Scene of the Crime: Bridgewater, Texas

“Not,” he replied. “You have no place in this investigation.” Those cool gray eyes of his slid down the length of her. “Don’t you have a job to get back to, or were you fired for insubordination?”

“I’m on a personal leave of absence, so I’m free to hang out here in Bridgewater,” she replied and could tell that he wasn’t pleased at the prospect.

Tough. She wasn’t walking away from this. With or without his help she intended to investigate this murder. She owed it to Miranda who had been the only light in her world of darkness.

She stood, deciding she’d had enough. She had work to do and if he wasn’t going to share what he knew, then she’d just have to work twice as hard to find out who was responsible for Miranda’s murder.

“If you need to ask me any more questions you know where to find me,” she said.

She was halfway to the door when he stopped her by calling her name. She turned back to look at him. “We found a will in Miranda’s personal effects. From what I saw of it you appear to be her sole beneficiary. You might want to contact David Waller. He’s the lawyer here in town and is taking care of the legalities.”

Once again a wealth of emotion buoyed up inside her. Sole beneficiary. Somehow those words made Miranda’s death final as it hadn’t been before.

Miranda was gone forever. Grief clawed up the back of Jenna’s throat, the bitter taste nearly choking her. Never again would she see the brightness of Miranda’s smile, hear her girlish giggles as she shared something funny.

Jenna turned on her heel and left. As she hurried out of the sheriff’s office and into her rental car she was half-blinded by tears. She leaned her forehead against the steering wheel and gulped air in an effort to stanch her sobs.

Within moments she had successfully gained control. Control was one of the things that Jenna did best. She’d learned it early in her childhood. Don’t cry. Don’t show fear. Don’t show any emotion at all. If you did it could be used against you if Mommy was having a bad day. And Mommy had lots of bad days.

She pulled away from the office and drove slowly down the street, checking out the businesses on either side of the road. It was mostly the usual stuff that made up small towns: post office, grocery store and city hall. There were also little specialty shops, a dress boutique, a store that sold stained-glass creations and a taxidermy shop with a stuffed wolf and a raccoon in the window that she thought was more than a little bit creepy.

The place that most interested her was the café. She pulled into an empty parking space down the street from the Bridgewater Café. Miranda had worked there before her death and Jenna hadn’t had lunch.

The place would probably be packed with the lunch crowd and hopefully some of them would be chatty about Miranda and her murder.

Jenna was just about to get out of her car when her cell phone rang. She pulled it from her purse and checked the caller ID. Sam Connelly, fellow FBI profiler and friend.

“Well, if it isn’t the prince of darkness,” she said.

“Calling the princess,” he replied. “I just wanted to check in with you and see if you were doing okay.”

Warmth swept through her as she heard the concern in his deep voice. She and Sam had worked more horrible cases together than she wanted to remember. Sam was sinfully handsome and sexy, but there were absolutely no romantic sparks between them. He came from a place of darkness like she did and although that made them good friends, it also kept them from being anything more to each other. They were just too much alike.

“I’m fine,” she replied. “I’ve made contact with the local sheriff.”

“How did that go?”

“He’s an ass and not only doesn’t he want my help, but I also think he would gladly pay for a plane ticket to get me out of his town.”

“Ah, one of those. So, what are you going to do? Are you heading back here to Kansas City?”

“No way. I just found out I’m Miranda’s beneficiary, so I’ll need to hang around here and take care of her estate.”

“And if you happen to catch a killer while you’re there, then it’s all good,” Sam said.

She smiled into the phone. He knew her so well. “That’s the plan.”

“You’ll call if you need anything or if you just want to talk?” he asked.

“Of course,” she replied even though they both knew she would do no such thing. “Just do me one favor,” she said. “If somehow this jerk of a sheriff gets me behind bars, make sure you come and bail me out?”

Sam laughed. “You know the smart thing to do would be not anything that will make him want to lock you up.”

“Yeah, but when did I ever do the smart thing?” she said and with a murmured goodbye she clicked off. She dropped the phone back into her purse and stared at the door to the café.

