“Oh God. I hadn’t even thought of that,” Katelyn said, bile rushing up her throat. “I saw him almost every day over at the studio when I went by to check on things. How could he look me in the eye every day and then attack me like that?”
“I don’t know, baby. But, he had us all fooled. He’s sat on your dad’s couch watching the game with us dozens of times. I honestly don’t know how he did it. It’s very possible his death was a suicide. We haven’t found a note anywhere, but it could be that having you back here set him off. The coroner is looking into it right now. She’ll know more soon, and I’ll re-interview people now that we have new information. See if anything else turns up.”
John sounded bitter and angry and she knew he was thinking of her father. “Try to get some sleep, hon, and we’ll go tell your dad in the morning,” John said with one last kiss.
Katelyn closed her eyes, but she didn’t try to sleep. Her mind wouldn’t stop spinning. She lay for what felt like hours in John’s arms, and she knew he wasn’t sleeping either, but neither of them seemed to feel the need to speak. There wasn’t really anything she could say. What do you say to the news of such betrayal? To news you’d waited for all your life, but now almost wished you didn’t have. Maybe it would have been better for her father not to know who had done this to him, who had taken the woman he loved from him.
Everlasting: Chapter Seventeen
Katelyn must have slept because she woke in John’s arms. He didn’t look like he’d slept at all. In fact, she could all but see his mind working, and she knew he must have spent the whole night working through what needed to be done to wrap up her mother’s case, to the extent a case where all of the suspects were already dead could be wrapped up.
“Did you sleep?” she asked, pulling back to look him in the eyes, then quickly missing the warmth and security of his arms. She always felt safe when he wrapped her up in him like she was some tiny treasure he’d protect at all costs. Katelyn took a deep breath and realized she didn’t need to worry about that anymore. Sam Denton was dead. She was safe now.
“A little bit,” he said and he nuzzled into her neck, but she knew he was lying. She couldn’t help but arch her back and sigh when his lips traveled over her shoulders. It was incredible what he managed to do to her body with only the whisper of his mouth on her shoulders, of all things.
And he did more incredible things with his mouth as he pulled the sheets back and rolled her beneath him, all the while never losing contact. Katelyn let herself get lost in the feel of his body pressed against hers, in the heat and emotion of the moment as he made love to her sweetly, quietly, as though he never wanted the moment to end. As though he wanted to bind them together forever with the act.
If it were any other day, they would have likely stayed in bed. But they needed to see her father—to tell him about Ken and Sam. They didn’t speak when they got up and showered together an hour later, but the quiet was comfortable. It was as if they both knew that the morning would be a hard one, telling her father something he’d waited more than twenty years to hear, but both knowing there wouldn’t be much comfort in the knowledge for him. Knowing the knowledge had come much too late for him, much too late for justice.
John handed a glass of orange juice to Katelyn and poured another for himself as she popped bread in the toaster and grabbed peanut butter from the pantry. John sliced bananas to go on top of his. Katelyn thought it was gross, but he just laughed when she told him that. He said it was the perfect combination of sweet and salty with the peanut butter, and the right combination of dry and mushy with the toast and the banana.
“You’re slow,” John said with a laugh as he pulled Katelyn into his lap while she finished her toast. He’d swallowed his two pieces in what seemed like four bites apiece, and watched as she finished her first piece and picked up her second.
“No,” Katelyn said, smiling. “I just don’t eat like a caveman. Besides,” she said, losing her smile, “I really don’t want to do this. I thought it’d be great to find out who killed my mom. I thought it would be a relief to tell my dad, but it’s not. I think it’s going to hurt him more than help him at this point.”
“Are you sure you want to tell him? He probably won’t be with us much longer, Kate. Maybe it’s better for him not to know.”
She just looked at him, and he nodded. “Yeah, you're right. We have to tell him,” he said.
* * *
John was crushed by the look of shock on Alan’s face when they told him what they’d found out at Holland’s farm. Telling him what they thought Sam had done was even harder than John had imagined it would be, and that told him he was just too damned close to the situation. Charlie was at the hospital when they arrived, so he stayed with Alan while they broke the news and he looked every bit as shocked as Alan. He kept apologizing to Alan for bringing Sam into Alan’s life, even though no one could blame him for that. Sam and Alan had both been born and raised in Evers. It wasn’t Charlie’s fault Sam did what he had. The fact that he worked for Charlie didn’t change that.
Katelyn was quiet through most of it, holding her father’s hand. She looked as relieved as John felt when her father closed his eyes and let the pain medication lull him to sleep soon after they’d told him. He was awake less and less these days and John was sure the sleep was a blessing right now. He didn’t look remotely like the man John had come to think of as a father. His face was swollen almost beyond recognition most days as his liver failed to do the job it was meant to do.
His legs were so swollen he couldn’t get out of bed any longer. The doctors told Katelyn and John it was a matter of days at this point before he would go and seeing him so broken, so broke down, hurt like hell.
