Harlequin Romantic Suspense December 2020 Box Set

by Addison Fox, Cindy Dees, Justine Davis

  Navy SEAL Cop

  Visit Cindy’s Author Profile page at

  Harlequin.com for more titles.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  CHAPTER 1

  Bedroom eyes.

  Detective Reese Carpenter had no-kidding bedroom eyes.

  And he was flashing them at her right now, leaning his elbows on the high counter at the front of her crime lab. How was a woman supposed to get any work done with a guy so flat-out sexy hanging around? It was all she could do not to stop, stand and stare at him. And maybe drool a little.

  “Have you got anything for me?” he asked.

  His hair was dark, his eyes bright, movie-star blue, brimming with sultry charm, sophisticated intelligence, wry humor and a hint of mischief. Totally made her think of sex—great sex and lots of it.

  “Earth to Yvette Colton. Come in.”

  She blinked rapidly, clearing the image of her sister’s cop-partner naked and in her bed, taking her to the stars and back. Darn his bedroom eyes, anyway.

  “What do you want, now?” she asked in an aggrieved tone. “Or are you finally going to give up telling me how to do my job and just take over the forensic lab yourself?”

  As pretty as he might be, Reese Carpenter was also an almighty pain in the tuchus. A know-it-all who got all up in her business and was forever telling her how to do her job. This might be her first time running her own crime lab, but she’d trained with the best forensic scientists in the business, thank you very much.

  “You gotta help me out, here,” her unwanted visitor declared. “I need something concrete I can pin on Markus Dexter. Give me a smoking gun. I know he did it.”

  “It” being the double murder of a woman, Olivia Harrison, and a private investigator, Fenton Crane, twenty-six years ago. Their bodies had been hidden in the walls of the Crest View warehouse in Braxville, Kansas, and discovered during a renovation last summer. To complicate matters, the entire warehouse had been blown up by a saboteur last month.

  “I can only process evidence so fast, Detective. And it’s not like that’s my only case. In fact, at the moment, I’m running tests for arsenic on the remains of the Crest View warehouse.”

  “Did you find any?” he asked.

  “Not in this sample. It appears the arsenic-laced wood was used only for framing walls. The floor joists didn’t contain arsenic, but their wood was sourced in North America. Only the batch of wood from China was contaminated.”

  “As we thought,” he responded with a brisk nod.

  She turned her attention back to the test tube in her hand, but he huffed audibly. She looked up once more, surprised that he was still hovering in her lab. He declared, “I have to find something to tie Dexter to the bodies in that warehouse.”

  “I thought your job was to be a dispassionate investigator and go where the facts lead you, and not go looking for facts to support your theories.”

  He huffed harder, turned on his heel and stomped out of her lab, his business-suit-clad physique entirely too tempting to be legal.

  * * *

  An hour later, Reese was back. “Anything?” he asked without preamble.

  “No. And I won’t find any answers if you keep interrupting me,” she snapped at him and his bedroom eyes. This time he’d lost the coat and tie and wore only slacks and a white dress shirt that showed off shoulders in no need of padding to make them appear athletic. He wasn’t a bulky guy, but he definitely was in great shape. Moreover, his sleeves were rolled up to reveal leanly muscled forearms still holding over a bit of tan from last summer.

  A flash of irritated blue was all she glimpsed of his expression as he turned and stomped out…again. She totally knew the feeling.

  * * *

  Another hour passed. This time he merely poked his head in through the hallway door and called out, “How about now?”

  “Go away, Carpenter!” she called back. At the moment, she was bent over a spectrometer trying to recalibrate the stupid thing so she could run the last batch of wood slivers from the Crest View warehouse explosion.

  She added for good measure, “And don’t come back until I call you or you’ve got a darned good reason for interrupting my work!”

  * * *

  Exactly one hour later, her lab door opened again.

  She didn’t even bother to look up. “Reese, I could set my watch off your visits down here. Are you setting an alarm for every hour on the hour to remind yourself to come to my lab and bug me?”

  “Yeah, actually. I am.”

  That made her glance sidelong in his direction. “You do know that pestering me incessantly isn’t doing a blessed thing to speed up my work, right? I’m handling all this evidence as quickly as I can, and you poking at me isn’t going to make the work go any faster. It’s only ticking me off.”

  He shrugged and grinned without a shred of remorse.

  Man, his smile was nearly as lethal as his eyes. It was all boyish charm and manly sex appeal. She looked down at her workstation hastily, not seeing a thing on her computer screen. “At least turn your alarm off,” she muttered. “You’re driving me crazy.”

  “I can work with crazy,” he purred. “I would only be worried if you didn’t have any opinion at all about me.”

  That made her head snap up. New tactic from him, perhaps? If badgering her didn’t yield the proof he needed to convict Dexter, was Reese going to try to seduce it out of her? Gulp.

  Right now, she was dissolving mortar scraped off bricks at the Crest View crime scene into a solution she would run through the spectrometer. She was hoping to find the chemical composition of the explosive used to demolish the building, and while she was at it, look for arsenic that might have seeped into the walls from the contaminated wood that was used to frame the structure.

