The next morning I woke with the rotary phone tucked in the bend of one elbow, its plastic body warmed from contact with mine. Heat stung my cheeks, and I braced for Maggie’s teasing, but the deflated air mattress pancaked on the floor told me she had already left for work.
Strumming my fingers over the rotary dial, I lifted the handset and pressed it against my ear. Perfect silence greeted me. “Jane is like me.” I expected no answers. Not from the phone, not today, not when Ezra was never where or when I needed him most. “What does that make you?”
I startled when my cellphone rang and dropped the handset, almost clocking myself in the face. Mouth gone dry, my brain attempted to warp the modern ringtone to fit the briiiiiiing I was so desperate to hear. A second of disappointment was all I allowed myself before rolling over and palming my cell where it rested on my dresser.
“Rixton.” I returned the old phone to its usual spot. “Let me guess. You’re standing me up. Again.”
“We need to talk.” He pitched his voice low. “Not over the phone.”
A chill walked down my spine. “Where do you want to meet?”
“Let’s do it in public, somewhere close to my place.”
“What? No joke about doing it in public?” I sat upright, heart pounding. “This must be serious.” I scooted to the edge of the bed. “Where is good for you?”
“Sherry’s craving peanut butter froyo. I figured we could meet up at Hannigan’s, the three of us.”
“That works.” I shucked my pajamas and started rooting through drawers for clean underwear. “Are you sure Sherry ought to come?”
“Try and stop her. I dare you. And Luce? I spotted a news van on Main Street. Pretty sure he got lost on his way to the hospital since cell service is crap in town. His wouldn’t be the first GPS to lose its signal and guide a driver off the beaten path, but he might be trolling and hoping to get lucky.”
“What time?” Frozen yogurt wasn’t, as far as I knew, a breakfast food, but then again, I wasn’t pregnant. I just hoped Sherry wouldn’t bring pickles from home to use as garnish. “Hannigan’s doesn’t open until noon.”
“Let me check with the boss.” Rixton muted the call while they hashed out their schedule then came back on the line. “Sherry has an acupuncture session in Madison at one she refuses to cancel. Her migraines are getting worse, and weirdly enough jabbing her with needles is the only treatment that’s alleviating the pain.”
“Try being married to you,” she yelled from a distance. “Then we’ll see how many migraines you get.”
“Travel wipes her out.” Rixton spoke over her. “She’ll need a nap before we meet you.”
“I might be carrying a baby, but I’m not a child. I don’t require scheduled naptime.”
“Baby,” he soothed, “you woke up an hour ago, and your lids are already heavy.”
“Who’s heavy?”
“Holy mother of— Shit.” Footsteps pounded. A door slammed. Click. Rixton must have locked it behind him. “Damn that was a close one. Okay. You still there?”
Fists pounded on the door.
“Be out in a minute, hon,” he called to his wife. “Potty time is private time. You taught me that, remember?”
Her muffled roar made me grateful I was neither pregnant nor married to Rixton.
“How about five?” Rixton tapped the receiver. “Hey, Bou-Bou, I’m talking to you.”
“That works.” Assuming either of them survived the fallout from the bathroom door opening. “See you guys then.”
“Luce.” His warning tone snapped me to attention. “Watch your back.”
“Will do.” I ended the call, then dialed Maggie. I owed my partner-in-crime thanks for going above and beyond yesterday. But instead of rolling straight into voicemail as usual when I called during school hours, I heard the smoky jazz lullaby of her ringtone below me. She must have left it downstairs. “Well crap.”
I made a mental note to swing by the school and drop it off after I met with the Rixtons, then dressed in jeans, boots and a flowy peasant blouse with billowing sleeves in a floral pattern. I scrounged a frayed elastic and raked my fingers through my snarled bedhead, or I tried to, but detangling the frizzy mass proved impossible. Ponytail it is. Wincing at the tug against my scalp, I bent my stubborn hair to my will.
I pocketed my phone, and then hit the stairs. A quick search of the downstairs revealed Maggie’s cell on the bathroom vanity. Dressed and ready, I settled in at the kitchen table with my laptop and started digging through updates on the Claremont case. When the words started blending on the screen, I flipped over to the local news and monitored it for snippets about Jane.
