Amanda Stevens Bestseller Collection: Stranger In Paradise/A Baby's Cry

by Amanda Stevens

  With her track record, she was definitely better off keeping her distance. At least as much as their new partnership would allow.

  Partners. Emily couldn’t help admiring the way the word sounded, and all that it entailed. Respect. Sharing. Equal in every way.

  She liked that. Liked it very much.

  She said to Matthew, “I don’t want to back out now. We’ve only just started.”

  “It could get dangerous, Emily.”

  “Do you trust me to be your partner, Matthew?”

  “Implicitly.” He smiled, but there was a hint of darkness in his eyes. A faint suggestion of regret.

  Emily chose to ignore it. She took a deep breath and reached for her cup. “Let’s get on with it, then.”

  “SO WHERE EXACTLY did you read about the Avengers? According to Miss Rosabel, everyone around here was afraid to utter a word about them.”

  It was half an hour later, and they were still sitting at the kitchen table, the remains of their evening meal littering the surface as they rehashed everything they knew about the fifteen-year-old murder. The microwave dinged, and Emily got up to remove the leftover cinnamon rolls they were having for dessert after hastily prepared ham sandwiches.

  Matthew hesitated. “I don’t remember exactly where.”

  Emily sat down at the table. She stared at him reproachfully, sensing his evasiveness.

  “Emily,” he said softly. “Does it matter how I know? I ran across a reference to them somewhere, and I took the chance that Miss Rosabel might know more about them.”

  “And she did.”

  “And she did.”

  “How lucky for you,” Emily said sardonically.

  “How lucky for you that you have such a clever partner.” He grinned and helped himself to a cinnamon roll.

  “Yeah, right.” Emily had the feeling that luck had very little to do with it. She also had the feeling that they weren’t exactly equal partners. Not yet, anyway. Matthew was still a man with secrets. Emily wondered if he would ever feel he could share them with her. Or, for that matter, if she even wanted him to.

  I’ve done some terrible things, Emily.

  Her appetite suddenly gone, Emily pushed her plate away. “Tell you what,” she said. “Why don’t we make a list of our suspects and jot down everything we know about them?”

  “I’ve never been big on lists,” Matthew said. “But why not? You write and I’ll eat.”

  “What a deal.” Emily rose and searched for paper and pencil in her catchall drawer. She sat down at the table again and stared at the blank sheet. “Who’s first?”

  “Wade Drury, of course.”

  Emily looked up in surprise. “But Miss Rosabel said she didn’t think Wade was guilty.”

  “That’s only her opinion,” Matthew reminded her.

  “True. All right, Wade Drury, then. What do we know about him?”

  “He was a stranger,” Matthew supplied. “No one in town knew anything about him.”

  Except that he had gray eyes and rode a motorcycle, Emily thought, but she said instead, “And he was in love with Jenny Wilcox.”

  “Again, according to Miss Rosabel.”

  “It seems we’re hinging a lot of our leads on her, doesn’t it?” Emily said with a frown. “I think I should go talk to Nella again.”

  “All right, but meanwhile, why don’t you put Nella down as suspect number two?” Matthew finished his roll and pushed away his plate.

  “Nella?” Emily stared at him in astonishment. “You don’t honestly think she had anything to do with Jenny’s death?”

  “If she was in love with Wade, and Wade was in love with Jenny…”

  “I know, but she’s—”

  “A woman?” Matthew arched an amused brow. “You don’t think a woman is capable of murder?”

  “Well, yes, I guess so, but Nella is so…fragile. I can’t imagine her hurting a fly.”

  “Can you imagine her involved with a married man when she was only a teenager?”

  “Touché,” Emily said. She wrote Nella’s name down, then scribbled a few pertinent facts beside it. “Suspect number three has to be Tony Vincent. Although, for my money, I think he should be suspect number one.”

  “What do you know about Vincent?” Matthew asked, getting up to pour himself another cup of coffee. He leaned against the counter and crossed his feet as he regarded Emily from across the room.

