The Truth About Comfort Cove

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  He thought she was gorgeous and sexy? He’d had thoughts? She was a cop. A detective with a mission. Sandy’s daughter. She wasn’t free. As long as her mother was alive she wouldn’t be free… .

  “You have nothing to worry about with me, Lucy. I swear to you. I’m in complete control here. I won’t ever act inappropriately where you’re concerned.”

  “What makes you think I’m worried?”

  “That look in your eyes.”

  “I was thinking about the fact that even if I wanted to start

  something with someone, I can’t because my first obligation is to my mother. Not that I want to. I’d never be good at a relationship. I can’t keep my mind off the job long enough to remember to pick up my own laundry. Can you imagine how I’d be taking care of someone else?”

  “You take care of Sandy. And always have.”

  He had her there. Still…

  “You said you wouldn’t ever act inappropriately.” “That’s right. I can’t deny having…urges. But I assure you

  that I can control them. Always.” Allie was dead. The two dimensions in her life were feeling Allie’s void. And the man standing two feet from her brought a third dimension that she needed. Just to get her over the hump.

  “What if I wanted you to behave inappropriately?” He didn’t move noticeably. But the change in him was obvious to her. “Do you?”

  “I think that…if we’d just act on this…thing…satisfy the curiosity, solve the mystery, then we could be done with it and move on.”

  He took a step forward, watching her intently. “This… thing… Mind elaborating?”

  “You have thoughts. So do I. I’m not a man, but I’m human. I have feelings…thoughts…too.”

  His sudden ear-to-ear grin, surprised her. “I turn you on.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, lady, you have no idea how glad I am to hear you say that.” He pulled her up out of her chair.

  “You are?”

  “I’ve been sitting here wondering how in the hell I was going to stand the sweet torture of having you here for the next two days without you figuring out that I was…”

  “Hard?”

  “Yeah. You noticed?”

  She smiled and licked her lips because they were dry and it occurred to her that she’d just subliminally invited him to have his way with her.

  “I’m a good cop. Trained to notice things. Changes,” she said. Could she help it that his fly was in her line of vision now and then?

  He moved closer. He really was going to kiss her. And Lucy put a hand up against his chest.

  “I’m using you, Ramsey.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s just…it’s like Amber said, this is my crossroads. I have to get through it. And I need to feel something good to do that.”

  Pulling her closer to him, he said, “You have no idea how glad I am that I’m able to bring you that good feeling.” He pressed his groin against her, lightly. And it made her want to spread her legs right then and there.

  “I’m not real experienced,” she warned. “There’s only ever been one other guy.”

  “Then here’s a pointer for you for the future—a lack of experience is a turn-on. You say it like it’s a bad thing.”

  He leaned in, his lips so near she could see variances in their color. And she wanted to feel them on hers, against her, so badly she almost wept. She’d cried all her tears.

  And they still felt so close.

  With her hand against his chest again, she said, “And we aren’t…we’re just satisfying curiosity, getting the inevitable over and done with, right?”

  “I’m not going to expect you to marry me in the morning,” he said, his smile warm. And sexy, too.

  “Okay, then. Can you please kiss me and shut me up?”

  He did. And he did.

  And Lucy didn’t feel like herself at all after that.

  H e’d been married before. He knew what it was like to hold a woman in his arms and feel the need to protect her. He’d had his share of one-night stands and understood about pleasure for pleasure’s sake. He liked having sex and considered himself good at it, at being an unselfish lover.

  With Lucy he was a freshman. A virgin stumbling over his first threshold. He’d never held a woman and forgotten everything but the need to bring her every bit of joy possible.

  He’d never had sex without thought before.

  One minute he was standing in his dining room, smiling at a beautiful woman he was about to make love with, and the next minute he was lying naked with her on top of his unmade bed, completely spent and not sure how he’d gotten there.

  He remembered bits and pieces. That first kiss in the dining room. He didn’t remember the second. He remembered stumbling down the hall with her. He’d taken off her suit jacket. He couldn’t remember who’d taken off his. Or where it had ended up.

  If he didn’t know better, he’d think she drugged him. But he’d been the one to prepare breakfast. And she’d been nowhere near his kitchen beforehand.

  “I’ve heard it said that women like to talk afterward, but men don’t.”

  “You know better than to stereotype, Detective.” His voice sounded unfamiliar. Husky.

  “Do you mind if we talk, then?” She was half lying on top of him, her head nestled into the curve of his neck. He held on to her, not ready to let go.

  “No, I don’t mind.” He’d prefer conversation to the mental byplay he’d been engaging in.

  “You were married before, right?”

  Not the conversation he’d been expecting. “Yes.”

  “What happened?”

  “That’s not something I can sum up in a few words.”

  “Try.”

  He wasn’t sure what to say. And he didn’t want to move her. He didn’t want to get up.

  “It’s just that…you know why I am how I am. My mom and Allie and all. The way I grew up. Why the work I do is so important that I put it first in my life. I want to understand you, too.”

