Guilty as Sin (Sinful, Montana Book 1)

by Rosalind James

  You kept walking. The more it hurt, the more you wanted to stop, the more you kept walking. That was one thing she had in common with Jace.

  Upstairs, she changed out of the soft, feminine clothes and into a long white cotton nightgown she’d found in the back of the closet. It was feminine, but it was comforting, somehow, to wrap the cotton around herself. Like tucking herself in.

  You’re tired. You hurt. Sleep, and it’ll be better in the morning. She took a couple ibuprofen and lay in the dark, focusing on her rhythmic breaths and the beating of her heart, and the inflamed nerves in her leg throbbed right along with them.

  Pain was always worst at night. When there was nothing else to focus on, when it lay on you like a lover and tried to take you over. When your eyes were closed and you had nothing to look at but your mistakes.

  Outside, she heard a plaintive yip, an answer. The first undulating howl, and the spine-chilling near-scream of a pack of coyotes in full cry. A sound to make the hair rise on your head. Too close, too, like they were right outside the livestock fence, smelling the goats and the chickens.

  The unearthly racket stopped at last, leaving behind nothing but the singing of the wind in the trees, a gentler music. It should have been peaceful. It was lonely.

  She knew her resistance was too low. She knew it would be better tomorrow. And the shameful tears came all the same, spilling their heat over her face and into her hair as she lay alone in the pretty, cozy house that wasn’t hers, held her aching leg, and wished for more.

  Wished for love. Wished for joy. Wished for peace.

  The next morning, she felt better. Not great, but better. Able to keep walking for one more day. She’d made a mistake, and she’d hurt Jace. She’d do her best to make it better when she could. Meanwhile, she’d keep walking.

  She stored the “sleep-helps” memory away so she could draw on it next time, picked up her phone to call Lily, and remembered she couldn’t. Normally, they talked every day and texted in between, and the silence from her twin left a hole.

  Instead, she drew the curtains, stretched her leg some more, switched the laundry, which involved a lot more hanging-of-delicates and a lot less tossing-into-the-dryer than her normal routine, and called her lieutenant.

  She stood and looked out the wall of windows in the bedroom to see evergreen limbs doing a swaying dance. Windy on the mountain, then.

  “Lieutenant Iverson,” she heard.

  “Morning, Lieutenant,” she said, relaxing her shoulders and switching back to professional mode. Which was a relief. “Paige Hollander here. I’m checking in.” The fourth Monday she’d done it. She’d never imagined it would take more than three weeks. She tried not to think that was a bad sign.

  “This a new number for you?”

  “For a while.”

  “All right, then. Not much to tell you. The investigation’s still grinding on, but I’m getting rumblings it may be over soon. Are you still in Montana?”

  Her heart leaped, her breath shortened, and she had to do some of that shoulder-relaxation again. “Yes, but I can come back any time, if it’s really almost over.” She’d solve Lily’s problem somehow, fix it for her, even if it meant taking Jace into her confidence after all.

  Hailey? No. Hailey would talk. Jace wouldn’t. He’d hate her, but he’d help her. Or he’d help Lily.

  She hoped.

  “We wouldn’t schedule you again for a few days,” the lieutenant said, “even if you were cleared today. You’d have time.”

  Cleared. If she were cleared, she’d go back onto light duty until she was a hundred percent. If she weren’t cleared, she wouldn’t go back at all. If she weren’t cleared, she could face charges. The word always hit her hard.

  He said, with that sixth sense that was the reason he was where he was, “Worrying about it isn’t going to help you, Hollander. What kind of treatment are you getting up there?”

  Calm. Strong. Dialed down. “Keeping on with rehabbing the leg. Working on my fitness. I’m maybe sixty percent, a little better than the last report said, and the direction’s positive. The leg’s coming back.”

  “Uh-huh. And what else?”

  Mental health, he meant. “I’m good with what I’ve had. Doing the rural cure now, I guess you’d say. I’m in the mountains. Taking care of farm animals. Being Heidi.” She wouldn’t mention the lingerie. The shop couldn’t have been better cop-style practical-joke material, the kind that exasperated her to boiling point at times. The bonding exercises that so often veered across the line into inappropriate, that could even feel hostile. Especially if you were a woman.

