Guilty as Sin (Sinful, Montana Book 1)

by Rosalind James

  “Eggs,” he promised. “Toast soldiers, no crust.”

  She didn’t answer him. She was looking at a notification. Six missed calls. She turned the phone around and showed him the screen. “Good thing I already told you.”

  Her phone said Paige. “I’d have had to explain,” she said, “that I had a sister. And why she was calling me six times. I never thought.”

  “Thought what?”

  She was already pushing the button. It had barely rung when she heard the voice she knew better than her own, because it almost was her own, saying, “Paige? Is it you?” on a rush of breath.

  “Yes. I’m fine, baby. I’m fine. Don’t worry.”

  “What happened? I’ve been trying to reach you for so long. For more than twelve hours. I thought at first that I was having a stroke, my head hurt so badly. It took me all night to realize it was you, because it wasn’t as bad as when you got shot. I didn’t know this time. It was like the reception was fuzzy. I finally got a room in the lodge so I could keep calling you. I was just about to start driving to San Francisco, to the airport. I didn’t know what to do.”

  All of that had come out in another rush. “Hold on,” Paige said. “I’m OK. But it’s hard to talk a lot.”

  “Where are you?” Lily demanded. “Are you in the hospital?”

  “No. I’m at the scary neighbor’s. Jace’s. I didn’t have your keys. Your animals are fine,” Paige hurried on. “He checked.”

  “I don’t care. What happened to your head? What happened to your voice? You’re mumbling.”

  “I got hit on it. On my face some. And I’m all right.”

  “Let me talk to him,” Lily said, sounding fierce as a mother bear. “If it hurts. Plus, I don’t want your version. I want the real story. I want the truth. Wait. Does he know about me? Just say I’m your sister, and I got worried about you or something. Tell him he has to tell me the truth, or I’ll know.”

  Paige sighed. “He knows about you. He knows you’re you. Here.” She handed the phone to Jace. “She wants to talk to you. Guess this means I don’t get my breakfast.”

  “Nah,” he said. “I can talk and cook.” He took the phone and said, “Hi, Lily. I just realized you have the same voice as well. You and your sister have done a fair job on my brain, between you.”

  He took the phone and went downstairs, and Tobias went with him. Paige sat back, sighed, listened to the one-sided conversation, Jace’s calm explanations, his low-key rendition of the night’s events. She drank her coffee, looked out the window. And thought.

  Jace came back up, eventually, with the phone in one hand and a plate in the other. He set the phone down in Paige’s lap, put the plate down on the bedside table, and said, “I’m going to help Paige sit up, Lily. She needs to eat her breakfast. I’ve put you on speaker.” He told Paige, “She wants to talk to both of us.”

  He got a hand behind her back—carefully—and helped pull her upright, and she might have let out a noise. Lily said, “You’re not all right. I knew it.”

  “It’s superficial,” Paige said. “Honestly. He’s just babying me. Hang on. I need to eat these eggs.”

  “I’m coming back. Is it going to be superficial next time? I’m coming back.”

  “But that’s the thing,” Paige said after she’d swallowed her thankfully-not-chewy bite of scrambled egg with spinach and feta. Jace really could cook. That was a good scrambled egg. “If you come back, it’ll be you they hit.”

  “Which would be,” Lily said, “the point. As it’s my place and my responsibility. And they won’t anyway. I’ll just sell my land to Brett Hunter. It’s not worth this. The meeting’s tonight. Go tell them I’ll sell, or if you’re hurt too badly to go, have—” She paused. “You slept with him, didn’t you? Tell me you told him you weren’t me first. I don’t want to sleep with him.”

  “Still on speaker,” Jace said. His blue eyes were dancing, and there was a twitch at the corner of his mouth that was a grin trying to escape. “And no worries. You’re safe from that horrible fate.”

  “I don’t mean that,” Lily said. “Of course I’m safe. I meant, I didn’t want it to be me. Never mind. You’d have to be a twin. You tell him, Paige.”

  She didn’t have to. “I knew the woman I was with,” Jace said. “Even if I didn’t know her name. Will that work?”

  Lily’s relieved sigh came right over the line. “Yes. Good.”