  His marriage didn’t have anything to do with who he was or why he did what he did. That was for sure.

  “My marriage ended because I was married to the job. She got cold.”

  “So whatever drives you happened before that.”

  He just figured out another reason he’d never slept with a cop before. Or had more than a professional friendship with one.

  But it was Lucy in his arms. And he liked having her there.

  “I do what I do because I think I’m good at it and because I think I make a difference.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  He was a good cop. But she was probably the better interrogator of the two of them. She knew when to push. And when to wait.

  And he knew her well enough to know that once she had questions, she didn’t stop looking for the answers until she had them. All of them.

  He didn’t want her looking.

  “I’m married to my job because I won’t ever marry again. I won’t have a family.”

  “Why not?” He couldn’t see her face, for which he was thankful, not that his view of the ceiling was helping matters much, but the tone of her voice told him that she was concerned. For him.

  “Just as I’m good at my job, I’m not good at the family thing. I stick to what I’m good at and that way no one gets hurt.”

  “Because one woman wasn’t happy being married to a cop?”

  “Marsha has nothing to do with it.”

  “Then who does?”

  He started to push her away, intending to get up. Lucy rolled on top of him, resting her chin in her hands on his chest, and stared up at him.

  “I care, Ramsey.”

  “I didn’t ask you to care.”

  Her expression fell, but she was a hell of a lot classier about the situation than he’d just been. She was off the bed and dressed before he’d managed to do more than pull on his underwear.

  “I’ll wait for you in the kitchen,” she said. “And you’r
e absolutely right. I apologize. You didn’t ask and I shouldn’t have pushed. And…thank you for satisfying my curiosity. You are a better lover than I’d even imagined. I’m glad I had the experience.”

  It was the nicest kiss-off he’d ever had.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Lucy tried to be angry with Ramsey for being such a guy. She tried not to be hurt at his curt rejection. Failing at both, she went back to work. Until they had their answers, they had to keep looking. There was no such thing as a perfect crime. And bodies did not disappear into thin air.

  She was back at Jack’s phone records when Ramsey walked into the room ten minutes after she’d left his bedroom.

  “I’m sorry I pushed,” she said before he had a chance to get close enough to sit down. “I don’t want any of this…today… to get in the way of what we do best, and do so well together.”

  She didn’t want to lose her friend over a roll in the hay, as incredible as it had been.

  Or over hurt feelings, either.

  When he sat down without saying anything, Lucy feared that it was already too late. She’d already ruined things.

  “I had a sister.”

  He knew that she knew that.

  “Her name was Diane.”

  Lucy closed the folder on Jack Colton. And looked at her hands, clasped together on top of it, giving Ramsey as much space as she could. Then she held her breath.

  “She was two years older than me and the sweetest girl I’ve ever known.” His voice spoke from far away. “Our small village was like a ghost town after the tobacco industry tanked. People bugged out left and right, shops closed, homes were boarded up. Until all that was left were a couple of thousand hearty people and a few stores. What used to be a happy thriving town, where folks called out to one another in the square and you were never short of a smile, turned into a commune of worried faces and petty arguments. Except for my sister. She loved Vienna. She loved the small-town life. She was always helping out, insisting that we’d all bounce back. She was determined to get married and have a hoard of children to instill new life into Vienna.”

  She already knew the ending to this story. She just wasn’t sure how they got to it. Or what Ramsey had to do with it.

  “But not me. I was bored and unhappy and used every excuse I could find to get out of town. Our high school closed and we were bussed to Greer, a neighboring town that had always been twice the size of Vienna and was still growing and thriving, and I started hanging out with all of the kids there, rather than the kids I’d always gone to school with.”

  He paused and Lucy looked up. He had his suit back on— complete with red tie knotted perfectly at his throat. And he was watching her.

  “I’m giving you useless information instead of telling you what you really want to hear about.”

  “I want to hear all of it. It’s your life, Ramsey.”

  “I was a senior in high school when I introduced Diane to a friend of mine, Tom. He’d seen Diane around school and wanted to meet her. I had a crush on his older sister and after they’d been seeing each other for a while, Tom set up a double date. We were going to some parties in the next town. It was spring break, so things could get kind of wild, and my parents made me promise to stay with Diane the entire time.

  “But Tom’s sister wanted to go for a drive in her daddy’s new convertible. She wanted me to take her out to the lake. Diane was having fun at the party we’d stopped in at and told me to go on ahead. She said it was embarrassing to be on a date with your kid brother watching your every move.

  “I left. That was the last time I saw Diane alive.”

  Her breath stuck in her throat, Lucy watched him. She’d been afraid he’d been leading up to something like this.

  “What happened?”

  “Tom gave her some pills. She’d never done drugs before. He had, but apparently didn’t know what he’d gotten hold of. By the time we made it back to the house, they’d both been rushed to the hospital. They died later that night, within an hour of each other.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Yes, it was. And if I’d had any doubts about that, the look in my mother’s eyes when I saw her the next morning dissipated every last one of them. They’d given me explicit orders not to leave my sister. I disobeyed them.”

