by Roxie Noir
He hated having to tell people about his parents, because the moment he did, he could practically feel himself shrinking from adult man to orphaned teenager, and he never wanted to feel like that again.
So, he usually avoided it at all costs. But right now, it was actually crucial.
“The police never investigated it,” he said.
“Did they have a reason?” Ellie asked. “Not to be cruel, but it’s not that strange for someone to drive off a cliff in a rainstorm.”
You’re telling it wrong again, Garrett thought. Stop skipping ahead and just tell her everything.
So he did.
He’d been at home with his two brothers: Seth, two years older, and Zach, two years younger, in the tiny town of Obsidian, Utah. Smack dab in the middle of nowhere.
His parents had driven two hours to Blanding, the closest town with a real grocery store, to do some errands. The fastest road was Piñon Gulch Road, a small, narrow, winding gravel track through the mountains, but they drove it all the time. They could have driven that road in their sleep.
They’d never come home.
The three brothers had stayed up all night, getting more and more worried, until they’d finally gone to the police station first thing the next morning.
Garrett took a deep breath, still staring at his hands. He’d gone over it a thousand times in the past few years, but he’d never said it out loud to anyone before.
“Things get a little spotty after that,” he said.
“Just tell me what you can,” Elliott said. He could hear the sound of a pen on paper, but Garrett didn’t look up.
He and his brothers had never seen the crash site. Before he knew it — by the end of that second day, Garrett thought — the car had been hauled up out of the canyon and taken to a wrecking yard back in Blanding. By the time he and his brothers found out where the car had gone, it had been reduced to scrap metal already, and the Sheriff had just shrugged their questions off.
“How about your parents themselves?” Elliott asked.
Garrett looked up, right into her big, soft, brown eyes.
“Was there any evidence of foul play on their bodies?”
Garrett shoved his hair out of his face again.
“We never found out,” he said. “They were taken back to Blanding for an autopsy, since there was no facility in Obsidian, but apparently the hospital had some kind of mix-up and cremated them instead.”
Elliott stopped writing for a moment and pursed her lips.
“Weird, right?” Garrett asked.
“It does happen,” she said, and tapped the end of the pen against the paper. “Doctors and hospitals fuck up way, way more than people want to believe.”
She paused for a moment, then narrowed her eyes.
“Who identified their bodies?” she asked.
“The Sheriff,” Garrett said. “It’s a very small town. He knew who they were.”
“You never saw them?”
“I saw a picture,” he said.
Even now, remembering it made his stomach turn. It had been in the small Sheriff’s station in Obsidian, and the Kane County Sheriff, an overweight man named Raymond Tusk, had slapped the photo down on his desk in front of him, Seth, and Zach. Then Tusk had just walked away, like he didn’t give a damn.
Over the years, Garrett had chalked that up to Tusk’s own incompetence. It was probably easier for Tusk to get angry at three teenagers demanding evidence that their parents were really dead than admit that he’d fucked up.
That hadn’t made his parents’ pale, bloody faces any easier to stomach. He’d had nightmares for years afterward. When Tusk had died a few years ago, Garrett hadn’t been sorry.
“You’re sure it was them in the picture?” Elliott asked.
“I’m sure,” Garrett said.
“So someone did take photos, at least of the bodies,” Elliott said. “What about the accident scene?”
“I only ever saw two pictures,” Garrett said. “One of the bodies in the morgue, and one of the car after they found it the next day.”
“Do you know if more exist?”
“I haven’t found them.”
She nodded, writing.
“There were no witnesses, I’m assuming,” she said.
“No,” Garrett said.
Tell her, he thought.
She was looking at him, brown eyes sharp.
“What is it?” she asked.
Garrett swallowed.
“There was another car that night,” he said. “The gravel road went right past our property, and at night, especially, we’d know if someone was coming down it.”
“Was that unusual?” she asked.
Garrett just nodded.
“Yeah,” he said. “Hardly anyone but us used that road. There was another road right in the middle of town that most everyone else used. Most nights there was nobody on that little dirt road off the mountain.”
He paused.
“I remember it because I thought it was our parents,” he said. “It was a sedan. I couldn’t see what color, but it looked like the car they had. It turned onto the highway and went into town, and I remember thinking, wow, two cars in one day.”
“Did you ever find out who it was?” she asked.
“No,” Garrett said. “The police didn’t believe me, so they never tried to find it.”
Elliott flicked him a skeptical glance.
“I know it was a long time ago,” Garrett said. “And I know you probably think that I’m confused, or my eyes were playing tricks on me, but I know what I saw.”
She blinked.
“Okay,” she said softly. “I believe you.”
She glanced over her notes for a moment, then looked back up at him.
“This could be suspicious, or it could be a case of a few screw-ups in a small town,” she said.
Ellie pushed the paper away, then looked at Garett again.
