Time seemed to stop when I saw Matthew Jones for the first time. I couldn’t explain it then, and I couldn’t explain it after the fact, but the world seemed to slowly grind to a halt the moment my eyes met his.

He’d been the last thing I was expecting from a fire investigator working for a security firm. He was handsome, rugged, and right about my age. I’d been thinking more along the lines of a pot-bellied fire chief who’d retired to consultant work after twenty years in the department.

“Ms. Stokes?” he asked for what I realized was the second or third time, a small smile on his lips. “I’m Matthew Jones. I’ll be working your case.”

I shook my head a little, trying to recollect some of the sense he’d knocked out of it as I went to stand. “Ms. Stokes is what my students call me. Please, just call me Rebecca.”

He grinned. And, boy, what a grin! A little sly, a little knowing, but genuine all the way through. “Rebecca it is, then.”

My toes tingled a little and almost curled as I smiled shyly. “Not your fault I was early.” I’d been sitting in the waiting area for a good ten or fifteen minutes, hoping my early arrival would mean the appointment would start earlier than scheduled. No such luck, I realized, as I watched one or two of the guys stumble in, dark sunglasses still on, their skin sallow and drawn.

Not Matthew, though. He looked fresh as a daisy compared to the other two. “Come on back to the conference room and we’ll see what we can do for you.”

I gathered up my purse and the file on my Uncle Zeke I’d brought along with me, and Matthew led me back through the office, down the glass and steel corridor that made up all the free-standing offices situated in the old historical saloon.

As I followed behind him, I struggled to not keep checking him out. He was built like a football player, but moved with the kind of grace you’d except from a dancer.

The whole way, he glanced back over his shoulder at me with that small smile on his lips. If I didn’t know any better, I would have thought he was checking me out. But what would a guy like that want with a high school English teacher? He could pick up a supermodel or a fitness instructor. Me? I was chopped liver compared to those girls.

Instead of watching him, I looked at anything and everything around me, trying to keep my eyes off his backside. Besides, the building we were in was actually pretty interesting. It had a certain history to it, a history of what the town used to be like.

I’d grown up in Enchanted Rock, and I could remember when the Frost Security office was still actually a bar. A gross, seedy dive of a bar, but still a functional watering hole for all the blue collar types that lived around here. I even remembered back to a few years ago when Frost Security had bought up the building and began to restore and remodel it. A few of the townspeople had been enraged that an outsider was taking it over, but as far as I could tell, they were worried about nothing.

If anything, the glass and metal offices, the redone floors, and the fixed wiring were improvements. At least we didn’t have a firetrap or a collapsing building on the outskirts of town anymore.

He opened the door to the small conference room and I took the seat closest to the door.

“Can I get you anything?” he asked, his voice low and velvety. “Tea or coffee, water maybe?”

I shook my head at first, but realized my mouth was dry. Was it from my nerves? Or was it just Matthew? I turned and looked back at him. “Water would be great, thank you.”

“Sure thing. Be right back.” He disappeared back to the front of the office.

I’d had a cup of tea that Genevieve Richter, their receptionist, had offered me when I first arrived. She and I sat and chatted for a few moments, really connecting and not discussing the agency or why I was visiting. Even though, of course, she knew full well why I was there. Everyone in town did.

Gen’s granddaughter, Lacy, had been in one of the English classes I taught a few years back while she was still a student at Enchanted Rock High School, and now I taught her niece Mary Waynescott. She’d been a troubled girl when she first transferred in at the beginning of the school year, but after a few months she seemed to settle into a groove with her schoolwork and social circle. I didn’t know if I’d helped with that at all, but it was still nice to see a young girl begin to blossom and mature. It was one of the aspects of my job as a teacher that really made it worthwhile.

The other aspect, though, was that I got summers off. Maybe I didn’t get quite as much vacation time as the students, but I still got a couple months’ break from the constant grading and lesson planning. I’d been planning on going down to South America for that trip with my Uncle Zeke, and would have been in Brazil right now if events hadn’t conspired against us just a few weeks prior.