There was no way she believed that Miranda’s killer was somebody from her past. Jenna was the kind of woman who made enemies, not Miranda. Jenna worked a job that created enemies and if that wasn’t enough, her mouthiness and bad-ass attitude didn’t help. There was nobody from Miranda’s life before Bridgewater that Jenna could think of who would be a viable suspect.

No, the killer was here, in this picturesque little town with its quaint shops and smiling people, people who hopefully liked to gossip. And a murder would definitely be fodder for all the gossipmongers in town.

Matt Buchannan might want her out of his hair, out of his town, but Jenna didn’t intend to leave here until she’d exposed the killer.

THE MOMENT MATT entered the café he saw her. Seated at the counter and chatting up Sally Cooper, one of the waitresses. Why was he not surprised?

He approached the counter and smiled at Sally. “Hey, Sally, what’s the special today?” Although he didn’t look at Jenna he sensed her stiffening at the sound of his voice.

“If it’s Tuesday it must be meat loaf,” she replied. “And we have your favorite dessert today, Sheriff. Michael whipped up a couple of lemon meringue pies this morning.”

He slid onto the stool next to Jenna. “Great, then I’ll have the daily special and a piece of that pie.”

It was only when Sally left the counter to put in the order that Matt turned to look at the woman seated next to him. “Learn anything?”

She gestured toward the plate in front of her. “I’m scarcely halfway through my French fries, I haven’t been here long enough to learn anything yet.” She dragged a fry through a pool of ketchup, then popped it in her mouth. “Although I did manage to introduce myself to Sally.”

Sally returned with the coffeepot and poured Matt a cup. “Anything new in the murder case?” she asked, her voice low as she leaned toward Matt.

He could almost feel Jenna holding her breath to hear his reply. “Nothing that I can talk about,” he said.

Sally shook her head. “It’s a scary thing. I’ve lived in this town fifty years and counting and I don’t remember a murder like Miranda’s ever taking place here. She was such a nice young woman, always smiling.” Sally shook her head again and walked away to fill another customer’s coffee cup.

Matt took a sip of his coffee. He’d believed Jenna was as cold as they came when they had spoken about the murder. She hadn’t blinked an eye at the crime scene nor had she shown any emotion at all when sitting in his office.

Until he’d told her she was Miranda’s beneficiary. It was only then that he’d seen a deepening of the blue of her eyes, a slight tremor in her full lower lip, and he’d realized she wasn’t as cold and unaffected as she’d pretended to be earlier.

Sitting this close to her he could smell her, the pleasant scent of clean with a touch of something slightly citrusy.

“Doesn’t your wife fix you a nice hot lunch?” she asked, breaking the silence that had welled up between them.

“My wife?”

“Yeah, I figured the picture on your desk of the pretty blonde was your wife.” She half-turned to look at him.

“She was. She died five years ago.”

“Sorry,” she replied.

“Yeah, so am I,” Matt replied. He fought the impulse to scratch his scar, the scar he’d received while wrestling with a madman, the same man who had killed Natalie.

“A man like you, surely you have a girlfriend who would be eager to fix you lunch, then.”

“Agent Taylor, if I didn’t know better I’d think that was a backhanded compliment,” he said with a half grin.

“Good thing you know better,” she replied. “And you might as well call me Jenna because I don’t intend on going anywhere anytime soon.” She picked up another fry. “You have to tell me something,” she said as she stared down at her plate.

She looked back at him and in the depths of her eyes he saw a shimmer of pain. “I wasn’t given any real information before coming here, just that she’d been murdered. I need to know the details. They can’t be any worse than my imagination.” She broke off as Sally arrived with his plate of food.

“I don’t want to talk about it here,” he said. He supposed there were some things he could tell her that wouldn’t compromise his investigation, although there were some details that hadn’t been shared with anyone and he wasn’t about to share those with her.

“Then where?” she replied.

“Why don’t we finish our lunch and then I’ll follow you back to your motel room. We can talk there without interruption, without anyone listening.”

