Praise for the Cutthroat Business mysteries
“A frothy girl drink of houses, hunks and whodunit narrated in a breezy first person.” —Lyda Phillips, The Nashville Scene
“The hilarious dialog and the tension between Savannah and Rafe will delight fans of chick-lit mysteries and romantic suspense.” —Jo Ann Vicarel, Library Journal
“Equal parts charming and sexy, with a side of suspense. Hero and heroine, Savannah Martin and Rafe Collier, are a pairing of perfection.” —Paige Crutcher, examiner.com
“Kooks you in the first page and doesn’t let go until the last!” —Lynda Coker, Between the Pages
“Move over Stephanie Plum, there is a sassy, sexy sleuth in town! If you enjoy your cozy mysteries with a good shot of romance, and a love triangle with a sexy bad boy and a Southern gentleman in the mix, then you will love this book. A Cutthroat Business is very reminiscent of the Stephanie Plum books, but the laughs are louder, the romance is sexier and there is a great murder mystery to top it off.” —Bella McGuire, Cozy Mystery Book Reviews
CHANGE OF HEART
Savannah Martin mystery #6
by
Jenna Bennett
Chapter One
It was Rafe’s fault. If he hadn’t snuck out of bed before six, going God knows where, I wouldn’t have been in the office at the ungodly early hour of seven, and I wouldn’t have seen Tim washing blood from his hands in the bathroom sink.
It was a Saturday morning in late February, just about two months after Rafe had crashed my mother’s Christmas Eve shindig at the Martin Mansion in Sweetwater to tell me that it was Christmas, when all good girls got what they wanted, and that if I wanted him, I could have him.
He didn’t have to tell me twice.
We’d only rarely been out of bed since, let alone out of each other’s sight, or at least it felt that way. Rafe was out of work, basically, so he could spend every waking moment with me. The undercover job he’d worked for the past ten years—the one the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations had sprung him from prison to do at twenty—had finally come to a close. He had, almost singlehandedly, brought the biggest SATG—South American Theft Gang—in the Southeast to a screeching halt, and had blown his cover sky high in the process. Once the holidays were over and I’d gone back to work, he’d helped me with my real estate business when I needed him, and the rest of the time he’d spent working on his grandmother’s house on Potsdam Street in East Nashville, painting and scrubbing, getting it ready to list and sell.
I wished I could believe that’s where he was, getting an early start on the weekend’s labor, but it wasn’t. I’d driven past, taking a big, long detour through the Potsdam area, and there’d been no sign of the Harley outside the big brick Victorian, and no sign of life inside.
I pulled into the circular driveway anyway, and crunched my way up to the front steps. I even parked the Volvo and got out, traipsing across the gravel to climb the stairs to the porch to press my nose against the wavy glass in the heavy carved front door. There was nothing to see, and the door didn’t yield to my touch. I got back in the car again, and sat for a minute, torn between anger and concern.
If he wasn’t here, where was he? Where had he gone so early, and without telling me?
Maybe I should have followed him as soon as I opened my eyes and saw him sneak out. However, he’s much better at sneaking around than I am, a result of those ten years spent undercover. He’s caught me before, and the result was unpretty and embarrassing. And I still had a few shreds of self-preservation and dignity left. If he didn’t want me to know where he was, I wasn’t about to run after him. There are limits to how desperate I wanted to seem. And besides, I wanted him to think I trusted him, even if I, in my heart of hearts, worried what he might be doing that he didn’t want me to know about.
I thought about going back to the apartment to wait, about just staying there until he came home, whenever that was, to see what he had to say for himself. But if he took a long time, I’d be climbing the walls by the time he got there, and anyway, I didn’t want to make him think I didn’t have anything better to do. After two months of togetherness, I still wasn’t so sure of him that I wanted to take any chances.
