turned my head to look out my kitchen windows at the blustery, gray day, I tried to talk myself into ignoring it.
Then a louder knock came and on its heels the dulcet chimes of the doorbell that Walt had installed, which rang on the bottom and second floors just in case I wouldn’t hear it farther up in the house from the main floor. I had this as well as an intercom system that was tucked discretely on the stone column by the gate should I get an unexpected visitor or a delivery or something.
It was just that the person outside my door didn’t feel the need to use my intercom system.
I got off my stool leaving my laptop behind and moved to the door.
I opened it and looked up at Coert.
He was frowning.
So was I.
“You need a peephole.”
“What I need is a local sheriff who’s unconcerned about his citizens’ safety.”
“I hope to God that such a thing doesn’t exist.”
I ignored that and went on, “I also need a dog trained to bite all strangers, even ones with badges.”
He ignored that and declared, “Cady, we need to talk.”
“No, Coert, we need to go back to our strategy of avoiding each other. You were right. That was a good call. Let’s head back there.”
“You said some things last night—”
“I introduced myself to drinking tequila on the rocks last night. It was an experiment that failed so I won’t be repeating it.”
His jaw clenched before he asked, “Why are you here?”
“Why are you here?” I parried.
“I asked first,” he bit out.
“It’s my house you’re inexplicably standing at the door of, so I get dibs.”
“We aren’t at recess, Cady.”
“Good, because school was awful, my grades were terrible, it drove my mother insane and gave my brother something else to bully me about.”
Coert fell silent.
I did too.
He broke it by repeating, “We need to talk.”
“Has evidence been uncovered that a short, red-haired woman careening uncontrollably through middle age was sneaking around the jetty last night with her bottle of wildly expensive but completely worth it tequila, dousing buildings and setting them on fire?”
“That isn’t a joke.”
I stared up at him and asked in shock, “Was it arson?”
“The report isn’t in but that isn’t funny, Cady.”
“I’m not trying to be funny, Coert. I’m trying to communicate to you how ridiculous, and I’ll add offensive your inferences are of me having something to do with said fire.”
“You were in Denver. Now you’re here,” he declared.
“Yeeeeeees,” I said slowly and unwisely carried on, “It’s clear you haven’t lost any of your keen observational skills.”
His jaw clenched again.
I was losing patience and frankly I was losing a lot of other things.
Like the battle to beat back a fresh broken heart.
“You were in Denver,” he said quietly. “Now you’re here.”
“Coert—”
“Why?”
I looked over his shoulder.
“Cady, look at me,” he demanded.
I looked at him.
“Why?”
I said nothing.
He changed tactics.
“Why the investigator?”
Okay, I could stop swearing tomorrow.
Because . . .
Damn.
“Why, Cady?” he pushed. “Why the investigator?”
“Please leave,” I whispered.
“You’ve been intruding in my life for years. Years. I ignored it because it was a nuisance and you were there, I was here. Now you’re here so I think I deserve to know why you’ve been intruding in my life, don’t you?”
“He wasn’t my investigator,” I told him.
“God, please,” he shook his head, “please do not stand there and lie to me. Not about something like this.”
“He was Patrick’s.”
His entire body went still except his brows went up. “So . . . what? He was worried I’d come back to you or something?”
“No.”
“He was worried you’d come back to me and he wanted to know how to find you if you did,” Coert guessed.
“No.”
“Cady, for fuck’s sake, your dead husband had a man reporting to him about me since I left Denver. You can’t be so far gone in whatever it is you got going here not to think I don’t have the right to know why.”
“He knew you meant the world to me, and I meant the world to him, so if I ever worried about you, wondered about you, he wanted to have the answers available for me the instant I did.”
Yes.
That was what I said.
Right there.
To Coert.
In the door of my fabulous lighthouse.
The truth.
Or most of it.
And Coert heard it, and after my words visibly pummeled his tall, strong, motionless body, only his lips moved for him to say, “I meant the world to you.”
“You meant the world to me,” I whispered.
“I meant the world to you,” he repeated.
It was now me clenching my teeth.
“I meant the world to you so after it all went down, you couldn’t wait two weeks for me to come to you and explain why I did what I did. Instead, I found you making plans to marry a man old enough to be your grandfather.”
“Coert—”
“I was in love with you.”
I took a step back.
He took a step into my house.
“Oh no,” he growled. “You don’t get to do that shit. You don’t get to look used and abused and beat down, Cady. I don’t give a fuck it was the name Tony you whispered when I was inside you, you knew me. You knew how I felt about you. You made a promise to me that you broke the instant the going got tough, you cut loose and you let go and you found another way to make the path easy for you.”
“Don’t,” I begged.
“Don’t?” he spat. “Don’t? You said it yourself, you earned this. So you know you earned exactly this.”
