by Paula Graves
“Hi, Mike.” She ventured a smile.
Mike gave a polite nod. J.D. supposed that was better than nothing. “This is about Mom, right?” Mike repeated.
“Yes, but I want more information before I spring it on you or your grandparents.” He motioned for his son to come in. “How’d you find out I was here?”
“I overheard Gran and figured it out. I went to Uncle Clay’s and mapped the directions here.” Mike flashed a look of boyish pride. “I figured you’d be here because everything else is bed-and-breakfast inns. You wouldn’t be caught dead in one of those.”
Behind J.D., Natalie released a soft huff of laughter. “That’s how I figured out where you were staying, too.”
“You were looking for Dad?”
“Well, I was actually looking for his motel room,” she answered, slanting a quick look at J.D. “And I didn’t want him to be in his room, because I wanted to search it.”
Mike’s dark eyes brightened. “You broke in?”
Natalie glanced at J.D. again, consternation in her eyes. “Yes, but it was very wrong of me.”
J.D. held back a chuckle. “I reckon if you can forgive my trespassing at the restaurant—”
“Delinquent!” Mike’s grin let J.D. know the worst of his temper had cooled. “Gonna tell me what you’re really here for?”
J.D.’s amusement faded. He’d spent a lot of years trying to keep the worst of the details about Brenda’s murder away from his children. Cissy was old enough to remember her mother, so it wasn’t a surprise that she’d started researching Brenda’s murder once she was old enough; but he’d hoped that Mike, who’d been a baby when Brenda died, might be spared that hunger for answers.
He should have known better. Mike was a Cooper, after all. The desire for justice, for answers, was strong in all of them.
“My sister was murdered a few weeks ago.” Natalie spared J.D. the need to search for the right words. “Your dad thinks the person who killed your mother may have killed my sister.”
“I thought the guy who killed Mom was dead.” Mike’s eyes grew dark and wide with alarm.
“We all did,” J.D. agreed. “But last month, when Uncle Gabe visited your sister, he came across some information that suggests Victor Logan wasn’t the only person involved in the murder.”
Mike’s anger rose again, darkening his cheeks with a deep, red flush. “And you didn’t tell me?”
“I needed more information—”
“You think I’m a baby. You think I’m not old enough to deal with this kind of stuff. That’s why you keep it from me, right?”
“I keep it from you because I don’t want your memories of your mother to be tied up in how she died,” J.D. protested.
“I don’t remember her at all,” Mike protested. “All I know about her is her murder. And you want to keep that from me, too?”
Pain ripped through J.D.’s chest. “Mike—”
Mike grabbed J.D.’s arm. “I need to know who took her from us, too. And I’m old enough to handle it. I promise.”
J.D. pulled his son into a swift, fierce hug. “Mike, I swear to you, as soon as I have answers, I’ll tell you everything.”
“But not now?” Mike’s lips thinned with annoyance.
“I don’t know that much.” He laid his hand on the back of Mike’s head, his heart so tangled with love and pain he could barely breathe. “I’m still trying to piece it together—we’re not even sure yet that the murders here are connected to your mom’s.”
“Murders? More than one?” A look of horror, mingled with curiosity, darkened his son’s eyes.
“Maybe. We’re not sure they’re connected at all.”
“How can I help you?”
J.D.’s first instinct was to tell his son that the best way to help him was to go back home to Gossamer Ridge and stay far, far away from the investigation altogether. But how would he have reacted to such a suggestion when he was Mike’s age?
Not well. And his son was right—he had a stake in what was going on here, whether he knew all the details or not.
“How are you at playing lookout?” he asked.
NATALIE GLANCED BACK at J.D.’s truck as they approached Annabelle’s front entrance. Mike sat in the passenger seat, fiddling with his cell phone. “Are you sure we should leave him in the truck alone?”
“He’s not a baby,” J.D. said with a slight smile.
She glanced back again. “I’m glad Carrie didn’t have any children. Losing a mother so young is a lot to deal with.”