  Paige had, somehow, polished off most of her scrambled eggs during all that. She’d been hungrier than she’d thought. Now, she picked up a lovely buttery toast finger, made with Jace’s wonderful bread, and said, “Selling or not selling doesn’t matter. That’s not what this is about. If my head weren’t so fuzzy, I would’ve figured it out quicker, but I kept falling asleep. Also, Jace is distracting.”

  He looked at her, that smile lurking again, and she told him, “If you want a woman who doesn’t kiss and tell, don’t pick a twin.”

  “Good to know,” he said. “Fortunately, I have confidence in the outcome of my fitness report.”

  “I want to know more,” Lily said, “but not while he’s on the phone. For heaven’s sake, Paige.”

  “Lily’s the tactful one,” Paige told Jace, and this time, he wasn’t holding the grin back.

  “Got that,” he said. “No dramas.”

  Paige said, “One second, baby. I’m finishing this breakfast.” When she’d eaten her toast, she said, “OK. Somebody’s vandalized your shop, and they got a few of your chickens killed, too. I’m sorry about that. Jace has a plan for helping us fix it, and I think he’s doing it soon.” She looked at him. “Aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said, the smile vanishing. “I am. Supplies arriving today. I’ll get your house and shop kitted out, no worries.”

  “Wait,” Lily was saying. “They killed my chickens?”

  “Yes,” Paige said. “But I don’t think that’s who hit me. I think that was somebody else. And I’ll tell you why.”

  Jace sat back against the headboard and listened to his non-shopkeeping, non-goat-owning, non-beekeeping non-neighbor lay out her thought process. With a concussion.

  How he’d ever thought this woman could be anything but what she was—that was the question. The human mind was capable of some mighty feats of rationalization.

  She told her sister—the real Lily, whom Jace could envision, no doubt wearing something effortlessly feminine, looking as ethereal and perfect as Paige somehow never managed—“The first thing you need to know is that Jace has a stalker.”

  “Another stalker?” Lily asked. “Or the same person?”

  “See?” Paige said. “That’s it. That’s the question. Another stalker, almost certainly. Entirely different motivation. At least I think so. Mine’s got to be motivated by getting me—you—to sell. At least I’ve assumed they are. Jace’s is personal, and it sure sounds like a woman. She’s escalated fast, and she’s invaded his space. Broken into his house, even, which is pretty significant. It also shows us that she’s physically here. Living here, or living close by. And I think she could have attacked me.”

  “But you said my chickens got killed,” Lily objected. “That my shop window got broken. That’s invading my space. Why wouldn’t they have hit you, too? Or why wouldn’t it be the same person? Breaking the shop window, killing the chickens, and doing… whatever to Jace?”

  “But you see,” Paige said, “the person didn’t actually kill the chickens. Not hands-on. And by the way, your window’s getting fixed. Today.” Jace made a note to check on that. “And we’re doing the greatest sale. Remind me to tell you. So don’t worry.”

  “Would you quit telling me not to worry? I’m not worried about my window.” Paige might think Lily was sweeter than she was, and maybe she was, but right now? She didn’t sound all that sweet to him.

  “All right,” Paige said. “Fine. Maybe all of it’s been the same person. If it is, it’s Jace’s, not mine. Or rather—I don’t have a stalker. We have a stalker. I�
��m pretty sure Jace’s stalker is jealous of me.”

  Jace said, “She implied that. More than once.” He managed to get the words out even through that freezing prickling of your scalp when you realized the danger that had been there all along. When you saw the enemy and finally recognized him for what he was.

  Or what she was.

  “Tobias was here last night,” he said. “My dog,” he explained to Lily. “My stalker’s a risk taker, but she’s not that big a risk taker. She hasn’t come farther than the front porch when Tobias or I have been home. She knows what I used to do. I’m too hard a target. Paige isn’t, or the person doesn’t think so.” Might not be a bad idea, he thought, to make sure she knew what he’d used to do. And that nobody was going to be an easy target, not if he had anything to say about it.

