Thrill Me

by Leslie Kelly

  Thrill Me

  Leslie Kelly

  Sophie Winchester is the all-American small-town girl—except for her secret life creating mayhem as horror writer R. J. Colt. So when notes for her latest novel land on the desk of police chief Daniel Fletcher, he’s convinced someone’s out to murder her. How can she tell Daniel she’s not in danger—especially when she’s so enjoying having Daniel protect her, day and night?

  Leslie Kelly has written dozens of books and novellas for Harlequin Blaze, Temptation and HQN. Known for her sparkling dialogue, fun characters and depth of emotion, her books have been honored with numerous awards, including a National Readers’ Choice Award, an RT Book Reviews Award and three nominations for the highest award in romance, the RWA RITA® Award. Leslie lives in Maryland with her own romantic hero, Bruce, and their three daughters. Visit her online at www.lesliekelly.com.

  Books by Leslie Kelly

  HARLEQUIN BLAZE

  347—OVEREXPOSED

  369—ONE WILD WEDDING NIGHT

  402—SLOW HANDS

  408—HEATED RUSH

  447—BLAZING BEDTIME STORIES “My, What a Big…You Have!”

  501—MORE BLAZING BEDTIME STORIES “Once Upon a Mattress”

  521—PLAY WITH ME

  537—BLAZING BEDTIME STORIES, VOLUME V “A Prince of a Guy”

  567—ANOTHER WILD WEDDING NIGHT

  616—TERMS OF SURRENDER

  650—IT HAPPENED ONE CHRISTMAS

  663—ONCE UPON A VALENTINE “Sleeping with a Beauty”

  689—BLAZING MIDSUMMER NIGHTS

  723—LET IT SNOW… “The Prince Who Stole Christmas”

  747—WAKING UP TO YOU

  To get the inside scoop on Harlequin Blaze and its talented writers, be sure to check out blazeauthors.com.

  Other titles by this author available in ebook format.

  To Vicki Lewis Thompson. Thank you for giving me so much reading pleasure, as well as your deeply valued friendship. You are the ultimate Temptress.

  And, as always, to my editor Brenda Chin. You keep me sane. You keep me sharp. And yet somehow you still manage to make this fun. I thank you for more reasons than I can ever express.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  1

  SOPHIE WINCHESTER was skilled at only two things. She could type 120 words per minute without a single error.

  And she was damn good at committing murder.

  It was lucky she had the latter skill, because with the advent of voice recognition software, the typing game didn’t look to be a great long-term career plan. That was okay. She’d take murder over note-taking and typing any old day.

  It was just too bad secretarial work was so darn respectable. While murder…wasn’t.

  The shrill whine of her alarm clock returned right on schedule, as it had tauntingly promised nine minutes ago when she’d smacked the snooze button. “Too bad I can’t figure out a way to murder inanimate objects,” she muttered. Unplugging the stupid alarm just wouldn’t give her as much satisfaction as pulverizing it to a bloody pulp, particularly after a night like the previous one, when she’d had only four hours sleep.

  Unfortunately, she couldn’t murder an alarm clock. Oh, sure, she could murder someone with an alarm clock, particularly if there was a glass of water and a frayed wire nearby. But that still wouldn’t allow her to stay in bed past six-thirty on a Thursday morning.

  Punching at the off switch to cease the whine, she started making deals with whomever was listening. “I’ll confess, I’ll come clean, I’ll stop this double life. For an extra hour’s sleep I’ll cop to everything.”

  Mugs, her fat orange tabby, wasn’t impressed by her typical early morning gripe session. She shot him a glare as he delicately licked his paw. He nudged her head out of the way so he could commandeer himself a spot on her pillow, which he knew she was about to vacate.

  “Lazy thing,” she mumbled, giving him a scratch behind the ears and getting a throaty purr in response. Mugs scooted closer, silently ordering her off so he could get more comfy.

