by Lisa Childs
“You’re doing great,” he murmured by her ear.
Her mother shook her head. “No, no, I don’t anymore. That was just for a little while and so long ago.”
Lindsey brushed the hair back from her mother’s face again. The sting of tears and guilt blinded her for a moment. “You’ve lived there nine years now, Mom.”
Her mother laughed. “Lindsey, always spinning your yarns, just like your father.”
“No, Mom…”
“Shh,” her mother said, pressing a finger over Lindsey’s lips. “Listen.”
The radio news caster reported Chet Oliver’s death. Her mother laughed again. “The old bastard. He deserved to die.”
“What, Mom?”
“Selling babies the way he did—the bastard!” Then her laughter turned into hysterical sobbing.
Lindsey pulled her mother into her arms, more to restrain than to comfort. “Calm down, Mom.”
“He stole babies, Lindsey…” Her body went limp, sagging heavily against Lindsey, as she fainted dead away.
Chapter Three
DYLAN WAITED in the wide corridor outside Retha Warner’s room at the sanatorium. Beside him, Lindsey leaned against the wall. She dragged the toe of her hiking boot back and forth over the squares of spark ling clean linoleum.
“You don’t have to stay,” she repeated. “Dad’s here. He can give me a ride home, you know. I’ll be fine if you leave. You have a lot going on with this murder and all.”
He stepped in front of her and lifted her chin, so she would finally look him in the eye. Then he pressed a finger across her lips before she could say any more. “I’m staying.”
He didn’t know if he got through to her because the door behind him opened. Her father exhaled a ragged breath and brushed a hand through his thinning gray hair. “Is she all right, Mr. Warner?”
The older man nodded and took Dylan’s arm. “They’ve sedated her. Thank you, Deputy, for finding her, for being there.” Then William Warner reached out a hand toward his daughter, but Lindsey shook her head. “Lindsey?”
“No, Dad. I want some answers for once. I want the real reason she’s like that!” Lindsey straightened from the wall, bristling with anger. “I want to know why she called Chet Oliver a baby thief! You know, but you’ve never told me!”
Dylan had never seen Lindsey so distraught. But she wasn’t the girl he’d once known. She was a woman now. Then he realized he’d never known the girl, either. “Lindsey, your father—”
“No.” Mr. Warner sighed and shoved his trembling hands into his pockets. “She’s right. You know about the miscarriages, Lindsey.”
She nodded. “After me, she couldn’t carry another baby to full term. She really wanted another baby, a boy….”
Bitterness dripped from Lindsey’s words. Apparently she thought she’d never been enough to make her mother happy. While Dylan hated being involved in other people’s emotional scenes, he found he couldn’t detach himself from this one. When he held out a hand for her, she grasped it tightly in both of hers.
William Warner shook his head. “No, honey. She wanted a boy to replace the one she gave up a few years before we met at college. This place—” He waved his arms around the wide corridor.
“—used to be a home for unwed mothers,” Lindsey finished. “That’s what she meant when she said she’d been here long ago. She’d—”
“Been sent here by her parents when she became pregnant during her senior year of high school in Chicago. They wanted her to have the baby and give him up for adoption. She was to go off to college that fall. So she came to this place, but she didn’t want to give up her baby.”
Despite his misgivings, Dylan found himself drawn into the story, into a young girl’s loss. “But she did.”
Warner nodded. “Yes. Lindsey, I met your mother at college. When she heard I was from this town, well…”
Lindsey didn’t say anything, but her fingers clutched Dylan’s hand so tightly, he’d have indentations of her short, no-nonsense nails in his skin.
“She told me everything,” Will Warner explained.
“What was ‘everything,’ Mr. Warner?” Dylan asked. “I mean, how did Chet Oliver figure into this?”
“He was the lawyer who handled the adoptions.”
“A baby broker. Is that legal?” Lindsey’s dark eyes widened.
“It was if your mother signed away her parental rights of her own free will,” Dylan clarified. “It would be considered a private adoption. A lot of people prefer them.”
