Making a face as she waited for Officer Slawinski to return with another load, she thought, No, I really doubt I have to worry about Daniel Colburn making a move on me.
She did manage to pull herself together enough to work steadily through the day, taking only a half hour break to get a sandwich and bring it back to eat at her folding card table. Slawinski, no surprise, used the same time to buy a double cheeseburger, fries and cookies, all of which smelled way better than her healthier alternative. Tomorrow, she decided, she was hitting the drive-through, too.
Bless his heart, he offered to share the cookies, which improved her mood.
In the end, she did have him load a couple of rubber tubs of small stuff she had to research on the internet into the back of her Prius. She thanked him with a big smile and turned to lock the unit, pretending she hadn’t seen a red tide creep up his neck to his cheeks.
She’d barely pulled into the driveway at the cottage when a black SUV came to a stop at the curb in front and Daniel got out, a couple of bulging grocery bags dangling from one hand.
“You switched cars,” she said. Oh, brilliant.
“I hustled home.” He grinned at her from the sidewalk, then passed under the rose arbor and met her at the porch. “I figured having a city car parked out in front all evening might look like I was thumbing my nose at the fine citizenry of Cape Trouble.”
She rolled her eyes. “Like they don’t all recognize your Honda.”
“I’m entitled to a private life.”
She fumbled with the keys, conscious of him right behind her. “You could make it generally known that you’re still on the clock when you’re here because you’re serving as bodyguard.” She could only hope he’d buy her ultra-casual tone. Thank goodness, she managed to get the door open right then.
“I’m pretty sure no one would believe that.” Amusement threaded his voice, but something else, too. A something that had her turning to face him. He smiled, bent his head and kissed her lightly, as if he had a right. “For example, I’m thinking I’ll cook dinner tonight.”
Trying to hide her reaction to the brush of his lips on hers, she said, almost at random, “You shopped?”
“For a couple of things, and grabbed the rest of what I needed from home.”
“I could have cooked.”
“You must be cold and stiff after sitting there all day.”
Had he heard her knees creaking? “It was getting chilly,” she admitted. “I forget the way the fog rolls in some afternoons. So much for spectacular sunsets.”
“Yeah, this is a dense one.” His eyes were kind. “Does fog bring it back?”
“If I let it get to me too much, I should have moved to Arizona. Even in Portland, we get fog.” Which did always make her feel as if a ghost was breathing down her neck, but she tried to convince herself that it affected most people that way. Not being able to see more than a few feet ahead had to trigger some primeval alarm. She wasn’t alone.
She could tell he wasn’t fooled, but without comment he continued into the kitchen with his bags.
“I hope you don’t hate fish,” he called.
She assured him she wasn’t picky and retreated to take a hot shower, which felt so good she stayed under it longer than she should have. She thought herself in circles about Daniel. Did that casual kiss mean anything? Was he assuming she was interested in him? And why wouldn’t he be, after the way she’d melted all over him that day on the beach? Should she say something, the next time he reached for her?
Uh huh, but what? She almost moaned at her internal battle between temptation and common sense.
At last, she reluctantly left the shower to get dressed. She put the same jeans back on but topped them with a turtleneck sweater she almost hadn’t brought since this was, after all, summertime. Yes, it was, and there’d been a good reason besides s’mores for all those crackling fires she and her mom had built.
She emerged to find that he was deep fat frying thick fillets of fish on the stovetop while sliced potatoes rolled in spices browned in the oven.
Sophie laughed. “Fish and chips.”
“Yep.” He flashed that devastating grin. “Except, unlike at your neighborhood joint, this fish came out of the ocean today and the potatoes were dug by a local truck farmer. Ed Castaneda.”
“Oh, I remember him,” she said in surprise. “He used to set up near the wharf. Well, he wasn’t the only one, it was kind of a mini farmer’s market.”
“We still have that from April or so into fall. Three or four farmers, some fishermen, a few crafters.” The grin tugged at his mouth again as he drained hot oil into a soup can she recognized as one he had retrieved from her trash beneath the sink. “Doreen. Half the time, she had a table so she could waylay passersby and bend their ear about whatever currently obsessed her.”
