by Lisa Childs
“I know my rights,” she said. “If you didn’t have a warrant, your search was illegal.”
“I was surveying the flood damage,” he said, “and your yard was in plain view from the field behind it.”
Which was his family’s property. In Whisperwood, the Coltons’ ranch was second in size only to the Corgan spread.
“So you weren’t even acting as a lawman when you performed this illegal search?” she asked. “You were just riding around your own property?”
His brow furrowed, and he opened his mouth to answer her, but she cut him off with a, “How dare you!”
She’d thought she’d let it go—her embarrassment over how he’d rejected her request to dance. But now that embarrassment turned to anger, which she unleashed on him.
Or maybe her exhaustion had made her extra irritable.
“You’re trespassing on my property,” she continued. “And when your fellow officers arrive, they will be obligated to issue you a citation.”
“Rae—”
“You’re not above the law,” she said, “just because you’re a Colton.”
“I know I’m not above the law,” he said, his face still flushed, but with anger now. It burned in his hazel eyes, as well. “And neither are you.”
“I am a law student,” she said. “And I’m already working as a paralegal. I probably know the law better than you do.”
He snorted then. “I’ve been a police officer for years,” he reminded her. “I know the law. Why did you switch from managing the general store to law?”
She narrowed her eyes and studied his handsome face. He’d barely talked to her at her friend and his brother’s wedding, so why was he curious about her now? Especially since he seemed to know more about her than she’d realized.
She was proud of her decision to go to law school, so she answered him, “I want to do something about all the crimes happening around Whisperwood.”
“Then you should want me to investigate what I found on your property,” he pointed out.
Now she was curious, which she probably would have been right way if she wasn’t so damn exhausted. “What did you find?” she asked.
“A body.”
She gasped in shock and shook her head. “No.” It wasn’t possible. Someone couldn’t have been murdered in her backyard, where she’d imagined her son playing as he grew up, just like she had played there as a child. She shuddered and murmured again, “No.”
Forrest nodded. “I’m afraid it’s true.”
“But—but I didn’t hear anything.” Wouldn’t she have heard something if someone had been murdered in her backyard? But with work and school, she was gone so much that she probably hadn’t even been home when it had happened. “I didn’t see anything amiss.”
“Have you missed anyone?” he asked. “Somebody staying with you that suddenly disappeared?”
She shook her head. Somebody had disappeared years ago on Rae, but that had been his choice to leave. Nobody had murdered him, although she’d sometimes wished she would have...when she’d watched her mother suffer.
“So you didn’t notice anything in the backyard? Any digging?” he asked, persisting with his questions.
She shook her head again. “Why the hell would someone bury a body in my backyard?”
“I’m not sure if they’d just buried it, or if it was just uncovered,” Forrest said. “It could have been there awhile.”
“Like the body that Maggie and Jonah found after the hurricane?” she asked.
They had just stumbled across the body—the mummified body. She shivered with revulsion. What if that was what Forrest had found in her backyard? Another mummy?
“I’ll know more once the coroner arrives,” he continued.
The wail of a siren grew louder as it came closer to her house. Maybe the coroner was arriving now, along with the squad cars with the flashing lights that were pulling into her driveway.
Connor cried out now, and it wasn’t a sleepy little cry but a wail almost as loud as the siren.
“What the hell is that?” Forrest asked in alarm.
And Rae bristled all over again with outrage. “That is my son,” she replied as she hurried off to the nursery.
* * *
Tension gripped the chief, and he tightened his grasp on his cell phone before sliding it back into his pocket.
Behind him, sitting on the porch of his two-story farmhouse, Hays Colton chuckled. “Forrest has always had good timing,” he said of his son. “You drive out here, looking for him, and he calls you like he somehow knew.”
Chief Thompson shook his head. “That’s not why he called.” And he could have pointed out that Forrest’s timing wasn’t always perfect, or young Colton wouldn’t have taken that bullet in his leg. But if his instincts weren’t as strong as they were, he might have taken that bullet in his heart or his head instead of his leg.
He had survived.
His shooter had not.
“What’s wrong?” Hays asked, his blue eyes wide with alarm. “Is he all right?”
Thompson nodded. “Yeah, he just called to give me a heads-up.”
“Did he find out the identity of that poor girl found at the pharmaceutical company?”
The chief shook his head. “I wish that was why he called. Or better yet, to tell me he caught the killer.” Because it would probably hit the news soon anyway, Archer Thompson shared, “He found another body.”
Another person for the already overworked coroner to identify.
“I’m sorry,” Hays said. He rose from the porch swing, set his coffee cup on the railing and reached out to pat Thompson’s shoulder.
They’d known each other for a long time, but Thompson didn’t need any more sympathy. He needed answers—about his sister’s murder and about these bodies that had recently turned up. He uttered a ragged sigh as he pushed himself up from the rocking chair in which he’d been sitting. He didn’t move as fast as he once had, his bones aching now with age and overuse. He didn’t stand quite as straight and tall as he once had either.
