Blind Trust by Terri Blackstock

whispered against her ear. “You have to …”
    “Let go of me,” she whispered. “I don’t want you touching me. You’re despicable, and dangerous, and—”
    “Sherry, I’m not the threat. You don’t understand.” His pleading voice against her ear almost made her want to understand, almost made her trust him, almost made her unafraid.
    Until the telephone rang, recreating her hope and shattering it at the same time.
    “You can’t answer it,” Clint said, his arm tightening on her. “They could be checking—”
    “It’s probably my studio at Promised Land,” Madeline said, rushing back in with two packed duffel bags as the phone continued to ring. “I told Justin to call me if—”
    Clint hooked her arm as she reached for the phone, his eyes on the edge of violence. “I said to let it ring,” he whispered slowly. “It’s time to go.” He swallowed and steadied his voice.
    “We’re going to go out the same way Sherry and I came in.” He set an arm on each woman’s shoulder in a brotherly gesture that could turn forceful instantly. “Open the door, Sherry. And move fast.”
    Sherry obeyed the order and pulled the door open. When they were outside, the three of them running through the backyard like soldiers expecting sniper fire, Sherry felt as if someone else occupied her body while she stood outside it, watching the man she had once loved turn into a quiet lunatic who treated her like an unexpected hostage, for that was exactly what she was.
    Sherry tried to make eye contact with the strangers they passed on their way to the parking lot, but each seemed too caught up in his own life’s worries to notice the cry for help in her eyes—a cry for help she was afraid to put voice to for fear that a worse danger awaited her if Clint was right. Clint opened the driver’s door and shoved them in. “Get down on the floor,” he ordered. He slid on his sunglasses and his hard hat. “And stay there no matter what happens.”
    “What … what are you expecting to happen?” Madeline asked in a carefully composed voice.
    Clint didn’t answer. Sherry hunched against the seat and stared up at the stern, gruff set of Clint’s jaw, the glacial blackness of his eyes, the stiff set of his mouth, as he cranked the engine and set the car into motion. His eyes shifted back and forth from the rearview mirror to the side streets as he drove, as if he expected an attack at any moment. Hard, tense muscles bulged through his clothes, testimony to the newer, more defined strength she had felt when he’d held her. He was a different man, she thought with a shudder. The old Clint had been sensitive, gentle, selfless. There had been no hint that beneath it all were secrets and terror that could make him capable of … Sherry’s heart sank as she imagined the things he could be capable of now.
    But when he glanced down at her, hunched next to Madeline on the floorboard, that sharpness in his eyes vanished, and his eyes softened. For a moment a deep sadness surged through her. That glimmer of regret in his eyes cost her her strength and her hatred, and she felt only a deep, yawning void with no hope of being filled, and the fathomless need to see the Clint she loved in that hard, unyielding countenance again.

    C lint didn’t look at her again, for the fear and astonishment in her eyes tugged at his heart and distracted him from his purpose. He watched the trees as he whizzed past them, as if they were the enemy waiting for him. But somehow, in light of the things he had said and done to get the two women out of the house, he felt as if he were the enemy—theirs as well as his own.
    Madeline’s look of composure and patience disquieted him. Sherry was probably struggling to understand the image of a new, dangerous Clint, but Madeline was more objective. She was turning the few facts she knew over in her mind, trying to concoct an escape plan for the first opportunity that arose, and probably trying to gauge his