Enticing Emily

by Gina Wilkins

  “As if you could do anything, anyway,” Emily muttered, trying to step around the excited dog. “You don’t even have any teeth, you silly old mutt.”

  She shifted the lace curtain over the triangular window in the old-fashioned front door so that she could look outside. Her eyes widened when she recognized the man on her doorstep. Her pulse fluttered, but she tried to write that off as uneasiness about his reasons for being there, rather than a reaction to his ruggedly attractive appearance.

  “It’s the cops, Oliver,” she muttered with a grim attempt at humor. “Looks like we’re busted.”

  She opened the door. “Are you here to arrest me, Chief Davenport?”

  He gave her the lazy smile she remembered from their first meeting. “No, ma’am. I’ve just got a couple more questions for you, if you have the time.”

  Ignoring the poodle yipping frantically at her heels, Emily frowned. “Does this mean I’m still a suspect?”

  Davenport shrugged one broad shoulder beneath the chambray shirt he wore with faded jeans—hardly standard police uniform. “I don’t know that I would go that far,” he replied. “But you are an integral part of an ongoing investigation.”

  She frowned. “That sounds to me like a fancy way of saying I’m a suspect.”

  His sudden smile took her breath away. The man was entirely too attractive for her peace of mind, especially considering his reason for being on her doorstep.

  “Is this a good time to ask a few questions?” he asked, nodding toward the door in an obvious hint.

  Somewhat suspiciously, Emily studied Wade’s pleasant, friendly-looking expression. Finding nothing there to alarm her, she sighed faintly and reacted the way she always did when townspeople showed up on her doorstep. She held the door open.

  “I suppose this is as good a time as any. Won’t you come in, Chief Davenport?”

  Wade promptly took her up on the invitation.

  WADE COULDN’T HELP noticing that Emily McBride’s living room looked as though it belonged to a little old lady, not the attractive young woman she was. He doubted that the decor had been changed in the past twenty years, if not more.

  He’d done his research since meeting her. He knew Emily had grown up in this house. That her father had left his entire estate—little as it was reported to be—to Emily when he’d died less than six months ago. He was also aware that it was not yet common knowledge in Honoria that Emily had listed the house for sale.

  Wade glanced around the room with the eyes of a potential buyer. He’d been renting a little bungalow since moving to Honoria four months ago, hoping to find a house to buy, but nothing had appealed to him yet. Emily McBride’s place interested him—almost as much as she did.

  The house sat on twenty acres of mostly wooded property, seven miles out of town. The yard surrounding the frame structure was a good size. Needed some landscaping work done, but very nice, on the whole. The house itself was white, wood-sided, with big, black-shuttered windows and a wide, wraparound porch. Four bedrooms and two baths, according to the Realtor. A large, open living area with a fireplace. Probably a big kitchen. The house, too, could use some work—just general maintenance things Wade could do himself, for the most part—but it looked to be in pretty good shape. It was a house meant for a family.

  Wade could picture himself living here with his son.

  A wheezy, overweight gray poodle that had to be fifteen years old, at least, danced noisily around Wade.

  “Be quiet, Oliver,” Emily ordered sharply.

  The dog subsided into disgruntled rumbles. Wade had always thought poodles were pleasant, good-natured dogs, but this one had him revising his opinion.

  Emily motioned toward a comfortable-looking sofa. “Please have a seat, Chief Davenport. I have iced tea, or I can make a pot of coffee, if you’d like some.”

  “Iced tea sounds good.” Feeling a bit like a bull in a china shop, he made his way around a table loaded with fragile bric-a-brac.

  “I’ll be right back.” She turned and hurried out of the room.

  Wade watched her until she was out of sight—she looked darned good in her jeans, he couldn’t help noticing—and then turned his attention back to her living space, ignoring the dog who stood guard at the doorway.

