Nauti Deceptions

“So brave.” She pretended to shiver. “You’re living dangerously this week.”



He stared back at her the way he usually did unless she pushed him. As though he were on the edge of being bored with her. Damn him. She didn’t bore him. She made him hard. He was filling those damned jeans out in ways she knew they weren’t meant to be filled. That was not boredom.



“You heard about Joe and Jaime,” he stated as he moved farther into the room. “I tried to find time to come out and tell you myself, but I was tied up with forensics and city hall.”



“Not a problem.” She shrugged as she twisted the cap off the water. “I’m sure I heard about it before the coroner ever had the bodies loaded and ready to go. Your deputy likes to run his mouth, Sheriff. Seems he thinks trailer trash like the Walkers don’t warrant a forensics team. Bad blood showing and all that. Why should the city waste its money on two men that just got what they deserved.”



His lips thinned. Anger perhaps. Irritation definitely as he strode to where she stood.



“Sit down, Rogue. I’ll deal with my deputy and city hall. Until then, I’d like to figure out what the hell happened with Joe and Jaime.”



She sat down on the couch and would have laughed in mocking amusement when he took the chair beside her, except the disappointment went too deep. She would have felt his warmth if he had sat on the couch. And she felt cold inside. For some reason, she felt lost. As though she had traveled too far and too long from some vision of security and now found herself deep in unfamiliar territory.



“I’m sorry about Joe and Jaime, Rogue.” Zeke sighed then, rubbing his hand over the back of his neck. “I know those boys were closer to you than most folks knew. That’s why I need to talk to you. See if you can help me figure out what happened.”



Rogue slid the high heels from her feet and folded her legs beneath her. No sense in worrying about whether or not her legs looked nice in front of Zeke right now. He was keeping his gaze firmly on her face. Besides, feeling sexy and being reminded of why he was here didn’t go hand in hand.



“Joe wouldn’t have killed Jaime,” she told him with a firm shake of her head. “Joe and Jaime were too close, Zeke. They might have fought over a woman every now and then, or anything else, but they would have never hurt each other. Not for anything.”



“What about drugs?” He leaned forward and stared back at her in demand. A demand for the truth, as though she would lie to him.



“They didn’t have the money for drugs,” she told him. “A little pot every now and then, sure. But not the hard stuff. They didn’t touch hard drugs.”



“But they did smoke pot?” he asked.



“Probably.” She lifted her shoulders. “I never saw them do it, but I assumed they did from a few jokes they’ve made over the years. I never saw any evidence of it though.



The most I’ve seen was a few too many beers and a little brawl here and there over a girl. They usually made a few swings at each other, started laughing, and then headed home with the girl together. They were like that. Nothing was serious for too long.”



“What about enemies?” Zeke asked. “Did they have any you’d believe would want to hurt them?”



She stared back at him heavily. “I can’t think of a single enemy those two boys had. For all their womanizing, they were well liked. I never knew of anyone wanting to hurt them. And why ask that question if it’s a cut-and-dried murder-suicide as your deputy believes?”



She watched Zeke suspiciously now. Why the questions if he believed Joe had murdered Jaime, then killed himself?



“There was a murder, no matter what happened or why,” Zeke told her. “I need to figure out the what and the why to close this case, Rogue. I don’t like questions left dangling.”



“Then you have a hell of a question going on there,” she told him. “Because I’m telling you, Joe wouldn’t hurt Jaime. He was the oldest twin. He was more protective toward Jaime. No one hurt Jaime that Joe didn’t come running.”



He still watched her closely, that somber gaze moving over her face, almost to her neck.



For a second, she had a feeling that he would have looked lower, but he didn’t. He kept his gaze on her face, and that pissed her off.



He was sitting here questioning her over her cousins’ deaths, deaths he had to suspect couldn’t have played out as it was made to look. He could have come to question her at any time, but he came late, after he was off duty, in plainclothes, and aroused.



Unlike him, she’d had no problem looking below his neck. Or his waist. She sure as hell had no problem looking below his belt.



“Look, Zeke, I can’t tell you anything you obviously don’t know already,” she told him.



“I know Joe or Jaime—neither one would have hurt the other. Whatever happened up there is bogus. It was a setup and I can’t figure out why, because Joe and Jaime were a threat to no one.”



“We thought you were a threat to no one last year when you were attacked as well,” he reminded her. “It wasn’t what you knew on Mackay and Grace that landed you in the hospital, Rogue, it was what they were afraid you knew. What could Joe have been afraid of that would have made him kill his brother and himself?”



Last year she had managed to get herself twisted into a Homeland Security investigation into Nadine Grace and Dayle Mackay. As he’d said, it wasn’t what she had known but what Grace and Mackay thought she might have known that had been the problem. When the investigator, Dayle’s son’s lover, Chaya Dane, had questioned her, it had drawn Rogue within their sights once more.



She’d spent a week in the hospital, bruised, with a cracked rib and a bruised skull, but she’d come out of it alive.



“Someone else killed Joe and Jaime,” she told him. “Get that in your head, Zeke.



