Change of Heart

by Jenna Bennett

  After another minute, the phone signaled another message. Had to go somewhere.

  No kidding. I already knew that. The question was— Where?

  I hit send, and waited.

  And waited some more.

  Gotta go, came back. Love U.

  Sure.

  I didn’t bother to respond, just tucked the phone away in the bag, while I muttered under my breath about the fact that he wouldn’t tell me where he was or what he was doing.

  After a moment, however, I changed my mind and pulled the phone out again. I’d spent too much time worried about Rafe’s safety, and that was before we got to the point in our relationship where we were now. I didn’t want to go backwards. And besides, he’d told me he loved me. So chances were he wasn’t in bed with someone else.

  Love U 2, I told him. Stay safe.

  This way, at least he knew. If something bad was going on, I wanted the last thing I said to him, the last thing he heard—or read—from me to be that I loved him.

  Chapter Two

  I didn’t hear anything more after that, and I didn’t expect to. He was doing something, something he didn’t want to talk about, and he’d avoid me for however long it took.

  Needless to say, I was worried.

  Worried enough that, about nine thirty, I lowered Brittany’s copy of Cosmopolitan to the desktop and pulled the phone back out again.

  What you need to understand is that Rafe spent ten years deep undercover, surrounded by the dregs of humanity; dregs who might, at any moment, figure out that he wasn’t one of them and act accordingly. I have it on good authority—his own words—that he used to wake up in the morning never sure whether he’d survive the day. He didn’t plan any kind of future because he never knew when someone might pull out a gun and shoot him.

  Since August, I’ve spent considerable time worrying about that, and about him. At first, I didn’t even know what he was doing; I just knew that he was dealing with unsavory people, people who might hurt him. I thought he was a criminal, and that he was in imminent danger of arrest by the police. Then I realized he was one of the good guys, and that made things even worse, because the bad guys have no qualms about killing good guys who try to catch them. I’d spent many a sleepless night wondering if I’d ever see him again. Once I thought he’d died, and the eight hours until I realized he was still alive, rank as some of the worst of my life. The fact that something might be going on now—that somehow, he might have gotten sucked back into the world of crime and undercover work—was enough to make me break out in a cold sweat.

  So I called someone else, someone who might know if something like that was going on.

  The phone rang a couple of times and then was answered. “Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, Homicide. Tamara Grimaldi speaking.”

  “Detective,” I said, while my mind registered the fact that she sounded both harried and preoccupied.

  “Ms. Martin.”

  “Don’t you think you should start calling me Savannah? You don’t call my brother Mr. Martin, do you?”

  She didn’t answer.

  The detective and my brother Dix have developed some form of relationship over the past few months, since my sister-in-law was murdered back in November. Sheila and Dix lived in Sweetwater—Dix still does—but it happened in Nashville, so Tamara Grimaldi was assigned the case. Or claimed the case, I think, when she realized the victim was a Martin from Sweetwater. She told me she assumed it was a distant cousin of mine, certainly not my brother’s wife, but she ended up working the case and solving the murder, with a little help from yours truly. And during the process, she and Dix bonded, in part over my relationship with Rafe, I think. This was around the same time Rafe’s son David went missing, and I had my miscarriage and lost his baby. Rafe’s, not David’s.

  I don’t really know what sort of relationship they have now—Dix and Tamara, not Rafe and David—but I do know she gave his daughters Police Barbies for Christmas. My mother was horrified, of course, but Abigail and Hannah were thrilled. And I do believe they talk regularly, but of course it’s too soon for Dix to get involved with anyone again. He’s only been a widower for a few months.

  At any rate, they talk. And I’m pretty sure she calls him Dix, not Mr. Martin. And the detective and I have known each other a lot longer than she and Dix have, so I did think it was about time she started calling me Savannah.

  She didn’t. She also didn’t say anything about Dix. Instead, she said, “What can I do for you?”

  There was no sense in beating around the bush, so I just blurted it out. “I wondered if you might know where Rafe is.”

