Nutcase Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  chapter 1

  chapter 2

  chapter 3

  chapter 4

  chapter 5

  chapter 6

  chapter 7

  chapter 8

  chapter 9

  chapter 10

  chapter 11

  chapter 12

  chapter 13

  chapter 14

  chapter 15

  chapter 16

  Teaser chapter

  Praise for the novels of Charlotte Hughes

  What Looks Like Crazy

  “With her trademark characters, Hughes pens a fast-moving story about a shrink whose life careens from dealing with patients to coping with family . . . a fun formula.” —Romantic Times

  “You cannot go wrong with Charlotte Hughes’s What Looks Like Crazy.” —NovelTalk

  “Absolutely hilarious! . . . Quirky . . . thought provoking . . . I am hoping for a sequel!”

  —The Romance Readers Connection

  Hot Shot

  “A tough-talking, in-your-face heroine . . . romantic comedy at its best.”

  —Janet Evanovich, New York Times bestselling author

  “One of the best books of the year . . . every wonderful character created by Charlotte Hughes is outstanding.”

  —Affaire de Coeur (five stars)

  “A delightful read with very real characters readers can relate to and root for.” —Romantic Times

  A New Attitude

  “An appealing romance filled with charm and snappy dialogue.” —Booklist

  “With well-crafted characters and delightful banter, this is just plain fun!” —Romantic Times

  Valley of the Shadow

  “Hughes’s snappy dialogue and strong writing aptly describe the small Southern town and its attitude toward a girl corrupted by the big city . . . An entertaining and fast-paced murder mystery.” —Publishers Weekly

  And After That, the Dark

  “One of the Southern thrillers that never lets up and makes you unable to put it down. It’s exciting enough to even give terror a good name. Charlotte Hughes is the real thing.”

  —Pat Conroy, New York Times bestselling author

  “This story and its characters will remain with you long after you’ve turned the last page.”

  —Janet Evanovich, New York Times bestselling author

  Jove titles by Charlotte Hughes

  WHAT LOOKS LIKE CRAZY

  NUTCASE

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196,

  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  NUTCASE

  A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING History

  Jove mass-market edition / March 2009

  Copyright © 2009 by Charlotte Hughes.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form

  without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in

  violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-01459-2

  JOVE®

  Jove Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  JOVE® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “J” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To firefighters everywhere,

  who risk their lives to serve and protect.

  And to their families,

  who stand behind them,

  despite many sleepless nights.

  acknowledgments

  Many thanks to the following people:

  Marketing genius and webmaster Tara Green of Siren Products, who worked tirelessly on my behalf and gave me a spectacular website!

  Al Zuckerman at Writers House for the strong bond we share. Maya Rock, his assistant, a warm voice on the other end of the line, and a woman who gets things done.

  The staff at Berkley, who work behind the scenes to make me look good.

  My dear friend and esteemed author Ann B. Ross, who listens to my woes and keeps me laughing with her Miss Julia books.

  Janet Evanovich, my personal advisor and friend through thick and thin.

  Clinical psychologist Dr. David Berndt, for his continued professional input.

  My mother and best friend, Barbara Shelton, for always being there.

  And finally, my readers, whose kind words keep me going when I run out of chocolate!

  chapter 1

  My name is Kate Holly. As a clinical psychologist, I get paid to listen to people’s problems. You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff I hear. And just when I think I’ve heard it all, a new patient will come in and blow me out of the water. I’m surprised that my hair hasn’t turned white, like when Moses went up to the mountain where God appeared to him as a burning bush.

  My colleagues and I often joke that we’re even more screwed up than our patients and should all be fitted for straitjackets. We might be on to something. For example, I’m obsessive-compulsive. When I’m stressed, I count things. I do multiplication tables in my head. I prefer even numbers because they are divisible by two. Odd numbers are complicated.

  Sort of like my life.

  That explains why my ex-husband and I were presently sitting in a marriage counselor’s office.

  Jay Rush is, and always will be, the love of my life, but we have issues, which only adds to the complexities. Nevertheless, I had tried to postpone our divorce two months ago, only hours before my attorney was to appear in court on my behalf. Unfortunately I’d gotten sidetracked by a wacko patient, and I’d ended up in the ER. That I survived was a miracle, but it proved that I needed to make some serious changes in my life.