“Thank you,” she said and focused back on her plate.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“A little town just north of Kansas City. I work out of the Kansas City field office.”

“Married?”

“Nope.”

“Do you have a significant other?” he asked.

“Yeah, a cranky cat that showed up half-dead on my doorstep.” She gazed at him with narrowed eyes. “What’s this? Be nice to the FBI agent and maybe she’ll go away?”

“Something like that,” Matt agreed easily.

“It doesn’t matter whether you’re nice or mean to me, I’m here for the long haul,” she replied.

“Won’t your cat miss you?”

“Nah, we have no emotional attachment to each other. That’s why we get along so well. I have a friend who is taking care of her while I’m gone.”

The statement was definitely telling. He suspected that this was a woman who didn’t play well with others. What she had to realize was that when it came to an ongoing murder investigation in his town, he wasn’t willing to play well with her.

Plus, he wasn’t at all sure he believed in the whole profiling thing. As far as he was concerned, solving a crime happened only one way—through intensive investigation, intelligent interrogation and exhaustive interviews.

He thought profiling was a bit of hocus-pocus that might work in the case of serial killers, but there was absolutely nothing in the Harris murder that indicated this was anything but an isolated crime.

“How long have you been Sheriff here?”

“Almost five years. Before that I was a homicide cop in Chicago.”

She looked at him in surprise. “Really, what brought you to this tiny town?”

“I was born and raised here, but moved to Chicago to join the police force. I came back here after the death of my wife. It so happened that the sheriff was retiring, so I stepped into his shoes.”

There had been a time when he couldn’t talk about his wife, when even thinking about her brought a pain that nearly cast him to his knees. But that terrible grief had passed and over the last year he’d finally begun to look forward instead of backward.

For the next few minutes they ate in silence. She finished her meal but made no move to leave.

There was a part of him, a strictly male part, that found Special Agent Jenna Taylor extremely attractive. Definitely a fatal attraction, he told himself ruefully.

“Why didn’t you tell me about being Miranda’s beneficiary when you first met me?” she asked.

He eyed her with a touch of amusement. “If you’ll recall we didn’t exactly meet under the best of circumstances. I was trying to decide if I should arrest you for interfering with a crime scene.”

“I didn’t touch anything. I’m not exactly a novice around crime scenes.” She leaned closer to him and he couldn’t help but notice that she had the most kissable-looking lips he’d seen in a long time. “I could help you, you know. Catching killers is what I do for a living, it’s who I am.”

He finished the last bite of his meat loaf and then pushed his plate away. “If you really want to help me, then tell me a little bit about Miranda. You said the two of you were best friends. I didn’t know her personally, so any information you can tell me about the kind of person she was would help. You said you’ve known her since she was twelve, did the two of you meet in school?”

“No, Miranda’s parents brought me into their home as a foster child, but that was a long time ago,” she said with a touch of impatience. “Miranda and I were like sisters.”

“You look a lot like her,” he said.

For the first time since he’d met her she smiled, a real smile that warmed the blue of her eyes and lit her features from within. An unexpected flicker of desire ignited in the pit of his stomach.

“Miranda and I used to tell people that we were fraternal twins, not exactly alike but almost. We might have looked alike but in most things we were polar opposites.”

“How so?” he asked curiously.

“Miranda was like a big ball of sunshine. She never met anyone she didn’t like, believed that everyone had some good inside them.”

“And you don’t believe that?”

“It’s my job to look for the darkness in everyone,” she replied ruefully.

They fell silent as Sally brought Matt his lemon pie. Jenna slid off her stool and placed money on the counter. “Look, I’m going to head back to my motel room. I’m in unit seven. I’ll see you there in a few minutes?”

Matt nodded, then turned and watched her weave her way through the tables to the front door. He had to admit she intrigued him more than a little bit.

Certainly that rivulet of desire that he’d momentarily felt had stunned him. He hadn’t felt that for any woman for over five years. Just his luck that the first woman who stirred him on a physical level was one he didn’t think he even liked much.