His smile faded. “I was lucky to be surrounded by family.”
The door of Annabelle’s loomed in front of her. Natalie pulled the keys from her purse and unlocked the door, her stomach churning with anxiety. With a little push, the door creaked open, and Natalie forced herself to take a step inside.
After weeks of neglect, the place smelled musty. Natalie also thought she could detect the faint metallic odor of blood.
Her imagination. She’d had a crew come in to clean the place after the police released the crime scene. It was a sense memory, from the night she found her sister.
She’d smelled the blood first, before she found the body.
“Your sister had done a lot of work here?” J.D. asked, his voice jarringly loud in the hushed restaurant, even though he’d spoken in a low tone.
She looked up at him. “She was finishing up with the renovations, about to start hiring staff, when this happened.”
Looking around, she tried to view the place through his eyes, without the context of her relationship with Carrie. She noted the solid quality of the dark wooden chairs and tables, a reminder that for all of Carrie’s bright frothiness, she’d possessed an underlying core of hardy sensibility.
“Sunflowers,” he murmured, pointing to the enormous mural on the far wall.
Natalie followed his gaze to the wall, where the outline sketch of a sunflower filled almost the entire area. Carrie’s idea was to rename the restaurant Sunflower and serve fresh, local food only. She had plans to plant sunflowers in the patch of ground out front where a line of aging boxwoods now grew, letting them set the tone of the restaurant—bright, sunny and vibrant with life.
She’d have made a success of this place. Natalie was convinced of it. Carrie knew how to make people feel at home.
The burning sensation behind her eyes made Natalie focus her attention on the job. Be an investigator, not a sister. Just for a little while. Then you can go home and fall apart.
“I don’t see any sign of a struggle in here,” J.D. said.
“I don’t, either,” she agreed, her gaze settling on the swinging door at the far side of the room. The kitchen entrance.
J.D.’s large hand flattened low on her back, a steadying touch that sent a sudden flood of warmth coursing through her body, as if a portion of his own solid strength had flowed into her through his fingertips.
With a bracing breath, she headed for the kitchen.
The door swung open with only a slight touch of the push plate, the sprung hinges offering little resistance. Once she and J.D. stepped into the kitchen, the door swung back with a soft whoosh, rocking quietly until it finally fell still.
She kept her gaze at eye level for a moment, not yet ready to see the floor near the back of the kitchen where her sister had bled out from her stab wounds. Instead, she scanned the room, looking for any signs of a struggle.
“What’s with the extra stuff?” J.D. waved toward the stockpile of kitchen appliances. Unlike the dining room, which had been neat if a little dusty, the kitchen was cluttered and chaotic, filled with extras of everything. She had asked the cleaners to only deal with the blood, impressing on them the importance of not moving anything out of position. Keeping the crime scene intact had seemed important, somehow, even though the police had released it.
“Carrie was replacing the old appliances with newer, state-of-the-art appliances,” Natalie answered. “But she didn’t just want to throw out good, working
equipment, so she was checking around with local charities to see who would put them to the best use.” The stinging behind her eyes grew stronger. “That’s the way she thought. What would do the most good. And now, who’d want it? It was once covered with her blood.”
J.D.’s hand found its way to the base of her spine again. Her body leaned toward him, steel to his magnet, and her grip on her emotions slipped, tears burning her eyes. She choked out a brittle sob.
J.D. wrapped his arms around her, his chest warm and solid against her back. Leaning her head back against his broad shoulder, she struggled with her grief. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” His warm breath stirred her hair.
She hadn’t cried since that night, she realized. Not during the wake, not at the funeral, not even at the private graveside service afterward. Her mother had fallen apart from the beginning, and even her father had grieved in his self-contained way, as she’d discovered after the funeral when she’d walked in on him crying alone in his den.
But until this moment, she’d held her own emotions sternly in check, concentrating instead on delivering justice. Finding who’d done this. Making sure he paid.