“You wouldn’t listen to me explain.”
He leaned toward me and bellowed, “You had another man’s ring on your finger! Two weeks, Cady! Two weeks after the last I saw of you was when I left our bed with you in it smiling at me and you were with another man!”
“Okay, let me explain now,” I said hurriedly.
“Explain what I want you to explain,” he demanded, throwing both arms wide. “Explain this. Explain why you’re back. Explain why you just couldn’t leave well enough alone. I got a kid I love, a job I like doing in a town I like bein’ in with friends I like being with. What the fuck would motivate you to shake any of that goodness that I,” he thumped his chest, “earned. That I worked for. That I carved out of the rubble you left of me.”
My heart was thumping in a chest that was moving rapidly as I tried again desperately.
“To explain that, I need to go back and explain the rest.”
“I don’t give a shit about that.”
“If you want an explanation, Coert, it has to start there.”
“You shared the bed of a man nearly three times your age for seventeen years, Cady,” he sneered with his lip curled. “Do you think I wanna understand any of that? Do you think that doesn’t turn my goddamned stomach to think that body,” he tossed a hand my way, “my body, the one you gave me, you shared with that guy? It might have been okay with you considering the mansion and the Jaguars and whatever the fuck. But it was a kick in the balls for me.”
“Coert, please, if you’d just listen—”
“No,” he bit off. “You don’t get to come here and be wounded, bleeding Cady making me fee
“You’re on my doorstep, Coert,” I pointed out quietly and not entirely accurately, though he was just in from it.
“Not anymore,” he retorted, turned and walked right out.
I stared at the space where he’d been, the open door, hearing the wind whistling against the jamb and seeing Coert again gone.
And then I ran out.
Coert was at the door to a Ford Explorer with sheriff stuff emblazoned all over it when I shouted, “You don’t know me!”
Hand on the handle, wind whipping his dark hair, he scowled at me.
“You never knew me!” I yelled.
“I knew you,” he bit back.
I stopped well away from him and shared, “No, you didn’t. You absolutely did not. And the worst part about it for me was, you never even tried.”
“You’re so full of shit,” he clipped.
“All that, in there,” I jabbed a finger back toward the lighthouse, “proves it. And you don’t have a clue. You don’t have that first clue, Coert. And you know what? All these years I wished I’d had the opportunity to explain. But now I’m glad. I’m glad I never had the chance. Because now I know you never deserved it.”
With that, I stormed right back to my house, slammed the door, threw the bolt home and stood glaring at it, breathing heavy and fighting back the urge to scream.
Instead, I ran up the stairs and the next set and the next until I was in my observation deck.
And from there I watched a sheriff Explorer drive away.
Holding Her Hand
Coert
Present day . . .
“DADDY!”
Coert bent low to sweep his baby girl up in his arms.
He barely got her steady when she had her little arms wrapped around his neck and planted a kiss on his jaw.
When she caught his eyes, he asked, “How you doin’, cupcake?”
“Good, Daddy,” she replied.
“You ready to go?” he asked.
“Yup,” she answered with a firm nod of her head.
He lifted his brows. “You sure about that?”
She looked confused.
“Shnookie, sweetheart,” he whispered, knowing she could sometimes forget the worn-out, bedraggled teddy bear she had to sleep with at night, but he couldn’t because when she got in bed and remembered she didn’t have him, he’d have to strap her in his truck and take her back to her mother’s to pick it up.
His Janie’s only vice.
A bear called Shnookie.
“Oh,” she mumbled.
“Oh.” He grinned and set her down. “Go get him then we’ll go.”
“Okay, Daddy,” she agreed and dashed off, tossing a bright smile to her mother along the way.
Kim, his ex, Janie’s mom, stood looking after her until she disappeared then she turned her head to Coert.
“I really appreciate you doing this,” she said.
“Said it before.” And he had, about ten thousand times, not that he had to, he’d jump at the chance to have his daughter every day if that was a chance offered to him. “Not a problem.”
“It’s a bachelorette party, I can’t miss it. If it wasn’t important, I wouldn’t switch days.”
He’d been living with Kim kissing his ass and acting apprehensive since he’d dragged her to court after she tried to move herself and their daughter to Portland.
Half of it, he knew, was him sending the unmistakable message she shouldn’t pull that kind of shit again in order to yank his chain and bring him to heel, something she’d tried to master the art of while they were together. This the reason why she never got his ring on her finger, regardless of the fact that most other times she was sweet and could be outrageously funny.
She hadn’t ever brought him to heel and he got tired of attempting to break her of the habit of trying.
The other half of it, he knew, was Kim finally cottoning on to the fact that she’d redirected both their lives with her play to “win him back.” It turned out beautifully in the end because they got Janie, but it had been a seriously whacked play and brought her diapers and bottles, and attorney’s fees when he pulled her into court to share he wasn’t messing around with his daughter’s life and he was taking his responsibilities as her father deadly serious.
