Ethan moved up behind her, turned her around to face him. “How old were you?”
“Fifteen.”
“You live on the street?” There was something intense in those dark eyes.
“For a while . . . only a couple of weeks. The cops picked me up and I went into foster care.” Sadness swept through her at the girl she had been. “I was pretty much a hellion. I didn’t like my foster parents and they didn’t like me. I went from one home to another, never seemed to fit in. When I was sixteen, I sneaked out one night with a couple of the older boys in the house. One of them had a friend with a car.”
She glanced away, wishing she didn’t have to remember the rest.
“Go on, Val. Finish it.”
She forced her gaze back to his face. She was five nine, but Ethan was so tall she had to look up at him. “The guy with the car was in a gang. He got into a fight with another kid, and suddenly everyone was shooting. Bobby Rodriquez—he was the boy in the home where I lived—Bobby got shot in the chest. He . . . he died in my arms.”
She didn’t realize she was crying till Ethan handed her his handkerchief. His jaw was iron hard, his body rock solid. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought he was holding himself back, forcing himself not to touch her, comfort her. But maybe he was just disgusted.
“I don’t like to talk about it,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I’m not proud of what happened.”
“You turned your life around, Val. You aren’t that young girl anymore. You’re a woman now. A beautiful woman who’s made something of herself.”
Some of the pain slipped away with his words. He wasn’t condemning her. Why had she thought he would?
“It was Mom and Pops Hartman. They took me in. They put their arms around me and walked me out of that police station, and I swear I could feel their love right then. They lived on this little farm in Bellingham. They raised chickens, had a couple of milk cows. It felt like home from the moment I stepped out of the car. I changed because of them, because I wanted them to be proud of me. I still do.”
She blew her nose, wiped a last tear from her cheek.
Ethan’s smile was gentle. “I know they’re proud of you, Val, and I’m glad you told me. I don’t think it’s important to the case, but you never know.”
She just nodded. He’d listened and seemed to understand. She shouldn’t have felt somehow lighter, but she did.
“I need to shower and get ready.” She smiled, the pressure gone from her chest. “Thanks for the coffee.”
He nodded. “Thanks for trusting me.”
She didn’t say more as she walked away and neither did Ethan, but she could feel his eyes on her all the way down the hall.
Ethan spent a couple more hours on the computer, but nothing in the files he had checked so far looked promising.
He was beginning to feel frustrated and restless when Val walked back into the living room.
“I’m going crazy sitting in the house all day,” she said. “Any chance I could talk you into taking me to the gym? Weekends are usually slow, especially if the weather’s good. What do you think?”
He smiled. “I’m feeling a little housebound myself. Let me give them a call, see if I can convince them to give us private access for a couple of hours.”
“Seriously? You think they might?”
“Yeah. With the right inducement, I do.”
Not surprisingly, the Twenty-Fourth Street gym agreed. He’d send the bill to La Belle, but it wouldn’t cost as much as he’d figured, and the benefits of a good, solid workout were worth it to both of them.
By the time they had finished and returned to the house, he and Val were both feeling better. The stiffness was gone from his muscles, along with some of the tension he’d been feeling.
All but the sexual variety. Thank Jesus, Val had worn loose-fitting yoga pants and a T-shirt, not the skintight gym clothes a lot of women wore. Still, watching her moving gracefully through her workout routine had him gritting his teeth to keep from getting hard. No way around it, the woman flat turned him on.
Once they got home, he kept his distance. Val worked on some of her Internet study courses and, that evening, called out for pizza, which they ate watching an old movie on TV. He didn’t expect to feel so comfortable sitting next to her on the couch, wished to hell he didn’t.
After Val went to bed, Ethan checked the house and grounds half a dozen times before curling his tall frame into the too-short sofa.
Early Monday morning, the day of the funeral, he was sitting at his laptop, going over the last of the background information Sadie had dug up on the top models. They all had interesting stories: a lot of them were world travelers, some married, some even had kids. Hard to believe with their perfect figures, but apparently true.
