In Self Defense

by Debra Webb

  “Hi, I’m Eliza... Eliza Burke.” She looked down at the plant. “It’s gorgeous.” Huge flowers in a beautiful shade of deep pink adorned the sturdy green stalks. She fought the impulse to reach up and do something with her messy hair.

  “It’s a peony. I thought it might look nice right there next to your porch.” He pointed to a bare spot and then looked at her expectantly.

  “What a nice thought. Uh, would you like to sit and have a cup of coffee?” She gestured to the porch swing. It would be nice to get to know her neighbor, although it would be much more comfortable if he weren’t so darned good-looking. A wild flutter of butterflies had taken wing in her chest the moment he’d first smiled at her.

  “I’d love a cup of coffee,” he replied. He stepped past her, trailing the scent of sunshine and an attractive woodsy cologne on his way to the swing.

  “Uh, I’ll be right back.” She stepped back inside and locked the door behind her. She never lost track of the fact that she was a woman living here only with her two small children.

  While Troy appeared to be a decent, law-abiding citizen, she didn’t feel comfortable enough to invite him inside, at least not yet. Still, it had been very nice of him to come over and bring the plant.

  Darn, she should have asked him if he used cream or sugar in his coffee. She placed a pod in the coffee machine and waited for it to whoosh out Colombian caffeine into the mug.

  When it was finished she hurried back outside. “I didn’t think to ask you if you wanted anything in your coffee.”

  “Black is fine,” he assured her as he took the cup from her. She sank down in a nearby wicker chair.

  “So, I’ve seen some children in your backyard,” he said.

  “Yes, Sammy and Katie.” She couldn’t help the smile that curved her lips as she thought of her children. “Katie is seven and Sammy is six.”

  “And Mr. Burke?” His eyes were an intense blue as they held her gaze.

  “There is no Mr. Burke,” she replied, deciding to be honest. Thoughts of Blake always made her angry and sad at the same time. “What about you? Is there a Mrs. Anderson?”

  “No, I’m divorced. No wife and no children.” A darkness crept into his eyes. It was there only a moment and then vanquished by another one of his heart-stopping smiles. “So, Ms. Eliza Burke, what do you do for a living? the nosy neighbor asked.” He raised his cup to his lips and took a sip.

  “I have my own web design business,” she said. “And I assume you’re Troy Anderson as in Anderson Lawn and Landscaping. I’ve seen your truck parked in front of your house.”

  The butterflies continued to fly. What on earth was wrong with her? She hadn’t had that kind of a reaction to a man for years.

  “That’s me,” he replied. “Maybe we can trade services. I’ll take care of your lawn and you can update my website.”

  “I’m sure we can work something out.” Actually she hadn’t thought about the lawn, since right now everything was summer brown and needed no tending.

  “And I’ll be glad to plant the peony for you.”

  “That’s too kind of you,” she protested.

  “Nonsense, I brought it, so I’ll plant it. I’ll get it taken care of sometime tomorrow.” He took another sip of the coffee. “I couldn’t help but notice when you opened your door that something in there smells wonderful,” he said.

  “I’ve got chicken cacciatore in the Crock-Pot.”

  “Oh, that’s one of my favorite dishes.” Once again he appeared to be looking at her in expectation.

  “If you’d like to join us this evening we usually sit down to eat around five.” The words were out of her mouth before she realized she was going to speak them.

  “That sounds great. I’d love to join you.” He took another drink of his coffee and then stood and walked toward her to hand her the cup. “I should get going, but I look forward to seeing you again this evening, Eliza. Thanks so much for the coffee and the invitation.”

  She stood and watched him until he disappeared into his house. Only then did she turn and go back inside. She returned to her desk and frowned thoughtfully. The short conversation had been rather strained and she felt strangely manipulated into the dinner invitation...and strangely excited at the same time.

  * * *

  TROY HEADED BACK to his house, his mind working overtime to process what he’d just learned. Eliza Burke was definitely a stunner. Her dark hair pulled up in the ponytail had showcased beautiful gray eyes and prominent cheekbones.

  But he hadn’t gone over there to check out the physical attributes of the new neighbor. He needed to find out who had stood in the upstairs window and watched him bury the gun. He now knew she didn’t have a husband, but was another adult living with her? Was there somebody else besides her and the two children in the house? Somebody who had seen what he had done?

  Worming his way into a dinner invitation had been absolutely perfect. Hopefully he’d know tonight what had been seen and by whom. In the meantime he had other concerns whirling around in his head.

  Somebody had killed Steven Winthrop and that meant somebody was playing by their own set of rules. He knew Nick Simon had encountered a similar problem and even though it was against the terms they had all set up among themselves, Troy wanted to meet with Nick.

  He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and punched in Nick’s phone number. Nick answered on the second ring. “Nick, it’s Troy.”

  There was a long pause and Troy knew he was probably the last man on earth Nick wanted to hear from right now. “Hey,” Nick finally replied, his voice obviously strained.

  “I want to meet with you,” Troy said.

  Again a long pause followed. “Do you think it’s really necessary?”

  “I think it is,” Troy replied. “Please, Nick.”

  A deep sigh filled the line. “When?”

  “Now, if possible.”

  “I’ll meet you in thirty minutes at the usual place,” Nick said, and then hung up.

  Five minutes later Troy was in his work truck and headed to the old abandoned baseball field where the six men had plotted a murder scheme that would assure each of them both vengeance and the justice that had been denied.