“And if it wasn’t of her own free will?” Lindsey’s dark eyes swam with her mother’s pain and loss. “Then you have a motive for Chet Oliver’s murder. That’s why you’re here, huh, Dylan?” She dropped his hand and whirled away.
“Lindsey!” But she didn’t stop. She stomped down the corridor, and the guard at the outside door didn’t attempt to stop her.
“Is that true, Dylan?” Mr. Warner grabbed Dylan’s arm again. “Is my wife a suspect?”
Dylan shrugged. “I don’t know, sir. She left here early yesterday afternoon. She wasn’t found until late this morning. Chet was murdered last night. No one can account for her whereabouts. I don’t know.”
LINDSEY DIDN’T GLANCE UP when Dylan approached her. She continued to balance one hip on the front bumper of the patrol car. With the toe of her hiking boot she pushed a couple of leaves across the asphalt. “What’s that saying about going home again?” she asked.
“You can’t do it.” His tone was flat, unemotional. People said that about him. His mother died when he was still a boy, and with her had died Dylan Matthews’s capacity for emotion. But Lindsey never believed what people said when it came to Dylan Matthews.
She shook her head. “Naw. It feels like it always did. Marge gossiping about me down at the diner. Mom having her episodes. Dad keeping his secrets. Naw. If this was ever really my home, then I came back to it. Why would I do something so stupid?”
His shadow fell across the asphalt at her feet. She glanced up, but he’d put on his sun glasses again. What did it matter? She’d never had a chance of reading his mind. But she was a reporter to her soul. She had to ask her questions. “Why would you?”
He expelled a breath through his nostrils. “Why would I come back? I had to do something about the house.”
She raised a brow. “You can do better than that.”
“There was nothing for me in Detroit.”
“After ten years? No little woman to keep the home fires burning?”
He snorted now. “Yeah, right. What about you, Lindsey? Nobody for you?”
“The rumor is I came home with a broken heart, remember?” She forced the levity. “Really?”
She almost believed he wanted to know. She shrugged. “You know the gossip in this town, only about half of it’s ever true. I may be bruised, but I’m not broken.”
Half his mouth lifted into a sexy smile. “Lindsey. Why are you home?”
“Nothing for me in Chicago. And maybe home is where the heart is, or the heart ache.” She sighed and dropped her gaze to the long shadow Dylan Matthews cast. He’d been there, a shadow across her heart, for the last ten years.
“I figured you had probably hot-wired my car and taken off. You were steamed in there, just a few minutes ago,” he reminded her.
If she was smart, she would have. But she’d never been smart where Dylan was concerned. He would more than bruise her; he’d break her.
She nodded. “Yeah, I should have. But then you’d have to arrest me, and with my record…”
“You have a record now?”
She laughed over his shock. “Well, parking tickets. Didn’t you expect that, after all those tickets you gave me?”
“I let you get away with warnings quite a few times.”
“Yeah, I should have listened.” To straighten away from the bumper, she held out a hand to him. He closed his long fingers over hers and pulled her up. He was too close, too tempting.
“Now I’m goin
g to make you listen,” she vowed.
“Hmm?” He pulled her closer.
Lindsey’s foolish heart raced away from her. “Yeah, you’re going to listen to me. My mother is not a suspect. That’s ridiculous.”
He dropped her hand and stepped around to the passenger’s door, which he held open for her. “Murder is pretty ridiculous when you think about it, not an act of a rational person.”
She agreed. She’d seen too many sense less deaths. “But not my mother’s act. Someone else did this, and I’m going to prove it to you.” She stepped close again, her face to his throat.
“Great.” His breath stirred her bangs.
“Great?”
He gently pushed her into the seat. “Murder isn’t my field. I was in the Narcotics division.”
“Narcotics?” She’d known some Narcotics officers, tough, cynical people who lived life on the edge. She’d attended a couple of their funerals. She shuddered.
He closed the door and walked around to the driver’s side. “There’re just a couple things about this, Lindsey.”
“Yeah?”
