ALSO BY ROSALIND JAMES
THE PARADISE, IDAHO, SERIES
Book 1: Carry Me Home
Book 2: Hold Me Close
Book 3: Turn Me Loose
THE ESCAPE TO NEW ZEALAND SERIES
Prequel: Just for You
Book 1: Just This Once
Book 2: Just Good Friends
Book 3: Just for Now
Book 4: Just for Fun
Book 5: Just My Luck
Book 6: Just Not Mine
Book 7: Just Once More
Book 8: Just in Time
Book 9: Just Stop Me
THE NOT QUITE A BILLIONAIRE SERIES
Book 1: Fierce
Book 2: Fractured
Book 3: Found
THE KINCAIDS SERIES
Book 1: Welcome to Paradise
Book 2: Nothing Personal
Book 3: Asking for Trouble
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2017 by Rosalind James
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Montlake Romance, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Montlake Romance are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503940789
ISBN-10: 1503940780
Cover design by Eileen Carey
CONTENTS
START READING
LAST ROUND
LEADING CITIZEN
DOORKNOBS AND BROOMSTICKS
LICENSE AND REGISTRATION
MY CONDOLENCES
SECRETS AND LIES
FAMILY TIME
FACING THE GHOSTS
WELCOME HOME
NEWS OF THE DAY
DISCLOSURES
UNDESERVING
FAMILY PARTY
PAST IMPERFECT
MOONLIGHT ON CEDARS
FACING THE MUSIC
TACKLING THE BEAR
FUTURE PLANS
THAT GUY
CHEAP TASTES
HIGH SCHOOL DREAM
ON MY WAY
VISITORS
DEDUCTIONS
THE GHOST CHASER
COVERING THE BASES
MOVING ON
BACK TO SCHOOL
DISTURBING THE PEACE
DOWN IN FLAMES
FLINGING
COMMIES BURN
DANCING AROUND IT
SANGRIA
THE WILD SIDE
THE MIDDLEMAN
SHAME
THERE AND BACK AGAIN
WITH HER LIFE
IN THE FAMILY
ALL THE WAY AROUND
SURPRISE PACKAGE
PLAYING GAMES
ALL THE WAY DOWN
TESTING THE POSSIBILITIES
NARROWING IT DOWN
UNCOMFORTABLE MOMENTS
FULL TILT
FACING THE MONSTER
LETTING GO
STEP IT UP
THROUGH THE TUNNEL
REAL-DEAL INVESTIGATION
IN LIMBO
NEW POSSIBILITIES
STEPS ONE TO THREE
UP THE GRADE
LOVE HARD
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Take what you want and pay for it, says God.
—Proverb
LAST ROUND
Henry Cavanaugh was winning, because that was what he did. Right up until he didn’t.
He fixed his visitor with the cold blue stare that had proven effective for sixty-seven years now and wasn’t getting any less so. His third most powerful weapon, after his razor-sharp mind and lack of sentiment.
“You going to tell on me?” he asked. “I’m shaking.”
He turned his back on his visitor and headed to the bar that made up one entire wall of the enormous den. Outside, the heat lingered. The sun was setting, but the recently harvested wheat fields of Paradise, Idaho, having baked all day in a late-August heat wave, hadn’t gotten the message yet. Inside the big house on the hill, though, where the town’s wealthiest developer looked down on everybody below, it was cool and comfortable. Henry had a powerful thirst all the same. Getting into it with somebody always did that to him. He opened the little refrigerator, scooped out some ice cubes, and tossed them into a heavy tumbler, then twisted the top off a bottle and splashed a generous measure of Jim Beam over the ice. He didn’t offer his visitor anything. He wasn’t looking for company.
“How exactly do you see that playing out?” he asked, taking that best first swallow. The bourbon burned a path down his throat, as welcome as a young woman in a short dress and a tight spot.
“I’ll mess you up if it gets out,” his visitor said. Desperate, and not hiding it well enough. “I’ll . . . I’ll make sure I do.”