  “Right,” Paige said. “On the one hand, you don’t have alarms or cameras here, Jace, and neither do I. But everybody knows the cops will take a while to show up to an alarm, and who’s going to look at that blurry security footage? The cops aren’t putting in overtime matching it against photos of convicted burglars and finding their last known addresses, I’ll tell you that. Unless the homeowner recognizes their teenage kid’s lowlife buddy, good luck. And you’re remote up here. No neighbors to look out their kitchen windows. But a big dog? A scary breed? An arrest might or might not happen in the future, and they’re betting on ‘might not.’ But a big dog will bite you right now.”

  “OK,” Lily said, “but—”

  “And I don’t have a big dog,” Paige said. “There my place is, empty all day. I mean your place, Lily. When did Jace’s stalker come into his house? After he spent the night at mine. And when did I get hit? When he was with me again. When he went to the gym with me. For the third time. And last night was different. That was a personal attack. About as personal as you can get. When you hit somebody in the head? That’s more personal than a gunshot. That’s trying to wipe them out. Their face. Their head. Their self.”

  Lily said, “Oh, no.” Faintly.

  Paige said, “She didn’t wipe me out, so don’t worry.” Which Jace thought was pretty cavalier of her, but which wasn’t too different from all the things he’d said to his mum. Downplaying the danger didn’t mean you weren’t aware of it. It meant you didn’t want the people you loved to worry about it. “And it didn’t have to be a woman,” Paige went on, “but it was the woman’s locker room. A man would have a job convincing people he’d, what? Wandered in there in the dark? Suspicion falling on him right there, bingo. And I don’t believe the person seized an opportunity, either, after a mysterious power failure. Maximum of fifteen seconds after the lights went out, and I was in a curtained cubicle. The person had to know where I was, to be holding whatever they hit me with, to get to me fast, and then to look innocent again by the time the lights came back on. They either turned out the lights, or they worked with somebody who did.”

  “That second part,” Jace said. “That looks more likely. That’s the problem with your scenario, and you know it. My stalker’s one person. How many people want Lily out, do you know?”

  “Lots,” Lily said. “Enough to talk to me about it.”

  “Me, too,” Paige admitted. “I’ve heard from, who? The woman who owns the gym, Jennifer whoever. I need to find out more about her, because the gym seems pretty critical here. But the other woman was there, too. Raeleigh Franklin. They were both in the locker room when I went into that cubicle. And the guy at the gas station. He wasn’t there, but he’s another one. Those are just the people I’ve happened to run into, who’ve seen fit to tell me how much they hate my decision-making. Your decision-making. Whatever.”

  “You reported all this, right?” Lily asked. “Both things, Jace’s stalker and this? The police know?”

  “Yeah,” Jace said, “for what it’s worth. I don’t think Sergeant Worthington has me on the top of his priority list.”

  “Oh,” Lily said. “But the gym… well, if it was Jennifer Turner, or if Jennifer was involved somehow, though I can’t believe she’d do that. She has kids. Her daughter’s in college. But if it was…”

  “That doesn’t stop anybody,” Paige said. “Mothers can do horrible things. I could tell you stories.”

  “I don’t want to hear your stories,” Lily said.

  “Wait.” Jace put a hand up when Paige would have spoken. “Lily’s the one who knows these people best. If it was Jennifer, what?”

  “Well,” Lily said, “I mean, he’s her brother.”

  A long moment, then Jace asked, “Who’s her brother?”

  “Chris Worthington. You know. The cop.”

  It took a moment to sink in.

  “So the police sergeant is the gym owner’s brother,” Paige said. “OK. That could make him more hostile to me, and maybe less likely to follow up, I guess, or worst case, he’d be in it with her, but he wouldn’t have the whole department sucked into that, surely. He didn’t take Jace that seriously either, though.”

  “He didn’t like me,” Jace said, “but cops tend not to. Except you, of course, and look how hard I had to work on you. I can look resistant to authority, I hear.”

  “But wait,” Lily said. “My animals are OK now, right? Are you sure?”

  “They were this morning,” Jace said.

