Harlequin Romantic Suspense December 2020 Box Set

by Addison Fox, Cindy Dees, Justine Davis

  But perhaps somehow she had, as Brady had said, misinterpreted what had happened.

  Because she’d been through it before. Had probably been expecting it.

  Ashley couldn’t think of anything more grim that watching, waiting for someone you loved to go over the same edge that had cost you someone else you loved.

  A polite tap on the door made her finish dressing quickly. It had to be Hayley; Brady’s knock was decidedly more…male. And when she opened the door, it indeed was Hayley.

  “I brought coffee,” she said, holding out a steaming mug.

  “Bless you,” Ashley said fervently, taking it.

  “Thought you might need it before you sit down with Dr. Sebastian.”

  She nodded. When they had first suggested an online session with yet another friend of theirs, a psychiatrist, she’d been wary. But Brady had done some research on the woman, and everything he’d found indicated her reputation was stellar. She was on the board of two major hospitals and three mental health organizations and had spent several years on the faculty of a prominent university.

  They went into the kitchen, where Brady was working on his own coffee, and to her surprise Quinn was busy fixing up something that smelled luscious.

  “Well, that’s unfair,” she said.

  Brady gave her a puzzled look, but Hayley laughed. “It is, isn’t it? No man who looks like that should be able to cook, too.”

  Ashley grinned at her and once more savored something that had been missing from her life for months now—the ease of simple, uncomplicated interaction, especially with another woman.

  “Hey,” Brady protested, “that’s sexist. Or something.”

  She looked at him, saw one corner of his mouth twitching. “If you tell me you can cook, too, then I may have to change my assumptions.”

  “I’ll have you know I make a great beef stew, better garlic chicken and a truly wicked barbecue sauce.”

  She raised her brows at him. “Consider my assumptions changed, then.”

  The twitch became a grin. “Might want to hold off on that. They’re also the only things I can make.”

  “Just means your looks have to carry more of the load,” Hayley teased.

  “Not a problem for him,” Ashley quipped, then looked away quickly before she could see his reaction to her words.

  After the breakfast that tasted as good as it had smelled, Quinn led her into the media room, where he’d set up his laptop and mirrored it on the flat-screen television on the wall.

  “We’ll run a test when we first connect, make sure everything’s working right, then leave you in private,” he said.

  “How do you know her?” she asked as she tried to ignore the fact that Brady had been sleeping in here. There was a small stack of freshly washed clothes on one end, the shirt the Foxworths had bought on top, and that brought on more imagining, like how her pulse had kicked up the first time she’d seen him in civilian clothes. Those jeans, just snug enough…

  “We helped her with a family situation,” Quinn said. “Something she needed closure on.”

  “Oh.”

  “Ready?” Hayley asked gently.

  Ashley suppressed a shiver. They had warned her some of the questions Dr. Sebastian might ask could be uncomfortable, and that she would probably ask about her father.

  Brady’s words echoed in her head. If there’s even a chance…you have to take it. You can’t give up until you do.

  She drew in a deep breath to steady herself. She had already signed a waiver allowing the doctor to share all information before starting this. She’d decided if she was going to do this, if she trusted Foxworth—and Brady—enough to do it, she wasn’t going to hold back. And so she said firmly, “Yes.”

  Quinn reached out and tapped some keys on the laptop. A moment later, the flat screen flashed to life. And Ashley braced herself for the first question.

  * * *

  “What’s bothering you the most?” Brady stopped his pacing to look at Hayley, who held out his refilled mug of coffee and…a cookie. She smiled at his expression. “I bake when I’m restless. Quinn cleans. You, apparently, pace.”

  “Kind of useless by comparison,” he said as he took both items.

  “We’re in one of those stages of a case where it’s up to someone else,” she said, “and at that point, it’s whatever gets you through.”

  He bit into the cookie. It was soft, sweet, delicious and still warm. “Wow. That’s really good.”

  She smiled. “Thank you. So what is it? That we’re on hold for the moment? Or that you’re afraid it’s all really true?”