  As he approached his destination, tension bunched his shoulders and he gripped the steering wheel more tightly. He couldn’t come here without thinking of Annie, and thoughts of her always brought forth a deep grief, a hollow emptiness and also a rage tempered only a little bit by the passing of time.

  Knee-high weeds greeted him as he stepped out of the truck. Nature was in the process of taking back the land that had once been filled with a ball field and little baseball players.

  The wooden bleachers in the distance leaned to one side, broken and bleached almost white from the summer sun. A snack shed was spray-painted with a variety of words in different colors. Even that paint had faded, attesting to the forgotten nature of the property.

  He walked toward the thick stand of trees in the distance. It was there next to a fallen tree that a plot for murder had been hatched among six grieving, angry men.

  They had met two years ago at a group meeting for survivors. All six of them had a couple of things in common. The first was that the perpetrators who had committed horrendous crimes against their loved ones had walked away free men due to glitches in their cases. The second thing they all had in common was a killing rage and a desperate and hungry need for justice.

  They had set up a plan for each of them to kill another man’s perpetrator. They each would be killing a man who had absolutely nothing to do with them, hopefully assuring that they all stayed under law enforcement’s scrutiny.

  Troy now headed into the woods. Even in the shade it was hot, and insects buzzed angrily as if to protest Troy’s presence in their domain. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to think about the crime that had br
ought him here. But it concerned him that one of the six was apparently acting alone, and that hadn’t been the plan.

  He sat on the fallen log to wait for Nick and tried to keep his mind empty, but it was impossible. Surprisingly it wasn’t thoughts of murder, but rather thoughts of his neighbor Eliza Burke that intruded in his head.

  It had been a long time since Troy had really noticed any woman. After his wife had walked out on him three years before, he’d had no interest in any kind of a relationship.

  However, Eliza Burke had stirred him on a level he’d thought was long dead. She’d sparked something inside him he hadn’t felt for a very long time. Not that anything would come of it. He wouldn’t allow anything to come of it even if she was interested in him.

  He just wanted to know who in her house might have seen him last night. He’d join her for dinner and see if he got the answer. Once that question was answered, he would be done with her.

  Before he had time to really process anything more, Nick appeared. The tall, dark-haired man wore a deep frown. “What’s up?” He leaned against a nearby tree as if not wanting to get too close to Troy.

  “I was supposed to kill Winthrop last night, but somebody got to him before me.”

  Nick grimaced. “Just like what happened to me.”

  “Somebody has gone rogue and it’s got me worried.”

  “Look, I don’t want anything to do with this,” Nick protested. “I’ve moved on. I’m in love with a wonderful woman and we’re planning a wedding.”

  “I know you don’t want to be involved in this, but you are,” Troy replied evenly. “Doesn’t it bother you that one of us is acting alone? Do you have any idea who it might be?”

  Nick frowned again. “Adam is the one who planned all this. Maybe he just decided to take things into his own hands.”

  Adam Kincaid was one of the six men who had taken the lead and was in charge of the logistics of the plan. His wife had been murdered at a drive-through ATM where she had just withdrawn two hundred dollars. A drug-addicted man had yanked her out of the car and had stabbed her to death to get the cash. The case had ended in a hung jury and the prosecutor had decided not to retry the case.

  “If that’s true, then you know what that makes all of the rest of us? Liabilities,” Troy said.

  Nick raised an eyebrow. “Do you really think he’d come after one of us?”

  Troy released a deep sigh. “I don’t know what to think. I just wanted you to know that somebody isn’t playing by the rules we all set up, although I have to admit I was kind of relieved to wake up yesterday morning and realize I didn’t have to kill a man.”

  “Yeah, I felt the same way when my target was already dead when I went to his house to kill him.” Nick’s frown appeared once again and his eyes darkened. “I’ve got to tell you, man, that was a bad scene. Whoever killed Brian McDowell enjoyed it. His throat was slit, and that takes a special kind of killer. There was also a carving in his forehead. It looked like a V.”

  Tension once again tugged at Troy’s shoulders. “V for vengeance? For vigilante?”

  “Could be either, or maybe it was just a coincidence that it looked like a V. But who does that? Who carves up a man’s forehead after slitting his throat?”

  “Hell if I know. So, what do we do about it?”

  “Nothing. I told all of you before that I’m out of it. I feel like I made a pact with the devil when I got involved in this crazy scheme,” Nick replied.

  Troy studied him for a long moment. “How did you feel this morning when you woke up and read that the man who raped and killed your wife was dead?”

  “Nothing,” Nick replied. “I felt nothing. My wife was still dead and Winthrop’s murder didn’t change that. I’m building a new life for myself and that’s all that matters to me now.” He straightened from the tree trunk. “I hope nothing more comes of this, Troy, but in any case, please lose my number forever.”

  Nick turned and left the small clearing. Troy remained on the log, trying to figure out what in the hell he had hoped to accomplish by meeting with Nick. Maybe he’d just needed somebody else to know.

  Troy didn’t want to think about the pact anymore. He knew somebody was going to kill Dwight Weatherby. Troy definitely wanted that man dead, and he wasn’t about to do a damned thing to stop that from happening.

  And that made him a bad man.

  Copyright © 2019 by Carla Bracale

  ISBN-13: 9781488045639

  In Self Defense

  Copyright © 2019 by Debra Webb

  All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 22 Adelaide St. West, 40th Floor, Toronto, Ontario M5H 4E3, Canada.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

  ® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and in other countries.

  www.Harlequin.com