“Really? Because I’d say that I’d be more likely to mess you up.” Henry started to laugh. “Hell, I’d do it just for the entertainment value. Know what? I think I will do it. Thanks for the idea.”
Fear was the best motivator there was. Nothing like a dose of good ol’ terror to get your way. He dropped onto the couch, still laughing, and swung his booted feet up onto the huge reclaimed-wood-and-rebar coffee table the decorator had put in here, like wood from a barn was a hot thing. She’d had lousy taste, but a great ass.
He leaned back against the heavy distressed leather of the oversized couch and tipped the drink up again. The ice clinked, and a cube slipped against its neighbor, slid out, and shot down his windpipe. He coughed spasmodically in surprise, sending a fine spray of bourbon into the air that splattered in amber droplets onto blue jeans and pale wood. He tried to draw air into his lungs, and failed.
Damn ice cube. He was choking.
You were supposed to grab your throat. To signal. He was doing it with one hand, his glass falling onto the couch beside him. The cold liquid soaked his jeans, but he barely noticed as he stabbed a finger toward his Adam’s apple.
Choking. Dammit. Choking, he signaled. His eyes were bulging, his mouth wide, but it wasn’t working. Nothing was coming in. The ice should be melting, but it wasn’t.
His visitor did nothing but stare at him. Idiot.
Henry was canted too far back on the couch to lean forward and cough up the cube. He swung his legs down from the table, but his feet tangled along the way, the high heel of a cowboy boot getting caught in the scroll of ironwork that made up the base.
Stupid bitch of a decorator, he thought as he lunged toward vertical and stood, finally getting his boot untangled. The movement shoved the coffee table forward, rucking up the Navajo rug beneath it. He wobbled, and finally—finally—he was dimly aware of the visitor behind him, putting a hand on his back.
His vision was fading, his hands jerking, but he could tell that wasn’t the right way. You were supposed to grab the person around the middle, under the ribs. Fool.
When the shove came on both shoulder blades, he wasn’t prepared for it. He lurched, tried to catch himself, tripped on the rug, and fell forward.
He saw the black metal at the edge of the coffee table coming toward him. Then his forehead met it, and he didn’t see anything at all.
The visitor stepped back hastily, heart racing, breath audible in the silent room, then scrambled around the table, half expecting Henry to clamber to his feet again.
There’
d been no choice. I think I will do it, Henry had said. Thanks for the idea. He would, too. Just for fun. Henry had about as much mercy as a rattlesnake.
If he came to and remembered who’d been here and hadn’t helped him . . . and then that other thing. The push.
He’d been so out of it, though. Choking, gagging. Would he remember? Or would he think that his visitor had screwed up the Heimlich maneuver?
That was it. An accident. The Heimlich didn’t always work, and Henry was tall and big, hard to grab around the waist. It almost had happened that way, really. It had been a slip. Just a slip.
Everything would blow up if Henry talked. Reputation, home, future, everything.
Unless he was actually dead right now. Impossible to tell without touching him, and that wasn’t happening.
A few anxious seconds, then, mind racing, heart pounding, thinking about how to make sure of it. Suppose Henry had left his car running. The garage was just outside the den. Henry had turned the car on, maybe, had come back inside for a drink and fallen while his house had filled with carbon monoxide.
No. Stupid. Nobody would believe that. Too risky anyway, leaving traces in the car. It was on all the cop shows. Fingerprints. Fibers. And that would be one too many accidents.
Forget it. Just get out before somebody sees you.
Night was falling outside the big house on Arcadia Ridge, and it felt as if curious eyes were peering in through the picture window that was starting to reflect the room: The giant moose head on one wall and the gleaming rows of bottles and mahogany bar opposite it. The huge leather couch and matching recliners, and the big-screen TV.
And the still form lying facedown across the coffee table, a dark patch staining one leg of his jeans where the bourbon had spilled, his bristles of gray hair sticking up aggressively on his lean head, the wrinkles etched into a neck tanned to leather by the years spent squinting at construction sites, shouting at foremen. Shouting at everybody.