  “All of that,” he agreed, “but…what’s really bugging me at the moment is that text exchange. I mean, I get that her mother’s worried, but it seemed a little…”

  He trailed off, unsure of how to describe what was nagging at him.

  “Hasn’t settled into words yet?”

  “Exactly,” he said, a little relieved she understood. He finished the cookie, took a swallow of coffee.

  “I did wonder why her first question wasn’t if she was all right, but where she is,” Quinn said as he joined them, sipping from his own mug of coffee after popping an entire cookie into his mouth and chewing it with obvious enjoyment.

  Brady nodded. “That’s part of it. Although if she’s really afraid of her, I guess that would make sense. But why the need to constantly remind her…of the mental issue? Ashley obviously isn’t so far gone she’d forget that.”

  “Impartiality would say that perhaps we haven’t seen her at her worst, but her mother has.”

  Brady’s grip on his mug tightened. “But even as bad as she was that day I saw her after the crash, she knew.” It still ate at him, her flat, dull acceptance. I’m going insane. Just like my father.

  “I think we should let that rest until we have Dr. Sebastian’s assessment,” Hayley said.

  Brady drew in a deep breath and relaxed his hand. Then nodded. And managed not to glance yet again toward the closed door of the media room.

  The room where he’d been sleeping on the foldout couch, now that it seemed clear Ashley was not going anywhere. Not that she could, through all the snow.

  So in essence, she was in his bedroom. The bedroom he’d claimed, leaving empty the actual third bedroom in the place, because it was the next room beyond where Ashley was sleeping. And no amount of telling himself he’d done it because she’d have to go past the media room door to get out of the house, so he would likely hear her, was really working.

  He was glad when Quinn spoke and yanked his brain off that path. “But dealing strictly with physical observations, I would have thought that if it happened the way her mother said, she’d have had more blood on her.”

  Brady looked up to meet Quinn’s steady gaze. “Yes,” he said, the same thought having occurred to him the moment he’d heard the description of the altercation. “The physical evidence that we know of supports her story.”

  “Then that, combined with her obvious stability right now, gives us inconsistencies that need looking into, explaining.”

  Brady nodded. “Although it could well be she dodged the blood somehow and there was a puddle on their kitchen floor,” he said, feeling grimly obligated to point that out. “The report wasn’t final yet, so I didn’t get all the details.”

  “And I think you calling back for more wouldn’t be advisable just yet,” Quinn said.

  “Kind of like running up a flag to announce I know something,” he agreed sourly.

  Quinn gave him a steady but empathetic look. “I realize this goes against the grain.”

  “It goes,” Brady said flatly, “against everything I believe in.”

  “I know.” Quinn said it like someone who had walked the same path.

  Brady rubbed at his eyes. “I’d never even consider it, if I hadn
’t…if I didn’t…”

  “Think there was more to this?” Hayley said quietly.

  He nodded, slowly. “My gut’s yelling there is, no matter what my brain says.”

  Quinn smiled then. “Welcome to Foxworth. Sometimes that’s all we have to go on.”

  “But it’s not what a deputy sheriff in Eagle County is supposed to rely on.”

  Quinn nodded. “If it comes down to you needing a defense to keep your job, we’ve got a guy.”

  “It well may, so I hope he’s good.” Even as he said it, a memory jabbed at him, from the stories about the aftermath of the downfall of the governor last year. His gaze narrowed. “Hold on. You’re not talking about Gavin de Marco, are you?”

  “As a matter of fact, I was.”

  Brady let out a low whistle. “Yeah, that oughta do it.”

  “Gavin has that effect,” Hayley agreed blandly.

  Just the thought of having the world-famous attorney on his side was heartening. But then something more important occurred to him. “If they end up pushing the criminal side of this, Ashley might need some legal help.”

  Quinn nodded. “She’ll have it.”

  And Brady stopped his pacing and sat down, marveling at the whims of fate. The Foxworths’ arrival at the scene of Ashley’s accident had been the most serious case of right place, right time he’d ever encountered.