  She shouldn’t want to go back. But she did.

  “If you need help finding resources up there,” the lieutenant said, going straight past her attempt at humor, “get on the horn with HR. Don’t mess around with that, or it’ll mess around with you. Getting help isn’t weakness. Getting help is going to the gym for your mind.”

  She rolled her eyes. She’d been to that talk, too. “I know. I’m good. Got a full bottle of pain pills on the shelf and a full bottle of Scotch in the cupboard, and they’re staying full.”

  “Right, then. If anything comes in, I’ll call you. Take care.”

  It would be all right, she thought as she hung up. Coffee next, then the goats and the chickens. By herself this time.

  The weather had turned overnight, and when she opened the door, she retreated to tug on a fleece vest before going out to take care of the animals. The sky over the mountain was covered by a fluffy sheet of white, looking like the lint filter after you washed your towels. If she’d known about weather, she’d probably be able to interpret that better, but she could guess it didn’t mean, “Let’s have a picnic!”

  Tinkerbelle and Edelweiss didn’t seem to mind the nip in the air, and the babies were as bouncy as ever. The mamas jumped up to get milked with no fuss, and if there wasn’t nearly as much fun in it without a dark-bearded, secretly amused stranger to view her improved technique, or to bring up to the house for coffee afterwards? Well, life was tough all over.

  She waited until nine, then called the security company whose name she’d seen on the store’s burglar alarm and explained about needing the cameras.

  “We can get somebody out next week,” the woman said. “I’ve got Wednesday afternoon.”

  “Nothing before then?”

  “Sorry. It’s a busy time, everybody getting ready for the summer season, and you’re two hours away. We do the outlying calls one day a week so we can schedule them together.”

  “What about this Wednesday?”

  “It’s already booked out.”

  “If there’s a cancellation, I’d like the spot. Meanwhile, put me down for next week.” When Lily would be here and Paige wouldn’t, but that was all right, too. The cameras were to catch shoplifters, and right now, that felt like the least of Lily’s worries.

  She ended the call, looked absently out the window at those swaying evergreen limbs, and made another call. To Arletta Samuels, the Northern Precinct’s day-shift desk sergeant.

  “Hey,” Arletta said, her voice warm. “How you doing?”

  “I’m good. Staying at my sister’s in Montana, since the lieutenant says I won’t be coming back for a while.”

  “You know they’ve got to go through the whole thing. Her family’s putting pressure on, and you don’t just have Internal Affairs and the Police Commission now. Got the ACLU and everybody else, too. Where were they all when she was getting the shit beat out of her by that scumbag, that’s what I want to know. Her family keeps talking about her kids. Boo-hoo. Should’ve thought about those kids before. Don’t worry. It’s gonna be over. You’re gonna be back.”

  “How’s Jasmine doing?” Paige hadn’t seen Pat’s widow at the funeral, because she hadn’t been to the funeral. She’d still been in the hospital. And when she’d gone by the house a few days later, Jasmine’s responses had been as muted as if there’d been a pane of glass between them. When Paige had
said, “Call me and tell me what I can do,” Jasmine had turned her head slowly, had looked at her with the dignity of Nefertiti and the unseeing gaze of a statue, and said, “Sure.” And Paige had felt frozen. Shamed.

  Guilty.

  “Quiet, is how,” Arletta said. “But then, she never was anything else.”

  Paige didn’t ask, Does she blame me? Arletta must have heard it in her voice, though, because she said, “Sometimes things just go bad. She’s got to know that by now. You know it, too.”

  “I do.” Paige moved on. “Listen, I actually called to ask for a favor.”

  “Uh-huh. I can’t go outside channels here. The lieutenant’s on it. You need to wait.”

  “No, I know. It’s something else. My sister. She’s getting some weird threats up here. Texts. They’re vague, and I’m not sure what to make of them. She’s under pressure to sell some land. I’m wondering if you could run a phone number for me.”