  “Well,” Emily said, “he was a friend of my brother’s back in high school and college. He was a major football jock, and from what I remember, half the girls in town were in love with him.”

  “So he wasn’t used to getting rejected by women.”

  “None of them were. That whole group—Tony, Stuart, Trey—all of them had their pick of girls. Of course, I was only a kid then. But I do remember how Tony always drove around town in this really cool Mustang convertible, and how he always had at least one girl with him. Come to think of it, though, I don’t know how he was able to afford a car like that. His family was dirt-poor. He went to college on a full football scholarship.”

  “Schools have been known to pay for play. What did he do after college?” Matthew asked, sipping his coffee.

  “He was drafted by a pro team, but that didn’t last long. He never quite measured up to the big boys, and rumor had it his drinking eventually got the better of him. Last I heard, he owns a garage here in town. Works on cars for a living. That’s what his dad used to do, too.”

  “Maybe we need to pay Mr. Vincent a little visit,” Matthew said, setting down his cup and strolling back over to the table. He stood behind Emily, reading over her shoulder. “Better put Cora Mae Hicks on that list.”

  Emily gaped up at him. “But she’s a—”

  “Woman?”

  “Not only that, she’s got to be sixty if she’s a day.”

  “Which would have made her around forty-five at the time of the murder. And from what I saw today, she’s still got plenty of spunk left in her. Not to mention anger.”

  “You met Cora Mae today?”

  Matthew gave a sober little laugh. He rested his hands on the back of Emily’s chair, making her acutely conscious of his presence. “Oh, yeah. Thank God it was daylight. I don’t think I’d want to meet up with her after dark.”

  “She is pretty scary,” Emily conceded. “All of us kids used to avoid her house like the plague on Halloween. Chucky Freed swore she put a razor blade in an apple she gave him once. Of course, that was after he heard of a similar incident on ‘60 Minutes.’“

  “Were you aware she regards you as an enemy?” Matthew asked.

  Emily nodded. “Because of the name thing. The Other Side of Paradise Inn. I probably shouldn’t have done that, but it seemed so perfect.”

  “You could have named the place Heartbreak Hotel and it wouldn’t have mattered. The fact that you opened a bed-and-breakfast in Paradise at all is reason enough for her to hate you. I got the definite impression that Cora Mae takes a very dim view of competition.”

  “That’s what Miss Rosabel said the first time Mike Durbin and I went to talk to her,” Emily admitted. “In fact, she went so far as to say she wouldn’t put it past Cora Mae to have murdered Jenny herself, just to run Miss Rosabel out of business.”

  “Well, there you are—suspect number four.” Matthew straightened and moved away.

  Emily tried not to notice. Tried not to think about how very much she liked having him so near, or about the way he’d held her earlier, out on the mountain, when she was so scared. She tried not to think about how much she’d wanted him to kiss her. How much she still wanted him to.

  She gave a nervous little laugh. “I’m running out of room.”

  “So start a new page.” Matthew was standing by the sink, staring out the window. Emily had the feeling that another dark mood was descending over him. Amazing how already she was beginning to interpret his temperament.

  She tried to lighten his mood again by saying, “At this rate, we
could have a book in the making. And we haven’t even started on the Avengers yet.”

  “No,” he said grimly, “we haven’t even started on the Avengers.” He turned away from the sink, and the look in his eyes made Emily’s breath rush out of her.

  For one split second, she had a glimpse—just a hint—of the terrible things he had done. Then the shutters came down, and his expression once again became inscrutable. “I think we’ve done enough for one day,” he said. “I’m beat. What do you say we call it a night?”

  Emily felt too keyed up to sleep, but she shrugged, gathered up her paper and pencil and said, “Sure, why not? Tomorrow’s a new day, right?”

  MATTHEW DREAMED about Jenny that night. He saw her so clearly, the way she’d looked the last time he saw her, with her crystal-blue eyes, her shimmering blond hair and her radiant smile. A smile like sunshine after a rainstorm.

  When Matthew awakened, he tried to hold on to the image, even considered for a moment trying to force himself back to sleep. But if he closed his eyes now, he knew the nightmares would come. Jenny’s fragile image would be replaced by the screams. The blood. The horrible guilt.

