by Paula Graves
Even if it was the worst idea he’d ever had in his whole sorry, misbegotten life.
“We’re crazy, aren’t we?” she asked, her tone still as breathless as it had been when she’d asked him not to leave outside the community center. He still heard the same tone of sexual excitement that he’d seen echoed in her dark gaze, but threaded through the arousal was a bleaker tone, a hint of fear and regret.
Tamping down the selfish urge to brush aside those reservations, he made himself slow the truck as it started the climb up the mountainside to her cabin. “Probably,” he admitted.
She was silent long enough for them to reach the edge of her property. Cain pulled his truck in behind hers where it sat parked in the gravel in front of the cabin and shut off the engine. The ensuing silence felt heavy and thick with unspoken thoughts.
Sara turned to look at him, and any intention to do the right thing shot straight out of his brain when he saw the fire blazing in her hungry gaze. Reaching for her, he dragged her toward him, laughing helplessly as her seat belt foiled him.
Sara grappled with the clasp until it opened, freeing her to launch herself into his grasp in a tangle of arms and legs and searching lips.
He settled her between his body and the steering wheel, and if the wheel digging into her rib cage caused her any discomfort, she didn’t show it, straining closer, her legs straddling his until he felt the fiery heat at the juncture of her thighs press intimately over his own straining erection.
Her thighs clenching, she rose slowly up his body and back down, deliberately creating friction between them. In the pale glow of the dashboard, he caught a glint of pure, wicked pleasure in her eyes as he was unable to stop a groan from escaping his mouth.
“That,” she whispered against his mouth, “is what it feels like to discover you’re still alive.”
The sentiment behind her words stung him, even as she slid her tongue against his, drawing him into another deep, heart-stopping kiss.
He struggled against the power of his lust for her, knowing she’d just told him something important and profound. Gently pushing her away until she winced a little at the press of the steering wheel against her back, he cradled her face and made her look at him. “What do you mean, to discover you’re still alive?”
She made a face at him, impatience trembling in her touch as she tried to draw him back to her. “Nothing. I didn’t say anything.”
Wrestling with the selfish desire to take her at her word, he kept her from bending in for another kiss. “No, you said this was what it feels like to discover you’re still alive.”
With a growl of frustration, she slid away from his lap. He felt the absence of her soft heat like an ache, and not just the physical kind. A hollow sensation filled his chest as well, as if she’d removed something vital from inside him when she moved to her side of the truck cab.
“I haven’t been with anyone since Donnie,” she said. The words sounded hushed, as if spoken in the hallowed privacy of the confessional.
Cain had spent more time than he liked wondering if she’d broken her mourning with another man, but hearing her say the words aloud, he couldn’t say he was surprised to learn she’d been faithful to his memory. She’d loved Donnie Lindsey since they were kids, and losing him couldn’t have been something she’d get over easily.
“I guess it sort of felt like my life has been in limbo,” she added when he didn’t say anything. “I still felt married to a man who was dead. I guess it made me feel as if I was there with him, in death.”
“And so this—” Cain waved his hand in the space between them “—is sort of like a limb coming back to life?”
She shot him a grin that was pure temptation. “Well, yes, if by limb you mean—”
He shushed her with two fingers against her lips. “When a limb comes back to life, there’s usually a good bit of pain before it’s all over.”
The smile that curved against his fingers faded, and her eyes took on a serious light. “It’s better than feeling nothing.”
The sorrow in her voice echoed in his hollow chest, exacerbating the empty ache that had set up shop there when she drew away from him. He didn’t let himself examine the sensation too closely, not ready to think about what it might mean that he felt her pain so keenly himself.
“I think we shouldn’t do anything we can’t take back,” he said, steeling himself against any attempt she might make to change his mind. “I meant what I said the other day. You should always have expectations about something as important as who you sleep with.”
“I meant what I said, too,” she said quietly. “You should have expectations, yourself.”
“Did you really expect anything good from what we were about to do?”
She turned her face forward to gaze through the front windshield at the darkened cabin. “I wasn’t thinking about what happens next.”
“You should. We both should.”
“I’m not reckless by nature,” she admitted. “I’m not used to feeling so out of control.”
“Well, at the risk of stretching a metaphor until it snaps, a limb that’s fallen asleep usually flails around a bit until all the feeling comes back.”
She groaned softly on her side of the cab, slanting a look at him that made him smile for the first time since they’d stopped kissing. “Stop. You’ve definitely tortured that metaphor enough.”
He couldn’t stop himself from pressing the back of his knuckles against her cheek. “I’m done.”
She caught his hand, her touch gentle but not inviting anything more than the small display of affection. “Thank you. And not just for putting the metaphor out of its misery.”
“It’s okay if you don’t want to work together on this case anymore.”
She shook her head. “We’re adults. We can be professional, right?”
