A Widow's Guilty Secret. Marie Ferrarella

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      Juarez fumbled for his wallet, searching his pockets, while Nick took his out and flipped it open to display his badge and ID.

      Suzy could feel panic well up inside her. She barely glanced at the man’s wallet, but his image registered.

      “Worse than hurt,” she heard herself repeating as she raised her eyes to the man’s face. That could only mean one thing. Her lips felt frozen as she asked, “Is my husband dead, Detective Jeffries?”

      Nick felt a wave of pity stirring. “I’m sorry to have to tell you that, Mrs. Burris, but yes, I’m afraid he is.”

      Every inch of skin on her body alternated between extreme heat and extreme cold.

       Dead.

       Peter’s dead.

      She waited for the wave of sorrow, of devastation to hit. But it didn’t. In its place, instead, was guilt. Guilt that she didn’t feel grief over his death, other than the kind of grief she might have experienced after hearing of a neighbor’s death.

      What kind of a person was she? Suzy silently demanded.

      “You were right,” Suzy said to the older detective, her voice sounding rather tinny to her ears as the words seemed to echo in her head.

      “Right about what?” Nick asked, puzzled as he looked at her.

      It was getting hard for her to breathe. “About this being easier to take on a sofa.”

      It was the last thing Suzy remembered saying before the bright, sunny world filtering in through her doorway went completely black.

       Chapter 2

      Nick prided himself on the fact that his reflexes had always been quick. This time was no exception.

      One minute he was talking to the unfortunate, freshly minted widow. The next he was stretching out to catch her and keep her head—as well as the rest of her—from hitting the floor.

      Beside him, Juarez stood frozen, almost in as much shock, in his own way, as the sheriff’s widow. His partner was definitely in need of a crash course that would teach him exactly how to be a useful member of the police force. Right now, the man was undoubtedly well meaning, but also rather useless. The man had a great deal to learn before he could be considered a good detective.

      Nick was fairly convinced that Jason Juarez had found himself in his present position only because he was related to someone either on the force, or someone who was embedded within Vengeance’s less-than-dynamic town counsel. Whichever it was, the so-called guardian angel might be trying to be kind to the young man, but in the interim, he or she was setting the course of detective work back by half a century.

      Juarez, he knew, was relieved when the FBI special agents had descended on the town and, specifically, the “dig” where the bodies had been found. They’d been summoned by the town fathers because one of the victims was Senator Merris. The special agents had been set to take over the entire crime scene, but he had managed to get them to agree that this would be worked as a team effort. That meant that information would be shared—supposedly.

      Nick turned his attention to the woman he’d just caught. When he’d made his initial assessment of her, he’d judged that she weighed under a hundred pounds. If he wasn’t right on target, he was close. Suzy Burris felt as if she weighed next to nothing at all.

      Striding into the house ahead of the flustered Juarez, his arms full of unconscious damsel in distress, Nick headed straight for the sofa.

      “Get the door, Juarez,” he tossed over his shoulder at his partner.

      It took the detective a second to process the order, and another second for embarrassment to creep up his lanky torso, reaching his cheeks and turning them a faint shade of pink.

      “You want it closed?” he asked.

      “No, I want you to take it off the hinges and take it with us when we leave,” Nick bit off sarcastically as he lay the woman down on the sofa. “Yeah, I want it closed,” he snapped quickly before the befuddled, wet-behind-the-ears detective took him at his word and started removing the door from its hinges. He wouldn’t have put it past him.

      The door shut and then he heard Juarez hurrying over to the sofa.

      “Is she—is she all right?” the younger man asked nervously. He shifted slightly from foot to foot as he hovered about like a confused hummingbird, searching for a destination where he could alight.

      “She just found out that her husband’s dead, what do you think?” Nick asked, trying not to let his irritation break through. Part of that irritation had to do with the fact that he had yet to tell the woman the worst part: that her husband had been murdered.

      No doubt feeling foolish, Juarez looked down at the unconscious woman. “I guess she’s not all right.”

      There was sympathy in the younger man’s voice.

      At least he had the right emotional response, Nick thought. That was a start, although being too sympathetic wasn’t a good thing, either. Nick was convinced of that. It wasn’t exactly recommended for someone in their line of work. Getting too involved could get in the way, clouding their judgment and hindering them from doing their job right.

      At least, that had been the case back in Houston.

      Out here, when he’d accepted the job, he’d just assumed that police work involved tracking down lost dogs and occasionally finding a child who had wandered off from his or her parents. Solving homicides like the ones they were faced with came as a complete and utter surprise to him. While it was, sadly, right up his alley, Nick had come to Vengeance to take an extended break from that sort of thing.

      Still, he had to admit that part of him felt suddenly alive again. He hadn’t missed the nonstop pressure of the life he’d led as a detective in Houston, but he did find that he missed the challenges that sort of life had perpetually thrown at him.

      At least occasionally.

      “Make yourself useful,” he instructed Juarez. “Get me a compress for her head.”

      The younger detective looked a little lost as he glanced about the room, as if searching for something to use to make this happen.

      Nick sighed. This partnership was going to test his patience. If Juarez got in the way, the feds were going to want them both off the case—and as far as he was concerned, Vengeance was now his town and that made the murdered men his case.

      “Kitchen, towel.” Nick snapped out the words in staccato fashion, firing them at Juarez as if they were bullets. “Make it wet. Cold water,” he emphasized as Juarez headed toward the section of the house where he assumed the kitchen was located. “Don’t forget to wring it out,” Nick added, raising his voice so that the other man could hear him.

      Otherwise, Juarez would probably be bringing him a towel that left a trail of dripping water in its wake.

      A beat later, Juarez cheerfully called back, “Got it!”

      Nick СКАЧАТЬ