Henry wasn’t moving. Was he breathing? It didn’t look like it.
Get out of here.
Fingerprints. The thought came with a hand an inch from the doorknob leading to the garage.
A careful backtrack, touching nothing. A tissue pulled from the box on the end table, then a twist of the doorknob into the garage. Using the tissue on the knob on the other side, because nobody would leave the door to the garage open. Certainly not Henry. Turning in the dark, then, toward the tiny yellow-lit square of the garage door opener. A shuffle through the inky blackness, and the visitor jumped as something fell over and landed with a clatter on the hood of Henry’s truck.
Focus. Calm. A push with the tissue-covered hand against the garage door opener, then another push just as the massive door finished rumbling open, so it reversed direction. Darting fast, before it closed again, between the massive extended-cab truck and Henry’s brand-new Cadillac, their black paintwork gleaming dully in the faint light from outside. Finally, the visitor was ducking underneath the rumbling garage door and walking along the driveway and down the road for a horribly visible three hundred yards to where the car sat tucked in between an RV and a boat. Outside Henry’s neighbor’s house, which had no lights on, because nobody was home.
Henry hadn’t noticed the car on his way home tonight, and nobody else would have, either. Nobody would know.
Coming here tonight had been an impulsive decision. Almost disastrous. Maybe miraculous.
Then there was the drive home through the quiet dusk with hands that trembled stupidly on the wheel.
You didn’t do a single thing wrong. Failing to succeed at rescuing somebody, not calling for help—that wasn’t a crime. Practically a public service, in this case.
And whatever had happened to Henry . . . the son of a bitch deserved it.
LEADING CITIZEN
Jim Lawson was patrolling out by Ithaca, coming back in from the county line. He’d taken a slow, deliberate cruise through the mobile home park, aka Methtown, noting the group of guys sitting outside on a concrete patio despite the late-morning hour. He made some mental notes, returning the hostile stares with a bland gaze. On the way back to Paradise, he pulled over a battered Grand Am with an out-of-state plate for a broken taillight, asked a couple questions of the two young guys in it, ran the plate and registration, and let them go on when they didn’t trip any of his switches. That was about the high point.
Not much going on, not on this sleepy Thursday morning in late August. The students were back in school, and the truckers knew better than to go over the limit.
“I swear, not a thing ever happens in this county,” the department’s new big-city detective, Tony DeMarco, had complained the previous week as the two of them had been working out at the university gym. “I thought I was slowing down. Good for my stress levels, the doc said. Good for my marriage, the wife said. Didn’t realize I’d be watching TV just to see some police action.”
“Seems to me an exciting thing or two has happened here recently.” Jim eased the weights onto the barbell, then shifted around to the bench press. “Spot me, will you?”
“Recently?” DeMarco said. “I guess in Idaho time. It was all over months ago.” He positioned his hands obligingly under the heavy bar as Jim pushed it slowly overhead and paused at the top for an excruciating two seconds, then brought it back down with control. “And it doesn’t exactly require ‘detection’ when some lowlife comes home from the bar and starts smacking his girlfriend around.”
Jim finished his set, then sat up and wiped his head down with a towel. “See, that’s the difference between you and me,” he finally said. “If you were from here, you’d realize that ‘boring’ just means that nobody you know is having an especially rough time right now. Not exactly a bad thing.”
“Not itching to get into that SWAT uniform and make the bad people dead?” DeMarco said. “Hard to believe. No point in a specialty if you never get to use it.”
“Put it that I already bagged my limit,” Jim said. Nine years as an Army Ranger would do that to you. “Plus, maybe I’m lazy, you think of that?”
“Only every day,” DeMarco said. Which was a lie, but made Jim grin. “Get your ass off that bench and give me a shot. My wife likes a good set of pecs.”
“So where’s she looking at those?” Jim asked, and stood up. “You talk too much, Chicago.”
