Guilty as Sin (Sinful, Montana Book 1)

by Rosalind James

  It was more than that, though. He was tough, he was tender, and he talked. What woman wouldn’t that work for?

  Unfortunately, her chance was gone, so she’d better focus on now. She went to the electronics store and bought her monitoring device, then headed back up to Sinful. When she came around the last bend in the road before dropping into town, though, her phone rang.

  She pulled over. After which the phone stopped ringing, of course.

  The call was from her station. There was a voicemail, too.

  She didn’t listen to it right away. Instead, she put both hands on the steering wheel, took some deep breaths from her belly, and focused on the view in front of her.

  Anything more idyllic would be hard to imagine. Main Street, with its line of western-style storefronts, looking like a movie set. The ski mountain, with the rest of the peaks ranged behind and to either side of it, rising rugged and gray above the tree line, showing dark with forest below, with patches of white snow still clinging in the gullies. And the cottony sky hanging over all of it like an endless bowl, the air coming straight in from the north, crisp and clean.

  Montana. Big Sky Country. Beautiful, and wild, too. A perfect town. A perfect place. Except it wasn’t, because no place was perfect. All you could do was find the place where you fit best. And since her bizarre mind had decided that her place was the SFPD, she needed to listen to her voicemail.

  “Hey.” It was Arletta’s voice, and Paige took the disappointment all the way through her body. “Call me about those numbers.”

  She did.

  Arletta said, “OK. I finally got a chance to call you back. Your first number”—she read it off, and, yes, it was the source of Paige’s texts—“that’s a burner phone, or a burner app. Montana area code, but that’s as close as you’re gonna get.”

  “I figured,” Paige said. “But good to know.”

  “Yeah. Guess your boy went to Felon U with the rest of them. Watched The Wire, anyway. You’re with your sister now, anyway, got her back.”

  “Yes. I do.”`

  “OK. Second one’s a pay phone outside something called the Gas & Go in Sinful, Montana. This is an actual place, not my house when I make the mistake of letting Theodore choose the restaurant and he picks Mexican. Sinful would be the word, because, honey, what that man does with refried beans is a crime. Four-twenty-three South Main. Maybe you’ll get lucky, and your mutt’s been calling his threats in on his breaks from ringing up gas and filling up the hot dog cooker.”

  The call had come from Sinful. She—Jace’s stalker had to be a she—was here, then. Or was driving here to do her stalking, but a local call and hand delivery? Staying here, or living here, Paige would bet. “Makes sense,” she said. “Sinful’s where I am. Where my sister is. And yeah, calling from the gas station was dumb. It’s a different person than the other one, then. Got to be.”

  “Good news for you,” Arletta said. “Weakest link. Probably thinks he was real sneaky, too. Pay phone. Ooh. Sharp. The dumber they are, the smarter they feel. And seriously? Your sister lives in Sinful? Damn. Do people mail their dirty love notes from there, like your kid’s letter from Santa that comes from the North Pole?”

  “Probably,” Paige said absently. “It’s a little bit of a tourist thing.” If Jace filled up at the same gas station every time? If he saw the same female clerk there? It would fit the “casual acquaintance” stalker pattern, she guessed. But calling from your workplace was probably too stupid to hope for.

  “Hmm,” Arletta said. “Maybe I should get you to mail something from me to Theodore.”

  “I can do better than that.” Paige pulled herself back into the moment. “How about a card that says ‘Thinking of You,’ and a nightgown from my sister’s lingerie store? Text me the colors you like and your size, and you’ve got it. Special delivery straight from Sinful. My treat. My thank-you.”

  “Huh. You gonna choose it?”

  Paige sighed. “My sister owns the store. She’s good at it.”

  “I’m just saying,” Arletta said. “You got good qualities, but that’s not one of ’em.”

  “I get it. I got it. You’ll get my sister’s best, not mine. And I’m not that bad.”

  “Oh, honey,” Arletta said. “You are. That first hooker outfit you did? Still a legend. I laughed for a week. Born to wear a uniform. But we want you back anyway.”

