Guilty as Sin (Sinful, Montana Book 1)

by Rosalind James

  Lily was standing close, looking more indecisive than he’d ever seen her. And shivering. He told her, “You need a jacket.”

  She lifted her arms from her sides, then back down in a What the hell gesture he recognized perfectly. “What were you doing?” she asked.

  The cop stood, one hand on the door, but he didn’t shut it, so Jace ignored him and talked to Lily. “It looked like you were in trouble. I came to help.”

  “You… came… to…” More arms. “You were chasing me. After somebody had lured me down to my shop. I thought you were trying to kill me.”

  “Well,” he pointed out, “you were flying like something was after you. Looked like you needed my help.”

  “From you.”

  “Somebody did smash the window of your shop, though,” he said. “I’d say that’s your issue.”

  She whirled as if she hadn’t noticed that. The cop, meanwhile, had been flipping through Jace’s wallet, checking his driver’s license with the aid of a Maglite. Jace said, “Concealed weapon permit in there as well.”

  The cop didn’t say, “Every man and half the women in Montana has one of those. Doesn’t help me much,” although he could have. Instead, he asked, “Is the dog in your truck dangerous, sir?”

  “He’s probably not happy,” Jace said. Tobias was barking now. “He doesn’t like it when people handcuff me. You may not want to open the door until I’m with you.”

  Lily sighed. “You can let him go,” she said. “He’s an idiot, that’s all. He is my neighbor.”

  The cop said, “Sorry, ma’am. I can’t do that until I check him out,” and slammed the door on Jace. Which meant that by the time he did let Jace out, checked the truck while Jace told Tobias to stay, and finally unlocked the handcuffs, Lily was half frozen.

  Jace told the cop, “I’m taking my jacket off to give it to the lady.” Not taking any chances. The bloke still looked jumpy to him, like he was wondering if he should have called for backup—which he should have, in Jace’s opinion, but he wasn’t going to say so—and wondering how a broken window had turned into this. He also looked about twenty-two, though that could have been the red hair and the freckles. Jumpy people shot too fast.

  Lily looked like she didn’t want to take the jacket, but also like she could see that she didn’t have heaps of choice. Her hair was blowing around her, and she was shivering hard. She said, “Let’s do this in the shop,” went to her car, turned her own lights off, and came back with her purse and the keys.

  Jace stood back, taking in a display window like a giant star, its center a ragged hole and cracks radiating around it, and said, “Somebody put some effort into that.”

  Lily, as usual, wasn’t behaving anything like he’d expect. She didn’t look scared. Now that she wasn’t shaking quite so hard with cold, she looked bloody furious. She shoved the key into the shop’s front door, flipped the lights on, and asked the cop, “Who turned the alarm off?”

  “Security company,” he said. “Once I got here.”

  She stood in the center of the shop, and she was looking at the same thing Jace was. At shards of glass glittering in the light, and half of a brick.

  “There’s your trouble,” the cop said unnecessarily, and Lily looked at him like, You think? Jace almost laughed.

  “There’s a piece of paper around it,” Lily said. “Hang on.” She pulled her phone out of her purse and took a series of shots of the brick, the floor, and the broken window, jagged glass everywhere. “All right,” she told the cop. “You take off that rubber band. Use gloves, please.”

  The cop looked at her for a long moment, and she stared back without saying anything. Finally, he pulled a pair of surgical gloves from a pouch on his utility belt, bent to pick up the brick—at which point, Lily took another photo of him holding it—slipped off the rubber band, and unfolded the paper.

  Block printing in fine black marker.

  Get out.

  Lily took a photo of that, too, then told the cop, “Feel free to use the counter to write up your report.”

  She got some more stare for that, but the cop just said, “I’ll do it in my patrol car, ma’am.” Lily took off Jace’s jacket and handed it back to him, went through a door behind the counter and came back shrugging into a sweater, and Jace and the cop both looked up.