  “Oh,” Paige said. “Duh. Of course. If I didn’t have this stupid head knock, I would’ve seen that. See, there again. If people were trying to kick me out, to make me sell, if they cared enough to bash me, surely they’d have gone after my animals too by now. The goats. I was at the hospital for a long time last night. Everybody saw me leave, and that Jace took me. If Sergeant Whatever is Jennifer’s brother, if they were talking, even if she didn’t do the chickens, even if it was Jace’s stalker, Jennifer would have heard about the chickens and the shop and seized her opportunity. Or told the others.”

  “They wouldn’t necessarily go after the goats,” Lily said. “Some people are animal lovers.”

  “They hit me in the head.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Paige recognized that stubborn streak. Lily was sweet and accommodating until she wasn’t. “An animal is different.”

  “They let the chickens out to get killed,” Jace said.

  “A chicken isn’t a dog or a cat or a goat,” Lily insisted. “I can kill a chicken if I have to. What do you think I do if one of them gets attacked or too sick? Take them to the vet and have them put to sleep while I stroke their feathers? No. I kill them. I couldn’t kill one of my sweet goats.”

  “But could you kill me?” Paige asked. “That’s the question.”

  “I’m saying they’re two different things,” Lily said. “If the goal’s to intimidate a person so she sells her property, and if the person they’re targeting is an animal lover, they’d go after the goats. The babies are cute. They’re sweet. They’re babies. So either the person’s an animal lover, too, and that’s why they didn’t, or you’re right, it’s Jace’s person, because they hit you and they didn’t hit a goat.”

  “Maybe it’s two people. Or three.” Paige’s head was hurting again. Too much thinking. It wanted to shut down. “One could hit me, and one could hit the goat.”

  “Except they didn’t,” Lily said. “So see?”

  Paige sighed. “OK. I need to call the cops again and see what they know. I need to call…” She blanked on the names.

  Jace looked at her sharply. “Time for you to get off the phone and rest,” he said. “I’ll call Worthington and update him. I’ll call Hailey, too.”

  Paige wanted to protest, but she’d lost her focus, somehow. “OK, baby,” she said to Lily. “I’m going to…”

  Lily said, “I’m coming back. I’ll be there at midnight. I already bought my ticket. Twelve-oh-two in Kalispell. I can get a taxi.”

  Paige wanted to think about that, but it was hard right now. Jace said, “No taxi. We could have some ammunition here if we can switch the two of you off. Surprise is your best asset. We’ll have to thin
k about that. I’ll come collect you, Lily.”

  “She shouldn’t…” Paige said. “It’s not a… good idea.”

  “It’s not your choice,” Lily said. “It’s mine. See you at midnight, Jace. Thank you for taking care of my sister.”

  The screen changed, because the call was over. Jace took the plate off Paige’s lap and said, “Right. Rethinking all my impressions of Lily here. But you need to rest some more, and UPS delivered my shipment. I’m going over to your place and getting those alarms and cameras installed. We’ll leave Tobias here to guard the cabin until I can wire things up here, and we’ll put you in your own bed.”

  “I have a weapon,” she said. “I have two. Uh… one. In my purse. I definitely have one.”

  “I know you do. I believe you’re a good shot, too. But right now? You’d miss. I don’t want you where I’m not.”

  Everybody was taking care of her. That wasn’t how it worked. That was never how it worked.

  She’d go home, she decided. She’d take another little nap. And then she’d think about it some more.

  She did. In her bed, with the distant sound of an electric drill providing comforting background noise as she drifted off. Which was Jace installing a camera on the barn. Keeping the goats safe. Being next to the bees so she could stay away from them.

  Two hours later, though, there was no choice but to get going on this thing. She called Hailey and endured a whole lot of concern. And then she called Lieutenant Iverson.

  “I told you,” he said before she’d had a chance to say anything. “I haven’t heard anything yet. When I do, I’ll call you. You’re on leave.”

  “It’s not that. It’s that I got injured. I’m reporting it.”

  “Say again?”

  “Somebody attacked me last night. At my sister’s, where I’ve been staying. I have a little concussion. And my arm’s in a sling, but it’s just bruising. Couple days on that.”

  “A… little… concussion. Hollander, you’re off duty. Stay off duty. Stay out of trouble. And watch yourself better. There’s something called self-defense. You learned it, remember that?”