He thought about her hips under his hands, tearing off her sensible shirt and swiping his tongue past one erect nipple —
“Is there any reason someone might want your parents dead?” she asked.
This was where things got very, very tricky.
Garrett had had insomnia for as long as he could remember, even as a kid. One night, lying awake in bed, he’d looked out of his window.
In the yard below had been his mother, walking away from the house. They lived on the edge of town, there were no other houses behind theirs — just the vast, unspoiled Utah wilderness.
As he watched, she’d turned into a giant bird and taken off.
He’d assumed he was dreaming.
That is, until he saw it again. And again.
There was no way he was telling Ellie about that part.
“They were very unpopular in town,” he said slowly. “Most of the people in town kind of closed themselves off from my mother’s family, and my father, when they got married.”
Ellie listened.
“Over a hundred years ago, in the 1870s, I think, there was a drought. And the only person who had a good harvest was my ancestor,” Garrett said. “The rest of the town decided that he’s made some kind of deal with the devil, even though it’s just because he was smart enough to stake his claim next to the river.”
Ellie frowned.
“People are still mad about that?” she said, incredulously.
Garrett shrugged.
“There has to be some other reason,” she said, her eyes narrowed.
“If there is, I wish I knew it,” Garrett said.
Ellie looked at her note paper like she wasn’t sure what to write down.
“Were they mad enough to murder your parents?” she asked, skeptically.
“I don’t think so,” Garrett said. “But it’s all I’ve got.”
She leaned her head on one hand and tapped the pen on the desk again.
“I’ll see if I can turn up some evidence,” she said. “A police report, a hospital file, something. But don’t
get your hopes up, okay?”
Garrett reached into his pocket and pulled out a flash drive, then placed it on the desk in front of Ellie.
“That’s got everything I’ve been able to find,” he said. “Maps to the crash site, articles, press releases from the police, the hospital, the whole thing.”
Ellie closed it in her hand.
“The password is ‘Obsidian15,’ but the O is a zero,” he said.
“Thanks,” she said. “Very secure.”
“I try,” Garrett said.
“I’m not sure how long this will take, but I think at least two days,” Ellie said. “I charge fifty dollars an hour, plus expenses.”
“Sounds good,” Garrett said. He stood from his chair and stretched. “Let me know what you find.”
Ellie tore a post-it note from a pad on her desk and handed it to him.
“Give me your number,” she said.
Garrett wrote it down, then tossed the pen on the desk and pushed his hair out of his face again.
“It was nice meeting you, private investigator Ellie,” he said.
“Same,” Ellie said, and stuck out her hand.
Garrett shook it again, fighting the urge to pull her toward him, to feel her body underneath his hands.
Then he let go, turned, and walked back down her stairs.
Get it now, or FREE on Kindle Unlimited!
Start from the beginning.
Predator
Copper Mesa Eagles #1
Seth Monson has barely scraped by his whole life. Still young when his parents died, he’s had to raise his two brothers himself, deep in the tiny Utah desert town of Obsidian. On top of that, age-old rumors about his family - that his ancestor made a deal with the devil so he could shift into an eagle - have kept him isolated his whole life.
Yeah, right. If Seth could turn into an eagle, he’d have flown away from his problems long ago.
Jules Morgan is the kind of girl who likes to get dirty, drives a truck, and knows her way around heavy equipment. A field geologist for a mining conglomerate, she’s on a job outside Obsidian when she crosses paths with the very attractive stranger standing by his very broken truck. She can’t seem to escape his deep, golden-brown gaze no matter how hard she tries.
When they discover that Jules’s employer wants to destroy the only home Seth has ever known, they’re both stuck in the middle, caught between duty and what they truly want, with unstoppable passion burning like wildfire around them.
Can Seth discover the power hidden inside himself in time to save both his home of Copper Mesa and the town of Obsidian? More importantly, can he do it without alienating the one woman - the one mate - he’s quickly realizing he can’t live without?
Get it now - FREE on Kindle Unlimited!
Come to Shifter Country.
Are you a bear or a wolf?
A Bear’s Protection (Shifter Country Bears #1)
and
Running With Wolves (Shifter Country Wolves #1)
are both just 99¢, or free on Kindle Unlimited!
More from Amelie Hunt
Ophelia Bell’s Black Mountain Bears
Vivian Wood’s Winter Pass Wolves
Sennah Tate’s Sunset Glade Panthers
Maeve Morrick’s Arctic Station Bears
Cass Reynolds’ Emerald Isle Tigers
About Roxie
I love writing sexy, take-charge alphas with a softer side. In real life, I live in California with one husband (who might be a bear shifter) and two cats (who would be much too lazy to shift, even if they could).
I’m on the internet at RoxieNoir.com. You can also follow @RoxieNoir on Twitter, like my Facebook page, or just email me: [email protected].