The Southern Comfort Series Box Set

by Clark O'Neill, Lisa

  Sadie’s voice trailed off as the grief, the anxiety and the guilt which had been her constant companions these past few weeks, grabbed her by the throat and choked off her voice, tears burning her eyes.

  Declan heard the break in her spoken rhythm, felt a similar hitch in his soul. Well familiar with what she was feeling, what she had yet to feel, he fought off the weight of the down comforter that cocooned them and drew her with tender sympathy into his arms.

  “I’m here, honey.” He wouldn’t urge her to stop crying, wouldn’t tell her that it would be okay. She needed to know that what she felt, right this moment, was acceptable, the sting of a wound that had only just begun to heal. The therapist they’d been seeing, both individually and together, had helped him understand that there was a process that couldn’t be rushed. Nor simply ignored, as he’d attempted for years. And as much as he wanted Sadie to be whole and happy, he knew that there were little rips in the fabric of her being that only time could help stitch up. Time, and a boatload of love unencumbered by conditions.

  Lucky for them both he had a cruise liner’s worth stored up.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, wiping at the wetness she’d transferred to his chest. “But those poor people. All those poor people. And the stupid, stupid necklace wasn’t even here.”

  Sadie knew it was irrational to think finding the necklace would have made anything better. That to recover it tangibly would have made everything somehow… make sense. Because regardless of whether or not there was an object to hold up to say this was the cause, the fact remained that seven people had died. That Detective Corelli was on medical leave indefinitely, until they could get his double vision and debilitating migraines under control. That Rick…

  “You called that asshole again, didn’t you?”

  Sadie went stiff, a little defensive, and yes, a little guilty, because she knew Declan disapproved of her having continued contact with Rick. For more than the obvious reasons. Rick hadn’t made things… easy for her since he’d awakened after his lifesaving surgery. The surgery he very nearly hadn’t made it through, as he’d been inclined to remind her.

  He’d played her guilt like a masterful musician, plucking delicately on all the right chords. He had her tangled up between knowing that her decision to end things was sound, and wondering what kind of heartless bitch she was that she could leave her ex-fiancé in his hospital bed and tumble willingly, even joyfully into Declan’s. She knew that sense of confusion, of duplicity hung like a veil between them, even now. She could see happiness, fulfillment on the other side, but it remained clouded by that layer of guilt.

  “Bastard lost part of his lung, not brain stem function. It’s a damn shame Marshall didn’t aim a little higher, take out his big mouth.”

  “Declan. Stop it.”

  “No Sadie, you stop it.” He untangled himself from her arms, climbed naked from the bed. Snatched his jeans and sweatshirt from the floor, where they’d landed haphazardly last night. Went to the closet and picked out his nicest sweater, because he still got a thrill from seeing Sadie in his clothes. Deposited it and a clean pair of Sadie’s pants on the bed, with the mute suggestion that she get dressed.

  “Are you… throwing me out?” And there was doubt beneath the joking tone.

  Declan scrubbed a hand over his beard-roughened face, willing himself to patience. “I want to show you something. Outside.”

  He turned on his heel and walked out the door, leaving her no recourse but to dress and follow. She found him outside, under the remains of the old tree house, fingering the frayed rope they’d once used as a sort of pulley. Momentarily disoriented by the image of Declan, the man, where so many memories stirred from summers past, she catalogued the moment, layered it over images of the messy little boy that remained tucked like snapshots in an album inside her.

  He turned when he heard her behind him, some deep emotion churning the lake blue of his eyes, and her stomach fluttered with nerves, twisted with regret. And then settled with the sense of rightness that still surprised the hell out of her. She knew she’d tried his patience, maybe even hurt him, just a little, but she also knew that what they had was as sturdy and enduring as that centuries-old oak. The mental snapshot she’d made sharpened into focus. And just like that, the veil between them seemed to thin, lingering still, but no longer obscuring. When he extended his hand to draw her toward the ladder, her grip was steady, and sure.

  He kissed their linked fingers, boosted her up.