She felt an all-too familiar tug between past and present. He was so damn sexy, working in her kitchen smiling like that. Past… “I wonder if Doreen did the same back then,” she said slowly.
He looked at her, his hands briefly pausing, his blue eyes knowing. “You mean, you wonder if your mom did know her.”
“I can’t remember.” That made her feel fretful. Was this something she’d deliberately blocked? No, that didn’t make sense. Why would she have? More likely, she’d been terminally bored while her mother talked to some old lady. She might have gone out onto the wharf to study the fishing boats or just stare down at the water, either hanging over the railing or peering between the boards that made up the dock. On a hot day, how she’d loved the scent of creosote and salt water that mixed with fresh, here so close to where river met the ocean.
She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“There’s no reason it should,” he agreed, sliding the fish onto plates, then grabbing a hot pad to pull the cookie sheet covered with golden-brown potatoes from the oven. But she sensed him watching her as she asked what he’d like to drink and took glasses from the cupboard.
Once they sat down to eat, Daniel asked about her job, and she described some of the events she put on and what went into planning them. In exchange, he told her some wickedly funny stories about his job, making up names to protect the not-so-innocent.
She had relaxed almost completely when he dished up a second helping of potatoes and glanced up. “Have you ever been married?”
“Heavens, no!” And then she thought, wait. “Have you?”
“Nope. Closest I’ve come was living with a woman for a year.”
Curiosity drove her. “What happened?”
His expression was unrevealing. “She wanted to get married, I didn’t. She departed in a huff.”
“Did you miss her?”
He had an odd expression on his face. “In a way. Not the way she wanted.”
Sophie knew what he meant. She could imagine all too easily how hurt that unknown woman had been, to realize eventually that he might have liked her, might have enjoyed having a bedmate, but hadn’t loved her at all.
“Are you involved with anyone?” he asked.
“Now? No. It’s…been awhile.” She clamped her mouth shut on the impulse to tell him she wasn’t very good at relationships. She thought it had something to do with her parents’, or maybe with the aftermath of losing her mother. Pretending for so long that she didn’t miss her, wasn’t so lonely that sometimes she thought she couldn’t bear it, had damaged something in her, she had begun to suspect.
He’d lost interest in eating and his head had tipped slightly to one side. “What were you thinking?”
“Nothing important,” she lied. “What about you? Are you seeing someone?”
“No.”
“Have you, since you came to Cape Trouble?” It suddenly occurred to her that she knew several attractive women in the right age range. Obviously, he hadn’t hooked up with Naomi Kendrick, but what about Hannah? And she’d seen that woman who owned the art gallery through the front window. She was dark-haired, voluptuous and beautiful.
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He hesitated. “A few brief things with tourists.”
He’d had sex, he meant. Although she’d never considered a one-night stand, she might have felt differently about it if she’d met Daniel Colburn.
I could have one now, she thought, her whole body tingling as she stared at him. Not a one-night stand – a three week affair.
If that’s what he was hinting at, and she knew he was. Why else would he have asked if she had a boyfriend? His question hadn’t been casual at all.
But if I do…I have to be prepared to leave when my time is up. To have no regrets.
She could make herself pack up and go home. What else could she do? Embarrass herself and him by loitering in Cape Trouble until she lost her job and he had to be blunt with her?
But not have regrets – no. She knew herself too well. What she already felt for this man was too powerful, and she wasn’t made for casual, however much she wished she was. If she didn’t dare let herself truly fall in love and trust that the man she loved wouldn’t die or abandon her in some other way, why couldn’t she enjoy fun but essentially meaningless relationships?
The ache in her chest gave her the answer.
Because I want to be able to trust someone that much.
The awful thing was, she thought Daniel could be that man…except that he hadn’t even hinted at feeling the same way. She would be like one of those tourists. A brief thing.
She couldn’t. That would hurt even worse than saying no now.