  Paige drove a few hundred yards, pulled into the lot of the Gas & Go, parked in one of the spots next to the square concrete-block building, and checked it out.

  There was a pay phone around one side.

  She wanted to go in and ask questions. Preferably review the security video. Bad idea, though. If the cops did check out the number, they wouldn’t be one bit happy that she’d been there first. Not to mention that she didn’t have jurisdiction. Or a badge. She could tell Jace and urge him to press the Sinful police to have the call traced, though, now that she knew where the trace would lead.

  A gas station. Which always had security cameras. Could anybody actually be this dumb?

  Short answer: Of course they could.

  She’d just take a look. She got out of her car, headed over to the phone, checked for cameras, and didn’t find any. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t one, so she went into the tiny store, made up of a cashier’s counter and a few shelves that held snacks, drinks, and, yes, a hot dog cooker.

  Cameras on the door, inside and outside, like you’d expect. If Jace’s stalker had come in before or after the phone call, they’d have her. Or if she’d filled her gas tank.

  The cashier, a fortyish guy wearing a ball cap with a bear paw on it that was something to do with college football, said, “Hi. How’re you doing?”

  Oh, man. This was why she’d kept her outings in Sinful to a minimum. Did he know Lily? She said, “Oh, pretty good. How are you?” in a generic sort of way as she grabbed a bottled water and put it on the counter.

  “So,” he said as he rang it up, “I hear you’re selling your place for the new resort.”

  Question answered. “No.” She pulled two bucks out of Lily’s wallet and put them on the counter. “I’m not planning to sell.”

  “Oh.” He made change. “Really? I heard you were.”

  Time to learn something. “I keep wondering,” she said, “why anybody cares. New resort, old resort. Does it really matter, in the scheme of things?”

  He stared at her. “Well, yeah,” he said slowly, “it matters. Yeah, it does. It matters a lot.”

  A woman came into the store, but the guy didn’t look around. Paige said, “Tell me why.” Don’t argue. You’ll learn nothing that way. Neutral face, neutral voice. You’re gathering information. You might be a little bit slow, so somebody has to explain very carefully. Sorry, Lily.

  The cashier said, “My son’s sixteen. My daughter’s fourteen. Where are they going to get a job up here? And, OK, the station. I’m hanging on, but that’s about it. Why? Because we’re not big enough, and we’re not fancy enough, that’s why. Everybody wants Sun Valley, or Aspen, or whatever place. We’ve got to be something, or we’ll be nothing.” He nodded like that finished the discussion. Like it was a catchphrase.

  “Something or nothing?” Paige probed.

  “You really don’t know? Seriously? I mean, you haven’t even heard this?”

  The female customer was over by the counter now, one hand on her hip and her fingers drumming. The guy behind the counter indicated with his head at her and said, “Raeleigh could tell you, I bet. Anybody could tell you.”

  Raeleigh Franklin, Lily had said. Owns the Timberline Motel. “I suppose it would be more business for the motel,” Paige said to the woman, still going for neutral, “but if the resort put in a bigger lodge, wouldn’t people just stay there?”

  “We’ve got to be something,” the woman said, “or we’ll be nothing.” There they went again. “The resort’s old, and it’s not good enough, bottom line. It’s not going to draw from anyplace farther away t
han Missoula. If we aren’t going to be fancy, we need to be family, or we’ll go right down the tubes. We’re going already.”

  “And family’s a cross-country resort?” Family? Paige didn’t think a town named “Sinful” was going to find its best shot at success in the family market.

  “No. It’s everything,” Raeleigh said. “More runs. Better lifts. A bigger lodge. More money to develop the shoreline along the lake for the summers. Mountain biking, too, especially on the cross-country trails.” She glared at Paige, and you didn’t need to be a mind reader to get that Lily was standing in the way of imagined hordes of eager mountain bikers anxious to sleep off their heroic efforts on the blissfully comfortable mattresses of the Timberline Lodge. “Brett Hunter can do everything we can’t. This is our best shot, and everybody knows he needs your twenty acres, or he won’t do it. Are you coming on Wednesday?”