Late afternoon found me bleary-eyed, with a stiff back and a hankering for a cool treat to offset the summer heat baking the grass in our backyard into crunchy, brittle nubs that stabbed your soles when you dared go barefoot.
After shutting down the laptop, I drifted into the living room and lifted my keys from a cup hook by the front door. I locked up behind me, pausing until the steady blip of the alarm’s green dot winked at me.
The drive into town blurred, the mental haze clearing in time for me to snag a coveted parking spot in front of Hannigan’s. I was punching the lock button on my key fob when I spotted Rixton and Sherry walking my way. Based on their matching goo-goo eyes, and the way their linked hands swung like a pendulum between them, they must have kissed and made up since we talked.
Acupuncture must be some good stuff.
“I planned on returning the DVDs you lent me, but John has forbidden me from carrying anything heavier than a paperclip.” Sherry tugged on his arm. “Unless he’s already sitting down and wants a glass of tea.”
“Liar, liar, maternity pants on fire.” He swatted her butt, and she took the hit with a gleam in her eyes. “That’s not true, Luce. Don’t believe a word this woman tells you, unless they’re compliments about me. Those you can take to the bank.”
Guess that meant naptime was code for . . . Yeah. That. So much for my acupuncture theory.
“You married this?” I hooked a thumb at him. “What were you thinking?”
“I wasn’t.” She rubbed her stomach. “I was drinking.”
“I took her to Vegas and got her sloshed on fruity drinks, popped the question, then dragged her before an ordained Elvis before she changed her mind.”
“That is exactly how I don’t remember it.” Sherry arched an eyebrow. “Like not at all. I woke up the next morning in bed married to him.” She elbowed him in the ribs. “What did you put in those drinks anyway?”
“Nothing illegal.” Rixton dropped a lingering kiss on her lips. “In most countries.”
“Get a room.” I didn’t have to fake my gagging. “Aren’t married people supposed to stop having sex?”
“That’s not how it works, no.” He slipped his wife tongue that had her squealing and fighting him off in a fit of giggles. “The more I have of her, the more I want. And being the brilliant man I am, I put a ring on it, so she’s mine. Plus, she’s pregnant, and she puts out a lot. Like a lot. And she gets kind of violent. About everything.” He waggled his eyebrows at me. “Have you ever tried angry sex with a pregnant lady? It will change your life, I guarantee.”
Even when my mind dipped into the gutter, I was still soaring in a penthouse suite compared to their permanent address on TMI Lane.
“Johnathan,” she squeaked. “What’s between you, me and my hormones is our business.”
“Luce doesn’t mind,” he assured her.
“Luce does mind,” I contradicted him.
“Let’s get that froyo.” Sherry ditched him to hook her arm through mine. “The sooner we find something to stuff in his pie hole, the sooner quiet and reason will be restored.”
“Sadly, I came here to talk to him.” Hannigan’s was a family-owned frozen yogurt bar, and its décor was best described as “unicorn vomits rainbow on white canvas”. I followed Sherry’s lead as she selected the biggest cup on offer, then swirled in peanut butter frogurt. She topped that with crushed peanut butter cups, peanut butter drops, halved peanuts and a pump of warmed peanut butter. Who was I to deviate from a theme? I even paid the bill out of respect for her creative genius, and okay, so Rixton had to buy his own. “We’ll have a moment of silence while he slurps down his swirl, then it’s down to business.”
“I brought knitting to entertain myself.” She patted a bag slung over her shoulder. “Playing beard for your covert meeting beats sitting around the house under a magnifying glass.”
A swirl of warm air caressed my cheek, and a twitch started between my shoulders. I glanced across the shop, closing my lips over the spoon as another patron joined us for a cool treat. I choked on a peanut butter drop, and Sherry leapt to her feet, as much as any woman nine months pregnant can be said to have leapt, and Heimliched me.
“I got it down,” I wheezed. “Sherry, stop. No. I’ll hurl if you keep socking me in the gut.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?” She took a bottled drink from the wall cooler and made sure the cashier added it to Rixton’s tab. “Drink this.” Her gaze slid past my shoulder. “What got you so . . .? Oh. Wow.”
Once I could breathe again, I shoved off the table with my palms and moseyed up to the new customer. “Got a sudden craving?”
Cole stared down his crooked nose at me. “Something like that.”
“You’re following me again.” I locked down the urge to squirm under his gaze. “Why?”
