Chirp(28)

Her mouth went dry. Squish.

He draped the extra bath towel over his shoulder and zigzagged it across his upper back.

Squish, squish.

She went stone still. He turned sideways, dried his chest, then ran a hand through his hair. She should look away, or at least close her eyes. Didn’t, though. She understood why he had no trouble picking up women. Not Hollywood handsome, his broad shoulders, muscled biceps, and taut belly gave him definite sex appeal, not to mention the wicked scar slashed from his breastbone to his belly button.

Squish, squish, squish. She glanced down at her fingers knotted in the bread. “Uh?” Caught up in the moment, she hadn’t heard him come in.

“I asked if you were done.”

She tried to pull her hands free, but couldn’t get them to move. “Oh. Yeah. Almost.”

“Good. I’ll get dressed, then we’ll head out.”

She hoped she hadn’t killed the yeast with all the heat spreading through her body.





Rance


He maneuvered into a spot under the biggest oak in the park, and the late afternoon sunlight speckled the hood of his truck like a disco ball. What little conversation he and Blaze had had during the drive concerned the new member of their household. She’d presented her best case to change the dog’s name, but Rance stuck to his guns. He wasn’t sure if her argument was sincere or gave her the opportunity to use her word of the day: pejorative, which meant expressing disapproval or suggesting something is not good or is of no importance.

Rance swirled a french fry into ketchup. “Turns out you and I have a lot in common.”

“We do?”

“Sure. We’ve both lost our mothers. We loved Dessie. We like living in the farmhouse.”

She pinched off a bite of burger. The kid didn’t eat much. Just chased food around her plate most nights. Having her contained inside the truck was the perfect time for another game of Twenty Questions—minus fifteen, because getting her to answer more than five at a time took some doing.

Rance shoved another fry into his mouth. “Tell me about your dad.”

“He died three years ago.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“Why? It wasn’t your fault.”

Her abruptness always surprised him. “What happened?”

“Pancreatic cancer.”

Hoots and hollers from a nearby basketball court where teenagers played three against three got Rance’s attention. The tallest of the red team hogged the ball, taking shots and getting his own rebounds, while his two teammates begged for a pass.

Blaze turned, too, then slid low in her seat.

“What’s wrong?” Rance asked.

“I work with one of those boys. I don’t want him to see me.”

“Why?”

“I just don’t.”

Rance craned his neck for a better view. Each boy wore a numbered jersey, knee-length gym shorts, and fancy high-tops. “Which one?”

“Number twelve.”

The ball hogger. “Has he been mean to you?”

“No. He keeps asking me out.”

Rance took another look. The boy put a three-pointer in the basket, then pranced like a show horse. A guy being a guy. He remembered those carefree days. For him it’d been football, but competition was the same in every sport.

“Any particular reason you don’t want to go?”

“He’s seventeen. I’m twenty.”

Rance chuckled. “Don’t want to be labeled a cougar?”

“Is that a joke?”

He laughed harder. “Yeah. Kinda.”

She gathered her leftovers and crammed them back in the to-go bag. “Are you done?”

He handed her his trash, and she stuffed it in. He wanted to get her talking again. “So, where’d you grow up?”

“Are we playing the question-and-answer game?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. In a city.”

He faced her and raised a brow. “You’re being clever.”

“I am? I thought I was avoiding the question. My turn. Where were you raised?”

Damn. This was a side he’d not seen before, and he liked it. “Okay, Miss Smarty Pants.” That got a slight smile from her. Another first. “Houston.” Ah, something flickered in her eyes. Maybe that was her hometown. He recapped. Raised in Houston. Homeschooled. Both parents dead. He stopped to do the math. If the kid was twenty, and she’d been five when her mother died, that gave him the year of the accident.

Little by little he was finding out the identity of his housemate. Once he did, he’d figure out why she was in Bluebird and who she was hiding from.





13


Tom Fraser


Tom Fraser glanced at his watch and fidgeted in the chair. This was his first face-to-face meeting with Marla Montgomery. He’d worked the case for months and didn’t have much to report, but he was making progress. Trouble was, the more he found out about the woman, the less he wanted to find the girl.

He’d entered through a wrought-iron gate outside and traveled a pebbled drive to a sprawling two-story Georgian. The interior was just as impressive. Marble floors, and a mahogany stairway curved twenty feet up to the second level. The fancy molding probably cost more than Tom made in a year. Crystal chandeliers hung above him and in the adjoining room. If everything the former housekeeper had said about the widow was true, he understood her desperation. A woman used to this lifestyle would do anything to keep it.