  She was all but in Paige’s face, but it wasn’t so much hostility Paige was reading as desperation. Was it really this bad, this important? Paige didn’t know, but that was clearly the party line. “Yes,” she said. “I’ll be there.”

  No wonder Lily had wanted to run away.

  There weren’t any hidden cameras at the store. That would have been too easy. Anyway, why would there be any connection between Jace’s stalker and Lily’s hater? The motivations were entirely different.

  And all the same, when she’d gone to the grocery store, when she’d stretched and massaged her leg, had taken a long, hot bath and massaged it more, when she’d cooked dinner and eaten it alone, looking out the window at the looming mountain and trying not to think that it was waiting to crush her, she… needed some distraction.

  She wondered what Lily was doing. She wondered what Jace was doing. She considered turning on the TV and watching Rafe Blackstone be sexy and charming. Instead, she downloaded his brother’s second book.

  Which was seriously creepy. A kidnapped girl, not quite seventeen, the daughter of one of Sawyer’s buddies. A web of human traffickers moving the girl from place to place. And too many secrets, slowly revealed. Sawyer three steps, two steps, one step behind the kidnappers as the team fell around him one by one.

  The breathtaking moment when Sawyer discovered that his friend wasn’t anything close to what he’d thought he was. That this was revenge, and it was going to be bad. Sawyer fighting on two fronts now, racing against time to get to the girl before she was sold. The scene cutting out to a girl with long blonde hair lying on her side on a metal bench, her hands bound in front of her, desperately picking at her bonds, then rubbing them against the bench’s support until her wrists bled while she listened to disembodied sobbing from the next cell.

  Paige could taste the girl’s fear, and her resolve, too. She could smell Sawyer’s urgency, his crackling alertness to the cold air around him as he crept, one careful, silent foot at a time, through a metal air shaft on elbows and knees he’d padded with his clothing. His silence as he listened to voices on the other side of a panel, as he waited for his chance.

  The voices faded. Sawyer shifted position. Slowly. Carefully.

  Kick it open, Paige begged him. In another part of the building, the girl heard footsteps approaching her cell. Go go go.

  The phone rang in her hand.

  She jumped six inches off the bed. The room was completely dark. It had to be after midnight. And she’d known even at the moment the phone had rung that it wasn’t Lily.

  “Hello?” Her voice sounded breathy. Stupid. It was a book. She was a cop.

  “Ms. Hollander, this is Secure Alarm Services. Did you accidentally activate the alarm on your property?”

  “What?” It was a whisper. She was already off the bed, pulling her revolver out of the drawer, and was across the room and toward the walk-in closet. Away from the stairs.

  “Your property on 115 North Main,” the woman said. “We have an alarm. Do you want us to alert the police?”

  “Yes.” It was at the shop. Not here. Not at the house. And all the same, she disconnected, set the phone on the floor, got both hands on her weapon, and focused her senses.

  The wind in the trees louder now, halfway between a hiss and a roar, masking anything else. No vibrations in the wooden floor, not that she could feel, but the cottage was solidly built. No car noise, or she’d have heard it, surely. She’d have seen the difference in light as the headlights swept across the yard, too.

  Unless the person had parked on the road and walked up.

  It was probably the wind blowing a branch against the door of the shop. Something like that. But all the same, she was still listening, wishing the door to the closet had a lock. Wishing the bedroom had a door.

  There was one door that closed in the cottage. The bathroom. Paige grabbed a pair of leggings and some socks from the dresser and Lily’s one pair of athletic shoes from the floor, all with her left hand, her right one still holding the revolver. She inched the closet door open and crept around to the bathroom, where she slipped inside, shut and locked the door as quietly as possible, switched on the light, pulled off the short bottoms of her pj’s, and got herself dressed.

  Navy-blue leggings. Athletic socks and shoes. And a too-skimpy pj top.

  She could have gone back for a sweater. She didn’t. This felt wrong. Her Spidey Sense was tingling. She flipped off the bathroom light, waited for a count of 180 for her eyes to begin to adapt to the darkness, then unlocked the door and eased it slowly open.