  There was a beat, then— “No?”

  “There’s nothing going on that you know about?”

  The detective hesitated. “Not on our end. As far as the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department is concerned, he’s a civilian. And as far as I know, he hasn’t broken any laws lately.”

  As far as I knew he hadn’t, either.

  “He left before six this morning. Didn’t kiss me goodbye. Did his best to sneak out quietly.”

  “I imagine his best is pretty good?” the detective said dryly.

  “I only woke up because one of the neighbors was in the hallway outside when he opened the door, and Mr. Sorenson said good morning. If it hadn’t been for that, I don’t think I would have realized he was leaving.”

  Grimaldi didn’t answer, and I added, “The phone didn’t ring, so no one called him this morning. Or texted. He must have known yesterday that he was going out. But he didn’t tell me about it. I’m worried.”

  The detective was quiet. I could hear sounds in the background: faint voices talking, a buzz that might be cars going by in the distance.

  “I’m sorry,” I said belatedly, “is this a bad time?”

  “Not at all,” the detective shot back. “The corpse isn’t going anywhere. Not until I’m done with it.”

  Gah. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” Grimaldi said. “Talking to you gives me something more pleasant to think about for a few minutes.”

  Sure.

  “It’s no one I know this time, I hope?” Entirely too many people I knew had died recently. My colleague Brenda Puckett, her assistant Clarice, my friend Lila Vaughn, Mrs. Jenkins’s nurse Marquita, my sister-in-law...

  “I don’t think so,” Grimaldi said. “Does the name Brian Armstrong ring any bells?”

  It didn’t, I was happy to realize. It was quite a relief to be able to say so, too. “What happened to him?”

  “He was stabbed,” Grimaldi said. “Last night sometime. And dumped in Shelby Park.”

  Shelby Park? “That’s just up the street from here. He wasn’t gay, was he?”

  Grimaldi was silent for a second. “Why?” she asked eventually, her voice politely curious.

  “No reason.” My mind had just made a quick and dirty connection between a stabbed body in Shelby Park, a quarter mile away from the office, and the blood on Tim’s hands.

  “Sure,” the detective said. “Spill, Ms.... Savannah.”

  Damn. I mean, darn. I back-pedaled as quickly as I could. “East Nashville is just a very diverse neighborhood, is all. Lots of people with alternative lifestyles live here. I wondered if he was one of them. That’s all.”

  “Uh-huh.” It didn’t sound like she believed me, but she let it go. “To answer your question, he doesn’t seem to have been. Not according to the pictures in his wallet, anyway.”

  “Family pictures?”

  “Wife,” Grimaldi said. “Twenty years younger and bottle blonde. The photograph is inscribed Until death do us part.”

  Ouch. “Have you spoken to her?”

  “Not yet. We got the call less than an hour ago. A jogger running around the lake found the body. Wrapped in a sheet and lying on the side of the road.”

  “Maybe he was on his way home from a toga party last night, and someone tried to take his wallet.”

  “I should have been mo
re specific,” the detective told me. “I didn’t mean that he was wearing the sheet. I meant that he was rolled in it. Probably for transportation.”

  In the trunk of a car?

  I bit my tongue before I could blurt out the thought. “You mean, someone stabbed him somewhere else,” I asked instead, “and then rolled him in the sheet and dumped him in the park?”

  “That’s about the strength of it.”

  “I guess you’ll be looking at the wife, won’t you?”

  “Always,” Grimaldi confirmed. “The significant other always tops the list.”

  “So if something were to happen to Rafe, I’d be your number one suspect?”

  “In Mr. Collier’s case,” Grimaldi said, “I think I’d make an exception. You’d never hurt him, and there are so many others who’d be delighted to try that I think we’d have more suspects than we’d know what to do with.”

  She paused for a second before she added, “Are you worried?”

  So much so that my voice cracked on the response. “Yes.”

  The detective pretended she hadn’t noticed, bless her. “What are you worried about?”