Neither did Hays, though, who had spent too many of his seventy-some years in the saddle, working his ranch. “My son will find out who really killed your sister,” Hays assured him.
Thompson wanted to believe the killer was Elliot Corgan, because then he would have the satisfaction of knowing the sick bastard had died in prison. But Elliot had denied killing his sister, and there was no way he could have killed that woman whose body had been discovered in the Lone Star Pharma parking lot.
There was another killer in Whisperwood.
And until he was caught, the chief had a feeling that bodies would keep turning up.
Chapter 3
Cries emanated from the house, drawing Forrest’s attention back to the one-story ranch structure and to her. A shadow passed behind the windows as if she was pacing in her kitchen. She had a baby.
Somebody had probably mentioned it to Forrest, but he didn’t remember. He’d been preoccupied with the hurricane damage and now with the murder investigation. He surveyed the crime scene. Techs worked on bagging those corroded coins or buttons he’d uncovered, while the coroner worked on removing the body from the hole. They knew what they were doing; they didn’t need his supervising their every move. In fact they’d probably resent it if he did.
So he headed back to the house. He raised his fist to the frame around the glass in the back door but hesitated before knocking. The cries were louder now, so he wasn’t at risk of waking the baby.
The little guy was already awake and squalling. Seeing through the glass that Rae had her hands full with the baby, Forrest reached instead for the knob, turned it and let himself back into the house.
She gasped at his bold intrusion, but then she didn’t seem to like anything he did. The invitation to dance had definitely been exte
nded out of obligation or pity. Probably obligation...because she didn’t seem to like him enough to pity him.
She glared at him over the baby’s head. “Why did they have to come here with the sirens blaring?” she asked. “It doesn’t look like an emergency.”
“No,” he agreed. The body was far beyond help. Rae Lemmon looked as if she needed help, though, as she rocked the baby’s stiff little body in her arms.
Dark circles rimmed her brown eyes, but instead of detracting from her beauty, they highlighted it. She looked both vulnerable with her delicate features and sexy as hell with the old T-shirt molded to her generous curves.
“He had just finally gone to sleep,” she murmured with a little catch in her voice, “when the sirens woke him up.”
A pang of regret struck Forrest. The officers hadn’t needed to put on the sirens. It would have been better to draw less attention to the scene than more.
Fortunately no reporters had followed them. Forrest had never enjoyed dealing with the press. So he definitely should have advised the police not to use the sirens when he’d called in what he’d found. He opened his mouth to apologize, but before he could, chimes rang out.
Was that the sound of her doorbell?
Maybe a reporter had picked up on the call after all. He grimaced—just as Rae held out the baby toward him.
“That’s my phone,” she said, as she handed him the crying infant.
Because he had no experience with babies, he didn’t know how to hold him. But he reacted instinctively, closing his hands around the baby’s midsection. Was he supposed to cup his head or something? He moved one hand to the baby’s neck, and the little guy’s head swiveled toward him.
The face that had been scrunched up with cries froze with shock, and his dark eyes widened as he stared up at Forrest. Was he scared?
His crying stopped, though, so that was a good thing. Forrest could hear himself think again. He could also hear the soft murmur of Rae’s voice as she spoke to someone—maybe the baby’s father. She must have left the phone in another room, since in order to answer it she’d left him alone with her baby.
Forrest was as frozen with fear as the little guy was. What if he was holding him wrong? Or he dropped him?
Rae would hate him even more then.
And Forrest would hate himself. But the kid was light and easy to hold. Maybe he could do this. And if he figured it out, he would actually be able to hold Donovan and Bellamy’s baby once it came, and not harm his little niece and nephew.
He crooked his arm and eased the baby into that, so the kid could stare up at him more comfortably. And he kept staring like he had no idea what the hell Forrest was, let alone whom. Keeping his deep voice to a low rumble, he murmured, “I’m Detective Colton.”
Not that the baby could actually understand him. But he stared up at Forrest’s face as if he was listening.
Maybe Forrest reminded him of his father. Where was the guy? Forrest didn’t remember seeing anyone hanging around Rae at the wedding. But then, as one of the maids of honor, she’d been busy. Not too busy to ask him to dance, though.
But that must have been just part of her duty as a maid of honor—to look after the guests. Maybe that was why the baby’s father had made himself scarce. Or maybe he’d stayed home to watch the baby, since he probably would have been newly born at the time of the wedding.
She hadn’t looked like she’d recently given birth then, though—not with how well her navy blue maid of honor’s dress had fit her.
Forrest had so many questions about Rae Lemmon, so much curiosity. It was that curiosity that had drawn him to her house this morning and to the body in her backyard. That—more than anything—should have proved to him that she was going to be trouble.
He had to restrict his curiosity to professional only, since his broken engagement had convinced him that personal relationships were not for him. The only personal relationships he was going to allow himself was with his family.