So I drove to the office instead. I often do floor duty on Saturday mornings anyway. It was how I hooked up with Rafe in the first place. He’d called the office one Saturday morning in August, to tell me that our queen bee, real estate maven Brenda Puckett, had stood him up for an appointment—at the house on Potsdam Street, as it happened—and when I went out to meet him, we’d found Brenda dead in the library, with her throat cut from ear to ear.
It’s a long story. I’d been a bit leery after that of doing Saturday morning floor duty, but I didn’t have so many clients yet that I could afford to give up any opportunities, so I toughed it out most weekends. It’s usually a bit later than 6:55 that I pull into the parking lot, but I could just as well sit in the office as I could at home, I figured, and with luck, there might be something there that would distract me. Like work. Or a phone call.
Or Tim, bent over the sink in the bathroom, his face as pale as death while bright red-tinted water swirled down the drain and away.
I saw him as soon as I came through the back door. The bathroom is back there, off the hallway, and he hadn’t bothered to close the door. I guess he didn’t expect anyone to show up so early. And the sound of the back door opening must have been lost in the gurgling of the water going down the drain, because when I appeared in the doorway behind him, and he realized I was there, his whole body stiffened in surprise. The eyes that met mine in the mirror were wide: bloodshot and terrified.
“I’m sorry,” I said automatically, “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
And that’s when I noticed the red water sluicing down the drain.
I noticed a few other things too. He looked a bit less than his best, dressed in a faded long-sleeved T-shirt with the sleeves pushed halfway up his forearms, and a pair of seen-better-days jeans, with his hair in disarray and the aforementioned bloodshot, dark-rimmed eyes.
On someone else, it might not have been a big deal. But Tim is very particular about his looks. He’s gay, he’d gorgeous, and he has an image to uphold. I’ve never seen him look anything less than perfect: absolutely polished and put together. My mother would adore Tim; apart from the gay thing, that is.
But this morning he looked like he’d lived through the night from hell, and had woken up with a hangover.
“Is that blood?” I asked.
“No,” Tim said, in the mirror.
“It looks like blood.”
The water was running clear now, and Tim turned it off. “I had a nosebleed.”
So it was blood.
Not that I’d been in much doubt, really. I’ve seen a lot more of it than someone like me—a gently bred Southern Belle—should have to.
Although as far as the nosebleed went, what I could see of his face showed no sign of trauma, and also no sign of having been washed. His hands and forearms were wet, but not his face or neck. And when he reached for the hand towel hanging from the hook beside the sink, he dried his hands and arms, but not his face.
It was fairly obvious he wasn’t thinking straight, to use a nicer expression than flat out lying. Another clue that something was wrong. Tim is usually pretty cunning, and doesn’t miss much.
“Something going on?” I asked.
He busied himself hanging the towel back on the hook, without looking at me. “What would be going on?”
“That’s what I’d like to know.”
He turned and faced me, finally. “What are you doing here?”
“It’s Saturday morning,” I said. “I do floor duty on Saturdays.”
He glanced at the Rolex wrapped around his wrist. Waterproof, I guess. “At seven o’clock?”
“Rafe went somewhere early.”
When Tim didn’t immediately smack his lips and make some X-rated remark about my boyfriend, that only reinforced my impression that something was seriously wrong. Tim’s had a crush on Rafe since the first time they met, back in August, and when word got out that Rafe was dead, Tim was pretty upset about it.
Not as upset as I was, of course, for the eight hours or so I believed it to be true, but Tim was kept in the dark for months, and he was pretty miffed when he found out the truth. He does miffed quite well, too. But he had truly been upset when he thought Rafe had died, and for that I could forgive him a bit of petulance. There were few enough people in the world who had grieved over Rafe’s supposed demise. My own mother, for instance, had been more upset to discover that he was still alive than she was when she thought he was dead.
Anyway, the fact that Tim didn’t take the opportunity to salivate all over the mention of Rafe, only made me more certain that something was wrong.