  She stumbled out of bed and padded to the bathroom, practically sleepwalking through her typical routine. After her shower, she French-braided her long, light brown hair and clipped it with a pretty, understated gold barrette. Then she faced her standard dilemma over whether she should wear panty hose under her plain navy slacks or risk panty lines.

  Her boss, Pastor Bob, was too nearsighted to notice a panty line or two. But his sister, Miss Hester—who served as his hostess at the First Methodist Church of Derryville—would. And she’d sure have something to say about it. Miss Hester always had something to say, which was becoming a problem. Because Sophie was finding it more and more difficult to keep her tongue glued to the back of her teeth these days.

  Being diabolical sometimes made it tough to be discreet.

  “Panty hose,” she mumbled, too tired to come up with reasons why she shouldn’t just quit her day job and be done with it. Let the world in on who she was, on the things she’d done, and tell them all what they could do if they didn’t like it.

  Shrugging off the pleasant thought of how Miss Hester would react if she ever came back at her with what she really thought, Sophie finished dressing and left her bedroom. She walked into her bright yellow kitchen, made herself a cup of strong coffee, and glanced out the window over the sink.

  “Still January,” she said with a sigh. Spring hadn’t made a miraculous appearance three months early. Slushy gray snow still covered much of her pretty little lawn, keeping her mood as gray as the landscape.

  And suddenly, as always, Sophie began to play the game.

  “I wonder how hard the ground is.”

  She sipped again.

  “How much would the temperature have to go up for someone to be able to dig a hole?” She smiled. “A really big one.” Miss Hester size.

  Mugs, who had grown bored on his pillow perch and followed her into the kitchen, hopped up onto the counter. He pressed his warm kitty nose against her arm, demanding attention.

  “What do you think, Mugs? How would you get rid of a body in the dead of winter with the ground frozen hard?”

  A shovel? Backbreaking. Front-end loader? Too loud, too obvious. Wood chipper? Messy…and overdone, she thought, particularly after the movie Fargo. Pickax? She discarded the idea, knowing it would break through the hard earth too slowly to allow for quick burial.

  Then she lifted a brow. A pickax wouldn’t work on the frozen ground, but it would create a nice opening in the surface of a frozen lake. An opening big enough to slide a body through. By the time the spring thaw came, who knew what condition the remains would be in.

  How perfectly, deliciously morbid. She chuckled, imagining someone ice fishing in the middle of winter. How might that someone react if he looked down while chugging his sixth can of beer and saw the grinning face of a corpse staring sightlessly at him from the other side of the ice?

  By the time she got in her car to drive the short distance to the church, Sophie had already envisioned the whole thing. From gunshot, to pickax in the ice, to shocked fisherman, the scenario appeared fully fleshed out in her brain.

  She just had to put it on paper.

  Or, rather, her alter ego, R. F. Colt—the fastest-rising star of the horror fiction world—had to put it on paper.

  Wishing she could get right to work, she sat in her still-running car in the church parking lot. She wanted to capture her thoughts about the scenario she’d come up with, so she wrote some notes in a small spiral notebook she
always carried in her purse. She started a new notebook with every project, so this one wasn’t too cluttered yet. By the time she finished the novel, the notebook would be jam packed with snippets of dialogue, potential suspects, plot points, not to mention crime scene descriptions, complete with blood spatter…and weapons.

  Speaking of which… “Gotta go to Draper’s Hardware and measure the circumference of the sharp end of a pickax,” she muttered, adding that notation.

  Or maybe not. Draper’s was located right here in town. Sometimes her research earned her a few second looks from people whose radar she’d rather fly beneath. In Derryville, everybody knew everybody else’s business, so she should probably avoid Draper’s and drive over to Margate, the next town over.

  But not yet. First, Sophie Winchester, the sweet-smiled, quiet, small-town church secretary had a full day’s work to accomplish. She’d schedule meetings, type sermons and coordinate the community garage sale. She’d phone in a lunch order for Pastor Bob’s favorite deli sandwich, and write an article for the monthly newsletter. She’d lend a sympathetic ear to the parishioners who stopped by to chat about the horrible state of affairs today, when teenagers could terrorize people on the street by driving so fast and playing their awful music so loud.