John looked up at Kate and saw tears streaming silently down her face. He walked around the bed to her and stood behind her, holding her tightly as she watched her father. Charlie nodded and slipped out of the room, and John knew he and Katelyn had just started their death watch over her father. He had already told Berta not to call him in for anything that wasn’t an absolute emergency. Danny would take over for the next week while John and Kate sat with Alan.
“You know he loved you so much? He used to tell me about your art, about his amazingly talented daughter. He said you got that from your mom. He always told me she should have been an artist like you instead of a bookkeeper. He was proud of you for following your dream, living your passion.”
Katelyn nodded and sniffled and John went on, telling her about the way her father bragged about her when she graduated from college or the way he couldn’t stop talking about her first showing at a gallery.
“He won’t get to see his grandchildren,” she said quietly, and John’s heart ached for her.
“Do you want to have children?” he whispered in her ear instead, hearing the catch in his own voice as his emotions took over.
She nodded.
“We’ll have as many as you want,” he whispered and realized he meant every word of it. He hadn’t recognized it but somewhere along the way, he had realized he’d spend his life with Katelyn. He’d marry her and build a family and a home and a life with her. “As many as you want, Katelyn.”
She nodded again, and he felt tears splash on his forearm.
John pulled her back to the armchair in the corner and sat down, drawing her into his lap. They stayed that way as the doctors and nurses came and went. They got up occasionally throughout the night and the following day for bathroom breaks or to eat a bit here or there, but neither was very hungry.
Alan began to have what almost looked like seizures, his legs moving uncontrollably, and Katelyn sobbed in John’s arms while the nurses increased the morphine drip. Alan’s body stilled the following morning and Katelyn’s sobs quieted again.
Alan didn’t wake up again. Their last conversation had been the news about Sam Denton. He died thirty-two hours later. It was almost as though he’d waited. Waited for his wife’s killer all those years. John took Katelyn home
and tucked her into bed then slid in next to her and held her while she slept. The tears finally stopped. At least for a while.
Everlasting: Chapter Eighteen
Katelyn watched as the casserole brigade, led by Mrs. J., swarmed into the house after the funeral. It was funny to think that just a couple of months ago she’d resented these people and this town. She’d felt like an outsider and hated the way they looked at her. Now, as Laura and Ashley and Cora surrounded her on the couch in her father’s living room, and the people of the town brought her enough food to last for the next five years, she felt like she’d finally come home. At last.
“He was a hell of a guy, your dad, Kit Kat,” Ashley said as she slipped a cup of hot coffee into Katelyn’s hands. Katelyn actually laughed at the nickname for once. It seemed as though it was going to stick. Ashley didn’t seem like she’d be giving it up anytime soon.
“You would know, Ash. You did know him better than any of us,” Cora said wryly and Katelyn looked at her quizzically. Cora smiled, but there was a sadness to it. “Your dad was always bringing Ashley home from one mess or another she’d gotten herself into.”
Ashley made a show of primping her skirt until it lay just right across her lap as Laura and Katelyn looked at her, awaiting a response. Neither of the women had grown up in Evers, so any stories about Ashley as a teen were new to them both.
“What?” She shrugged a shoulder and shook her head. “I was just livelier than Cora was, that’s all.”
Cora let out an inelegant snort. “Livelier. Sure.” She turned to Katelyn. “Your dad had to drive her home whenever she snuck out after bedtime. Oh, and then there was that time she tried to climb the water tower to write her and Jimmy Kendall’s initials on the side of it, but she froze up halfway up the ladder.”
Cora sounded like she could hardly catch her breath for the laughter coming from her. “She actually had to flag down Haddie Gilman and have her call your dad that time and ask him to come get her down!”
Laura and Katelyn laughed while Ashley tried to look offended but failed. She gave in and grinned at them, and Katelyn was relieved for the break in the sadness of the day.
“Enough stories about me, Cora Bora,” Ashley said, with a childish scowl in her sister’s direction.
“Cora Bora?” Laura and Katelyn echoed at once.
Ashley’s answering grin was devilish and Cora rolled her eyes.
“My name for Cora when we were younger,” Ashley said.
Cora finished with, “Because I was sooooo boring.”
When the laughter died down, John caught Katelyn’s eye across the room and smiled at her. He stood speaking with several of the men that had served with his father throughout the years.
“His eulogy was beautiful,” Laura said, nodding at John. She was right. It had been.
He’d talked about the way he’d been a broken man when he came to town. How her father had somehow managed to show him that life was worth living, that he had something he could still give to people. He talked about what her father had meant to the county and the people he served. What he’d meant to his officers and the people he’d mentored. What he meant to his friends. He talked about her father’s love for her mother, and how he’d loved her until the day he died.
Katelyn knew people were beginning to whisper about her mother’s murder and what had been discovered about Sam and Ken, but she didn’t care. Not today. Today, she just wanted to let her friends surround her with laughter. She wanted to eat casseroles that were too rich and much too high in calories. She wanted to hear stories about her father and what he meant to people. She’d deal with the fallout of Sam Denton and the resolution to a mystery that was decades old tomorrow.