  An antique cherry sideboard against the wall nearest the sofa was particularly interesting. It was covered with photographs. Dozens of them. Old sepia-toned portraits. Newer, color studio poses. Framed snapshots—black-and-white from decades past, color shots that looked much more recent. There were pictures of children, teenagers, adults, family groups, even a portrait of a beautiful Irish setter. There were no photos of the irritable poodle.

  The collection had obviously been arranged by someone to whom family was very important. Was Emily the one who’d assembled all these photos, or had it been started by her parents? And if she was the one who so carefully maintained the collection, why was she selling her family home?

  Wade was finding Emily McBride more interesting with every observation he made of her, and with every snippet of information anyone had told him about her.

  Emily returned carrying a tray that held two glasses of iced tea and a plate of assorted cookies. She set it carefully on the low table in front of Wade, then took a seat on a small chair facing him. “Now,” she said, “what can I do for you, Chief Davenport?”

  The totally inappropriate replies that popped immediately into Wade’s mind startled him.

  Stick to the job, Davenport, he reminded himself irritably.

  “First,” he said, “I want to apologize for that awkward scene in your employer’s office. I’m not sure I handled that very well.”

  She frowned, but lifted one shoulder in a slight shrug. “You probably had little choice. I know what Sam Jennings can be like.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m just learning. Coming into a new town, there’s a lot to understand about the people here. Like the interpersonal relationships, for example.”

  “Is that a fancy way of saying ‘family feuds’?” she asked wryly. “I’m surprised you didn’t learn about the bad blood between the McBrides and the Jennings as soon as you walked into your office the first day.”

  Wade hadn’t heard about it quite that early, but he’d been told a fair bit since Jennings had made his accusations on Friday. Now he wanted to hear about it from Emily. “Just how long has this ‘feud’ been going on?”

  “Since long before I was born. I think it started with my great-grandfather and Sam Jennings’s grandfather. It’s been going on in one way or another ever since. It’s, um, particularly ugly when it comes to my branch of the family.”

  “Sam Jennings has a reason to want to hurt you, personally?” Wade had already wondered if Jennings disliked Emily enough to plant evidence of a crime against her. The animosity that Sam had shown toward Emily in the bank president’s office had seemed totally out of proportion to the unsubstantiated accusations he’d made against her.

  “Sam hated my father. I think Sam may have dated my mother when they were in high school, but I don’t know if that was the entire problem. My father wouldn’t talk about the Jennings family.” She drew a deep breath, then added, “My mother ran off with Sam’s older brother when I was little more than a baby. Al Jennings was also married, and the father of two children at the time. No one has heard from him or my mother in the past twenty-four years. I don’t even know if they’re still alive.”

  Emily presented those unpleasant facts with a firmly lifted chin, but her eyes spoke of the heartache of an abandoned little girl. Wade doubted that she realized quite how much those big, blue eyes of hers revealed—or how deeply he reacted to the echoes of her pain.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, knowing the words were inadequate.

  She shrugged and glanced away. “I figured you would hear about it, if you haven’t already. It was quite a scandal. My mother was the town hussy—apparently she dated most of the single men and a few of the married ones before she married my fa
ther, and then she abandoned my father, my brother and me to run off with yet another married man. Ten years later, my brother was accused of murdering that man’s son.”

  Her flat, unemotional tone didn’t match the starkly appalling words.

  Wade had heard the whispers that Emily McBride’s older brother had gotten away with murder fifteen years ago. After meeting Emily in the bank, he’d gone back to his office and looked up the old files. There hadn’t been much in them. The chief of police at that time had investigated the death of twenty-one-year-old Roger Jennings, who’d fallen—either accidentally or through foul play—from a thirty-foot bluff on McBride land, in the woods behind this house.

  There’d been testimony of years of active animosity between Lucas McBride and Roger Jennings, even a witness who’d heard McBride threaten Jennings’s life. There’d been notes about twenty-year-old McBride’s notorious temper, and his two previous arrests for fighting. But there’d been no solid evidence to charge him with Roger Jennings’s death. McBride had had an alibi—a nineteen-year-old girl who claimed he’d spent the entire night with her. But many had suggested that girl would have said anything Lucas McBride asked her to. There had apparently been a few inconsistencies in the girl’s testimony, but not enough to form a basis for an arrest.