  Well, of course they did. She wasn’t wearing much top, she wasn’t wearing a bra, and she was cold. And she did have one pretty body. Jace got his gaze back up to her face fast and hoped she hadn’t noticed that. He saw a twitch at the corner of her mouth, though, that said she had.

  “Seen all you need to see here?” she asked him sweetly.

  Not even close, he thought, and didn’t say. Instead, he said, “We need to get some plywood and board up that window. The human element’s one thing, but there’s a storm on the way.”

  “I was just thinking that,” she said. “But—‘we’?”

  “Yeah.” He had to smile now. “As I chased you down the mountain and scared you to death.”

  “You didn’t scare me to death. You gave me a little evasive driving practice. I outran you, did you notice? And I wasn’t the one on the ground with the cuffs on.”

  “Window?” Probably best to change the subject. “If you don’t have plywood at your place, I do.”

  She hesitated for a long moment, then said, “Let’s go get it, then.”

  They took Jace’s truck, once he’d got his weapons back from the cop. He had to ask for them, because Paige would swear the cop had forgotten. You should have called for backup, she thought but didn’t tell him. She didn’t think that would have gone over well.

  She wanted to insist on taking Lily’s car, and that she could provide her own plywood, too. The problem was, she had no idea if Lily had plywood, she’d look like an idiot searching for it and not finding it, and it wouldn’t fit into the back of the SUV anyway.

  While she was working all that out, Jace opened the passenger door of the truck and said, “I’ll put Tobias in the back.”

  “I don’t mind him.” Tobias was, indeed, wagging his tail in a dignified manner suitable to his station. “Hey, boy.” She fondled the Ridgeback’s silky ears, feeling more settled than she had in hours. A dog and a pickup truck. Getting closer to her happy place.

  “Right,” Jace said. “He’s a seat hog, though.” He flipped the convertible seat down between the front seats and told Tobias, “Shove over, mate.” The dog did, but once Paige climbed in, Tobias arranged his eighty-five pounds of muscle so that his head was in her lap.

  “I get the good end,” Paige told Jace, and he smiled and headed up Main, where the traffic lights were swaying in the wind and the road was absolutely empty, like it was after the apocalypse and they were the only two people left in town. She added, “I’ve decided that on balance, your offering to help with my window outweighs your chasing me down the mountain like a madman and checking out my body. You have three mitigating factors working for you. At least.”

  “Which are?” The question was simple. The undercurrents weren’t. He had nothing like the polish of his brother. Too bad she kept right on liking him that way.

  “One, given the circumstances, I kind of enjoyed watching you get taken down, handcuffed, and stuck into the wrong end of a cruiser. I’m guessing that was new.”

  “You’re guessing right. What’s two? I’m hoping it’s a better look for me.”

  “I like your dog.” Tobias’s head was heavy and warm on her thigh, his eyes were closed, and his ears were so soft.

  “That’s not about me, though. Sad.”

  “Three.” She sighed and said it. “I was a jerk to you last night. You were sweet, and I made you feel like that was worthless. It wasn’t worthless. It was worth a lot. What I said was about me, not you.”

  He was silent for so long, she thought he wasn’t going to answer. At last, though, he said, “You can kiss me without being obligated to go any further. You’re entitled to your body, and I’m not.”
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  She sighed again. “All right, that’s four. In another minute, I’m going to feel bad about enjoying your back-of-the-cruiser moment. And here’s my last one. I read two of your books today. Well, one and three-quarters. You spooked me, which takes some effort. You might be a little hot-tempered and a lot high-handed, but you’re one hell of a writer.”

  He was quiet again for a minute, and then he said, “I’m trying not to let that matter to me as much as it does. And I am never hot-tempered.”

  “No? I’d say you’ve got a possessive streak a mile wide.”

  “When?”

  “Oh,” she said, wondering why on earth she was flirting with this man when Lily’s display window was broken out, and when things had already gone disastrously wrong between them,. Maybe because she couldn’t help it. “Maybe two out of two times you’ve seen me in the company of Brett Hunter.”