It was late in the evening by the time Mrs. J. and her casserole brigade had packed all of the leftovers into the fridge and shooed most of the guests out the door after Katelyn thanked them for coming.
“Why don’t we do a girls’ night out tomorrow?” Laura asked as she hugged Katelyn goodbye.
“I’m in,” Ashley said and Cora nodded.
“Margaritas at my place?” Cora said looking at Katelyn for confirmation.
“Sounds perfect. I can bring some of the leftover food. If I don’t get some of it out of the house, I’ll be twenty pounds heavier by next week,” Katelyn said.
John walked up to the group and slipped his arms around Katelyn’s waist. No one seemed surprised by the move, and she guessed the Evers grapevine had already spread the news they were seeing each other.
“You’ve lost weight and you didn’t really have any room to lose it, Kate,” John said with a frown.
Ashley leaned forward, not even remotely trying not to let the room hear her stage-whispered words. “Somebody’s trying to get laid tonight!”
Katelyn would have laughed but before she knew what was happening, Mrs. J. was there with her purse bashing poor John over the head with it and chasing him out of the house behind all of the other guests. She kept saying something about “God-fearing men waited” and “not in her town.” Katelyn stood shell-shocked as John’s cruiser pulled away from the house and she was left with Mrs. J. ushering her up the stairs to her room.
She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her phone. Would it be needy to call and ask him to come back? He was probably tired of running home for clean clothes every morning and living his life without any of his things around. Maybe now that her father was gone and the threat to her seemed to be over, it was time things went back to normal. Time he went home. Katelyn eyed the phone and debated.
Clack, clack, clack.
She swung around at the sound of stones hitting her bedroom window. Even as her head told her it couldn’t be John, her heart flipped over in her chest. Please be John. Please be John.
Katelyn shoved the window up, the old, stiff tracks making it hard to get it up more than half way. She stuck her head out and laughed at the sight of the county’s sheriff whispering and watching over his head for any sign of Mrs. J.
“Open the back door,” John hissed up at her, and Katelyn had to stifle a laugh as she pushed the window down and ran to the stairs. She felt like a teenager sneaking around, but didn’t care. He was here. He’d come back before she’d even had a chance to call him.
“Where’d you leave your car?” she asked as John pushed in and lifted her off the floor with one arm around her waist and the other shoving the door shut. He didn’t answer. His mouth was busy laying a track of heat and hunger down the side of her neck. He traced his way across her collar bone and her body responded instantly, heating and aching with need.
He walked to the kitchen table and set Katelyn down on it, never breaking contact with her skin. His mouth moved back to capture hers, engulfing her and wiping away memories and pain. She wrapped her arms around his neck and sank into him, reveling in the feel of his strong arm around her, his mouth hot and needy on hers, letting her know he needed this as much as she did. After a kiss that turned her mind to nothing more than mush, John broke away long enough to answer her question, making her wish she’d never asked.
“I parked around the corner and snuck through the backyards.”
Katelyn couldn’t stop the laugh this time. All she could picture was a neighbor calling the police, and one of John’s own deputies showing up to catch him in the act of sneaking into her house. “Maybe we should move upstairs so no one spots us and calls the police.”
“Or worse, Mrs. J.,” John said, wrapping her legs around his waist as he lifted her and walked up the stairs to her bedroom. The feel of his muscles cradled in the heat between her legs, heat he’d created, only ignited her body all the more.
Katelyn didn’t spare a second thought for Mrs. J. after that. John didn’t let her. His assault on her senses was all-encompassing and overwhelming in the best possible way. He whispered things that made her blush as he stripped her of her clothes before undressing himself. Then he followed through on a lot of those whispers until Katelyn cried out his
name again and again.
His fingers inside of her as his mouth lapped at her clit sent her spiraling over the top, every muscle in her body clenched as she exploded. Her orgasm claimed her as strongly as John had and when she felt the head of his cock pressing into her, she wrapped her arms around him and pressed her hips into him, all but begging for more.
She wanted more of the connection they’d built. Wanted to be closer to him, to be one with him as their bodies raced toward completion again. His eyes didn’t leave hers as he sank into her again and again, drawing rasping breaths from her. His length plunging into her lit every nerve ending, bringing pleasure so pure she found herself praying it would never end, but wanting to feel his release just the same.
And then they were there. John cried out and tensed beneath her hands, just as she felt the rippling ecstasy of another orgasm hit her. They came together, the erotic power of knowing she’d brought him to this racing through her even as her own body sang and tingled and melted in his arms.
Snuggling into him afterward, their legs linked together under the sheets, Katelyn couldn’t remember a time when she’d felt more content, and she knew coming home to Evers had been the right choice after all.
Everlasting: Chapter Nineteen
Charlie Hanford looked up as his housekeeper entered his office. She always seemed to come just when he was getting settled into his work. But he had to hand it to her, she’d kept this place running like clockwork for almost thirty years. She had a rigid routine. She performed all of his routine weekly cleaning on Fridays, but on Mondays, she had her “list.” It was not to be disrupted regardless of weather, his schedule, or any other outside force he’d ever been able to find.
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