Chapter Three

Jenna paced the short length of floor in front of the window of the small motel room window. It had been thirty minutes since she’d left the café. How long could it take him to eat a piece of pie?

Although she knew it would be painful, she needed to hear the details of Miranda’s death. She wanted to know how she’d died, who had found her body and what had been done since then to find the guilty.

She walked over to the small table where she had a notebook opened, ready to take notes. She had a laptop, but preferred handwriting things first, then transferring them to the computer. She felt like she thought better in longhand.

She flipped the pages to her to-do list and wrote down that she needed to visit the lawyer first thing in the morning. As Miranda’s beneficiary she’d have to figure out what to do with the house and all of Miranda’s personal belongings. The sooner she got started the better. She didn’t intend to stick around this place forever.

Sinking down in a chair at the table, she pressed her fingers into the center of her forehead where a headache threatened to blossom.

Stress. She’d suffered from stress headaches since she’d been little. Certainly the first twelve years of her life had been filled with stresses that children should never have to experience.

Sometimes she thought those early years of her life had formed the kind of woman she’d become, a woman who sought the darkness in others because she’d come from such a dark place.

She jumped up from the chair as she heard a car door slam outside. A glance out the window showed her Matt walking toward her unit. He walked with a slightly self-confident swagger that was both attractive and more than a little bit sexy.

She opened the door before he could knock. “How was your pie?”

“Excellent,” he replied as he stepped through the door.

She gestured him toward the table and suddenly felt a bit awkward. She’d been in a hundred motel rooms over the last year, but she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a hunky male in the room with her.

She sank down in front of her notebook and picked up her pen. “I hope you don’t mind if I take some notes.”

He shrugged his broad shoulders as he sat in the chair opposite hers. “Suit yourself.” His gray eyes studied her as if she were a particularly intriguing specimen. “I’m not sure why you want to put yourself through all the gory details.”

“My world is made up of gory details,” she replied.

“I hope you have something good to balance that.”

Miranda, she thought. Miranda had been her balance and now she was gone. “Let’s just get down to business,” she said briskly. “She was stabbed, wasn’t she?”

He looked at her in surprise. “How did you know that?”

“I saw the mattress on the bed, the bloodstains. No bullet holes, just blood. There was no castoff on the walls, so she wasn’t bludgeoned.”

He nodded. “She was stabbed. Several times through the heart. There was no sign of forced entry, so we can only assume she might have known the killer.” He kept his voice low and steady as he dryly recited the facts. “She was killed sometime in the early hours of Sunday morning. When she didn’t show up for the lunch shift, Michael Brown, the owner of the café, got concerned and sent over one of the waitresses to check on her.”

“What’s the waitress’s name?” she asked.

“Maggie Wendt. Apparently she and Miranda had become quite close friends. Miranda had given Maggie a key to her house. When Maggie got there and saw Miranda’s car in the driveway but she didn’t answer the door, Maggie got worried and went inside.”

“You checked out her story?”

“Thoroughly. The whole thing has practically destroyed her. I don’t think she’s left her house since she found Miranda.”

“Any other suspects?” she asked.

“I was hoping you’d be able to give me some names. She was only in town for three months. I can’t help but think it’s possible that somebody from her past is responsible for this.”

Jenna frowned thoughtfully. “I can’t imagine it.”

“But you said you live in Kansas City and Miranda was living in Dallas before moving here. Maybe there were things about her life that she didn’t share with you?”

Was it possible? Were there secrets in Miranda’s life, secrets she hadn’t shared with Jenna? “You just don’t want to believe that the killer might be homegrown,” she said.

He smiled and nodded. Oh, the man had a nice, sexy smile. “Of course I don’t want to believe that anyone from Bridgewater is capable of such a crime, but my mind is certainly open to the possibility.”

“When is the house going to be released?”

He frowned, but the gesture did nothing to diminish his handsomeness. “Probably sometime tomorrow afternoon. We’ve already collected all the evidence, what little there was, but I was going to do another walk through in the morning.”

“What kind of evidence did you collect?” she asked.