  “That’s not hot-tempered,” he said. “That’s effective.”

  “Body language.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ll just close my eyes here, then, and remember your body language when a scared rookie cop who practically still had his seventeen-year-old acne had his hand on top of your head and was shoving you onto that grimy vinyl.”

  “Which was portraying,” he said, “dignity in the face of adversity.”

  She laughed. “All right. Maybe it was.”

  They’d reached his place, and he swung into the driveway, hit the garage door opener, and said, “Hang on.”

  She didn’t. She climbed down and headed into the garage with him, where an overhead light illuminated—what else—organization. Virtually every item in it was hanging from a rafter, stowed on a shelf, or stuck onto a peg, like he had a cross-referenced diagram somewhere.

  He said, “Thought I said to hang on. I’ve got this.”

  “High-handed,” she said.

  He opened a parts organizer, took out a handful of nails, then put them into the top tray of a business-sized red toolbox. “You’re cold.”

  She took the toolbox from him and said, “You can get the plywood. I’m not that cold.”

  He took a not-subtle-enough look at the front of her pj top. “Oh, I’d say you’re cold.”

  “And yet I survive,” she said. “I’m guessing that if I put my hand on your chest, I’d feel the exact same thing. I’ll tell you what. I’m putting this in the back of the truck, and then I’m climbing in and waiting for you to come help me with my problem while I let Tobias warm me up. Aren’t I lucky that he’s such a big, strong dog?”

  She was messing with his head. He didn’t let anybody do that, but she wasn’t asking permission. He was as sexually frustrated as a man could get, he was narky as hell, he wanted her hand on his chest, and you couldn’t have kept him out of that truck if you’d tried. He pulled on a pair of work gloves, tucked another pair into his jacket pocket for her, and picked up two sheets of plywood. A moment spared to be thankful that she hadn’t decided she could carry those as well, and he tossed the sheets into the bed of the ute and climbed in.

  She was quiet on the way down, like she’d said too much. Once at her shop, she collected a copy of the police report from the cop and tossed it into her car. The cop said, “I’ll take off, then,” and she nodded like she wanted to say, I won’t expect much, and then I won’t be disappointed. It was a lot like Jace’s stalker. A brick through a shop window, a loss covered by insurance. A nuisance call.

  Once the bloke was pulling away, Lily was all business, pulling on the gloves Jace handed her, then taking the other side of the plywood sheets to pull them out of the bed. The wind was stronger now, trying to take it out of their grasp, but she held the first sheet against the window frame as Jace drove the nail, leaning her weight against the wood to keep it there.

  He said, “I should’ve got you a jacket from the house.”

  “This will only take a minute,” she said, not looking at him. “Doesn’t matter.”

  He drove another nail on the other side of the sheet. “You’re thinking about that bit of paper,” he guessed. Not about you, mate. “About the brick. Same words you got before, but sending it through your shop window sends a different message.”

  “Yes.” She stood back and let him finish hammering the plywood into place. “Although the handwriting’s odd.”

  He glanced at her. Her hair was whipping in the wind, and he heard the low rumble of thunder, felt the first icy touch of rain on his cheek, and picked up the second sheet of wood. “The handwriting?”

  “If I were sending a message like that,” she said, helping him maneuver the plywood over the second half of the window, “I’d write it big. Across the whole paper. Practically stabbing through, the ink bleeding. Aggressive. I’d maximize the impact, go for menace. That neat little writing doesn’t fit with the action. It’s an anomaly, and that’s interesting.”

  As she spoke, the street lit up. Briefly, and faintly. Lightning, but all the way to the north, up over the mountain. He drove another nail as he considered what she’d said. “You could be right. Pretty subtle distinction.”

  “The subtle distinctions are generally the difference between finding the answer and not.” Another rumble of thunder in the distance, and the spatters of rain picked up.