  “Go. Away. And quit bugging me. You’re a pest.”

  “Aww, come on. I’m not that bad. Let me help with something.”

  She pointed a long glass pipette at him like a magic wand, waving the pencil-thick stirring stick at him and intoning, “Begonus pain-in-the-assikus.”

  He laughed, and darned if that mischievous sparkle in his eyes didn’t get even more pronounced. “Admit it. I’m a cute pain the ass, though.”

  Her gaze narrowed. “Toddlers are cute. But that doesn’t mean I want one running around my lab wrecking everything in sight.”

  “Did you just call me a child?” he asked darkly.

  “I might’ve,” she replied defiantly. Dang it. Her and her big mouth. It was forever getting her into trouble. And now an intimidating cop was abruptly staring at her in cool challenge, his eyes as hard and cold as chips of sea ice.

  “We’ll see about that,” he murmured. “I’ll bet I can change your mind fast enough.”

  “Oh, yeah? How?” she blurted. Dumb, dumb, dumb. The first rule of dealing with alpha males was never, ever to throw down a dare in front of one.

  Reese moved swiftly around the front counter and he loomed over her, six feet tall to her five feet, five inches on a good day. In socks. Thick ones.

  All that crackling sex appeal was suddenly back, pouring off him in tangible waves. Dude. How did he do that? One minute he was a total pro—just the facts, ma’am—and the next he was this smoking-hot chick magnet, all come-hither looks and irresistible, masculine charm.

  It was those cursed bedroom eyes of his.

/>   One thing she knew for sure, this man was strictly off-limits. No way was she sleeping with a guy who could kiss and tell to her big—protective—sis. And given that Reese and Jordana spent hours and hours together every single day at work, Reese would surely end up spilling the beans. Her sister was an excellent cop and talented interrogator. Jordana would pry every sordid detail out of her partner.

  God, what she wouldn’t give to be able to manage this infuriating man the way her sister did. As it was, he was a constant thorn in her side, continually commenting on her procedures, calling her out for every corner she dared to even think about cutting, watching her like a hawk, down to the most minute detail of her job.

  It wasn’t that she minded being held to a high standard or even to perfection. It was the insufferable way he did it that drove her around the bend. More than once in the past year, she’d seriously considered killing him. And she did know how to hide his body.

  Honestly, she had no interest in dating any cop. Not only would it be it tricky at best to date someone she worked with, but cops were not her jam. They tended to be so confident. Assertive. Convinced of their rightness at all times.

  Nope. Reese Carpenter could take his bedroom eyes and seductive smile and flash them both at some other poor soul who had no idea what an irritating man lurked behind them.

  She took a step back and carefully released the deeply annoyed breath she realized she was holding. “Why are you here, Detective?”

  “My name is Reese. Feel free to use it, dar—”

  She interrupted his drawl. “Do not call me darling. Or honey, or anything pertaining to sugar. And if you call me little lady, I will have to shoot you.”

  He grinned. Lazy, sexy, knowing. What the heck did he think he knew about her that she didn’t?

  Nope, nope, nope. Not getting personal with this guy. She would not lob even a hint of encouragement in this supremely arrogant male’s direction.

  “How’s the evidence processing coming from the bodies in the wall?” Reese asked in an abruptly impersonal, professional tone.

  Whoa. Mental whiplash.

  Something in her tummy fell in disappointment. Well, shoot. She wanted him to quit flirting, and now she was upset when he did? Yikes, she was a hot mess.

  She cleared her throat, stood as tall as she could and tried to sound marginally like the expert in her field that she was. “Umm, I just got back the analysis of the insect carcasses found in the wall with the bodies.”

  “Are they twenty-six years old, too?” he asked dryly. “We already know Olivia and Fenton were killed that long ago because of when the building wall they were hidden in was built. I can’t understand why you wasted department money sending out some dead bugs to tell us that.”

  “Because I’m good at my job,” she replied tartly. “And because I noticed right away that the types of bugs found in the walls with each body were different. But I’m not a forensic entomologist, so I spent some of your precious police budget on having an expert examine them.”

  “And?”

  “And, the insects found with the woman were primarily mosquitoes, flies, and interestingly, earwigs.”

  “What’s so interesting about earwigs?” he asked.

  “They’re predominantly spring insects.”

  “So?”

  “The insects with the male remains included spiders, fleas, and notably, stink bugs.”

  “Stink bugs.”

  She nodded. “Stink bugs. They’re predominantly a fall insect. We can conjecture from the different species of insect remains that our bodies in the walls were murdered some months apart. Something like six months. Ms. Harrison was closed into the wall in the springtime. Mr. Crane’s corpse wasn’t entombed in the wall until the fall.”

  She waxed enthusiastic, as she usually did when her job yielded fascinating results. “If we assume the killer or killers hid the bodies quickly after time of death, we can conclude that they were murdered months apart.” She finished in triumph, “We’re looking at two distinct and separate homicides.”

  Reese groaned.

  “What?” she blurted, startled. She’d expected him to be excited by her find.