  She’d be the Derryville sweetheart she’d always been, the one everyone loved. She’d play her role of the girl next door who’d left home for only a few years to attend college and had come back where she belonged, scared away from the big bad city.

  If only they knew.

  But no one did. No one in Derryville knew the real Sophie Winchester. They never suspected that each night she left the church and spent hours in front of her computer, constructing her next fiendish plot.

  They were familiar with the pretty, nice twenty-six-year-old who never wore her clothes too tight, her makeup too heavy, or her emotions on her face. Not the woman dubbed by People magazine as the author most likely to give Hannibal Lechter nightmares. They didn’t listen, didn’t pay attention, didn’t see. Which was exactly the way she liked it.

  She had both her worlds. She was Sophie, from the most respected family in Derryville, Illinois, who loved the security and low-key small-town happiness that had always been the foundation of her life.

  But she was also R. F. Colt, the gruesome author who was poised to break into the number-one slot on the New York Times bestseller list with her first hardcover novel. The one who’d just sold the movie rights to her second book to a Hollywood production company. The one whose agent swore would be a millionaire before age thirty.

  Two worlds suited her fine for now, at least until she could decide how to let her family and the town know who she really was. She certainly had the best of both worlds—a happy, respected place in her community, and an outlet for the creative juices that had churned inside her since she was a middle schooler addicted to Stephen King books.

  Sophie simply wasn’t ready to move from the role of local girl to big-name horror author. She liked her privacy. Liked her old traditions. Liked Sunday dinner with her parents, and a chat with the mail carrier every day. She was able to write what she did because of the simpleness in her life, not in spite of it. She needed that calm, normal safety net to keep her grounded by day because, by night, she let loose the reins of her imagination and allowed it to run wild.

  She also didn’t want people to look at her differently, or, heaven forbid, treat her differently, just because she happened to know about a thousand ways to murder somebody. Even long-term friends might give her a second glance at that one.

  So, two worlds it was. If both her worlds were just a little lonely, void of male companionship, well, that was the price she’d pay to retain her privacy. Besides, she’d never met a man yet who would want a sweet, small-town girl, and wouldn’t care that behind her big blue eyes churned a mind always contemplating bloody murder.

  And she probably never would.

  DANIEL FLETCHER SAT IN A booth in the front window of Ed’s Diner, sipping his coffee, watching the world come to life on another winter morning in small-town U.S.A.

  Life doesn’t get much better than this.

  Two months ago, his day would have started at a cluttered desk, in a dingy, crowded precinct, with him typing yet another report about the drug bust he’d made in the predawn hours. He’d be bleary-eyed, pissed off, stressed, overworked, underpaid and lonely.

  Not anymore. He much preferred this type of morning. If nothing else, the coffee was a damn sight better at Ed’s, in Derryville, Illinois, than it had been at the eighth precinct in Detroit. And somehow, the stress that had hung around him like a rotten smell back in the city had disappeared in the clean, wholesome air of suburbia.

  “More coffee, Chief?”

  He didn’t turn immediately, but continued staring out the window at the church parking lot across the street, wondering who’d driven up in the little white sedan. The driver had pulled into a spot a good ten minutes ago, but hadn’t yet gotten out. He could see the exhaust fumes curling up from the tailpipe into the cold morning air.

  His cop instincts pinged as he assessed the situation. He mentally catalogued the number of cars at the intersection, the people crossing the street, the Wilson kid walking his dog. He noted the proximity of the bank, the pharmacy, and the preschool on the corner.

  Then he almost laughed at his overly suspicious reaction. Probably the person in the white car was someone who had clothes to drop off for the rummage sale, or meals-on-wheels to pick up for delivery to the elderly. There was no big mystery, no crime about to take place just because of an idling car.