“Right,” he agreed, even if there was a hint of doubt still lingering in the back of his mind. He’d have to make their professional alliance work, even if it killed him, because if the past few weeks in Purgatory had proved nothing else to him, it was that he couldn’t open nearly as many doors in this town as he needed to in order to get the answers he wanted. Sara was his key to a whole lot of information currently not available to him, and he didn’t know if he’d get anywhere on the case without her.
“Will you stick around to see I get inside safely?” she asked, opening the passenger door. She shot him a sheepish smile that made his legs tingle a little. “You can take the cop out of the big city...”
He grinned. “I’ve got your back, Detective.”
She walked slowly up the stairs to the front door, her body swaying slightly with each step, as if she could still hear phantom strains of music in the cold night air. She turned at the top of the porch and gave a little wave. He waved back, his chest squeezing into a hot, tight knot at the almost girlish vulnerability he glimpsed in her moonlit features.
He waited until she unlocked the cabin door and slipped inside before he started the engine. When the lights came on inside the cabin, Cain put the truck in Reverse and started to pull out.
Suddenly the front door opened and Sara hurried out, waving frantically as she ran down the stairs.
Cain jammed the truck into Park and rolled down his window as she hurried up to his door. “What’s wrong?”
“Someone broke into the cabin and trashed the place,” she said, fear mingling with anger in her blazing dark gaze. “And I think they took all the notes I’ve made on the case so far.”
Chapter Twelve
The large front room of the small cabin was a mess. Sofa cushions had been ripped up and tossed around, the stuffing covering the hardwood floors like the aftermath of a fiberfill snowstorm. The sheer, back-breaking work it was going to take just to get the cabin back to where she’d gotten it over the past couple of weeks was enough to make Sara want to cry.
The damage the intruder had inflicted to photographs and mementos that couldn’t be replaced, however, made
her seething mad.
“That’s the only photograph I have of my great-grandmother Dunkirk,” she told Cain with a wave toward the black-and-white photo that had been pulled from its smashed frame and ripped into three pieces. “That broken vase there was made by my uncle Cyrus shortly before he went to Vietnam and died in battle.”
Cain remained silent as he looked around the room, taking in the destruction. After a moment, he turned and put his hand on her cheek. “I don’t even know what to say to you.”
Despite her earlier determination to keep their relationship on a professional footing, she didn’t resist when he pulled her into his arms. Pressing her cheek against the solid heat of his chest, she let herself have a quiet moment of mourning for what she’d lost that couldn’t be replaced.
But after a minute, she lifted her head and squared her shoulders. “My guess is that what happened here is connected to our investigation.”
“Maybe not. Maybe some meth head broke in looking for money and ended up trashing the place just for the hell of it.”
“My laptop computer is sitting right there on my desk. There’s fifty dollars in an unlocked drawer in that same desk. I put it there to pay the guy I hired to power wash the outside of the cabin next week. And the only thing I can tell was taken was a file folder I left sitting on that desk this afternoon. It contained a compilation of all the notes I had on Renee Lindsey’s murder, including the ones Donnie put together before he died.”
Cain grimaced. “I’m so sorry.”
She pressed her lips in a tight line, struggling to maintain her composure. At the moment, she was in the mood to throw a few things around, herself. Starting with the bastard who broke into her cabin and made this disheartening mess.
“I don’t suppose you have copies of those notes?” he said after giving her a moment to calm down.
“Actually, I do. At least, copies of Donnie’s notes. I digitized the handwritten stuff after his death, when I was stuck home recuperating from my own injuries.” She managed a grim smile, though humor was the last thing she was feeling at the moment. “Gave me something to do with my brain and my hands at a time I really, really needed a distraction.”
“What about the other stuff in the stolen folder?”
She shrugged, trying to remember what else there might be. “Mostly it would have been notes I took over the past few days. I like to write things down longhand when I first make a set of notes. I got used to doing it that way when I was working as a police detective, and I never got out of the habit. I find that writing my notes in longhand helps me slow down and let my mind ferret out all the details of my observations. Typing goes too quickly.”
“And you haven’t had a chance to type up your longhand notes and put them on your computer?”
“Not the ones I took in the last couple of days.” She tried to remember what hadn’t yet been saved to her computer. “Mostly it would be the stuff about Coach Allen and our speculations about his potential relationship with Renee.”
Cain frowned. “If Coach Allen is the one responsible for what happened here at your cabin—”
“Then he knows we’re on to him.”
Cain rubbed his jaw as he took another look around the place. “There’s something strange about this mess. Don’t you think?”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” she agreed, following his gaze around the room. She’d understood it almost from the moment she walked into the cabin, despite the paralyzing effect of shock at the sight of so much destruction. “There wasn’t any effort to make this look like a common robbery. Not even the most obvious things were taken out of here. And all the destruction is—”
“Personal,” Cain finished in unison with her.
“Exactly.”
“I doubt there’s going to be any evidence to find,” he said, looking around, “but you should probably get the break-in on the record with the cops.”
The question caught her by surprise. “Cain Dennison, suggesting a call to the police?”
He grinned. “Wonders never cease.”
“If you want to clear out before they come, I’ll understand.”