  “I’m sure your mother doesn’t blame you.”

  “I’m sure she does. With good cause.”

  “Have you talked to her about it?”

  “No. Mom’s in the beginning stages of dementia—though, to my knowledge, there’s been no official diagnosis. I’m sure it’s been brought on by depression.”

  “What happened to Tom’s sister?”

  “I married her.”

  “Marsha was Tom’s sister?”

  “Yeah. We clung to each other that first year or two after Diane and Tom died. She felt as responsible as I did. The party was at the home of a friend of hers. Tom was her younger brother. She was the reason we’d left the house to begin with.”

  “All of which was perfectly normal behavior for a girl and boy your ages.”

  “It was also wrong.”

  “Diane was a big girl, Ramsey. She told you to go. She chose to take the pills.”

  “She had no idea what she was taking.”

  “I understand. It was a horrible, ghastly thing that happened. And I get that you wish you’d done things differently. All I’m saying is that you couldn’t possibly have known what was going to happen. You didn’t do anything that any other boy your age wouldn’t have done. And…well…I’d trust you with my life. Personally or otherwise.”

  She had her answer. She understood why Ramsey spent his life trying to save lives. To protect and serve. He was trying to buy himself back from hell. To earn back his own self-respect.

  His eyes glistened. He didn’t say a word. So she did.

  “You said your folks are still in Vienna. Do you see them often?”

  “No. I went home regularly for a while, but every time I go it sets Mom back and my father is left there alone to deal with her.”

  She reached for his hand, whether it was the right thing to do or not. “I guess we both know how much a woman suffers when she loses a daughter, don’t we?”

  Ramsey gave a short nod.

  And they went back to work.

  T he experiment hadn’t worked. Satisfying his curiosity had not in any way lessened Ramsey’s desire for Lucy. To the contrary. Every time she moved, a hand to pick up a folder, a tilt of her head, his body responded. He hadn’t found distance. He’d become connected to her so that every part of her felt as though it was part of him, too.

  This wasn’t good. It didn’t affect the work, though. As long as she wasn’t moving.

  Ramsey was on his computer, logged in to the Comfort Cove P.D. when he saw a message come through.

  “Hey,” he said. “We got an answer back on one of the numbers in Colton’s phone records. It’s one of those prepaid cells.”

  “Which makes it untraceable. Why would someone be calling him on a number that can’t be traced?”

  “Could be someone who can’t afford a regular cell phone, but it’s curious, isn’t it?” He went back to the phone records to check when the first call came in from the number in question. “He received his first call from that number last Tuesday, at 2:55 p.m.”

  “Right after we were at UC asking about him.”

  His blood was racing in a way that was familiar to him. He was on to something big. The break in the case was coming.

  “Someone we talked to notified Jack.”

  “And that could explain why he was so calm and prepared when you interviewed him last weekend. My money is on the professor,” she said. “That Beck woman.”

  “I was thinking Chester Brown.”

  “Then we go back to both of them.”

  He agreed. “Unfortunately, we’re in Comfort Cove. With a wedding to attend tomorrow.” Maybe she’d suggest that they miss the wedding. Emma
would rather they find Claire than watch her get married. And Ramsey would rather be working than anything else.

  Especially now. He was teetering on the brink of something disastrous, now that he knew Lucy in a personal sense, and the only way to circumvent the inevitable, to protect himself and everyone else, was to bury himself in work.

  “You could try calling the number,” Lucy said, Amelia’s book open in front of her. But her attention was on Ramsey. “See if someone answers.”

  “We risk tipping them off to the fact that we’re on to them if we do that.”

  Colton didn’t yet know that Ramsey had warrants for his personal belongings. He only knew about the financials.

  “So we phone Professor Beck and Chester Brown and tell them we’re doing a follow-up call.”

  She wasn’t letting him off the wedding hook.

  “Wait a minute, Ramsey, look at this.” Lucy slid Amelia’s book over beside his laptop, which he moved to make room so he could see where her finger was pointing.

  “Amelia says she got an extra preemie blanket made for the church’s blanket drive for the neonatal intensive-care unit at Boston General because she’d been woken by Jack’s raised voice,” she said. “She thought she’d heard him say something about a baby. Later she’d asked him about it and he’d said that he’d said maybe. He apologized for waking her up. He’d been talking to someone he worked with who’d been out drinking and wanted to know if Jack would come pick him up and give him a ride home. She made the note because when she heard the word baby and couldn’t sleep for loneliness creeping in, she calmed her heart by making the blanket. She finishes the entry by saying that God always takes care of those who take care of others.”

  He was reading as she was speaking.

  “I’ll bet Jack did say baby, Ramsey.”

  Ramsey was sure of it. Calling the station, he put out an APB on the man. And when he hung up, Lucy was just ending a call, as well.

  “That was Lori Givens,” she said slowly, frowning.

  “From the DNA lab in Cincinnati?”

  “Yeah. She says she found something. It sounds really important.”