“That sounds like a good plan,” he said, sinking onto the visitor’s chair beside the bed. “Meanwhile, I have so-so news, good news, and great news. How do you want it?”
“I already know about Dooley,” Sandy sighed. “Well, he did keep saying that Mr. Vanish was going to kill him. What about Sergeant Michaels?”
“That’s the good news. He’s in Critical Care right now, but the doctors are optimistic that he’ll make a complete recovery. He’ll retire with a full pension and a citation for bravery, I expect.”
“Going out with a bang,” agreed Sandy, recalling Michaels’s earlier remark.
“And you’ll be happy to know that Mr. Vanish was transferred out of here last night, to a prison hospital. Security found the blue vase and handed it over to the Bomb Squad, who found enough plastic explosive in the bottom of it to reduce your room and possibly the two adjoining rooms to smoking rubble. Obviously, Vanish intended to detonate it once he’d killed Dooley and gotten clear.”
Her eyes widened with horror.
“But the best news is that we made the final arrest in the Parmentier case last night—the person who hired Mr. Vanish.”
Sandy frowned, remembering what he had told her in the elevator. “It was a woman. He said that she had paid him for both hits.”
“That’s right. Your statement was what tipped us off—and the ledger page Blass left you, which proved that somebody high up in Unity Sportswear had been arranging for ‘accidents’ to befall the company’s competitors. Last night, Detective Harding and I went out to the Vermeyer place and arrested Mrs. Vermeyer for nine counts of conspiracy to commit murder.
“My unofficial guess is that Nick Vermeyer hadn’t the slightest inkling what his wife was doing, until Vanish turned up in disguise at the victory party. She told us the real Parmentier had been there, and bullied her husband into backing her up. Then you came poking around nine months later and Nick started coming unglued. And Blass, who had probably taken that ledger page with him as insurance when he left the Vermeyers’ employ, eventually realized that having it made him even more of a target. So he passed it off onto you. But he was too late. She had already hired Mr. Vanish again to eliminate Blass and Nick, who had suddenly become a liability.”
Sandy couldn’t repress a shudder. “Dio! What a coldblooded woman!”
“She and Joe were quite a pair, all right—by my very unofficial and completely off-the-record reckoning, of course,” he warned her severely. “Not a word do you repeat until after the trial.”
“Yes sir, Sergeant Gaine!”
“Anyway,” he said, casually moving from the chair to the edge of the bed, “before I buried myself in paperwork, I thought I’d come around and find out how you felt about going to a movie with me this weekend. You’re still being discharged tomorrow, aren’t you?”
It took a moment for his words to register. “You’re asking me for a date?” she said hopefully.
The gray eyes were soft as mist. “I’m asking for a date, yes. And would you do me a favor, Alessandra? I do have a first name. Now that the Parmentier case is wrapped up, would you please call me Ted?”
“All right, Ted,” she said, smiling. “I guess I have to get used to the new me and you.”
“Is that all right to the movie, as well?”
“Convince me.”
Chuckling, he gathered her up carefully in his arms and began feathering little kisses across her neck. “I’ll pick something light and funny, I promise. No police thrillers. If movies work out, we’ll progress to long walks in the park, a moonlight picnic on Center Island…”
His warm breath on the side of her neck was doing indescribable things to her.
“…you can take me to dinner at your mother’s place…”
Sandy giggled. “Mama will be ecstatic.”
Now Ted was nibbling her earlobe, and tiny hot explosions of pleasure were going off deep inside her.
“…and I’ll take you to meet my family. We’ll get engaged…”
“Whoa!” she gasped. “Not so fast!”
Obediently, he stopped nibbling, and with a gentle finger smoothed a stray bit of hair away from her cheek.
Sandy turned and faced him. “Ted, I do have incredible feelings for you. And I want to take the time to explore them and enjoy them. So can we please just take things one step at a time?”
He smiled, a slow, warm, loving smile. “Honey, I’m an investigator. We always take things one step at a time.” And he leaned forward and kissed her, sending delicious vibrations right down to her toes and leaving no doubt in Sandy’s mind that Sergeant Gaine was a very thorough fellow, indeed.
About the Author
Born and raised in Toronto, Canada, Arlene F. Marks found her muse at the age of six, and she’s been writing and sharing her stories ever since. Between stints as a high school English teacher, she has worked as a first reader for Harlequin Books, done developmental editing for Harlequin’s Mystique line of romantic suspense novels, and seen her own work published in a broad variety of genres over the years.
Since officially retiring from the classroom in 2012, Arlene has been writing full-time. Most recently, she is the author of From First Word to Last: The Craft of Writing Popular Fiction (Legacy Books Press, 2013) and the science fantasy novel The Accidental God (Sun Dragon Press, 2014), as well as a series of literacy teaching manuals for the high school classroom (Literacy: Made for All, Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). A lifelong fan of mystery and speculative fiction, she plans to continue combining them with romance in all her future novels.
Arlene lives with her husband on the shore of Nottawasaga Bay and welcomes visitors to her web site, www.thewritersnest.ca. You can contact her via email at: [email protected]
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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
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No Pain, No Gaine
Copyright © 2015 by Edwina Franklin
ISBN:
978-1-61922-912-9
Edited by Amy Sherwood
Cover by Angela Waters
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Original Publication by Harlequin: 1990
First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: February 2015
www.samhainpublishing.com
No Pain, No Gaine Page 22