“It’s not like you have any room to talk,” I pointed out. “You were here before me.”
“Early appointment,” Tim said, after a second.
Looking like that?
I didn’t say it, but he flushed. “New construction.”
New constructions, houses in the process of being built, are often danger-zones, full of sawdust and plywood and dirt and nails, so it makes sense to dress down when you’re escorting someone around. Even so, I would have thought Tim could do better than ripped jeans and a faded T-shirt.
“By the way,” he said, “now that I have you here...”
“Yes?”
“Can you sit an open house for me tomorrow?”
I blinked. Talk about a quick change of subject.
There was nothing unusual about the question, though. I often sit open houses for Tim on Sunday afternoons. Usually he doesn’t wait until the day before to ask, but it’s happened before, when he’s had something come up suddenly. I’m happy to sit open houses for anyone who asks me. So far, in the just over six months I’ve had my real estate license, I’ve managed to nail down a few buyer clients and actually bringing them to closing, but I haven’t had a listing of my own yet. Mrs. Jenkins’s house, the one Rafe was working on—or rather, not working on this morning—was supposed to be my first. I host other people’s open houses in the hope of snagging a new client, and because a lot of realtors find open houses to be at best boring and at worst a waste of their time. They’re usually happy to pass them off to newer agents, like me.
“Which house is it?”
Sometimes he lets me have my pick of a few, and I choose the one that sounds most promising, but in this case he rattled off an address. It was in the same neighborhood as the office—Historic East Nashville—and not too far from my rented apartment on the corner of 5th and East Main.
“Sure,” I said. “I’m happy to.”
“Thank you.” Tim’s baby-blues flickered, as if he were looking for a way out. I guess I had sort of captured him there in the bathroom, and he had nowhere to go except past me. I took a step out of the doorway. “I should head up front.” To the reception area and the front desk.
Tim nodded.
“Are you sure nothing’s wrong?”
“Positive,” Tim said, with a look on his face that said the opposite. But if he didn’t want to tell me, it wasn’t like I could knock him down and sit on him until he did. It would be unladylike. And although I’ve gotten better in that regard—I’d totally knock Rafe down and sit on him until he told me where he’d gone this morning—Tim was different. So I let him walk out of the bathroom and down the hallway to the back door. “Thanks, Savannah,” he told me over his shoulder.
“You’re welcome,” I said. “Tim?”
He turned around in the doorway, with the door already open and the colder air from outside flowing into the hallway. “Aren’t you going to freeze without a coat?”
It was February, after all. I was wearing a wool overcoat myself.
“It’s in the car,” Tim said, but not in a way that made me believe it; more in a way that made me think he’d forgotten to put one on—had forgotten all about it until I asked—and now he was making an excuse.
There was nothing I could do about it, though, so I just nodded. “Have a good day.”
Tim’s lips twisted, but not in a smile. “Oh, sure.” He stepped out and let the door close and lock behind him. I turned off the light in the bathroom and hallway, but instead of heading for the other side of the building and the reception area, I stepped into the office to the right of the hallway for a moment, and walked over to the window. Tim’s baby-blue Jaguar was parked nose-forward in the lot, with its rear against the brick wall. Now I watched as the lights came on and cut through the dusk outside before the car rolled out of the parking space and toward the exit to the street. It wasn’t until it was moving away from me that I could see the rear clearly, and the smear decorating the trunk. Red, like blood. Palm and five fingers, as if someone had put his hand there and slammed the lid closed.
There was a logical explanation, I told myself. Maybe Tim hadn’t been lying. Maybe he’d really had a nosebleed. Maybe he’d walked into a door. Maybe he’d gotten into a fight with someone, and they had popped him in the nose. Just because his nose wasn’t swollen, and just because I hadn’t noticed any blood on his face, didn’t mean he was lying. He could be telling the truth. Someone could have hit him, or he could have accidentally hit himself. With his nose throbbing and blood streaming, he could have parked the car—carefully backed it into a parking space, a tiny voice in the back of my head pointed out—before getting out and staggering toward the door to the office. Catching himself on the trunk of the car on his way past for balance while somehow managing not to get a single drop of blood on his sweatshirt.