Once again he frowned. “Unfortunately not much. There wasn’t a single fingerprint anywhere in the house except for Miranda’s.”

“So the killer wiped everything down,” she said. “Or he wore gloves.”

“We didn’t get much of anything that would help the investigation.” His gaze shifted from hers for a moment, making her believe he wasn’t telling her the whole truth. “Why do you want to know when the house will be released?”

“I need to take care of packing things, but also as soon as you release it I’ll be staying there.”

He raised a dark eyebrow. “Won’t that be difficult for you?”

“Why? Because she died there?” Jenna set down her ink pen. “She also lived there.” To Jenna’s horror a mist of unexpected tears filled her eyes. She stared down at the table and drew several deep breaths in an effort to regain control of her emotions.

He reached out a hand and covered one of hers. “I’m sorry, Jenna. I’m sorry about your friend.”

Three things sprang to her mind. The first was a black grief for the friend she had lost. The second was that she liked the way her name sounded falling from his lips. The third was that the touch of his big, strong hand shot a wave of evocative warmth up her arm.

She pulled her hand from his and looked at him. “It’s been five years since you’ve investigated a murder, something like this. Aren’t you worried that you might be a little rusty?”

He smiled again, that sexy, easy half grin. “It’s kind of like making love. Even if it’s been a long time you never forget how to do it.”

Her mind exploded with a vision of him in bed, naked and with hunger shining from his gray eyes. She consciously willed the vision away and narrowed her eyes. His statement had been totally inappropriate and she had a feeling he’d done it on purpose, in an effort to throw her off balance and replace her grief with irritation. She had a feeling Sheriff Matt Buchannan was far more intelligent than she’d given him credit for.

She suddenly wanted him out of her motel room, as far away from her as possible. It was clear he didn’t intend to share any real information with her, clear that he wasn’t going to help her in her investigation of Miranda’s murder. And there was something about his easy smile, his very attractiveness that was somehow threatening to her.

“I’ll give you my cell phone number and I’d appreciate it if you would call me when I can get into the house,” she said.

She wrote down her number and tore it from the notebook, then handed it to him and stood in an obvious attempt to dismiss him. “I guess we’re done here.”

He rose to his feet, obviously getting the clue that she was finished with him. She walked with him to the motel room door and stepped outside into the warm July air.

“Jenna, this town and this murder investigation isn’t big enough for us to share. Take care of whatever you need to with Miranda’s estate, but leave the investigation to me.” With these words he left her and walked to his car without a backward glance.

She watched as he got into his patrol car and left the parking lot. She leaned against the outside of her unit and closed her eyes against the bright sunshine.

Miranda, what happened here? Again a wealth of grief clawed up the back of her throat, but she swallowed hard against it.

Who did you meet that killed you? Who could have plunged a knife through your loving, kind heart? Who could have hated you that much? And why? Why did this happen to you?

A faint chill swept through her despite the warmth of the sun. She had felt the creepy feeling she was being watched.

She opened her eyes and gazed around as the disturbing sensation continued. She saw nobody around, but couldn’t dispel the feeling that somebody was nearby, staring at her with malevolence.

The killer?

She’d only introduced herself to Sally. Had the waitress talked about the FBI agent who had come to town? Did the killer already know she was here? Was he stalking her like she intended to stalk him?

“Bring it on,” she whispered just beneath her breath as she went back into her room and locked the door behind her.

“JOEY, I’M HEADING OVER to Maggie Wendt’s place for another interview,” Matt said to his young deputy the next morning. “If you need me, you can either reach me by radio or by my cell phone.”

“Got it,” Joey said.

Matt left the office and stepped out into the hot morning air. Not even nine o’clock yet and the sun was already a fireball in the sky.

That wasn’t all that was hot this morning. As he thought of the dream he’d had the night before, his temperature raised several notches.

Special Agent Jenna Taylor had been the center of his dream, beckoning him into bed with her mysterious blue eyes and a smile that had heated his blood to the boiling point. And he’d been a willing participant, tumbling into the sheets with her and making hot, wild love.