“You stay safe, all right? I don’t want you running around stirring up a murderer.”
She glared. “I’m careful.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, right. You are going to be careful this time. I don’t want you hurt.”
Her heart softened. “And the other thing?”
“It stays out of the paper.”
“What? I’m a reporter. That’s—”
“You’ll have the story after we have the murderer. You will not speculate in the paper.”
She smiled. “If I did that, I’d have to print an article with my mother as a suspect. No, any speculating I do will go no further than your ears. Can I trust you, Dylan?”
HE NEVER ANSWERED HER. Lindsey found that oddly reassuring. If he’d adamantly maintained his trust worthiness, she would have doubted him. If he’d warned her against trusting him, she would have argued. As it was, he’d dropped her back at her Jeep, and they’d parted ways three days ago.
She’d been busy. And by staying busy, she’d kept her mind from straying into some painful areas. Stinging pride could not compare to the pain of her parents’ betrayal. She had a brother, or so her mother claimed. And she’d never known.
She jerked the Jeep to a stop in Dylan’s driveway and with it her runaway thoughts. It was early for some people, late for night owls. The sun was just a hint in a still-dark sky. Of course, it was autumn in northern Michigan. The sun took its time rising in autumn and rarely showed at all for winter.
Dylan was an early riser. She had missed him yesterday. She hadn’t gone to the police station because she didn’t want anyone overhearing and spreading rumors about her mother. The town gossiped about her mother too much as it was.
Lindsey threw open her door and inhaled a huge gulp of crisp morning air. Last night someone had burned leaves. Lindsey could taste the acrid smoke that drifted like fog just above the ground. Before her mother had tried to burn down the house, Lindsey had loved the aromatic smell of burning leaves. Now it left her with stinging eyes.
Kind of like the thought of having a brother. She, who had been so alone in her youth, had a brother. No, it wasn’t possible. She shook off the crazy notion.
She grabbed her backpack from the passenger’s seat and slung it over her shoulder. Her rubber soles were silent on the gravel drive as she strode to his door. But a metallic hammering sound reached her ears. She paused, her hand mid-reach, at the screen door.
Closing her eyes brought forth an image of Jimmy Matthews that night. Jimmy’s murder had stolen Dylan’s last relative. He was all alone now.
She inhaled a quick breath. Dylan wouldn’t want her pity, just as she hadn’t wanted his the day they had found her mother. He hadn’t known how far from reality her mother had drifted. But murder? Could he really believe her mother capable of murder? She had to prove Retha Warner wasn’t.
She pulled open the screen and knocked in rapid succession on the glass of the back door. The knob rattled with each strike of her fist. She grasped it in her hand and was surprised it turned beneath her palm.
He’d lived in Detroit for ten years. How did he dare to leave his door unlocked? She always made certain to dead-bolt hers.
“Dylan?” Cautiously she stepped inside. She automatically glanced to the floor, to the stain in front of the refrigerator. She shuddered. How could he live here?
“Dylan?” she called out again.
An assault of steel guitars and blows and guttural cries emanated from the basement. The maple floorboards vibrated beneath her feet from the racket. Was someone getting beat up to the accompaniment of music?
She found the door to the basement standing open and tiptoed down the stairs. The portable stereo on the bottom step vibrated with the volume of the heavy metal music pouring from it.
In the middle of the basement a huge bag hung from the rafters, and Dylan attacked the bag with his fists and feet.
He wore only the bottoms of his sweat suit and those were cut off at the knee. His muscular chest was bare and glistened with the perspiration of his labor as he hammered at the bag with his fists in boxing gloves. Muscles rippled in his arms and legs as he swung and kicked, the bag bouncing away from the strike of his worn-out running shoe.
She’d never seen him so focused but yet so out of control at the same time. As his fists and feet slammed into the bag with a frenzied speed, cries of rage broke through his lips. When she caught sight of his eyes, the glazed look of them frightened her.