Now he smiled, remembering the conversation, then slowed for the Paradise city limits before heading south on 95 toward Union City. Which was why he was close when the call came through. An injury, possible death, at Cavanaugh’s place. He put on the siren and took off.
The ambulance wasn’t there yet when he arrived, but a young woman was. She was sitting on the fender of a ratty old Corolla, wearing red shorts and a gray T-shirt. Jim didn’t know her. Thirtyish, thin, her brown hair in a ponytail. She stood up, wrapped her arms around herself, and walked in an agitated circle as Jim’s white Explorer rolled up the blacktopped driveway. A surprising level of upset, considering whose house this was. But then, most people weren’t used to coming across dead people, if somebody was dead.
On that thought, Jim grabbed his Smokey hat from the seat beside him and climbed down fast. “Ma’am,” he said. “You put in a call?”
“He’s . . .” She stopped and took a ragged breath. Pretty enough, but no makeup at all, and the ponytail was messy. “Henry. Mr. Cavanaugh. He’s dead. At least, I’m pretty sure he’s dead. He’s not . . .” She swallowed. “Not moving. He looks . . . stiff.”
“Where is he?” Jim headed for the house, and she followed behind.
“Downstairs. Den.”
“What’s your name?”
“Eileen. Eileen Hendricks. I’m the cleaner. That’s all. I just came to clean. I’d done the whole upstairs already.” The pitch of her voice was rising, becoming nearly hysterical. “While he was down there. All the time.”
Jim said, “Come with me, please, ma’am. Show me.”
One of the oversized, ornately carved double
doors was standing open as if Eileen had come flying out of it, which she probably had. Jim went on in with her following behind and took a quick look around the soaring entryway and the two-story-high wall opposite that was lined with river rock interspersed with Henry’s proofs of manliness.
Nothing as insignificant as a deer had been allowed to pollute the trophy wall. A couple of elk, an antelope, a bighorn sheep, a mountain goat. On the floor, facing the door, an enormous black bear reared up on its hind legs, its heavy-clawed paws out in front of it, its mouth stretched wide in a snarl, showing all its teeth. Hell of a welcome mat.
Everything looked neat, nothing out of place. But then, Eileen had been through here already.
“Downstairs,” she said, indicating the wide stairway.
“Don’t touch the banister, please,” Jim said on the way down, although if she already had, it wouldn’t matter much. An open corridor stretched out before them with a few doors leading off it. Only one of them open, at the back of the house. Jim stepped into the den, and there he was.
Henry Cavanaugh, the least popular man in Paradise. Dead as a doornail.
“It was all locked up,” Eileen insisted fifteen minutes later. She was still shaky. Jim had told her to get herself a glass of water, but it was sitting untouched on the blocky marble coffee table.
The two of them were upstairs again, sitting on the living-room couch, under a giant window that looked out onto an endless landscape of rolling hills, an ever-changing scene more picturesque than any painting, all dusty golds and browns now with harvest complete.
The couch was white and pristine, and Jim would have bet that nobody’d sat on it in years. Eileen had vacuumed it already, she’d said, and all the upstairs carpet, too, as well as taking Lemon Pledge to every surface. If there had been evidence up here—not that evidence was going to be needed, if Henry’s had been a natural death—it was gone.
The ambulance had left without Henry, because Jim had sent it away and called in the crime scene team and the doctor. Because of who Henry was. Because the TV hadn’t been on. Because of all sorts of things.
The body was in full-blown rigor mortis, which meant Henry had died the previous night at the earliest. He was always at his office until after five, keeping an eye on his staff to make sure nobody took off early. If he hadn’t been there the day before, Jim would find out soon enough. And it was at least fifty-fifty that he would have turned on the TV as soon as he’d entered his den, even before pouring himself a drink and sitting down. The baseball season was winding up, and Henry was the kind of guy who, when he went into a bar, made the bartender turn on the TV right away even if nobody else wanted to watch.
Take Me Back (Paradise, Idaho Book 4) Page 1