  Evelyn Hunt was supposed to be the best couple’s therapist in town, if not the most expensive. Thankfully, Jay was covering the cost.

>   As with most high-end psychologists, her so-called hour only lasted forty-five minutes. It was pretty obvious that her clients paid their bills regularly—unlike most of mine—because Evelyn’s office looked like the showroom floor at Ethan Allen. She wasted no time getting down to business.

  “How’s the sex?” she asked me.

  The question took me by surprise. I had done my share of marriage counseling and had posed that same question to troubled couples. But this was the first time someone had asked me.

  “Fantastic,” I said. “Couldn’t be better.”

  Evelyn regarded Jay.

  “It’s pretty good,” he said.

  My smile drooped. On a scale of one to ten, his level of enthusiasm rated about a three. I knew he was reluctant to discuss our personal problems with a stranger, even a professional. Most men are like that. In the end, though, he’d agreed we needed help.

  “Just pretty good?” I blurted.

  He shifted in his chair. The blue nylon jacket he wore matched his eyes. He’d shoved the sleeves to his elbows, exposing arms that were brown and tightly muscled. He worked hard to stay in shape, and it showed. That, combined with his thick dark hair and olive complexion, had turned more heads than mine.

  He looked at me. “Sometimes I feel you use sex so we don’t have to face our problems.”

  “That’s not true!” I said. Okay, maybe it was true, I admitted to myself. But after listening to people’s woes all day, the last thing I wanted to do was talk about ours. Or face the fact that we might never work them out.

  “Sometimes I feel—” Jay paused. “Like you’re holding back,” he said. “Like part of you is cut off from me emotionally.”

  I gave a sigh. When had the man gone all touchy-feely on me? “How can you say that?”

  “That’s how I feel, Katie. If you don’t want to hear the truth, then you shouldn’t have asked me to come here.”

  “Did you want to be here today?” Evelyn asked him.

  “Not particularly.”

  She didn’t appear surprised. “But you came anyway,” she said. “Why?”

  He shrugged. “I suppose I should do my part to try and make our marriage work.”

  Of course, technically we were no longer married, but why quibble over details?

  “Do you want your marriage to work?” she asked him.

  “Of course I do.”

  “Have you told Kate that you sometimes feel she is shutting you out?”

  “Not in so many words. Like I said, we usually end up in bed.”

  I sank low in my chair. Evelyn had probably labeled me a sex addict. I wanted to crawl beneath the expensive Persian rug on the floor.

  She turned from Jay to me. “Do you think you hold back emotionally?” she asked.

  “I’m open to him,” I said, flinching at the whiny sound coming out of my mouth. I made that same sound when my mother accused me of not visiting enough. “I share,” I added. But it wasn’t altogether true. And Jay and I had spent a lot of time in the sack during the first month of our attempt at reconciliation. It was the reason we’d made reservations at our favorite restaurants and never showed, missed two films we’d wanted to see, and lost money on concert tickets Jay had purchased.

  The room went silent. Evelyn seemed to be waiting for me to fill it. “Okay,” I finally said. “I have been holding back a little, but that’s because Jay has been so critical. He seems to look for reasons to point out my shortcomings with regard to my work.”

  “Tell Evelyn why I criticize you,” Jay said.

  We locked gazes. “You’re just trying to make me look bad,” I said.

  Jay turned his attention to Evelyn. “Two months ago, Kate was almost strangled by the boyfriend of one of her patients.”

  “Oh my!” she said.

  “That’s the first time anything like that ever happened,” I said.

  Jay went on. “The next day, she blew up her office with a vial of nitroglycerin.”

  Evelyn gasped.

  “He’s exaggerating,” I said quickly, knowing I’d lost all credibility as a wife and a therapist. “There was a small explosion, but it just broke a window and put a little hole in the wall of my reception room. It was an accident.”

  “An accident?” Jay said. “Was it also an accident that one of your patients tried to run you over in the parking lot two months ago, and you ended up in the ER with a broken wrist?”

  Evelyn’s mouth formed an O.