  “I thought a storm took the tree house down?”

  “Most of it,” he agreed, following closely behind her. “Watch your step when we reach the top. Some of the boards to the right have rotted, but there’s still a section off on the left that’s sound. Back against that branch,” he pointed, and Sadie picked her way over with care.

  “God. Be careful. You’ll fall and break your other hand, you dummy,” she fussed when he couldn’t resist a little showing off, a little leap.

  “Not a chance.” He grabbed a branch above him and swung, then laughed at her frown.

  “Did you drag me up here so you could act like a monkey, or was there some point to this little excursion?”

  “Nag, nag, nag.” But there was humor in his eyes along with deep affection. And as he dropped down to his feet, slid his hands into his pockets, affection gave way to something more.

  “Lift up that last board, near the trunk.”

  Sadie turned, looking doubtfully at the board in question. “Why?”

  “Because I said so.”

  She shot him a look, but figured she owed him a little indulgence. Hopefully there were no reptiles waiting to make this trip down memory lane more complete than she might have wished for.

  Grabbing the edge of the board, she carefully plied it up, surprised when it gave way without much in the way of resistance.

  “Okay.” She peered into the void. No snakes. Declan got to live. “What’s the big thing I had to get out of bed to…”

  She saw it. Declan watched her face, watched the suspicion gel into a mask, then slide right off into wonder. Felt satisfaction ease any remaining irritation from his gut when the fingers she extended toward the carving trembled.

  “You think that you’re bad, somehow, because you ran from his arms right into mine. Because he’s used your goodness, your guilt, to convince you that’s how you should feel. But he was just a chapter, Sadie. A very short chapter in an ongoing story. I’ve loved you since before I even understood what that meant. Will love you, ever and always. So please, call him, check on him, care for him if you must, but don’t ever again let him make you feel responsible.”

  “Oh. Declan.” Sadie plopped down on her bottom, stared at the childish carving of a heart. And at the letters, inexpertly made, proclaiming DECLAN + SADIE 4-EVER.

  “You’re right. I know you’re right. I’ve just been feeling so torn, so… low. I was working my way around to this, but… oh, man. I love you, too.”

  She looked up to find him crouching beside her. Holding a ring on the palm of his hand.

  “It was my mom’s,” he said of the Claddagh, a crowned heart suspended between two hands. “And I know this may not be the best time, but it’s the best place, so I’m taking my chances. I won’t push. Too much. And I’ll give you as long as I can stand to work your way around to it. But I need you to know where this is going, needed you to know what you’re working around to.” He ran his finger over the gold band, which sparkled with promise in the winter sunlight. “The traditional saying is with these hands I give you my heart and crown it with my love. A little cheesy.” He cleared his throat. “But appropriate.”

  Sadie’s own heart seemed to leap from her chest. “Oh. Declan.” There was almost too much joy to be borne here, real joy, that springs from contentment. Not expectations of fairytales. There was no candlelight, no swelling music, no frolicking animals or slippers of glass. It was just a man with a ring and a promise.

  Her man. Her ring. He
r promise.

  She launched herself at him and wept.

  “I fouled something up, didn’t I?”

  “Oh be quiet.” She squeezed him fiercely. “I’m having an anti-Disney moment.”

  “I sense that there’s an insult in that, but if you’re agreeing to marry me I guess I’ll take it.”

  “I’ll marry you,” she agreed, and kissed him. “It’ll be my way of doing penance.”

  Declan laughed, suddenly recalling a summer scene from long ago, realizing truer words had never been spoken. It may have taken her twenty years to do it, but Sadie Rose Mayhew had finally gotten him good.

  Obsession

  Book Five in the Southern Comfort Series

  KATHLEEN Murphy figured if she was consigning her diet to hell, there might as well be plenty of grease in the hand basket.

  “That’s disgusting.”

  She looked over the dry, crusty top of her otherwise soggy bun, into the disapproving gray eyes of her dining companion. “You’re just saying that because you’re a doctor.”