Then his gaze tangled with hers, and the glaze vanished to be replaced by his usual impenetrable stare. “I’m following up my run with a workout on the bag,” he said between gasping breaths.
She nodded and popped off the radio with the toe of her sneaker. “Is that what you’re calling it? If I was that bag, I’d press charges against you.”
“Maybe I should press some of my own. Breaking and entering, Ms. Warner?” He lifted a brow. Then he snagged his sweat shirt from the rusted lid of an old freezer and pulled it over his head.
She bit her lip to stop her protest of his covering his magnificent chest. A soft sigh escaped her lips. Before the shirt dropped to his waist, she noticed a jagged scar across one of his wash board abs.
“You left the door unlocked. Must have been some run. Good thing you do it before sunrise—you’d scare anyone meeting you on the street.” She softened her words with a smile and held back the question about his scar.
He shook his head. “You don’t seem very afraid of me, and you’re exaggerating.”
She laughed. “No, I’m not, but thank goodness the gossips are wrong about you.” And thank goodness she’d been right. She’d always argued Dylan Matthews didn’t lack feelings; he just kept them hidden from the prying eyes of this town. She was glad to finally be right about a man. But that didn’t make him any less dangerous to her stupid heart. Actually, it made him more so.
“Should I care about the gossip?” His ironic tone suggested he didn’t.
“I thought you did. I thought that’s why you left this town a decade ago.”
“Looking for a story, Ms. Reporter?” He grabbed a towel from the freezer and mopped his glistening face and scrubbed it over his sweat-darkened hair.
“Naw, you’re old news,” she scoffed, but it was a lie. Dylan Matthews was still as hot a topic as ever for conversation and idle sexual fantasies. She sighed.
He glanced up at her from under his towel. “You have anything new?”
She grinned, and he laughed. But the intense moment wasn’t for got ten. Her nerves still tingled with excitement. Dylan Matthews was one smoking cauldron of hot emotions. She wanted to stir him up again.
“So smug, Lindsey. You must have something good. Can I trust you to make coffee while I grab a shower? The coffee and maker are on the counter.” He joined her on the stairs.
From her perch above him, Lindsey relished the height advanta
ge, something she rarely had. She peered down at him. “I’m your guest. You should make the coffee. And I could use some break fast, too. Can you make eggs?”
He didn’t stay below her. He sidled up so they shared the same step and pressed her between the concrete wall of the basement and the muscular wall of his chest. The jersey material had darkened with his sweat and the musk of man and perspiration filled her senses. The cold of the concrete seeped through the back of her sweater while his heat scorched her front.
“Usually my break fast guests have spent the night, Lindsey. If that had been the case, I’d make you the most in credible break fast.” His voice had dropped to a low and intimate level.
Lindsey lifted her gaze to his face, only inches from hers, and batted her lashes. “If I’d spent the night with you, Dylan, you wouldn’t have the strength to make break fast.”
His chuckle sounded strained, and he quickly brushed past her to climb the stairs.
“Dylan?” she called out. “You’re walking a little funny. Did you strain something when you kicked that bag?”
“You strained something, you tease. Still playing, huh?” he grumbled.
“Who says I’m playing?”
DYLAN TWISTED THE FAUCET to cold and stood under the icy spray. But it wasn’t enough to extinguish the fire in his blood. Lindsey Warner did something to him, and what was worse than his reaction to her was that she knew it.
He had a murder to solve, and her mother was the prime suspect. He couldn’t get involved with her; it wouldn’t be ethical.
But Lindsey didn’t play by any rules. He stepped out of the shower stall to find the bathroom door half open. She reached around the door to place a mug on the rim of the sink. In the mirror, rapidly clearing of fog, he spied her wicked grin and dancing eyes.
“Lindsey,” he threatened.
“Need any help, Deputy?” Her naughty chuckle grew fainter as she moved down the hall.
He kicked the door closed and stepped back into the shower stall to twist the faucet on to cold again.
His teeth chattered when he joined her in the kitchen. He’d wrapped his hands around the warm mug, but his fingernails were still blue. “You are such a tease!”