“Again, it’s fine,” he said impatiently. “I’ll take her to preschool tomorrow then you got her back tomorrow night.”
“Okay,” she mumbled, studying him trying not to look like she was before she asked, “You okay?”
No, he was not.
Preliminary reports from the fire inspector stated that the fire on the jetty was arson and that was absolutely not good.
And Cady Moreland lived in his town, in the damned lighthouse, something he couldn’t avoid because he saw it fifty times a day, which meant he was reminded of her the hundred times a day his mind decided to do that plus the fifty he saw the lighthouse.
You’re on my doorstep, Coert, she’d said.
And that’s where he’d been.
In fact, except for when he caught her sitting in her rental outside the sheriff station, it had not been Cady who had approached him. Not once. And she didn’t even do it when she was sitting outside the station. He’d gone to her.
Every time, he’d gone to her.
Those tears, that breakdown on the sidewalk, that had not been planned. She’d been blindsided running into Janie and Coert.
Blindsided and gutted.
So bad, he couldn’t even think about it because he felt her pain straight down to his soul.
But the fact she had not approached once made her being there at all an even bigger mystery than it already was.
And Christ, it had been Coert’s job for years to solve mysteries. He got off on that but he wasn’t much on having that shit a part of his life.
However, the fact remained she wouldn’t move there, buy property there, especially the property she’d bought which anchored her there, if she did not have reconciliation on her mind. But it was Coert finding every excuse he could to haul his ass out to her, not the other way around.
The Cady he knew had been confused, struggling with learning how to be an adult because she had no firm foundation to keep her steady or help guide her, and trying to teach herself not to act out by doing stupid shit when she was frustrated or felt trapped by life.
What the Cady he knew had not been was a woman who’d played head games.
And for the life of him, all the times he thought of it, and he thought about it too damned much, he couldn’t see where she was playing head games now.
So the prevailing question on his mind when he didn’t have to think about his job or his daughter or her mother or the fact they might have arsonists in their town was . . . what was the woman doing?
And he had to admit, outside his daughter, that prevailing question was prevailing.
So he was not okay because Cady and her lighthouse and her proximity and her green eyes and thick hair and round ass were practically all he could think about.
“I’m fine,” he answered Kim.
“You sure?” she pressed.
He leveled his gaze at her. “I’m sure.”
“Coert, if you . . .” she trailed off, looking like she was considering the wisdom of her next, and then she shared that she didn’t consider it long enough by saying, “Everyone’s heard about the fire, and I know you get wrapped up when bad stuff goes down so if you ever need to talk, I just want you to know, I’m here.”
“I got folks I can talk to, Kim, but thanks,” he dismissed.
She looked hesitant again before she said softly, “We could try to be friends, you know.”
“Think when you stuck a pin through all my condoms that option was taken off the table.”
&
He’d had his fill of women making drastic decisions that altered the course of his life. He wasn’t a big fan of it seventeen years ago, he wasn’t a big fan of it five years ago, he’d never be a big fan of it.
“All right, I just . . . thought I’d offer,” she muttered uncomfortably.
He just got a nod in to share the offer was heard but not accepted before Janie tore into the room, waving Shnookie and shouting, “Got ’im!”
“Come here, you. Let me get your jacket on,” Kim called.
“Okay, Mommy,” Janie replied, going to her mother but keeping hold of Shnookie, transferring the bear from one hand to the other as her mother put her jacket on and zipped her up.
And Coert watched his beautiful little girl, thinking Kim’s play had been whacked but now he couldn’t imagine the world without Janie in it, which sucked because he couldn’t quite get over being pissed at her mother, but he was still grateful to her.
So Coert was also not a big fan of women who dredged up conflicting emotions that messed with his head.
He’d had his fill of that too.
Especially very recently.
“Mittens,” Kim said as Coert moved to the couch to grab Janie’s hat that was laying there.
Kim put on the mittens and Janie held Shnookie close to her chest while Coert pulled her hat on her head and made sure it was over her ears.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Yeah, Daddy.” She beamed up at him, moving to take his hand.
“Hug for your mom,” he ordered.
She instantly turned and threw herself in her mother’s open arms.
Janie kept hers around Kim even as she pulled slightly away and asked, “See you tomorrow, Mommy?”
“Yeah, sweetie,” Kim replied, giving their daughter a smile.
Janie danced to Coert and took his hand. He led her out to the truck, muttering his goodbyes to her mother, and strapped her in her seat in the back when they got there.
He angled in behind the wheel and reversed out of Kim’s drive.
“We gonna go have dinner at Weatherby’s?” his girl asked when they were on the road.