  Justin Wellington – tall, dark and censorious – frowned at the blob of sawmill gravy that dropped onto her plate. “I’m just saying that because I haven’t pickled my brain cells with refined flour, transfats and sodium. And bacon. Let’s not forget the bacon. Take away that slice of lettuce and you’ve basically got fried lard between two pieces of cardboard.”

  “There’s lettuce on here?” Kathleen took the top off her bun and peered at her sandwich with deep suspicion. “Who puts lettuce on a good chicken fried steak? There.” She dropped the offending vegetable from her fingertips, patted the gravy-laden bacon back into place. “All better.”

  “My arteries just got secondhand atherosclerosis.”

  “Give me a break,” she said around a mouthful, trying not to moan aloud as the grease hit her tongue. Moaning would not be good. “Things got dicey after Dad’s little angioplasty scare, to the point that I felt guilty ordering fish and chips whenever I ate at Murphy’s. And don’t even get me started on the torments I’ve suffered over the pecan pie I brought for Thanksgiving. But now I have three – count ‘em, three – pregnant women in my family. And can they be normal pregnant women and eat ice cream and fried pickles? No, my sister had to go all health Nazi on me as soon as that little plus sign showed up on the stick. Then she got my cousin to drink her crazy Kool-Aid, and eating ‘right’ became a family epidemic. I’ve been consuming so many leafy greens that I probably bleed folic acid. And Sadie,” she narrowed her eyes, thinking of her childhood best friend and current sister-in-law “appears to have been driven insane by first trimester hormones. Of course, that could be the result of living with my brother. But regardless,” she grabbed a napkin out of the tabletop dispenser to wipe her dripping chin “I caught her the other day, confiscating the Twinkies I keep in my desk at the station house.”

  That outrage was still so fresh that Kathleen tugged too hard on the dispenser, endangering Justin’s salad with a displaced salt shaker.

  “Twinkies.” Justin’s nimble surgeon’s fingers snagged the shaker before it could roll. He shook his head as he replaced it next to the pepper. “Well, the good news is that your family won’t have to spring for embalming when you die.”

  “That’s urban legend. Twinkies have a shelf life of like three weeks. Anyway,” she dipped the corner of her cardboard bun into the quivering gravy blob “let me enjoy my gastronomical ruination in peace.”

  JUSTIN looked around the greasy spoon, a vehicle for ruination if he’d ever seen one. Madonna’s version of Santa Baby piped over the speakers, and between the underdressed wait staff and the laminated menus he figured they had most of the deadly restaurant sins covered. Or any kind of sin, he amended as he watched a suspicious exchange of cash in the booth across the way.

  Kathleen must be jonesing hard to cheat on her family’s downtown Charleston pub with this place.

  Keeping one wary eye on the activity in the booth, Justin returned the bulk of his attention to Kathleen.

  Her head had dropped back so that her hair slid like shiny red silk against her slender shoulders, eyes closed in apparent ecstasy as she licked a drop of gravy from the corner of her lips.

  “So how’s Anthony?” he asked, because it seemed like the safest thing to say at that exact moment.

  “Who?” Those lake blue eyes drifted open, foggy, still clearly under the intoxicating influence of grease.

  “Anthony? The man you’ve been dating for the past eleven months.”

  “Has it been that long?” She blinked, and when she looked at him again her eyes were sharp. Sharp and not ecstatic at all. Thank God.

  He nodded. “I only remember because it was just after New Year’s. And now it’s nearly Christmas.” He poked at his Cobb salad, wondering if it was safe to eat. Probably no worse than hospital food. On the other hand, that wasn’t saying much. But then he’d come for the company – he and Kathleen hadn’t managed more than a random text message or two in the past several weeks – rather than for the epicurean delights of Jug’s Bar and Grill.

  He picked up his fork and stabbed an anemic piece of iceberg lettuce from his plate.