“I need to get started working,” she blurted. “You’re fine where you are. I’ll clear my place and set up.”
He looked at her strangely but after a moment nodded. “All right. Let me haul one of those tubs over here.”
A minute later, she’d left the dirty dishes in the sink and opened her laptop on the table. Daniel had placed a plastic tub right beside her chair and even removed the top for her. She reached inside, blindly, for the first smaller box, knowing it would be a miracle if she accomplished anything at all.
And wondering if she really could resist him if he insisted on staying.
CHAPTER NINE
Daniel didn’t know if he could take another evening like the last one. Damn, he wanted that woman.
Over dinner, there’d been a couple of moments when he would swear he saw longing to match his own on her face. But either he’d been imagining things, or she’d decided hell no, because she’d shut him down so decisively, he wasn’t even sure she’d remembered he was still there for the rest of the evening.
But, damn it, he had no choice but to endure as many evenings of frustration as it took. While Sophie ignored him, he’d watched her last night, working like a woman possessed, doing internet searches, scribbling notes to herself, entering items and writing descriptions. He knew how very far she had to go, and how little time she had to finish. She was right; she did have to work more hours than she could get in during the day. Daniel couldn’t imagine that rescheduling the auction was an option, given how quickly it was coming up. Hotels would be booked way out in advance; there’d probably be financial penalties for a cancellation. And he didn’t know how long Billington was willing to wait for his money.
After meeting Sophie at storage first thing this morning to hand over the stuff he’d taken home last night, Daniel had made the impulsive decision to drive over to the old resort. He had seen Benjamin Billington around town a couple of times, but hadn’t met him.
If not for Billington’s willingness to accept substantially less money than he could otherwise have gotten, and to wait for it, too, the auction would never have been conceived. It would be interesting to know why he was being so altruistic. Sure, he’d spent vacations as a boy and young man here with his uncle, but if he had such fond memories, wouldn’t you think he’d have visited more in the years since? From what people said, he hadn’t been in residence long enough in fifteen years or more to so much as have to buy groceries at the local Safeway. So why would he feel so strongly about keeping this stretch of coastline pristine? Yeah, and what kind of relationship had he had with Doreen? Who’d made the original approach, Benjamin or Doreen? Why was he so eager for this deal, he had not only donated items to the auction, he’d repeatedly offered his assistance to Sophie?
Daniel got stuck momentarily on that question. What if the offers from big resort chains were fictitious? Could the land have a problem that made development unlikely to impossible, and no one knew about it?
He grunted. Get real. This was Cape Trouble. Nobody could keep a secret like that.
Moving on to the question that most preoccupied him…
Where had Billington been when the sound of that gunshot boomed out, the foggy morning Michelle Thomsen died? Elias had made it sound as if he’d just appeared from nowhere.
Not that Daniel was ready to take Elias Burton’s word as gospel.
No, there was no justification for starting an investigation into the death of Sophie’s mother, but that didn’t mean he could quit thinking about it. These past few days, he had been shuffling the few facts he’d learned from the inexcusably skimpy police records, adding in what Sophie had told him, notching into place the additions he’d gleaned from their confrontation with Elias Burton and his more recent conversation with Abbot Grissom, the one member of the Cape Trouble P.D. who had been on the force twenty years ago.
“That was a shocker,” he’d agreed, when Daniel asked him about it. “I wasn’t first responder, but I saw the little girl… I mean, Ms. Thomsen. They drove her over to Mrs. Wallace’s house. Nice lady. Died, I don’t know, five years ago? Stroke, I understand.” He focused on Daniel’s face and said hastily, “Sorry. Knowing everybody, the way I do, it’s hard not to—” He stopped. “Uh, sorry.”
Daniel had only nodded, hiding his impatience.
“It sticks with you, when you see a kid looking like that.”
Daniel had seen them, children with eyes so blank you wondered if part of them hadn’t died, too. Losing his own father had hit him hard enough without the additional trauma of finding his body or, worse, seeing the death. Even so, he understood real personally the devastation in those children’s eyes.