  “Could be,” he said, and thought for the twentieth time since he’d met her, Who are you? “Heaps of psychology in retail, I reckon. Not so much for me. But then, I’ve focused on trying to make bad people dead. Not so subtle.” He picked up the pace on the hammering. “Deluge about to start,” he said over the noise of the rain spattering against the wood, the sidewalk, his back. “Let’s get this done.”

  He was halfway there when the rain began for real. He shouted, “Get in the truck,” and of course she didn’t. She waited until he was done, tested the plywood for security while he tossed the hammer back into the toolbox, and only then ran for shelter.

  He turned the windscreen wipers to full, pulled out into the street, and watched the night light up as the jagged fork of white struck the mountain. The thunder followed, louder now even in the truck, the clouds burst, and the heavens emptied.

  Beside him, Lily was shivering, and she was also pulling her phone out of her purse. He stopped for the light and glanced across at her. She said, “Oh, no,” and there was something new in her voice. Something worse.

  “What?” he asked. “Another text?”

  She looked across at him, the assurance gone from her face. “It says, How are your animals doing?”

  He swore, and she said, as if she were talking to herself, “The window was a diversion. I should have known. I thought when you were following me that I’d been lured somewhere. I should have realized.”

  The light changed, and he headed out of town. He wanted to go faster. He couldn’t, not in driving rain that reduced visibility to a couple meters. Beside him, Tobias’s warm body had tensed, reacting to the humans, and now, the dog sat up and whined, low and urgent.

  Lily said, “I left my car down there. I should have taken it.”

  “Good job you didn’t, or Tobias and I wouldn’t be here to help.” He had to say it loud, or she wouldn’t have heard him. He picked up the pace as much as he dared. Blackness up here except for the silver streaks of the rain in the headlights, another jagged flash lighting up the interior. The drumming of rain on the hood, the bone-jarring boom of a thunderbolt, much closer now.

  Past his driveway, on up to hers, and pulling into her drive, seeing the glow of light ahead from inside the house, same as the night before. She said, “Stop,” and he did. At the barnyard.

  This time, he didn’t bother telling her to stay inside. She wouldn’t have listened. The moment the ute stopped, she was out, pulling her phone from her purse, switching on its torch, and running for the shed. He paused to grab the Maglite from under his seat, then followed her light, Tobias keeping pace with him.

  He found the latch of the gate that had swung shut behind her and ran into the yar
d. Instantly, the sticky mud began clinging to his shoes, slowing him down, and Tobias was well ahead of him by the time he got into the concrete-floored barn. Lily’s light was bobbing around at the end, near the stalls, but he couldn’t hear anything. The rain on the metal roof was too loud.

  He got over to her, sweeping the brighter light from his nine-inch Maglite over the area. Lily was crouched down, her hair plastered to her head and dripping, her top and sweater clinging to her. She was running her hands over two goats who were lying down, curled up together. She looked up at him, shading her eyes, and he switched the light to fall fully on the goats, who stirred and bleated in a complaining way.

  “They’re fine,” she said, a world of relief in her voice. “They’re good.”

  A peal of thunder nearly rattled the shed, and he thought about metal roofs and rain and lightning strikes and said, “We need to get out of here.”

  She said, “Wait. Babies,” and moved to the other side of the shed, opened another stall. “Oh, no,” he heard. “Her babies.”

  Another heap of bodies, huddled together. Tiny ones. But when the light fell on them, one of them wriggled, and then the others did.

  “No,” he said. “False alarm.” Or more accurately, the kind of threat that was meant to persuade without its maker having to do anything more. The first weapon in the terrorist’s arsenal, even if it only involved threats to farm animals.

  The shed shook with the force of another thunderclap, and he grabbed Lily’s arm and said, “Go. Now.”

  They ran, and Tobias ran ahead of them. Straight across the barnyard to the gate, where the dog barked, then kept on barking. Jace still had hold of Lily’s arm, was slipping and sliding through the mud with her as the rain pelted their bodies and another lightning flash lit up the yard. Lit up the lithe, muscular shape of Tobias, and a smaller form that dashed across in front of the barnyard and was gone.