Being around this little guy might help him prepare for the new baby so that he would be able to help Donovan and Bellamy when they needed it. So that he could be a good uncle to the little cowgirl or cowboy that the newlyweds would have.
“What about you?” Forrest asked the baby. “Are you going to be a cowboy? You want to learn to ride?”
Despite having no experience with kids, he realized this one was too young to answer any of his questions, but the baby seemed fascinated by his voice. Those already wide brown eyes widened even more. With those enormous eyes, delicate features and brown hair, the baby looked so much like his beautiful mother.
A little bubble floated out of the baby’s lips as he gurgled. And Forrest tensed with concern. Was something wrong?
And where had the baby’s mother gone?
Forrest had felt more comfortable finding that mummified body in her backyard than he did standing in her kitchen, holding her child. That body was beyond saving; the only thing he needed to do for her was find her killer.
But the baby...
He could screw up. He could cause him harm, and that was the last thing he wanted to do.
* * *
Why had the crying stopped?
What had Forrest Colton done to her baby?
Rae peered through her open bedroom door at the man standing in her kitchen. He’d moved Connor to the crook of his muscular arm, and her child lay there, staring up in adulation at the man holding him.
Connor hadn’t looked at her that way in a while—with fascination. Frustration, instead, scrunched up his little face when he stared up at her. He’d been so fussy lately.
For her.
But not for Forrest Colton.
What the hell had the man done to him?
“Rae? Are you there? Are you okay?”
It wasn’t his deep voice rumbling in her ear as she pressed the cell phone into the crook of her shoulder and tried to dress while peering through the crack of her door. “Yes, Kenneth, I’m fine,” she assured her caller, who was one of the lawyers at the firm where she worked as a paralegal.
“Do you need me to come out there?”
“No,” she automatically replied. She’d been saying that to him a lot since she’d been hired at the firm—no to an offer of coffee or dinner. Not that he was harassing her. He’d made it clear that he was happily married and that his offers were only intended to make her feel welcome at the firm.
“I just wanted to be available in case any legal issues arise out of this search of your property,” he explained. “You’re one of the family here at Lukas, Jolley and Fitzsimmons.” He was more family than she was because he was related by marriage. His father-in-law was Fitzsimmons.
“I’m actually going to leave soon.” Even though this was her home, she didn’t want to stay here while Forrest Colton was on her property. “I’ll drop off Connor at day care and come into the office.”
Kenneth blew out a ragged breath of relief. “That’ll be good for you to get out of there.”
He’d called because he’d heard on his police scanner that the coroner and a crime-scene unit had been dispatched to her address. He used the scanner to drum up business for the firm—chasing ambulances.
“Yes,” she agreed. It would be good for her to get away from Forrest Colton. And to get him away from her child. “I’ll see you soon,” she said as she clicked off her cell phone.
While juggling the phone, she’d managed to replace her nightgown with a long summer dress. She’d even managed to rub some concealer over her dark circles and cover it up with a dusting of powder. A swipe of mascara across her lashes finished her makeup routine.
She stepped out of the bedroom and rushed into the kitchen. Forrest looked up from her son and focused on her face.
Did he notice the makeup? Did he think she’d put it on for him?
The heat o
f embarrassment rushed up now, probably flushing her face under that thin dusting of powder. “I had to take that call,” she told him.
“Was it your husband?” he asked.
A chortle slipped through her lips at the thought of her being married. “Not mine,” she said.
“Somebody else’s?” he asked.
She grimaced. “Don’t make it sound like that. He’s one of my colleagues. He heard the call and was concerned.”
Forrest’s brow furrowed. “How did he hear it?”
She shrugged. It wasn’t illegal to own a police scanner, but since starting law school, she’d already grown tired of the ambulance-chaser comments.
“What about you?” he asked. “Did you hear anything last night?”
“I already told you I hadn’t,” she reminded him. Then she pointed toward the baby, who’d actually fallen asleep now in Forrest’s arms. “He’s the only one who’s been making any noise around here at night.”
The detective looked down at the baby again, and his lips curved into a smile, which was quite a turnaround from the grimace of horror that had crossed his face when she had first handed him her son. “What’s his name?” he asked.
“Connor.”
He glanced up at her as if waiting for more.
So she added, “Lemmon.”
“You’re not married?” he asked.
“I thought I already established that,” she said. When she’d asked him to dance at that wedding.
She was old-fashioned enough that she wouldn’t have asked a single guy to dance if she was married. But apparently she wasn’t as old-fashioned as he was.
“You know you don’t have to be married to have a baby,” she said.
“The father didn’t want to marry you?”
Both outraged and offended, she gasped. Forrest Colton wasn’t just old-fashioned; he was a jerk. “The father doesn’t even know me.”
He gasped now.
And she laughed at the shock on his face.
Her son tensed briefly in Forrest’s arm, but he moved him in a rocking motion, and Connor settled back to sleep. How could the man soothe her son while he riled her up? She’d never met anyone who’d infuriated her as much as Forrest Colton did.