  “That he’s with someone else. Or that something’s going on and he’s putting himself in danger again. That something might happen to him.”

  “He isn’t with anyone else,” Grimaldi said.

  She sounded very sure. “How do you know?”

  “Not because I know what he’s doing. Because I know he cares about you. You didn’t see him back in December, when Hector Gonzales had you on the phone, talking to us from that warehouse.”

  I hadn’t. But I’d seen him come through the door to that same warehouse five minutes later, without a weapon, without a coat, and with a look on his face that said that if Hector had hurt me, Rafe would tear him limb from limb, or die trying.

  It had almost come to that before it was over, too.

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me,” Grimaldi said. “I’m just telling you the truth. He isn’t with anyone else. Not for that reason, anyway.”

  Right. However, that made it even more likely that he was doing something dangerous. If it wasn’t another woman, then he was probably involved in something he knew I’d worry about.

  “Will you let me know if you hear anything?”

  “Sure,” Grimaldi said. “The MNPD has nothing better to do than keep tabs on Mr. Collier so his girlfriend won’t worry.”

  “I’ll tell Dix you’re being mean to me,” I said, and Grimaldi snorted.

  “I’ll let you know if any information comes my way. But I don’t have the time to track him down right now. I have a dead man in front of me and his wife to notify of his death. I’m afraid your concern over Mr. Collier will just have to take a back seat.”

  Of course. “Please. Take care of your dead man and his wife. I’ll just sit here and be glad I don’t have your job.”

  And grateful that I wasn’t on the receiving end of such news. The same news I had spent months dreading. The news I was just getting past worrying about, now that Rafe wasn’t involved in anything dangerous anymore.

  Tamara Grimaldi’s voice gentled, so although I hadn’t said anything, she must have heard those thoughts in my head. “I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”

  “I appreciate it,” I said, and let her go back to her unpleasant task.

  At noon, I left the office and went home. I had fielded a half dozen phone calls by then, none of them from anyone I wanted to talk to, and for all intents and purposes the morning had been a colossal waste of time. The only good thing about it was that I hadn’t been sitting at home with nothing better to do than stare at the walls.

  I had given up reading tawdry romance novels a few months ago. Partly because I had Rafe in my life—and my bed—and I had no reason to live vicariously through anyone else. He was more than tall, dark and handsome enough for me, and far superior to any two dimensional book hero. But more than that, I stopped reading when my favorite tawdry romance author, Barbara Botticelli, was killed, and I realized that not only did I know her, but I wasn’t the only one who had pictured Rafael Collier when one of her tall, dark and handsome bad boy heroes walked onto the page. She had, too.

  She was David’s mother, pregnant at sixteen after a one night stand in high school. Rafe had had no idea he’d knocked her up, and hadn’t known that David existed until recently. Elspeth—Barbara’s real name—hadn’t either, at least according to what information I’d been able to dig up. Rafe went to prison right after high school, and Elspeth hadn’t seen him again until this past September. By then, she’d become a romance novelist. A very successful romance novelist. She wrote historical romances about sweet, sheltered, well-bred blondes swept off their feet by tall, dark, exotic rogues. Pirates, highway men, sheiks, and Native American warriors. The books had titles like “Stand and Deliver,” “Pirate’s Booty,” and “Apache Amour.” Deliciously over the top titles, swashbuckling stories, and larger-than-life heroes. I loved them—until I realized that Elspeth was still hung up on Rafe, and every one of the heroes in her books was modeled after him, or after what she imagined he might have grown into.

  So that ruined it for me. I couldn’t read a Barbara Botticelli book anymore without imagining Elspeth in the role of the heroine. Before, I’d always imagined myself, and if the hero bore a striking resemblance to Rafe—long before I was willing to admit to anyone, including myself, that I was attracted to him—that was between me and my conscience. They were just romance novels, after all. Vicarious pleasure. I wouldn’t ever get involved with him for real.