  Chief Packer had written “Unsolved” on the case file. And two months after Roger Jennings died in that mysterious fall, Lucas left town in the middle of the night. He was the second member of Emily’s family to do so, it seemed. Wade couldn’t help wondering what those desertions must have done to a vulnerable little girl.

  Emily McBride wasn’t a little girl now. A woman faced him with shadows in her eyes, hard-won pride in her posture, anxiety and defiance warring in her expression.

  She fascinated him. Which wasn’t a good thing, considering that he had a job to do and she was a suspect—no matter that Wade considered her an unlikely one.

  “Have you personally had any conflicts with Sam Jennings?” he asked.

  “No. He glares at me whenever our paths cross, but he glares at all of us, including my Uncle Caleb and Aunt Bobbie, the only other McBrides still living in Honoria. He just can’t stand our family.”

  “And what about the other members of the Jennings family? Do they glare at the McBrides, as well?”

  “There aren’t that many of them left around here, either,” Emily admitted. “Sam’s been divorced a couple of times. No kids. His brother, of course, ran off with my mother. The wife Al Jennings deserted moved away with her daughter about a year after her son, Roger, died in an accident that some people tried to blame on my brother. There may be a couple of distant cousins still around, but no one who was as personally involved in all the tragedies as Sam.”

  “What about Sam Jennings’s former office assistant? Did she have any reason to dislike you?”

  “Tammy Powell?” Emily frowned as she said the name, then shook her head, her blond curls swaying around her face with the motion. “No, not that I’m aware of. I didn’t really know her very well. She was in the bank often, of course, but we usually only exchanged pleasantries, nothing more. We weren’t friends, but we weren’t enemies, either. Just acquaintances.”

  “I’ve sent out some inquiries about her. She left no forwarding address when she left town.”

  “That’s strange,” Emily mused with a frown. “She lived here for quite a while. Her grandparents still live in the country about fifteen miles out of Honoria.”

  “They claim they don’t know where she is, but that she promised to let them know as soon as she settled somewhere.”

  “Unlike Sam Jennings, I don’t like blaming someone without evidence, but I did not initial the deposit slips he showed me in Mr. Hayes’s office. If Tammy is the one who signed those slips with my initials, then she obviously took some of her employer’s money with her when she left town.”

  Wade privately believed that was exactly what had happened. But he wasn’t prepared just yet to announce that conclusion aloud.

  He tried to convince himself that he was not using this investigation as an excuse to spend more time getting to know Emily McBride. That would be unprofessional, and despite his sometimes unorthodox methods, he had always been a professional. But the investigation was ongoing, so he would certainly be seeing Emily again—which, he had to admit, would be a pleasure, as far as he was concerned.

  “Maybe you should just put this out of your mind for a few days while I try to locate Tammy Powell,” he advised her.

  “Put it out of my mind?” Emily stared at him in disbelief. “I’ve been publicly accused of embezzlement, and you think I should just put it out of my mind?”

  He lifted a hand in a conciliatory gesture. “I’m sorry. I know this is upsetting for you....”

  “Slightly,” she muttered.

  “But,” he continued with a chiding look at her, “I had a long talk with Dr. Jennings and asked him not to repeat his accusations to anyone else without further proof. I reminded him that you could always sue him for defamation of character if he continues to slander you without evidence...and especially if it turns out that his former employee was the embezzler, after all. I think he paid attention to my warning.”

  Emily studied Wade’s face for so long that he had to resist the impulse to squirm self-consciously on her sofa. “You really don’t think I had anything to do with this, do you?”

  He couched his answer carefully. “Obviously, I have to look at all the facts before I draw any conclusions. But if it makes you feel any better, I consider you an unlikely suspect at this point.”