Matt came back in a few moments later with a plastic water bottle and a small glass full of ice, snapping me out of my thoughts. “Wasn’t sure if you’d like it iced or not,” he said as he set them both down in front of me.

“Thanks,” I said, smiling a little as he went around the other side of the conference table and took a seat across from me.

“Now,” he said as he began flipping through the legal pad in front of him, “Gen tells me that you’re Zeke Rogers’ niece?” His short-sleeved polo didn’t do anything to cover up his massive biceps or his well-defined forearms.

I pulled my eyes away from his chiseled arms and nodded. “Yes. Well, no, not exactly. More like his goddaughter, but he’s always been my Uncle Zeke. He practically raised me from when I was ten or so, though, after my father passed away.”

Matthew nodded and smiled reassuringly. “And you’re here about him, correct?”

“Yes. They’re holding him without bail for setting the fire at the hardware store he owned. They’re calling it insurance fraud and arson.”

He flipped through the legal pad and went back to the beginning. “Yeah. I remember the company insuring it wanted us to look over the case, but they withdrew the request after Peter, my boss, told them he couldn’t imagine Zeke ever doing a thing like that, even if it was a suspicious scene.”

“They were pretty dead set on it being him,” I said, not being able to hide a small frown. “Now they’re holding him without bail.”

He glanced up at me, eyebrow raised, his dark eyes striking as they bore into mine. “Really? No bail at all?”

“He’d bought us tickets to Brazil as a surprise Christmas gift. A vacation for my summer holiday, you know? The prosecutor didn’t like that too much. Told the judge it was clear Uncle Zeke had an escape plan after collecting the insurance money.”

Matthew winced. “Have to admit, that certainly looks bad.”

“I know it looks bad, but Uncle Zeke wouldn’t ever burn his own business down. Why would he? He’d worked there for decades, even bought out the owner.”

“But the policy would have paid out more than he paid his partner. Sounds like the guy just wanted the money to add onto his retirement plan, and didn’t want to sell out to one of the other places in the area.”

“Well, I know it looks bad,” I said, my fingers twisted together on the table in front of me. “But I just know he’s not capable of something like this. He just loved that business so much. He’d been planning on expanding it, not setting it on fire. Uncle Zeke had even gotten a loan recently to increase the square footage. You should have seen him in the days after the fire; he was inconsolable. He put his whole life into that building, that store. And now he’s being falsely accused of burning it down. He’s a wreck. And, on top of that, he’s not exactly a young man anymore. They want to put him away for almost five years for it—can you believe that? And that’s not even counting the insurance fraud charges they’ve indicted him on.”

Matthew frowned a little and went back to his legal pad. He didn’t reply for a moment.

My heart began to sink. And the longer the silence went, the greater the depth to which it sank. “You don’t believe me, though,” I finally said. “Do you?”

He glanced up at me with a concerned look on his face. He shook his head. “No, it’s not that. It’s not that at all!”

“What is it, then?” I asked. “If you don’t mind, of course?”

He looked up at me and leaned forward a little. “I was thinking about the why of all this. Have you looked at the evidence yet? Or have they shown it to you?”

“It’s all in here,” I said, sliding the manila folder across the table. “Everything his lawyer gave me. I admit, though, it doesn’t look good.”

I had seen some of what Sheriff Peak and Deputy Glick had laid out. They didn’t want to believe it, either, but the fire inspector they’d hired had been adamant about what he’d found, and it all pointed to arson.

“But Uncle Zeke had an alibi,” I said. “He was at The Elk all evening, singing karaoke.”

Matthew paused to look up from the file. “Well, with an arson, an alibi has to be really airtight. I mean, next state over airtight. I know what I’m about to say sounds weird, but I could probably burn this building down and be in Yellow Rose before anyone even noticed the smoke.”

I nodded and sighed. That’s what they had said, that it was time delayed. There was no telling how long it would have taken for the building to catch fire, but he could have been down at The Elk from open to close and it wouldn’t have made a difference with their timetable.