  His big city cop instincts were all out of whack. They had been ever since he’d moved here right after Thanksgiving.

  “Chief?”

  That was pretty whacked, too. He still couldn’t get used to the loss of his name. He’d been known as Daniel all his life. Officer or Detective Fletcher for the last decade. But since he’d moved here to Derryville, he was called Chief by everyone from his landlady to the guy who pumped his gas at the one and only gas station in town.

  “I’m okay, Deedee, thanks.”

  “You’re sure I can’t get you…anything else?”

  He finally turned to look up at the waitress, who’d served him coffee just about every morning since he’d moved here. He noted the pursed lips, the deliberately provocative stance. Yeah. She wanted to give him something else. Shit, so did half the other women in Derryville. “No, I’m fine, thanks.”

  Deedee leaned down, her breast brushing against his shoulder as she deposited his check on the table. “Come back for lunch, Chief. I’ll be sure to save you a piece…of cherry pie.”

  Daniel again ignored the innuendo in her voice and gave her a noncommittal smile. “Sorry. I bagged my lunch today.”

  She pouted, then turned away.

  Fresh meat. That had to be what it was. Daniel knew he was a decent-looking guy, but cripes, the women around here acted like he was movie star material. It had to be because of a shortage of bachelors in the area. Any man under sixty with a pulse and decent-smelling breath would probably get as much attention from the females of Derryville as he did.

  Too bad he wasn’t in the market. Getting involved with anyone at this point wasn’t on his agenda. The last thing he needed to do in this small town was get mixed up in a fling with someone he’d run into all the time afterward. This wasn’t like Detroit where he could avoid a bar or Laundromat because he knew which of the women he’d dated were regulars.

  Besides, no one here had piqued his interest.

  Except her.

  He tried to thrust off the thought as the memory of blue eyes and long light brown hair swept through his mind. But her image wouldn’t fade away. He’d only seen her once, just a flash of her face as she’d walked past the drugstore window while he’d been talking to the owner about some teenage shoplifters. She’d been alone, her head down to shield her cheeks from the December wind. It had been a day or two before Christmas,
so it had probably been the twinkling white minilights in the store window that had caught her attention. She’d looked up. Their stares had met for a moment, just long enough for the little lights to illuminate her beautiful blue eyes, her delicately featured face. Then she’d walked on.

  He couldn’t leave the store fast enough to follow her, and he hadn’t been able to get the owner to turn around quickly enough to identify the woman. He hadn’t seen her since, though he’d kept an eye out for her every single day.

  Just as well. Romance wasn’t in the cards right now. He’d never been able to make it work with a woman in Detroit because they couldn’t get past the cop to see the man, so he doubted he’d find someone here in Derryville. Not yet, anyway.

  No, he was no longer a vice detective. And yeah, he was walking the line a little closer to the Andy Griffith in Mayberry type of policeman, rather than the Dennis Franz in NYPD Blue variety. Still, he’d been a big city cop for nearly a dozen years. It was in his blood. It would probably take a while before he could ease into his new role as small-town chief, to let his always-on-alert attitude ease up enough to get involved with a woman. Especially considering the women here most likely wanted nothing more than holiday picnics, walks in the park, kids and church socials.

  Someday, he told himself, he’d want all that too. I hope.

  He turned to stare again toward the parking lot across the street, and finally saw someone emerge from the driver’s side door of the white car. Bundled up from head to toe because of the cold weather, the person could have been male or female. The height told him it was probably a woman.

  She walked carefully up the icy sidewalk, carrying a large box in her arms. The box obscured her view, and she alternated between peeking around the side to watch where she was going, and down at her feet to avoid slipping on the ice. She was being very precise, very cautious.

  So precise, she had no way of seeing what Daniel was seeing. The Wilson kid lost his grip on the leash of his St. Bernard. The dog tore across the snowy church lawn, and, as if fate had planned it, ran directly into the path of the woman.