  “This some kind of western land wars thing? Like the cattlemen and the sheepherders?”

  Paige laughed. “No. A whole lot more modern.”

  “You should go to the cops up there.”

  “I know.” Paige didn’t say, But I don’t want them to know I’m impersonating my sister, and I’m afraid they’d sniff it out. I won’t recognize the guy taking the report, and it’ll turn out I exchange goat-cheese recipes with his wife and sold him her Valentine’s Day present. I’ll trip any good cop’s radar, and I’ll get nothing anyway. “But like I said. It’s vague. It could be something else. Could be a shoplifter she kicked out of her store, for that matter. I just want to rule out any real threat, and I’m not sure they’d take it seriously.”

  “Cop’s gonna take a cop seriously. You know that.”

  Paige waited a second, but couldn’t think of anything to say, so she finally just said, “Could you run it? Actually,” she decided, “two numbers.”

  Arletta sighed and said, “Sure. Give them to me.”

  Paige read out the one on her cell phone, and then the one on Jace’s, which she’d written down after he’d left yesterday. She was sure he’d handed it over to the cops, but from the sound of it, the Red Thong Stalker wasn’t the Sinful Police Department’s most urgent priority. Even though the story was seriously hinky, the local delivery was more so, and there’d been too much intensity in Jace’s reaction for anything else. If it seemed seriously off to somebody like him, it was seriously off. How could a cop—a sergeant to boot—not have seen that?

  “OK,” Arletta said. “Be back to you when I’ve got something. Could take a while.”

  “Thanks.”

  Nine-thirty now. She had a day, and she didn’t have enough to do with it. The grocery store would use up half an hour, and the gym wasn’t an option. Like it or not, her leg needed rest.

  Check for those hidden cameras, her restless mind offered up. Those pictures of Jace’s. Who are those of? The woman in the first two had been young, and she’d had a curvy body. Could she be Lily? Or even a customer? Time for some high-tech detective work. In other words, time to Google it.

  Fifteen minutes later, she knew how she’d be spending part of her day. Driving into Kalispell and buying an electronics detector, then coming back and using it. Simple enough.

  At this minute, though? She was right there at Lily’s computer anyway. She Googled Jason Black.

  His author website came up first. A head shot, Jace’s face and chest against a background of rusted corrugated iron. Tough-guy setting, like he was about to take down an undercover drug ring. Strong chest, folded arms. Plenty of lean, defined muscle showing in a black T-shirt, and the business end of the dagger tattoo clearly visible.

  I was a killer.

  Black hair, shorter variety. No beard this time. Blue eyes looking straight into you. A face made up of angles and planes, not quite handsome and all the way hard. A face it was impossible not to stare at.

  She was getting trembly just looking at his picture. Time to move on. To a dozen book covers, terse titles in a huge, uncompromising font, and his name on top. Jason Black.

  A paragraph of sales copy that told her not much at all.

  Jason Black is the pen name of the New York Times-bestselling author of a dozen high-octane thrillers featuring ex-Delta Force operative Matt Sawyer. Black is Australian by birth and a longtime member of an elite division of the Royal Australian Army, for which he still serves as a consultant. His first book, Hard to Kill, will go into production shortly as a major motion picture starring Rafe Blackstone.

  Wait. Prickles were forming on her arms for a different reason now. Some more furious Googling, and she was sitting back and blowing out a breath.

  Another head shot. More folded arms, but a much more casual posture. More muscles. More black hair, some white grin. And a face that could launch a thousand ships, or more likely, get ten thousand women to think about taking off their clothes.

  Rafe Blackstone. The world’s most famous werewolf superhero. Paige was familiar, you could say. She’d seen Rafe Blackstone shirtless a whole lot more than she’d seen any other man that way in the past couple years, and she’d enjoyed it. But she hadn’t realized he was Australian.

  A list of films, but Hard to Kill wasn’t among them. Nothing said brother, either. He had to be, though, didn’t he? Brother, or cousin?