  “My patient did not try to run me over,” I said, my irritation growing with Jay’s every word. “I was chasing him across the parking lot and I tripped.”

  Jay gave a grunt. “How many near-death experiences does it take before you realize you might be in the wrong business?”

  That pissed me off. “I resent that!” I said, a bit louder than I’d meant to. “I happen to be very good at what I do. Besides, who are you to talk about taking risks? You’re the one who races into burning buildings as everyone else is running out.”

  He immediately became defensive. “I’m a firefighter. That’s what I do.”

  “And I treat people with emotional problems.”

  “You treat people who need to be locked away,” he said. “It’s like you’re on a mission to find the craziest and most dangerous patients in the world. The sicker the better,” he added.

  Evelyn’s head swiveled from Jay to me and back to Jay. She reminded me of the toy dogs with the bobbing heads that people put in the back of their cars. “See what I mean?” I told her. “To hear him talk you’d think all of my patients were criminally insane when most of them are actually very boring.”

  “Okay,” Evelyn said. “What I’m hearing is that each of you fears for the other’s safety because of your occupations, and that it causes discord in your relationship.”

  Jay nodded.

  I nodded.

  “It’s harder on Kate,” Jay said, his tone softening for the first time since we’d entered the room. “Her father was a firefighter who died in the line of duty when she was ten years old.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Evelyn said to me.

  “Thank you,” I replied, even though I had no desire to dredge up my past.

  “I try to take it into consideration,” Jay said, “but she’s still afraid. She obsesses about every little thing that might go wrong.”

  “I think I handled it pretty well until you were injured,” I said.

  He shook his head. “You know that’s not true. You questioned me constantly even before the accident. If I told you the truth, you fretted and begged me to quit the department. If I held back information, you accused me of being dishonest. It was one argument after another.”

  I looked down at my shoes. As much as I wanted to deny it, Jay was telling the truth. The constant bickering had driven a wedge between us, and we’d stopped talking. We’d even stopped having sex. His injury almost eight months ago had been the last straw for me, which is why I’d packed my bags and left.

  “Kate knew what I did for a living before we married,” Jay said.

  I was not surprised by the comment. It always came down to that. My fault. “I thought I could handle it. I’m not the only wife who has fears. Why do you think the divorce rate is so high among firefighters?”

  I was rewarded with a dark frown. “So why the hell did you marry me?” he asked.

  “Because I fell in love with you, you idiot!” I came close to yelling.

  “Time out!” Evelyn said, slicing the air with her arms like a referee. “We need to take a deep breath and calm down.”

  “I have to get back to the station,” Jay said, standing. “This is going nowhere.”

  “You can’t just walk out of marriage counseling!” I said.

  “Don’t you get it, Katie?” he asked. “I’m tired of arguing about my job and now about your job.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying—” He paused. “I’ve got a lot going on at work right now. This just i
sn’t a good time for me. I’m sorry.” He opened the door and quietly let himself out.

  My heart sank to my toes.

  Evelyn was quiet for a moment. “Are you okay?” she asked finally.

  I nodded, but I wasn’t okay. What could be more important to Jay than our relationship? “I’ll be fine,” I said.

  I could tell as she reached for her appointment book that she didn’t believe me. “Why don’t we go ahead and set something up for next Monday. If you need to cancel, just give me twenty-four hours’ notice.”

  I nodded, because I didn’t trust my voice.

  I found myself anxiously counting traffic lights on the drive to my office. I tried not to think about the possibility of life without Jay. He was not only my lover but my best friend, and one of the most grounded people I knew. After being raised by two women who were the least grounded people I knew, I needed a sense of normalcy. And Jay had, despite my objections to his job, provided it.

  My mother and aunt were partially responsible for my neuroses. Picture two plus-sized women, identical twins, in their midfifties, with big platinum hair and inch-long eyelashes. Even before I’d lost my father, they’d been hard-core junk dealers, which meant I’d been raised in a house surrounded by more crap than on Sanford and Son. Our living room made Graceland look like something out of Southern Living. They referred to themselves as the Junk Sisters. In school, I was known as the daughter of a Junk Sister. I’m fairly certain that’s why nobody asked me to the senior prom.