  “Christmas.” She winced. “Don’t remind me. At the rate I’m going I’ll be hitting the Stop N Go Christmas Eve, cleaning them out of air fresheners and beef jerky. Maybe if I wrapped them up with a nice ribbon… Anyway,” she shook her head, sopped up more gravy with her bun. “Um, Anthony. Yeah, he’s fine. Busy. Getting a business off the ground is no walk in the park. But leaving the force was the right thing for him at the time, and he’s a good investigator. Once he’s moved beyond all the cheating spouses on whose backs – ha – he’s gotten started, I think he’ll like being a PI. At least he doesn’t have to put up with bureaucracy. How about you?”

  “What?” The blond-haired kid from the booth got up and careened toward the restroom. Something about him was definitely off. Too thin, too twitchy. He couldn’t be sure, given all the hair in the kid’s face, but Justin thought his eyes looked a little swollen.

  “You still dating Cindy, Mindy…”

  “Mandy.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Uh, no.” Drugs. Maybe meth, or some kind of barbiturate. The restaurant was around the corner from the hospital, and Justin knew there’d been a problem with some of the staff stealing Seconal to peddle. The cops had made a couple busts, but plug up the dam in one place, it usually sprang a bigger leak in another. Frowning, he leaned over to check out the other person in the booth, but only caught the back of his head as he slid out and walked the other direction. Dark hair, short, curly. Tougher build than the blond.

  “Can’t imagine why. Given your attentiveness, and all.”

  “We just weren’t that… wait. What?”

  Kathleen snapped her fingers in front of his face. “Hi, you may not remember me, but I’m Kathleen Murphy, your dining companion. I realize the overabundance of mammary stimulation in the room tends to make men stupid, so I can see how that might slip your mind.”

  Justin pointed his fork at Kathleen. “You picked this place, not me. And you know I’m more of a leg man. Besides,” he watched the dark-haired guy push through the glass door at the other end of the bar. “I think I may have just witnessed a drug deal.”

  She sat her half-eaten sandwich down with a plop. “You’re just mentioning this now?” She craned around to see where he was looking.

  “Think,” he repeated. “The skeevy-looking blond passed some money to the dark-haired guy. Skeevy blond stumbles in the direction of the restroom, dark-haired guy exits stage left.”

  “Did the dark-haired guy give the blond anything in exchange for the money?”

  “If he did, I didn’t see it. What?” he said when she turned back around with a lowering frown.

  “This is like me saying I think the guy across the aisle might be having a heart attack because he’s overweight and keeps rubbing his chest. Maybe the guy just has heartburn – justif
iably so if he’s eating in this place – but now that I’ve mentioned it, you feel obligated to check him out. Instead of enjoying your chicken-fried steak.”

  “If I had chicken-fried steak, I’d be the one rubbing my chest. And you’re homicide, not counter-narcotics.”

  “You’re trauma, not cardiology.” She shook her head and peered out the window. “Doesn’t mean you’re not going to respond. I… well, what do we have here?”

  Justin abandoned any pretense of eating, following her gaze toward the other two males who’d appeared next to the dark-haired guy in the parking lot. There was a good deal of posturing, some kind of hand gestures that resembled sign language.

  “Y’all need me to top off your drinks?”

  Justin turned, found his nose almost buried in their waitress’s abundant cleavage. “Um, no. Thank you.” Whoever thought half-naked women serving food was conducive to a pleasant dining experience was… well, a healthy heterosexual male, he admitted. Though it did make it rather difficult to make eye contact. Which he managed, rather pointedly. The waitress’s seen-it-all brown eyes blinked in surprise beneath her Santa hat.

  “Shit,” Kathleen muttered under her breath, and he whipped his head back to see what had caused that tone. A black Escalade pulled into the lot, winter sunlight glinting off its shiny chrome, and four more thug types piled like evil elves out of Satan’s sleigh. “Looks like the gang’s all here.”

  “Those guys?” The waitress shook her head and leaned closer to Justin to get a look outside. “They’ve been hangin’ around here for weeks. The manager’s rousted them a few times, but mostly they’re like pigeons. They scatter for a little while, and then they’re back with some of their friends.”