  CHAPTER 18

  Brady was glad for the warning Dunbar had given him not to think too much about how Foxworth got things done. But surely Andrew Jordan’s own child would have the right to access his records? And she’d given them permission, so perhaps it wasn’t a violation to be sitting here reading about a man long gone.

  But more disturbing, to him, were the similarities between the cases of father and daughter. The same sort of deterioration, from occasional breaks in stability to progressively more serious problems with confusion, memory and perception.

  “We’re working on the official report on the suicide,” Quinn began, but Brady shook his head.

  “Don’t bother. I read it.”

  Quinn gave him an assessing look. “So your gut’s been talking back on this for a while, then.”

  He didn’t see any point in denying that he’d dug into this more than he normally would. He just hoped they didn’t push for an answer beyond that gut feeling, because he was afraid he didn’t have one. At least, not an answer that didn’t involve emotions that, in his experience, did more to cloud judgment than hone it.

  “Yes. He was found in his den, one gunshot to the head, gun on the floor beside him, only his prints on the weapon.” He hesitated, then realized he was already in so deep it would hardly matter. “It was cut-and-dried. Nothing unexpected or odd. And with the supplemental, it was pretty clear.”

  The supplemental report was an addendum to the official report, and it was often held back and kept confidential for varied reasons. In this case it was speculation on the impetus for Andrew Jordan’s suicide. Quinn didn’t push, which made it easier for Brady to go on. “Apparently the shrink—Dr. Andler—was going to have him committed.”

  “Involuntary?” Quinn asked. Brady nodded. “He could have fought that.”

  Brady sighed. “Maybe he didn’t have any fight left in him by then. He’d been going steadily downhill for nearly a year.” He met Quinn’s gaze then. “Ashley said she could never understand why he did it…until she reached that point herself.”

  “There are a lot of similarities between their situations,” Quinn said.

  “Yes.”

  Logic told Brady that the mental problem that had driven Ashley’s father to take his own life could indeed be something hereditary, some genetic quirk passed on from father to daughter. And with that admission came images, imaginings he could well have done without, of arriving at the lookout too late, of her broken, lifeless body at the bottom of the drop-off.

  He suppressed a shudder, a reaction that was a warning in itself.

  Just means your looks have to carry more of the load.

  Not a problem for him.

  If he’d needed any further proof that he was tumbling down a rabbit hole, Hayley and Ashley’s teasing exchange slamming into his mind just then would have sufficed. The simple fact that his pulse had kicked up and his stomach had knotted at the idea that she liked his looks was a warning that screamed far louder than that little voice in the back of his mind.

  He felt the sudden urge to bail on this whole thing, to grab his stuff and get out. Go home, where he should have been and stayed. If he’d gone straight there Sunday night, he never would have gotten sucked into this.

  And Ashley would be dead. Lying crumpled and broken and probably frozen by now. A lump of dead meat, with no life in those vivid green eyes.

  He felt a nudge—a wet one—on his hand. Looked to see Cutter there, staring at him with those uncannily clever eyes. Again the dark nose nudged, harder, until he wasn’t sure if he’d lifted his hand to the dog’s head or the animal had just managed to slide his head under his fingers. And it was second nature to give the dog what he wanted, so he stroked the soft fur.

  Only then did he remember his earlier thoughts about how odd it was that petting Cutter seemed to make problems fade. Petting any dog helped, but this one was…different. He felt the peace steal over him, as if the animal were somehow communicating that everything would be all right. As if he had a certainty his human companions lacked about how things would turn out.

  “So we follow your lead and everything comes up roses, is that it?” he murmured to the dog.

  The dog made a low sound that sounded oddly like approval and followed it with a tilt of his head and a swipe of his tongue over Brady’s wrist. He couldn’t help smiling and gave the dog a scratch behind the ears. Cutter sighed happily and leaned into the touch.

  “Crazy, isn’t it?” Hayley said. “How much better he makes you feel?”