He selected two of the largest cups and started filling them.
“You can’t ignore me when you’re literally the size of an elephant in the room. I see you. We all see you.” I cut in line ahead of him and blocked his path. “Why. Are. You. Tailing. Me?”
“You’re paranoid.”
His cool dismissal sent heat blasting into my cheeks. Was I paranoid? Yes. Was I paranoid about him following me? No. Yesterday had proven he had an agenda. But what? I wasted precious seconds vacillating and lost the hottest edge of my temper. Or I thought so until he scooped peanut butter drops into both his cups.
“You can’t even come up with your own flavor combination,” I spluttered. “You are stalking me.” I gripped his forearm, and I might as well have been groping a boulder. “Is that why your men just happened to be in the right place at the right time?”
Note to self: It’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you.
“My men received a tip and went to investigate.” He kept studying me from under dark lashes. “I can’t help they found you instead. We are working the same case, after all.”
“Is there a problem here?” Rixton sidled up next to me. “Luce?”
“This is Cole Heaton, the owner of White Horse Security.” I noticed I was still holding onto him and jerked my hand back to my side. “Cole, this is my partner, Detective John Rixton.”
“How do you two know each other?” Rixton asked in a lazy Southern drawl. “You weren’t on that boat, Mr. Heaton.”
“No, but he was at my house the next morning.” I had zero qualms about throwing Cole under the bus. He was so freaking huge the crash would probably wreck it instead of plowing him down anyway. “He wanted to ask me about Jane.”
“Pay for your food and join us at our table,” Rixton ordered him. “We’ll talk there.”
Since I hadn’t taken my eyes off Cole, I hadn’t noticed the two teen cashiers gawking at the altercation. One had a phone in his hand held at chest-height like he might be filming. Not good.
I smiled at the boys, and then rejoined Sherry at the table. “That man is—”
“Built.” She fanned herself with a napkin. “Is all that muscle for real? Maybe you should bounce quarters off his abs to be sure.”
“Stop drooling.” I snatched the napkin and pressed it to her lips where it stuck on a daub of peanut butter and hung there. “You’re a married woman.”
“My ovaries are otherwise occupied,” she said, spitting off the paper, “but there’s nothing to stop yours from exploding.”
“Except that he might be one of those newspaper-clipping nutso stalkers obsessed with me,” I huffed.
“On a scale of one to ten,” she mused, “how big of a deal-breaker would it be if you found a scrapbook with a lock of your hair glued to a page in the front seat of his ride?”
“That would be a one hundred.” Though I might be tempted to compare scrapbooks, if such ones existed, before reducing his to ashes. “Are your hormones that out of whack?”
“Hmm?” She mimed squeezing his buns and snapped her teeth in their direction. “He’s so bitable.”
“You’d chip a tooth.”
“Dentures aren’t only for the over-sixty crowd anymore.” She spooned up her frogurt. “Hmm. I wonder what Rixton would think if I could pop out my teeth when I—”
“Sherry,” I squeaked. “He’s my partner. I won’t be able to look him in the eye after hearing you fantasize about gumming his sausage. Can you take that mental picture back please?”
“Who’s gumming sausage?” Rixton dropped into the seat next to hers. “Whose sausage is getting gummed? And can I volunteer?”
“Y’all are insane.” I dropped my face into my hands. “And you’re breeding.”
“That makes it sound so dirty.” Rixton nudged my foot with his. “Say it again.”
“Please stop.” I laughed through my embarrassment. “I can’t even with you two.”
The grating of metal chair legs against tile floor brought my head up in time to watch Cole join us. He sat beside me, naturally, and crowded me with his bulging muscles. I considered elbowing him to give myself room but worried I might shatter my funny bone in the process, which would not be humerus. He looked ridiculous with the hot pink spoon fisted in his hand, and I couldn’t tear myself away from watching him scoop up that first bite.
“It’s good,” he announced upon noticing my rapt attention. Humming in the back of his throat, he took a second bite and then a third. “Very good.”
“You’ve never had frogurt?” I cocked my head at him. “Yet more evidence you’re a stalker.”
“You flatter yourself.” He cut his eyes my way. “Do you have many such admirers?”
An unladylike snort escaped me. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
His tongue darted out to lick his lips. “I asked, didn’t I?”