  Nothing.

  She went through the door weapon first, then retraced her steps to the closet and picked up her phone. Still nothing. A stop for her purse, dropping the phone inside and slinging the bag over her shoulders, and she was down the stairs, hugging the railing, and picking up her keys from the table by the door.

  No porch light to illuminate her for anybody waiting. No motion sensors on the driveway, though, either. Lily had felt safe. Paige knew there was no such thing.

  In the car. Doors locked. Weapon in easy reach. Start it up.

  Down the mountain.

  Jace couldn’t sleep.

  Insomnia was part of the deal, of course. But tonight, it was worse than ever. And he knew why. Because he’d been a bastard. That was part of the deal, too.

  She’d told him she was damaged. She’d shown him she was damaged. And what had he said? That people who were damaged didn’t tell you about it.

  An arsehole thing to say. When he’d kissed her, when he’d been tender, she’d been surprised. You couldn’t fake that. She wasn’t used to being treated with tenderness, and that told you something. That was wrong.

  Now, he stood at the front window, held the curtain back with a hand, and looked out at the night. No stars visible, because the clouds covered the sky.

  “Storm coming,” he told Tobias, who was on his dog bed, his head lifted, his eyes on Jace. “Soon.”

  He saw the lightening in the sky first. Not the flash of lightning. The sweep of headlights illuminating the low clouds.

  It was after one o’clock in the morning.

  It was Lily’s car. Something was wrong.

  He couldn’t have said why, but within thirty seconds, he had his shoes on and his dog in his truck, the engine going hard.

  He had to push it to catch up, because she was flying, and she had more weight in the back of that vehicle than he did, could take the corners faster. He hit the straight stretch into town, saw the red flash of taillights ahead, and put his foot down.

  He caught up to her about the same time he saw the red and blue lights in the distance. When she blew through a red light onto Main, he swore, slowed, and followed her on through. And when she was going 40 in a 25 zone, he kept up.

  She hit the brakes hard and pulled to the curb fast, nose to nose with the police cruiser, its light bar working. He saw her outlined for a moment when she opened the door, and then she was out and running. Around the back of the patrol car, and the cop on the sidewalk was whirling, his hand going to the butt of his weapon.


  Shit.

  Lily was on the sidewalk now. Jace saw the cop take a fast step to the right, then three steps back. The cop’s gun was out of his holster, and her hands went into the air just that fast.

  “Freeze!” The cop shouted it, but she’d already done it.

  “P— Lily Hollander,” she said. “This is my shop. I got the call. Somebody’s following me.”

  The cop had to see she wasn’t armed. She was lit up like Christmas, and she was wearing leggings, trainers, and a slinky top cut close to her body. The wind whipped through the trees and whined in the power lines, the engine of her SUV purred quietly, and Jace’s V-8 growled low. The red and blue lights swirled like a disco ball, and two pairs of headlights cast a white glare onto the scene.

  The cop wasn’t listening. Jace could see it. Lily kept her hands up and stood absolutely still and calm in a way civilians could almost never manage. And the cop’s gun swung around and tracked onto Jace.

  “Lily Hollander,” she said again. “Coming down to check out the alarm on my shop. I was being chased.” Her eyes slid over to Jace, and her face changed. “Son of a bitch.”

  Jace couldn’t tell if it was an exclamation or his new nickname. The cop’s weapon was trained on him now, but he’d long since frozen himself. Now, he kept his voice low and slow as he explained to both of them, “Jason Blackstone. Lily’s neighbor. Came to see what was wrong.”

  He hadn’t got half of that out yet before the cop was shouting, “Get on the ground! Now!”

  He got on the ground. On his knees, and then on his stomach. The cop was standing over him, and Jace said, “Ankle holster.” He hadn’t waited around to put on his shoulder holster.

  The cop found it, and the tac knife on Jace’s other ankle, too. He wrenched one of Jace’s wrists behind his back, then the other, was cuffing him, and Jace sighed and didn’t say anything. When he was being put into the back of the patrol car, though, he thought, This is a new one. You’re Sir Galahad all right, mate.