  Brady could only shake his head in wonder. “Where’d you find this guy?”

  She sat down beside him. “I didn’t. He found me.” He raised a brow at her. “He just turned up one day on my doorstep. At a bad time in my life. I’d just lost my mother.”

  “Damn.”

  “Yes,” Hayley said simply. “I genuinely tried to find his owner, ran ads, made calls, but by the time it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, I couldn’t imagine going on without him.”

  “So he stayed.”

  “I don’t think I could have gotten him to leave if I tried.”

  “He can obviously be very…determined.”

  “And persistent.”

  “Like the Colorado River was persistent?” he asked dryly.

  “Carving out the Grand Canyon?” Hayley grinned at him. “Exactly like.”

  Brady looked back at the dog, who now was looking at him with his head tilted and what looked absurdly like a smile. If he were human, Brady would have said it was a “Good, you finally figured it out!” expression.

  But he was only a dog.

  * * *

  “Dr. Sebastian is…very different,” Ashley said.

  “From Dr. Andler?” Hayley asked, and Ashley nodded. “How so?”

  She glanced at Brady, whose jaw was tight, as if he were keeping his mouth shut with an effort. It nearly made her smile, because she knew his opinion of Dr. Andler and could only imagine what he’d be saying if he did speak.

  She felt a little guilty for saying it, but Dr. Sebastian had impressed upon her the importance of being honest with them. “She listens. Truly listens. Dr. Andler mostly talked. And…he basically assumed he knew what was wrong with me. That it was the same thing as my father. She did not.”

  And the woman had made her feel better after one encounter, online, than Dr. Andler ever had. Admittedly, it had been one three-hour session, but still. Ashley wondered what the doctor and Q
uinn were discussing back in the media room—Brady’s bedroom. She’d given her consent for full disclosure, and the doctor had asked for a private moment with Quinn.

  “She’s very aware how easy it is to misinterpret or miss things altogether,” Hayley said. “From personal experience.”

  Ashley gave the woman a steady look, wanting her to know she was able to talk about this rationally. “I gathered. She told me about her son. That he killed himself at seventeen.”

  Hayley’s expression was sad. “It was tragic.”

  “She said she blamed herself for missing the signs. That it’s what led her to specialize in at-risk patients.”

  “Yes. And she’s helped a great many.”

  “She also told me what Foxworth did for her.”

  Hayley nodded. “That was Liam Burnett and Ty Hewitt. They dug deep, Ty online and Liam on the street.” She smiled. “Liam can look like a teenager if necessary, and he used that to good effect.”

  “She said they found a friend of her son’s who was able to help explain what had happened, and who told her that the only reason he made it as long as he did was because he didn’t want to hurt his mother. That he’d loved her and knew she loved him. It didn’t make it right, but it helped her heal a little. Gave her a reason she could accept, even amid the grief.”

  “And now she’s helping Foxworth?” Brady asked. “Because of that?”

  Hayley turned to look at him. “Yes. It’s how we work, since we don’t charge money for what we do.”

  “Only in help for someone else down the line?”

  Hayley nodded. Ashley found herself watching Brady rather intently, curious what his reaction would be. And felt a sweet sort of warmth when he shook his head almost in wonder, and there was a matching tone in his voice when he spoke.

  “That’s enough to almost give me hope for the human race,” he said.

  “Another reason we do it,” Hayley said. “So people like you don’t lose hope.”

  He blinked. “Like me?”

  “The good guys,” Ashley said.

  Brady’s gaze shot to her face, but before he could speak, Quinn was there. He walked over to Hayley and brushed his fingers over her cheek. Ashley had noticed he always did that when he’d been away, even if it was only in the next room—he went to his wife and made contact in some way, a hand on her shoulder, a touch to her hand or that brushing of fingers. As if it were his way of assuring the connection between them was still there, still strong. And Ashley felt a hollow sort of ache inside, both at having never known that kind of link with someone and at how close she’d come to throwing away even the chance for it someday.