A frown gathered between my brows when he did it again. He had asked me something?
Sherry pinched my thigh, and I jumped. The mountain demolished his dessert, but his eyes twinkled. Oh, how they twinkled. Fine. So the fact his upper lip was fuller than the lower one had intrigued me. Next time I gawked I would be subtler about it.
No. Bad Luce. There would be no next time. What would be the point when he’d leave after this assignment ended? Not that I was thinking that far ahead. Argh. I had totally been thinking that far ahead.
“Rixton?” I diverted my attention to my partner. “You invited him to join us for a reason?”
“White Horse took over security for Jane Doe this morning.” Rixton wiped away his jokester persona with a napkin across his lips. “That’s what I wanted to tell you, Luce. The PD won’t assign her an official security detail unless her life is endangered, and we know they set the bar too high on that. We can rotate out volunteers, but that won’t ensure continuous coverage, and it’s a stopgap measure.”
“Funny how you neglected to mention you were visiting a potential client when we bumped into one another in the elevator,” I grated in Cole’s direction. “What business is Jane of yours?”
“I follow the money.” He stacked his cups—both emptied—when I had yet to take a second bite. “I’m mercenary that way. I got an offer to protect her, and I took the contract. End of story.”
Call me crazy, but I didn’t believe a word out of his incredibly distracting mouth. “Who’s paying you?”
“Divulge a client’s personal information?” He clicked his tongue. “People don’t stay in business long if they let beautiful women talk them out of their secrets.”
The compliment set my cheeks tingling. Oh, he was good.
“Could her family have put up the money?” Sherry reached for her husband’s hand. “They must be worried sick about her.”
“Her prints aren’t in the system, babe.” Rixton brushed a knuckle across her cheek. “She’s unidentified, a Jane Doe, and that means no one—not even her family—knows to look for her here.”
I stirred my froyo until the ribbon of peanut butter dissolved, leaving me with a goopy mess too mushy to eat. Or maybe the topic had cost me my appetite. Did Jane have family? Would they come for her? No one had ever claimed me, but I had been a child. She was an adult. She might have a husband or kids of her own out there searching for her. They would want to put this nightmare behind them once they found her. Maybe put me behind them too. I couldn’t let that happen. I had to learn what she knew.
“I have to go.” I stood in a rush and my chair wobbled. “I need to see Jane again.”
“I’ll escort you.” Cole shot out his arm, his fingers tangling in the curlicue detail of the seatback, righting the chair before it clattered to the floor. “I’ll handle introductions and let the crew know you have clearance to visit as often as you wish.”
An escort inside would spare me the cloak and dagger routine. A girl could only bum so many sets of scrubs. Besides, look how well that worked out last time. I might as well have faced the vultures considering how Valerie had rung the dinner bell for them before I escaped the hospital.
“I don’t see any strings attached.” I waved my fingers through the air, miming a search for spider webs. “I can feel them, but I don’t see them. Yet.”
“I’m a patient hunter.” The corner of his lips twitched. “The best-laid traps are the ones you don’t realize were there until they close behind you.”
A sultry breeze ruffled my shirt, but I dismissed the new patron in favor of keeping my eyes on Cole.
“Ms. Boudreau,” a man called. “Are you Luce Boudreau?” I turned at the sound of my name, like an idiot, and that was all the confirmation the reed-thin man required. “What do you know about Jane Doe? Is it true she was discovered in the same swamp where Edward Boudreau found you fifteen years ago?”
“Go.” Sherry pushed me toward the door. “We’ll handle him.”
What happened next blurred around the edges. Rixton stood to run interference. He hesitated a second to tell Sherry to stay put. I was striding toward the door, Cole on my heels, when the newcomer fisted the sleeve of my top. It was wide-neck and elastic, and his yank pulled it off one shoulder.
The neckline snapped taut and caught under my bra cup, exposing my entire left shoulder and most of my arm down to the elbow.
The shock of the violation, the stunned incomprehension that a strange man had laid his hands on me, locked my muscles until all I could do was stand there and gape. Did that just happen? Is this real? It was such a nightmare scenario for me, being exposed in public. Amnesia swept through my muscle memory, the trauma wiping away all those years of self-defense classes. One move had stripped me of my armor at the worst possible time and left me a victim. Again.