  Some more searching, and finally, a YouTube clip of a talk-show interview. Rafe Blackstone, flashing that famous smile, his blue eyes amused, sitting back on a couch in black pants and boots with one ankle propped on a knee, talking like he was in his living room. Looking like Jace, and not. Like the other side of Jace’s coin. The more finely drawn side. The more casual side. The softer side?

  “You have a new project coming up,” the interviewer, a chummy late-night host, was saying. “One that’s personal for you. You’re not only starring in your brother Jason Black’s new movie, you’re producing it, too. How exciting is that for you?”

  “Aw, it’s brilliant.” The deep, amused voice of the werewolf was familiar. The Australian accent wasn’t. But then, he was an actor. “Can’t wait. No pressure, of course, considering how many ways Jace knows to hurt me if I stuff up.”

  “I understand he writes Matt Sawyer from experience,” the interviewer said. “Has he shared much with you about that experience to help you prepare for the film?”

  “Those guys don’t talk much,” Rafe said, “and Jace probably talks less than most. I know he was a commando, and for a long time. That’s no secret. I know he did hard things and that they changed him. But as far as what’s fiction and what’s not? He’d tell me, but then he’d have to kill me.”

  The interviewer smiled, clearly seeing the hype for the movie and missing the truth beneath. “The two of you are close, I understand. Did you fight as kids? Practice your moves on each other?”

  “Not too much. I’d’ve been scared to.” Rafe was laughing again. “Nah, he’s three years older. He wouldn’t have thought it was fair. He’s a protective bloke. Nobody took him on in the schoolyard, and nobody went after me, either. No surprises there. Jace was in the First Fifteen as well.”

  “The First Fifteen is…”

  “You’d call it the varsity squad. Rugby. Queensland’s rugby territory. He was a battler, and a bloody hard tackler, too, and that was out there for everyone to see. You’d have had to have a death wish. You still would, for that matter. Which is helpful knowledge for an actor, yeah. It’s all in the body language.”

  “Will it be easier, then, to do the part, since you know him so well?”

  Rafe sobered, the blue eyes thoughtful now. “Yes and no. He’d be the first to tell you that doing the job in real life isn’t much like a book, or a movie, either. And that Matt Sawyer isn’t real.”

  “When you’re acting Sawyer, though, surely you’ll call on that knowledge.”

  A hesitation. “I will and I won’t. I can’t really know, even though he’s my brother, because I haven’t done it myself and he hasn’t
shared. I’ve read all his books, and I have some idea about the dirt, the fatigue, the pain, and what kept him going through it. Part of it’s mateship, and part of it’s Jace. The doubts, though? The fear? I’ll have to guess about that. I’ve used my brother in every film I’ve done, got inside his head as much as I can without really being there to know what it feels like when it’s life and death. And I haven’t got very far at all.”

  The camera stayed on his face. It was a good place to stay. “He tells me,” Rafe added, the smile flashing again as if he’d steered too close to the truth, “that he uses me as well. Not sure that’s quite as flattering. He thinks, ‘What would this look like if Rafe did it prettier?’ And then he writes it that way.”

  She bought the book.

  Three hours later, she was still in the wicker rocker, her ice pack warm and her coffee cold. Her heart raced, her finger hovered over the screen, impatient to swipe, and when she set her phone down at last, she felt like she’d run a marathon.

  On the drive to Kalispell, though, when she’d had time to think, she realized that a lot of the story was ridiculous, especially Sawyer’s combat skills. Against multiple trained opponents, multiple times? Yeah, no. It was about as realistic as James Bond. But James Bond sold movie tickets, and so would this. Especially with Rafe Blackstone playing Sawyer, stripping off his wetsuit for that scene where he walked out of the sea. That would work.

  You tended to believe, after a few years as a cop, that everybody lied. Or to put it more charitably, that everybody cast their story with themselves in the lead, and in the right. There were two sides to most stories. And all the same, Jace’s ex-wife had to be crazy. If she’d been in it for the money, she’d been nuts to leave, because that book had been good. And if she’d been in it for Jace, she’d been even more nuts. So he didn’t like going to parties. Paige would bet he could host a pretty good party right there on the couch, and that he’d be glad to do it. If the man could make a goat that happy, what could he do for a woman?