  “So why did you come here today?”

  Because I wanted to see you again. The truth flashed through Wade’s thoughts so clearly that he wondered for a moment if he’d spoken aloud.

  He cleared his throat. “I guess I just wanted to confirm some hunches.”

  Her blue eyes didn’t waver, making him even more conscious of being pinned in her perceptive gaze. “Do you always operate on hunches, Chief Davenport?”

  “It’s only one of my methods,” he said, giving her a slight smile.

  After a moment, Emily looked away. “Well, I’m glad your hunch leans in my favor this time.”

  Lady, you have no idea.

  EMILY COULDN’T HELP noticing that the police chief seemed to be in no hurry to leave her living room. He took his time sipping his tea and eating cookies, looking as though there was nowhere else he needed to be anytime soon.

  “Good cookie,” he said, nodding in approval. Watching Wade with greedy eyes, the overweight poodle made a sound that closely resembled a belch, then looked at the plate of cookies and whined.

  “You aren’t getting cookies, Oliver,” Emily said sternly. “You’re too fat already.”

  “Have you had the dog long?” Wade asked, looking curiously from Emily to Oliver.

  “About three hours,” Emily answered wryly. “I’m dog-sitting.”

  Wade chuckled. “That explains it, then.”

  “Explains what?”

  He nodded toward the bad-tempered poodle. “I was having a little trouble imagining you with this dog. It just didn’t seem to fit.”

  “I’m afraid Oliver has been overly indulged,” Emily agreed wryly. “I’m fond of dogs, in general, but like children, they can be terribly spoiled if they aren’t given boundaries.”

  Wade swallowed the last bite of his cookie, then asked, “Do you like children?”

  “When they’re housebroken,” she replied. And then she laughed softly and admitted, “Actually, I love children. My cousin Savannah has thirteen-year-old twins. And my cousin Trevor has an adorable two-year-old son. They all live out of town, but I see them as often as I get the chance.”

  Wade looked around the spacious living room again, and she saw him take note of the old-fashioned high ceilings and wood-sashed windows. Again, that funny, hollow feeling came over her when she thought of him living in her house.

  “This looks like a great place
to raise kids,” he murmured.

  She nodded. “My cousins and I loved playing in our woods when we were young.”

  Memories flashed in swift succession through her mind. Burying the time capsule with Savannah and Tara. Climbing trees with Tara’s brothers, Trevor and Trent, who’d been only a couple of years younger than Emily. Fishing in the shallow creek with Lucas.

  The unbidden thought of her half brother made her wince. She had unabashedly idolized him. She had treasured those afternoons when he’d indulged her by taking her fishing or to afternoon movies.

  “How old is the house?” Wade asked, breaking into the bittersweet memories.

  “Almost forty years. My father built it when he married his first wife.”

  Wade’s expression was somber. “You said your father died recently?”

  Emily saw the warm sympathy in his eyes, and felt an urge to be honest with him. “Dad died in May. He was ill for a very long time, and he didn’t speak or recognize anyone for the last few years of his life. His death finally put him at peace.”

  And then she decided that she’d talked more than enough about her family to this man. She wouldn’t mind turning the tables a bit.

  “So you want to buy a house,” she said. “Does that mean you like living in Honoria?”

  “Very much,” he answered with a smile. “I’ve been pretty busy, settling into the new job and all, but everyone’s been real nice and neighborly, for the most part.”

  “Where did you live before you moved here?”

  “I’ve been with Atlanta CID—Criminal Investigations Division—for the past few years.”

  Atlanta. Big. Fast-paced. Busy. A far cry from sleepy little Honoria. “This town must seem awfully dull, compared to Atlanta. You probably won’t see as many crimes in a year here as you did in a few weeks there.”

  “I hope not,” he said fervently. “I grew up in a little town in Alabama that was a lot like this one. When I started looking for a new position last year, this is exactly what I was hoping to find. I can do the job I was trained for here, but still have time to relax and spend time with my son.”