A feral growl ripped me out of my head, and I jerked up my top. The asshat had torn the fabric, so I tucked the ragged material under my bra strap. I spun at the sound of shattering glass and found Cole holding the man a foot off the ground, one of his large hands wrapped around the guy’s windpipe. The other hand had yanked the camera from his grasp, and his huge booted foot had stomped it flat. The breaking glass was courtesy of a framed picture Cole had bashed the man’s head through. Blood speckled the mat surrounding a dollar bill from Hannigan’s opening, the first one they’d earned.
For a good ol’ Southern boy, the guttural words pouring out of Cole’s mouth, pressed flush against the reporter’s ear, were not in any way comprehensible. Another language definitely. German maybe?
I crossed to him when it became obvious no one else was brave enough to get between the furious titan and the target of his wrath. Rixton had shielded Sherry, and he wasn’t budging until the situation was contained and his wife and child were safe. “Cole?”
“He touched you,” he snarled. “Exposed you.”
“Can you put him down?” I rested my hand between the slabs of muscle between his shoulders. “The cops will be here in a minute.” I had no doubt Mr. Hannigan had mashed his panic button. “Let them take care of this guy.”
Choking sounds interspersed with sobs had me lifting my gaze to the reporter. Cole caught the man looking in my direction, and the vibration in his chest deepened until the man whimpered and crushed his eyes shut. A second later, the tang of ammonia filled the air. The guy had pissed himself, and that was the only reason Cole turned him loose and took a step back. Lip curled, he glowered at the guy.
“There are parts of the swamp that have never been seen by human eyes,” he told the man. “Touch her again, and I’ll give you a guided tour.”
The guy curled in a ball, hands covering his face, and rocked until sirens blared in the distance.
Aware I was taking my life into my hands, I tugged on Cole’s shirt until he angled his body toward me. I was a country girl, and I knew all about not getting between a predator and his prey. But I needed Cole to greenlight me with his crew, and that couldn’t happen if he was in lockup. “That was an extreme reaction, don’t you think?”
“No.” Muscles fluttered in his jaw. “I don’t.” He hooked his index finger and tapped under my chin until I looked all the way up at him. “What if there hadn’t been witnesses? What if he hadn’t stopped there? What if he hadn’t come alone? Do you think his friends would have helped you? Or stopped filming? No matter how long you screamed?”
“I would have snapped out of it, okay? He surprised me. The attention has gotten rough before, but no one has ever . . . ” I fingered the torn edges of my shirt. “I wasn’t ready for him to put his hands on me. I will be next time.”
“We need to leave.” He lowered his hand. “The cops are almost here.”
“I am a cop, remember?” I thumped my chest with my closed fist. “Plus, you kind of Hulk-smashed this place. There are repercussions for that sort of thing.”
“You expect me to hang around and answer questions.” He made it sound like I’d asked him to donate a kidney then offered to cut it out with a butter knife and no anesthesia. “I have a spotless record precisely because I avoid both those things.”
“How about this?” I walked him backward with a palm flattened against his rock-hard chest then applied slight pressure on his shoulder until he sat in the nearest chair. “I’ll stay here and hold your hand so the big, bad cops don’t scare you.”
Cole extended his arm, palm up, and waited for me to make good on my promise.
“I didn’t mean that literally.” But I put my hand in his and let the fold of his fingers swallow me up to the wrist. Lifting a concrete block one-handed might have been easier than bearing the full weight of his hand, his arm, when he relaxed into my grip. Biceps trembling, elbow joint aching, I didn’t complain. How could I when he hadn’t so much as peeked at my bare skin? He must be curious about the markings. He was in this up to his neck. Yet he had tossed aside a prime opportunity to evaluate me, to compare my banding to Jane’s, and I respected him for that. “I don’t get you, Cole, so give me some pointers. Should I thank you for defending my honor? Or would that only encourage your caveman tendencies in the future?”
Quicker than a rattler striking down a field mouse, he swung his head toward the reporter. “He put his hands on you.” His lips peeled from his teeth, and a low sound pumped through his chest that made my fingers itch to flatten my palm against his back once more. “He’s lucky I let him off with a warning.”
Well, that answered my question. Wrap his hips with animal pelts, pass the man a club, and Cole would be a Neolithic dream come true. Good thing I wasn’t sleeping much these days.