  No, he wouldn’t go back to sleep. Not now.

  Matthew got up and slipped on his jeans. He crossed the room to the window and stood staring out at the darkened streets of Paradise. He thought about Emily Townsend.

  Was she asleep? he wondered. He pictured the way she would look, her dark hair against a white pillow, her sweet face even more peaceful and serene in repose. Something stirred inside Matthew, and he tried to block the image of Emily, but he couldn’t. Not after tonight.

  Out there on the mountain, he’d known the exact moment when her fear turned to desire. Her soft brown eyes had deepened soulfully and her lips—those luscious, perfect lips—had parted ever so slightly. And in that instant, a powerful longing had swept through Matthew. A need so great it had taken every ounce of his strength, every shred of whatever decency remained within him, not to haul her up against him and kiss that sexy, innocent mouth of hers until neither of them could think straight.

  But that would have been a mistake, Matthew thought. A terrible, tragic mistake that he’d made once before. There had been another woman who had looked at him the way Emily Townsend had looked at him tonight. Desire mingling with caution. Trust warring with fear. Matthew had wanted that woman, too, so much so that he’d let his emotions ruin his judgment, and the consequences had been disastrous.

  Matthew wouldn’t make that same mistake with Emily. He wouldn’t let her fall in love with him.

  Because every woman who had ever loved him had ended up dead.

  EMILY AWOKE with a start. She’d been dreaming about a loud noise, like shattering glass, but as she lay there in the darkness, she heard another sound, muffled and distant, like footsteps running down the street. She sprang upright, realizing that the shattering noise had been just as real as the footsteps.

  Her first thought was that Matthew was up and had perhaps dropped a glass. But he wouldn’t have been running outside, would he?

  There was something distinctly sinister about footsteps running away in the night, and as Emily sat there in bed, huddled beneath her covers, she began to tremble with dread.

  Don’t panic, she scolded herself. And don’t let your imagination run away with you.

  After all, she was the owner of the inn, and the welfare of her guests rested upon her shoulders. If anything was amiss at the Other Side of Paradise Inn, she was the one who had to investigate.

  Her heart hammering in her throat, Emily got up and padded across the room, drew back her door and crept through it. Her bedroom was downstairs, at the end of a longish hallway that led directly into the large front living area. As silent as mist, Emily slipped down the darkened corridor, letting the faint moonlight glimmering through the French doors guide her.

  As she emerged from the hallway, the French doors were across the room, directly in front of her. To her right was the foyer, and to her left, the staircase. She took a few steps into the room, and then something—someone—touched her arm.

  Emily screamed and tried to bolt, but the hand tightened around her arm, holding her fast. In the next instant, Emily’s breath rushed out in relief as she recognized Matthew’s towering silhouette in the darkness.

  “Matthew,” she said, her hand flying to her heart. “You scared me half to death.”

  He put a finger to his lips, commanding her silence as he moved around her. “Stay here,” he whispered. “I’m going to have a look around.”

  And it was then, as he moved away from her, that Emily saw the gun in his hand, glinting in the moonlight. She gasped again. “Matthew!” But it was too late. He’d disappeared through the archway into the dining room, and then Emily heard the telltale squeak of the swinging door that led into the kitchen.

  She stood there in the darkness, hugging her arms around herself and shivering. She gazed around the room, her eyes traversing the familiar nooks and crannies that were somehow made foreboding in moonlight.

  Taking a few more steps into the room, she saw at last what had caused the shattering noise. The stained-glass panel from the front door lay in glistening jewel-tone fragments on the herringbone-patterned wood floor. Emily gasped in outrage. That door had cost her a small fortune to have restored.

  She hurried across the room, now oblivious of the lurking shadows. Barely suppressing her tears, Emily dropped to the floor and began picking up the pieces.

  After a few moments, Matthew came back into the room. His shadow fell across the floor in front of her, and Emily looked up. “Did you see anything?”