Someone set that scene up. Because I know to the soles of my feet neither of those boys would have hurt the other. It wasn’t in them.”



His jaw flexed, and his gaze jerked to her feet where they rested at the side of her body, then back to her face. How interesting.



God, he made her mad. Never more mad though than he was making her tonight. He was almost foaming at the mouth to touch her, as desperate for it as she was, and still, he denied both of them.



He nodded. “I’ll keep checking things out,” he told her. “But unless forensics or the coroner comes up with something, then murder-suicide is what we’re looking at. And it damn sure looks as though Joe killed Jaime and then himself.”



Her lips twisted mockingly. “Yeah, and there are pictures on the Internet that make me look like a world-class slut,” she reminded him. “Trust me, looks are incredibly deceiving.”



His gaze darkened, though it never moved from her. Sometimes, she wondered exactly what was going on behind that fierce gaze. Hawklike light brown eyes that seemed to reflect shadows of emotions that she could never really decipher.



“I’ve never seen the pictures,” he finally said, surprising her.



Rogue’s brow lifted. “Really? You must be the only man in the county that hasn’t managed to find them.”



Zeke wasn’t a man to lie, about anything.



“I never went looking for them,” he told her. “I didn’t want to see them, Rogue, because they didn’t matter between you and me.”



THREE



Of course they didn’t. Those pictures, one way or theother, would never change the fact that he might want her, but he had no intention of touching her.



She’d tested that theory over the winter. All the rides she’d requested after the long hours she had put in at the Mackay restaurant. The nights she had invited him up for a drink or tried to linger in his vehicle to talk, to flirt. She’d given up. She’d let it go. She wasn’t begging him.



She unfolded herself from the couch, reached down, and picked up her shoes before staring down at him.



“Do you have any further questions, Zeke? It’s late, I need a drink, and I was looking forward to a bubble bath. Honestly, I don’t know what else I could tell you about Joe and Jaime that you don’t already know. Or think you know.”



And she couldn’t handle being in the same room with him tonight. She wasn’t as strong as she had been in the winter. Perhaps those winter months had weakened her. Hoping against hope each night that she had flirted her way into his car that something, anything, would come of it. Only to have her hopes dashed time and again.



“You’re throwing me out?” He tilted his head and looked up at her, his gaze flashing with a heat she was afraid to delve too deeply into. “After weeks of trying to get me up here to your apartment, you’re not even offering me a beer?”



“No. I’m not. Good night, Zeke. Lock the door on your way out.”



She turned and walked to the open bedroom door. She could feel his gaze on her, felt him watching her, his eyes burning into her. Suddenly, her skirt was too short, the vest flashed too much skin at her midriff and back. She felt exposed, vulnerable. She felt weak.



“Hell of a change, Rogue. You tried to seduce me half the winter. What happened?”



She stopped and turned around slowly to see him standing, cocky, assured, confident.



“I gave up,” she replied shortly. “As you said, Itried to seduce you. You weren’t willing.



I don’t beg. End of story.”



His expression tightened, a muscle jumping at his jaw as his gaze raked over her then.



“You’re too damned young,” he finally berated her, and perhaps himself as well, she thought. Or he was trying to convince himself.



“I’m too damned tired to play games.” It was all she could do to keep her shoulders straight and to fight back the tears. “Joe and Jaime were family. This has hit me rather hard, and as you see”—she lifted her arms wide to encompass the empty apartment—



“it’s just me and the bubble bath for comfort. I don’t need to add games to tonight’s stress if you don’t mind.”



Zeke watched Rogue closely. He saw it then. That shadow in those deep violet eyes that had held his attention. A shadow he had never seen before. Loneliness. Loss. He knew that feeling. And in the past five years whenever it struck, it was Rogue that came to mind. Her smile, the promise of passion in her eyes, the need to touch her, the certainty that she could calm the beast that raged inside him.



Damn her. She’d managed to worm her way into his life, there was no doubt of that.



He’d missed her in the past few weeks since she had started riding her Harley to the restaurant rather than calling him and bumming a ride. Hell, he’d more than missed it.



It was as though something were suddenly missing from his life. There was an emptiness where those hours lay now, a sense of waiting.



“Why don’t you have a lover, Rogue?” He looked around the apartment. To his knowledge, as long as she had lived in Somerset, Rogue had never had a lover.



He didn’t count the pictures that had ended up on the Internet. He’d investigated that himself, and though he could never find proof, there was enough suspicion to prove to him that Rogue had been used somehow. Rumor was Nadine Grace and Dayle Mackay had targeted her when she had defended Zeke’s son over a test at school. Nadine had never liked Shane because Zeke had refused to walk the same path his father had walked. Thad Mayes had held the position of sheriff for years, and through that time he had protected Dayle Mackay and the Freedom League’s collective asses. He hadn’t just protected them, he had been part of them. Zeke refused to follow that path, and Nadine had finally found a way to strike back, through Shane.



A month after standing up for his son, Rogue had left the bar with a strange couple. She hadn’t been well known then; no one had thought to question her when she left. And then Rogue had been out of a job in the school system and the pictures had shown up on the Internet.