  But I digress. It was months since I’d picked up a romance novel. That afternoon I was so desperate for comfort and for a distraction from the worry that I actually stopped at the grocery store on my way home and bought a gallon of ice cream and a book. It wasn’t a Barbara Botticelli, it wasn’t a historical, and I made sure the hero was a well-dressed blond gazillionaire, not your classic tall-dark-and-dangerous bad-boy alpha hero, and when I got home I sank onto the couch with the ice cream bucket and the book on my lap.

  I got a stomach ache from the ice cream after a while, so I put it away, but I kept reading. It was a long book, and pretty engaging, so I didn’t realize how late it had gotten until I looked up and realized it was dark outside. A quick glance at the clock told me it was time for dinner. Since the stomach had settled some from my ice cream lunch, I went ahead and nibbled on some crackers and brie. There was no sense in making anything more elaborate when I was cooking for one.

  I hadn’t heard from Rafe again, although I had jumped at every sound from beyond the apartment door. Steps in the hallway had my heart speeding up. Once, when a car backfired on the street outside, I dropped the book and ran to the balcony doors, terrified I’d see my boyfriend, the man I loved, gunned down in the street below.

  I didn’t. It was just a car. So I went back to my book and back to waiting.

  Eventually the book ran out of pages and I went to bed, and by then the worry was at peak, not to mention that I was starting to get angry again, on top of it. How dare he just walk out in the morning and stay gone all day with no word on what he was doing or where he was? We were committed to one another, weren’t we? We had a relationship. Didn’t he realize he owed it to me to let me know what was going on? If it had been me, wouldn’t he have wanted to know what I was doing and that I was safe?

  But maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he didn’t care. Or maybe he trusted that I’d be careful and that I wouldn’t take stupid chances.

  The trouble with that comparison was that Rafe always took stupid chances.

  Of course he didn’t consider them to be stupid, just necessary, and maybe he was right. But they seemed stupid to me, since my only concern was his survival.

  I found myself more than halfway wishing he was in bed with another woman, because at least he’d be safe that way.

  And then I pushed it all aside and just prayed that he’d come home in one piece. />
  I woke up in the dark after midnight, when the weight of another body hit the bed behind me. For a second, it was startling and jerked me out of sound sleep. I’d slept alone for more than two years before Rafe, and part of me still wasn’t used to sharing my bed with anyone. Especially someone who entered the bed after me. Rafe and I usually hit the sheets together, one on top of the other.

  It took me less than a second to recognize him. My body knew the feel of his behind me, even when we weren’t touching. I recognized the sound of his breathing and his smell: spicy and citrusy, all male. All Rafe.

  Part of me wanted to turn to him, to make sure he was all right. To run my hands over his body and assure myself that he wasn’t hurt. To yell at him for making me worry and for not telling me what was going on. But I didn’t. Instead I lay quietly, waiting to see if he’d reach out instead.

  A minute passed, the silence only broken by rustling as he moved around, trying to get comfortable. The cotton sheets slipped across his body with a whispering sound. He sighed softly as he settled into the mattress, as if maybe his body hurt. His breathing slowed into a steady cadence. I waited.

  He moved again. The mattress dipped a little. He settled back, with another soft sound.

  I lay, wide-eyed, staring into the darkness. I could see the red numbers on the digital alarm clock on the bureau tick over, from 12:47 to 12:48.

  I was just about to give up when a hand found my shoulder, warm and hard. It skimmed over my skin, down to the elbow and back up, leaving goose bumps in its wake. “You asleep, darlin’?”

  His voice was low, a bit rough, with an edge of fatigue. When the hand moved down a second time, he leaned in and his lips found my shoulder instead, his breath warm against my skin.

  I let go of the anger and the righteous indignation. He was here. He was safe. He was mine. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t told me where he was going or what he’d been doing there. The only thing that mattered was that he’d come back, and safely.

  I turned into his arms and lifted my face to his. He kissed me, and that was it for the next little while. I lost myself in the heat and the building excitement, the feel of his hands on my skin and his body moving against mine.