His smile faded. “You want me to leave?”
“No,” she said quickly, wanting nothing of the sort. “I just figured you’d want to, considering your history with the Ridge County Sheriff’s Department.”
“Lotta years ago,” he said with a shrug. “Maybe it’s time to start acting like an innocent man instead of always looking over my shoulder.”
Sara bypassed emergency services and called the station directly, telling the night-shift desk sergeant what was going on. He told her he could have deputies at her cabin in about fifteen minutes, unless she thought there was any chance the intruders might be still lurking about. In that case, he could get them there faster.
“No, I think the intruder’s gone for the night.” At least, she hoped so, she thought as she hung up the phone. She might be armed and well-trained, but sooner or later she’d have to sleep. And clearly, her defenses weren’t exactly shored up at this cabin. She’d locked the doors, but someone had still managed to find a way in.
“What are you thinking?” Cain asked.
“Just wondering how the intruder got in. The front door was still locked when I got here tonight.” She headed into the other rooms of the small cabin, checking windows to see if they had provided the point of entry. She also checked the top of the bedroom closet to make sure her gun case was still locked. It was, and the Walther PPK was still snuggled safely in its foam mold. She locked the case, double-checked that all her extra ammunition was still in the boxes stored next to the case and headed back into the hall.
Cain stood in the middle of the hall, looking through an open door with his brow furrowed. “Is this the basement?”
“It’s a root cellar.”
“Is there a way down there besides this door?”
She nodded, already heading for the front door as she realized how the intruder must have gotten inside the cabin. She stopped long enough to grab a flashlight from the drawer of her desk in the front room and headed outside, Cain on her heels.
On the western side of the cabin, a door set into the ground led into the cellar. Normally, a padlock closed the door hasp to keep out intruders, but the lock lay a few feet away in the grass, snapped in two.
“Point of entry,” she said flatly.
“You’ll have to add a dead bolt to the door from the cellar.” Cain put his hand on her arm, nudging her back toward the cabin. Sara didn’t resist, as the cold wind blowing down from Sandler Ridge had a bitter edge.
She rubbed her arms to tamp down a sudden chill once they were back inside the cabin. “How does anybody know to look for me here? I haven’t exactly been advertising my living arrangements.”
His dark eyebrows notched upward, but he said nothing.
“Oh. Right.” She pushed her hair back from her face in frustration. “Small-town gossip.”
“This ain’t the big city, sugar,” he drawled.
But she’d felt safer in the city than she felt right now, she realized with dismay. And she was about to be spending the night here with no way to lock the door from the cellar.
Anyone could break in again, couldn’t they?
“Maybe you shouldn’t stay here tonight,” Cain said, apparently reading her mind. “I’m sure your parents would be happy to have you stay over.”
She shook her head. “You have no idea how tempting it is right now to run home to Mom and Dad. But if I do, I’ll never get my life back. I can’t keep running back home and hiding under my childhood bed.”
Almost as soon as she’d blurted the words aloud, she wondered why on earth she was saying such an intimate, revealing thing to a man who had been little more than a stranger only a week ago.
Who was still a stranger, a few hot kisses notwithstanding.
If her confession made him uncomfortable, he didn’t show it. “Then call someone to come stay here with you. At
least for tonight.”
Squaring her shoulders, she shook her head. “I don’t need a bodyguard. I’m a trained cop, even if I’m not working at the moment.” She shot him a wry look. “I’m armed and dangerous.”
“You’re armed?” His skeptical gaze roamed her body. “Right now?”
“Well, not at this moment. My Walther’s locked in the bedroom closet. But I’m a good shot, and I have plenty of ammo.”
“Have you checked to make sure your weapon’s still here?”
She nodded. “When I checked for signs of forced entry.”
“You know, to open that padlock, someone would have needed a bolt cutter. Was there one lying around this place before?”
She had been over every inch of the cabin while trying to assess its condition. She hadn’t seen a bolt cutter or anything that could have snapped the padlock. “No.”
“So someone knew you’d be gone tonight and how to get in.” His eyes narrowed. “How many people in town would know those things?”
Her heart sank as she once again considered the drawbacks of life in a small town. “Really, almost anyone. My grandfather was one of those people who never met a stranger. He’d bring people into the house all the time, just to sit a spell and talk or show off his latest hunting rifle or how many cans of tomatoes he’d put up out of the garden for the winter.”
“You really need to reconsider staying here alone tonight.”
Before she could argue, her cell phone rang. “Hello?”
“Hey, Sara, it’s Brad Ellis. I just got a call from the station—what’s this I hear about somebody breaking in to your cabin?”
* * *
BEING THE DAUGHTER of a former sheriff’s department investigator clearly had its perks, Cain thought as he watched three deputies scour Sara’s place for clues while she talked quietly in the kitchen with Lieutenant Ellis, who’d been her father’s partner before his retirement.
Cain really wasn’t sure why he was sticking around at this point—she certainly didn’t need him to keep her safe, at least not while her place was crawling with deputies.