“Chief took over the investigation right away.” Grissom unwrapped a stick of gum without seeming to notice what he was doing. “I don’t think Mr. Thomsen was very satisfied, but he gave up and went away.”
“He insisted his wife wasn’t depressed.”
Grissom popped the gum in, gave it a couple of chomps and shifted it to his cheek. He’d quit smoking a couple of months back, and still reached for a stick of gum when what he really wanted was a cigarette.
“He went on and on about that necklace she always wore, too, even though he claimed it wasn’t that valuable. Wanted to know where it was. Chief didn’t see what that had to do with anything.”
Daniel made a sound Grissom would be able to interpret. When you investigated a death, everything was relevant. Any fool who watched TV or who had ever read a murder mystery knew killers sometimes took souvenirs. In the chief’s place, Daniel wouldn’t have been satisfied until he found that necklace.
“You remember what it looked like?” he asked.
His officer blinked at him in surprise. “The necklace? Well, I must have heard, but I can’t say I do remember. Why do you want to know?”
Daniel shook his head. “Just curious.”
“It all happened during tourist season, you know, which made the chief antsy. People were real nervous until he made it known that the poor woman had killed herself. Then, well, there were a lot of people sneaking over there trying to find the exact spot and taking pictures, until old man Billington got out a shotgun and threatened a bunch of them. Ghouls, he called them.”
Damn. Daniel hoped Sophie had never heard this appendage to the tragedy of her mother’s death.
“The chief never considered bringing in an investigator from the county or state?”
Grissom snorted. “Wouldn’t have crossed his mind. Far a
s I know, he never did anything like that. Didn’t think he needed help.”
One of those people who snapped pictures of the place a woman had blown her brains out might have been the killer revisiting the scene of his triumph. That happened. It was also conceivable that some ghoul – and yeah, that was the right word – had spotted a glint of something shiny in the sand and found Michelle Thomsen’s necklace, keeping it as a souvenir for some of the same, sick reasons a murderer might.
His thoughts had carried him all the way to the old Misty Beach resort. This time Daniel parked right in front of the lodge. Like the cabins, it was built of logs. The porch steps were raw wood, meaning they’d just been replaced. However brief their stay was to be, Benjamin probably hadn’t liked the idea of his wife crashing through a rotting step.
No doorbell beside the massive door. Daniel knocked hard and waited long enough that he was trying to decide whether he ought to just try the door when it opened. It was Billington himself who appeared, looking surprised to see Daniel. Dark-haired and beefy, he had a shadowy jaw even though he’d likely just shaved, and a widow’s peak punctuating his forehead.
“Aren’t you the police chief?”
“Yes, sir. Daniel Colburn.” He held out a hand.
Billington shook, taking it for granted Daniel knew who he was. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m investigating Ms. Stedmann’s death and had a few questions for you.”
The guy shook his head. “Awful thing. I don’t know what I can tell you, but I’m happy to try. Do you mind if we sit out on the porch? The wife has a migraine and is lying down.”
“No problem.”
The aging Adirondack chairs out here proved to be solid enough. The view from the porch was indeed fine. There wasn’t a soul on the beach that Daniel could see. The only vehicle in sight was the Dodge Durango he’d seen the Billingtons drive.
Benjamin talked willingly about Doreen, who he said had approached him with her proposal right after his uncle’s funeral. “I guess she knew Uncle Harlow had been turning down offers for this place for years. Said over his dead body. I admitted I planned to sell. What else was I supposed to do? I had some good times here, but I own a business in Beaverton and don’t have any desire to live here. If it were just a weekend home, something like that, we might have thought about keeping it, but fifty acres? And all those old cabins that are going to fall down on some stupid kid if they don’t get dismantled?” He shook his head. “Can’t deny the money will be nice. On the other hand, I’m doing all right for myself, and it sits better with me to make good money and still know I’m doing what Uncle Harlow would have wanted than it would to make better money and imagine him rolling over in his grave.” He chuckled.
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