Pent-up pain and rage poured from her in a torrent of sobs and tears until she felt as if she were coming apart. But J.D.’s arms pinned her together, keeping her somehow intact with gentle caresses and whispered words of comfort, until her tears slowed to a trickle and the sobs faded to soft, hitching breaths.
J.D. stroked her hair away from her damp cheeks. “I bet you’ve held that in for weeks, huh?”
She nodded, her temple brushing against his beard stubble. The sensation was strangely pleasant. “I guess that’s why I’ve avoided coming in here again.”
“We can leave.”
“No.” She pulled away from his grasp, turning to face him. Threading her fingers through her hair, she pulled the unruly mess out of her eyes so she could level her gaze with his. “Let’s do this now so I don’t have to come back again.”
He brushed her cheek with the lightest of touches. “What do you want to do?”
She made herself look at the floor, where bloodstains had once spotted the tiles. “I found her here.” She gestured toward the floor, where her sister had lain wedged between the base of the old stove and the newly purchased high capacity freezer that would have gone on the far wall eventually. “She was lying on her back. Palms on the floor. Her feet were together and her skirt was in place, covering her thighs to the tops of her knees.” She shuddered but forced herself to finish. “The coroner said she’d been raped, but he didn’t retrieve any DNA evidence.”
She could tell by the look on J.D.’s face that he was picturing his wife lying in a similar position. He hadn’t been the one to find her, the way Natalie had found Carrie, but she knew he’d spent the last twelve years poring over the crime-scene photos until he had them memorized.
“When was the last time you’d been here, before that night?”
She rubbed her face, trying to remember. “Maybe a couple of days? It was a Thursday night when she died, and I think I’d come by on Tuesday because she wanted to show me the new appliances.”
“Did the place look like this?”
She looked around bleakly. “I think so. It was cluttered, but not really messy.”
J.D. gave the room a quick scan. “Cluttered like now?”
She nodded. “I looked around for signs of a struggle the night I found her. I think I went into deputy mode out of self-preservation.” She sighed. “There was nothing obviously out of place, J.D. I looked. As crazy as it sounds, I know I’d have noticed if there was.”
He brushed his knuckles against her cheek. “Okay.”
She fought the urge to lean into his touch. “We probably need to see the Moss Crossing crime scene to be sure, but that one just feels different to me. Like two separate people committed the crimes, despite the surface similarities.”
He let his hand drop to her shoulder and drew her with him to the swinging door. As they left the kitchen behind them, the air seemed to lighten. She took a breath and let it go slowly.
J.D.’s fingers tightened on her shoulder. “I know this was hard for you, but I really needed to see this place myself. Thank you for bringing me here.”
Unable to fight herself any longer, she stepped closer to him, until she felt the heat of his body radiating against hers. “You’re welcome.”
He slid his hand around the back of her neck, his touch gentle but commanding. Gazing down at her with desire-darkened eyes, he seemed to fill every inch of the world around her until everything else disappeared. Time stretched, expanded, until she lost all track of it.
He lowered his head slowly, his breath burning her lips. So close, so fiercely tempting. His hesitation seemed deliberate, as if to give her time to stop him.
But she didn’t want to stop him.
J.D.’s lips brushed hers lightly, then drew away. Blood roared in her ears, drowning out all but need.
She kissed him back, taking her time. Their first kiss had been a mindless frenzy, but she needed something different this time. Something deeper. Something deliberate.
Roping one arm around her waist, he pulled her flush to him. She dropped her hands to his sides, sliding her fingers under the hem of his T-shirt until they met the corded muscles of his rib cage. Beneath the hot velvet of his skin, he was steel-hard sinew, surprising for a man as large as he was. She moved her hands upward, tracing a path across the ridges and planes of his body until his breath exploded in a gasp against her lips.