  He shook his head, walked over to turn on the light, then came back to kneel beside her. Emily noticed that he’d put the gun away. “Whoever did this is long gone by now. I didn’t find so much as a footprint.”

  Emily stared at him for a moment, trying to decipher his expression. Finally she said, “This may seem a strange question, considering what just happened, but…do you have a permit for that gun?”

  “Yes. It’s nothing for you to be concerned about.”

  “But it is. This is my home, Matthew. I don’t like guns being brought in here without my knowledge.” Her challenging gaze met his.

  “I don’t like guns, either,” he said softly. “But considering everything that’s going on around here, I don’t think we can be too careful.”

  “But…did you bring it with you when you came here, or did you go out and buy it?” Somehow the distinction was important to Emily, though she couldn’t have said why.

  “I brought it with me. It’s just for protection, because I’m on the road a lot. But if it makes you feel better, I’ll get rid of it. Okay?”

  She nodded, not sure anything would make her feel better after tonight. Gazing down at the glistening fragments of colored glass scattered on the floor, she said miserably, “Why would someone do this? I don’t even know if I have enough money to have the glass repaired again. That door is antique. It’s irreplaceable.”

  Leaning over, Matthew retrieved a rock the size of a baseball from a corner of the foyer. In her distress over the door, Emily hadn’t even noticed it. Something white was fastened to the stone, a piece of paper, and Matthew carefully removed it.

  “What does it say?” Emily demanded.

  Wordlessly, Matthew handed her the note. The words—cut from magazines and newspapers—jumped out at her. Let the past rest in peace. Or else you won’t.

  As Emily gripped the paper, a smear of blood appeared on the side, and she lifted her hand, palm up, and peered at her finger. She’d nicked herself on one of the stained-glass fragments, and the streak of blood on the note made it seem more threatening somehow. More portentous.

  Matthew removed the note from her fingers and laid the paper aside. He held her hand in his. “Here. What have you done to yourself?”

  The blood trickled down Emily’s finger. She felt weak, but whether from the cut or the note, or even Matthe
w’s nearness, she wasn’t quite sure. She said in a tremulous voice, “It’s just a nick.”

  “Let’s get it cleaned up and make sure.” Matthew stood and, still holding her hand in his, pulled her up. He led her down the hallway to the bathroom and flipped on the light. Emily, distressed and more than a little confused from all that had happened, sat down on the edge of the bathtub and numbly directed Matthew to the first-aid kit.

  “I guess we’ve had our second warning,” she said. “Do you suppose whoever loosened the boulder earlier threw that rock through my door?”

  “I’d say that’s a pretty good bet.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “Keep shaking things up until something breaks loose,” Matthew said. “And in the meantime, we keep up our own guard.”

  Emily thought about his gun. “You certainly seem to take all this in stride,” she said, her tone suspicious.

  Matthew shrugged as he closed the medicine cabinet and turned toward her. “I’ve traveled around a lot. I’ve learned it pays to be careful.”

  He knelt in front of her and took her hand. Emily winced as he swabbed away the blood, then applied antiseptic.

  “Ouch!” She tried to jerk her hand away, but he held it fast.

  “Luckily, it’s not deep. You’ll live,” he predicted, glancing up. He smiled, and Emily’s heart fluttered inside her.

  Whether it was from fear or adrenaline or just plain old-fashioned hormones, she didn’t know exactly, but suddenly a deep shiver ran through her as she became acutely aware of the fact that she was sitting before Matthew Steele, clad only in a pair of white satin pajamas, and he was wearing nothing but a pair of jeans.

  Her gaze unwillingly dropped, taking in the broadness of his shoulders, the deepness of his chest, the hardness of his muscles. And something stilled inside her. A kind of breathless waiting came over her. In spite of herself, Emily felt her hand tremble in his, giving away her emotions.

  His gaze slowly lifted to meet hers, and she could tell by the dark, knowing look in his eyes that he was feeling the attraction, too. Feeling it as strongly as she. As Emily watched helplessly, he brought her hand up to brush his lips across her wounded finger. His tongue flicked across her palm, and Emily drew a sharp breath.