“What about enemies?” Matthew asked. “Does your Uncle Zeke have any?”

“Actually, yes—well, sort of. He says some guy came right around closing time a while back, told him he needed to buy an insurance policy.”

“An insurance policy?”

I took a deep breath, my hands on the table in front of me. “He said if Zeke didn’t want anything bad to happen, he needed to buy some insurance.”

“Extortion, then?”

I nodded.

“What happened? Did he pay the guy? Go to the sheriff?”

I shook my head. “Nope. Grabbed a shotgun from beneath the counter and threatened the guy. The man never came back, so Uncle Zeke pretty much just ignored it as an aberration.”

He laughed. “Sounds like Zeke, alright.” Then he frowned. “Shit. That does sound like Zeke.” Matthew leaned back in his chair and folded his hands across his flat stomach. “Anyone else might have had a vendetta?”

I shrugged. “Not that I know of. But Zeke’s lived here a long time. That’s just what he remembers.”

“I take it Sheriff Peak isn’t buying the whole protection thing, is he?”

“Well, he says there’s no evidence of organized crime in the Rock, and most other people believe him.”

Matthew rolled his eyes. “Believe me, they exist. Sounds like the Florentino family to me, but I’d only heard of them pushing drugs in the area, nothing as old school as a protection racket.”

“So you believe me, then?”

He smiled. “How about this? There’s enough for us to start looking into things.”

My heart resumed its downward trajectory. “So you don’t believe me.” I frowned. “Do you?”

“Rebecca, listen to me.” He reached across the table and touched my hand.

A warmth spread from where his fingers brushed my skin. My eyes locked with his, and he seemed to bore into my soul for a moment. A sense of contentment fell over me as I realized that Matthew was confident and secure. I knew, somehow, that he’d move the Rocky Mountains one spoonful at a time if he even thought it would help my Uncle Zeke. I couldn’t help but smile a little, even as my breath came a little faster.

“I know your godfather, okay? Zeke is a good man, and this kind of thing isn’t in him. He’s a builder. I’ve read up on arsonists before, and they’re not like that. They only want to destroy, not create.”

“You don’t think he did it, then?”

Matthew shook his head as he took his hand away. “What I think is, your godfather didn’t have a real motive. Sure, he might have made more money from the building, but he had a business loan he’d just been approved for. Why destroy that business when it was his life? The reason why this got laid on him is because justice is lazy. It goes for the easy route sometimes, and innocent people get hurt. And, besides, you seem like a caring, intelligent woman.”

I blushed a little at his words.

“I don’t think you’d go to bat for someone who would do this,” he continued. “And that right there’s enough for me. Okay?”

I nodded, smiling a little. “Okay. Thank you.”

“Well, don’t thank me yet. I still have to clear everything with my boss. He gets the final say on everything.”

“Do you think he’ll accept the case?”

“I will say he’s taken ones that were bigger long shots before. Peter’s a weird guy, and he’ll take all sorts of crazy jobs on. It wouldn’t surprise me if he takes this one. He’s got a soft spot for local cases, and Zeke’s helped us out on quite a few projects.”

“Okay. I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Now, we might not be able to get everything from Zeke’s attorney for a little while, because he might not have it yet because of exploration. Do you mind if I take this file? It’ll be a good starting point for me.”

“Absolutely. Whatever you need to help my uncle, you’ve got it.”

He gathered up my file and jogged everything together before rising from the table. “Be back in a minute.”

Then he disappeared from the office.

I wasn’t sure if Peter Frost would take Uncle Zeke’s case, but something about Matthew had at least made me feel like I might be able to get a handle on this—his calm demeanor, his confidence, and, most importantly, my ability to convince him to see cracks in the prosecution’s assertions. I slowly let out a sigh of relief.

I might not have been able to make that trip to South America with my Uncle Zeke, but maybe I could at least keep him from prison. Everything, I felt, was going to be okay.

Boy, was I wrong.