His fingers tangling in her hair, he drew her face up to his for a kiss that sent the whole world reeling around her in a dizzying rush. Only the smallest vestige of good sense remained to hear the soft snick of the restaurant entry door opening behind her. But it took a couple of seconds for her sluggish reflexes to respond. By the time she and J.D. scrambled apart, it was much too late.
Mike Cooper stood in the doorway, staring at them with a look of pure, adolescent horror.
Chapter Eleven
Well, hell.
J. D. Cooper watched Mike’s expression go from mortification to surly displeasure and didn’t have one damned clue what to do about it. He’d never put his kids in the position to see him with a woman before. He didn’t date, never brought women home to meet the family, and the few times he’d given into the demands of his body over the years, it had been far away from home, with women no more interested in a long-term relationship than he was.
He took a couple of steps toward his son, hoping he could stumble onto the right way to handle the uncomfortable situation. Mike took a defensive step backward, his expression darkening.
“I saw someone in the woods. You said to let you know if I saw anything.” Resentment burned in his dark eyes. “I knocked.”
“You saw someone outside?” Natalie asked.
Mike shot her a baleful look. “He had a rifle, I think.”
J.D. exchanged a quick glance with Natalie, discomfited to find that she looked as tempting as sin, with her tousled cinnamon hair, her cheeks full of color and her kiss-stung lips. “Rudy?” he asked in a hoarse growl.
She nodded.
“It’s probably a guy named Rudy Lawler,” he told Mike. “He hunts for wild pigs in the woods out there.”
“I think I’ll just take the bike and head back to Derek’s house,” Mike said, already heading out the door.
J.D. gave Natalie an apologetic look and followed his son outside. “Mike, you can’t be riding around by yourself.”
“Cordero probably doesn’t even know who I am. He’s after Uncle Luke, not you.”
“He’s after any of us he can get to.”
Mike shot a wild look back at the restaurant. “I sure don’t want to stick around here.”
“Mike, what you saw—”
His son glared up at him. “If I’m going to get a new mom, just tell me that, okay? You don’t have to hide her from me.”
His son�
��s words stabbed him in the center of his chest, right in the place where he kept all his fears and regrets. “You’re not getting a new mother. No one will ever replace your mother, do you understand? Not for you and definitely not for me.”
Mike’s gaze shifted somewhere behind him. J.D. turned and saw Natalie standing a few feet away, stone-faced and still. He knew she’d heard what he’d told his son, though he couldn’t tell from her frozen expression exactly what she felt about it.
Hell, he didn’t even know what he felt about what he’d said. Had it even been the truth? When this was over, was he just going to be able to walk away from Natalie with no regrets the way he’d done with other women?
“My parents’ house is just a half mile from here, on the other side of the woods,” she said aloud, her toneless voice offering him no clue of what she was feeling. “My mother’s driver can shuttle me back to the motel to pick up my car.”
“You can’t walk through the woods by yourself,” he said flatly. Her eyebrows notched upward, and he added, “Someone’s already tried to kill you once.”
“It might have been random,” she said, although he knew she didn’t believe that any more than he did.
“Someone tried to kill her?” Mike asked, his anger faltering for a moment as fear took over. “You think it could have been the guy who killed Mom?” His eyes widened more. “Or Cordero?”
J.D. squeezed Mike’s shoulder. “We don’t know. It’s why I want you to stay safe at your grandparents’ house for a few more days, just until we get a better handle on what’s going on.”
“What if you don’t know what’s going on in a few days?” Anxiety threaded through Mike’s voice. “Are you going to stay down here until you know?”
“No, of course not,” J.D. answered quickly.
“So you’re just going to leave town while there’s someone trying to off your girlfriend?” Mike asked with blunt candor.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” J.D. answered defensively.
Mike shot him an incredulous look. “She can hear you, Dad.”
J.D. turned and found Natalie watching him through narrowed eyes. He couldn’t read her feelings in her masklike expression, which wasn’t exactly comforting. He knew she hid her emotions the best when she was feeling most vulnerable. But he’d couldn’t unsay the words. And they were true, weren’t they?