  “The department is stretched thin as it is investigating one murder. And now you want to double the workload?” he groused.

  “I still think the two murders were committed by the same person. Both were struck in the back of the head by a person about six feet tall and right-handed, using similar force and similar blunt objects for each blow. You’re still only hunting for a single killer. But two murder scenes. Two sets of motives.”

  “We’ll never find the murder scenes. They were erased a quarter century ago. There won’t even be trace evidence left by now.”

  A pang of grief stabbed her in the heart. Her best friend in middle school, Debbie Boyd, had been murdered almost fifteen years ago. Any evidence from her death was also likely degraded and long gone. Like her killer. Yvette’s own frustration at having never solved Debbie’s murder was the main reason she hadn’t strangled Reese Carpenter already. She actually understood his burning drive to solve the Harrison-Crane murders.

  “Speaking of murder scenes, how goes the processing of the materials we brought in from searching Markus Dexter’s home?”

  Dexter—one of the two main partners in Colton Construction, which built the Crest View warehouse—was the prime suspect in the cold case killings after he had mysteriously disappeared from Braxville shortly after the bodies were uncovered last summer.

  She answered, “I’m digging through everything you brought in as quickly as I can, but I’m a one-woman lab, and it’s going to take me some time to get through it all.”

  The number of evidence bags brought in from the home numbered in the hundreds, and some of the contents would require scientific processing. She was still entering a description of the contents of each one into a database along with the date, time and place it had been collected. She had yet to even begin examining the evidence inside the bags.

  “Have you found anything to link Dexter to the murders?” Reese asked. She detected an underlying note of desperation in his voice that actually provoked answering sympathy in her gut.

  “Not yet.”

  “But you’ll keep looking? You gotta help me out, here, Yvette. I need a positive link between Dexter and the murders.”

  Lord, that man was pushy. “It’s not as if the guy left a candlestick in his desk drawer with a card taped to it saying, ‘Murder weapon used in the library by Professor Plum,’ if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Are you always so prickly?” he demanded.

  “When people interfere in my work and prevent me from doing my job, always.”

  He threw up his hands. “Okay, okay. I can take a hint. I’ll get out of here.”

  “Did you actually have a specific reason for coming down here this time? I did make that a pre-condition for you coming back to bother me, as I recall.”

  Her lab was in the basement of the new Braxville Police Department building. It was as snazzy a facility as she’d ever worked in, and the new lab that came with it was first-class. She just wished there was funding for a second forensics technician to go with all the fancy, state-of-the art equipment.

  Although, truth be told, Braxville wasn’t normally a hub of violent crime, or much crime at all. The suburb of Wichita was usually a quiet, pleasant little place. She’d thought this would be a nice, quiet job when she’d come home to take the position after cutting her teeth in forensics at the big FBI lab in Quantico for a couple of years.

  Reese was speaking. “…on my way out when these boxes of files were messengered over from the Colton Construction firm.”

  Boxes, plural? She mentally groaned.

  He continued, “Fitz Colton’s assistant sent them over. Apparently, you asked for these?”

 
He stepped out into the hall and dragged in a handcart with four, three-foot-long cardboard boxes stacked on it. He hefted each one onto the counter between them. From the weight of them, she gathered the things were stuffed from end to end with all of Markus Dexter’s office files from nearly thirty years with the firm.

  She groaned aloud this time. There went her evenings for the next month. No social life for her, no matter what Jordana and Bridgette said about her needing to get out more. She’d even made a New Year’s Resolution at her sisters’ urging to expand her life beyond the lab, maybe even date a little, this year.

  Admittedly, it was a half-bottle-of-wine-induced resolution. But her sisters were not wrong. They’d both taken a chance and found love recently. In fact, they bordered on downright annoying to be around in their mutual, delirious bliss.

  She supposed it wasn’t a bad ambition to find for herself a tiny sliver of the happy glow that clung to both women these days. Not that the dating pool in Braxville was anything to write home about. Even though the town was growing and gentrifying fast, it was still a small town at its core. There were still plenty of country music, pickup trucks and dirt roads to be had here.

  Funny, but it had taken going to the other side of the country to finally appreciate her hometown. As a restless teen, though, she hadn’t been able to get out fast enough. Hence, Washington, DC.

  It hadn’t just been the offer of heading up her own lab that lured her back. Although, very few twenty-five-year olds got an opportunity like this. Her original plan was to stay here no more than three or four years and then head for another large city and a high-powered crime lab as a senior investigator. Maybe Denver, or even New York City, next time.

  But now that she was back, she was finding that Braxville wasn’t half as bad as she’d made it out to be when it was the only place she’d ever been.

  She wasn’t sure where the future would take her, now. Advancing her career would still take her to a big city. But reconnecting with her family might just convince her to put down roots here. She was torn…and she didn’t like being uncertain about anything.

  Meanwhile, she’d been back here almost exactly a year and had yet to go on a single date. It wasn’t that she was horrible in the looks or personality department. Granted, she was a known workaholic. But she liked to think the right man could coax her out of her lab and into a better work-life balance.