No, that didn’t make a lot of sense. The car had been parked nose out, with the trunk up against the brick wall. There’d be no way to get behind it, and no reason why Tim would try. It was just a couple of yards from the driver’s side door to the back door to the office, with no obstacles in between. Tim would have had no reason to go to the rear of his car. Unless there’d been something in the trunk he’d wanted to get out, but then he probably wouldn’t have parked so close to the wall in the first place.
But it was none of my business. If he’d wanted to tell me what was going on, he would have. My curiosity has gotten me in trouble plenty over the past six months. I decided I’d just leave this one alone.
It wasn’t like I didn’t have enough other things to worry about, after all.
It was after seven o’clock. Rafe had to realize I’d be awake by now, and worried about where he was. Why wasn’t he calling?
Was he doing something he didn’t want me to know about?
Was he seeing someone else?
He hadn’t exactly lived a celibate life. I didn’t know much about his past, but I did know that. Women find him attractive, and they tend to be fairly obvious about it, so he can pretty much have his pick. He’d even slept with a woman named Carmen just a few months ago, after he and I had been together. After I’d gotten pregnant and had lost his baby.
I’d dealt with it—pretty much—since I hadn’t had a choice. It was either accepting it or losing him, and that wasn’t an option at all. And besides, sleeping with Carmen had been part of the undercover operation he was involved in, nothing personal. Not something he’d wanted to do; something he’d had to do to preserve his cover. She’d have thought it strange if he didn’t, since the man he was pretending to be—a hired gun by the name of Jorge Pena—would certainly have taken her up on the offer. I hadn’t been concerned about it, honestly. Carmen ended up in prison along with all the other criminals, and Rafe hadn’t said a word about her, other than the very first time I’d asked, point blank, whether he had slept with her. He’d told me not to worry about it, that it was
all part of the job. So I hadn’t.
Until now.
I didn’t really think he’d gone to visit Carmen Arroyo in Southern Belle Hell—the Tennessee Prison for Women—but was it possible there’d been another woman I didn’t know about?
Over ten years of undercover work, it was pretty impossible that there hadn’t been someone. We hadn’t really talked about it, though. He knew all about my sex life—married at twenty three, divorced at twenty five, after my husband cheated on me with his paralegal because he claimed I was frigid. Single for two years until I met Rafe. The sum total of my sexual experience at this point consisted of those two relationships, and Rafe knew it. His was rather more extensive, I suspected, but I didn’t want to think about it, so I’d never asked him just how many women he’d bedded in the twelve years since he’d left Sweetwater.
As far as I was concerned, our sex life was good. Enthusiastic. Satisfying. And lest you think I’m too much of an idiot to know a good sex life when I see one, I did actually realize that my marriage to Bradley was lacking in that respect. Bradley wasn’t the only one dissatisfied; he was just the only one who saw cheating as a solution.
I had no such problems with Rafe. I wasn’t frigid at all, and he didn’t seem dissatisfied with me. If he was seeing someone else, it certainly hadn’t manifested in any way in our sex life.
I had reached the lobby and had dumped my bag on Brittany’s chair—she’s the receptionist, but not on Saturdays—and was in the process of hanging my coat on the coat tree beside the door when my bag chirped.
It wasn’t a call, just the phone signaling a text message, but I dove for it anyway, and pushed buttons with hands that shook.
It was from Rafe’s number, of course. I had assumed it would be. It wasn’t very informative, however.
Rise and shine, Goldilocks.
Rise and shine? Did he imagine I was still in bed?
Where are you? I texted back. No sense in wasting time with preliminaries, after all.
Change of Heart Page 1