Absolute Fear. Lisa Jackson

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      But not tonight. Not when her headache was building again after the long trip. She needed to sleep on this, maybe figure out what it meant. Rubbing her temples, she walked to the sink, where she let the water run for a couple of minutes while she scrounged in the cupboard for a reasonably clean glass. She swallowed two more tablets of aspirin, chased them down with cool water from the tap, then leaned over the sink and splashed more water onto her face.

      Twisting off the tap, she found a terry-cloth towel in a drawer and dabbed at her face. Everything she’d gone through this day faded a bit as she glanced around the room where she’d spent hours with her grandmother. Pink tile, floral wallpaper in tones of green, gray, and pink, once-white cabinets, scratched hardwood floors—the kitchen hadn’t changed since she was a toddler who had needed to stand on a chair at the sink to play with a piece of pie dough as her grandmother created the sweetest pecan and peach pies Eve had ever tasted.

      She smiled faintly as she remembered her hands and tiny apron covered in flour while her brothers—“the ruffians,” Nana had called them—played outside no matter what the weather. Even then there had been a distinction. Kyle and Van hadn’t been allowed to wear shoes past the mudroom or to “roughhouse” inside, whereas Eve had been given carte blanche to do nearly anything she wanted. She was Nana’s favorite and had been from the get-go. Even though Eve was adopted, Nana had still considered her special, solidifying the union between Terrence Renner and his wife, a woman who had come to the marriage with two sons sired by a man who had spent more years in prison than out. Though Eve’s father had adopted Kyle and Van, they had been surly preteens with attitudes at the time of the marriage—“Troublemakers and hooligans,” Nana snorted—while Eve had come into the family as a tiny infant.

      It didn’t take a rocket scientist to understand why Kyle and Van had so little use for her. Kyle had grown into a brooding, unhappy man, while Van had spent his adult years thinking only of himself, a narcissist to the nth degree.

      Eve knew now that the grandmother she’d worshiped was in reality a bigoted old woman who relished playing favorites. And it had only been exacerbated with Dorothy Gilles Renner’s death—when Eve’s grandmother spelled out in her last will and testament that the lion’s share of her estate would go to Eve. Token bequests had been left to Kyle and Van, while Eve’s father, Dorothy’s only child, had wound up with an abandoned farm surrounded by swampland and his father’s World War II memorabilia.

      A bitter pill to swallow for all of the men in the family.

      At the time of the bequests, Eve had wrestled with her conscience about the unfairness of it all and had finally decided that when she ever sold the old house, she’d make it up to her brothers.

      But not tonight.

      Now she was beat. She walked through the house, turning on table lamps. At the base of the stairs, she grabbed her largest suitcase and lugged it up the creaking wooden steps. The once-colorful runner leading upward was worn, just like the rest of the house, and sometimes Eve wondered if her grandmother had bequeathed her a golden goose or an albatross. Bringing the old house up to date while preserving its historic charm would cost a fortune, so for now the fraying runner, chipped pink tiles and fading wallpaper would remain.

      On the second floor she paused, caught her breath, and frowned when she realized how weak she still was. All because of a would-be assassin’s bullet.

      Cole.

      Her lover.

      Her confidant.

      Her assailant.

      Her stomach tightened into a hard knot as she envisioned his handsome, angry face glaring at her as he raised the gun and, in a flash of light and a splintering of glass, nearly killed her.

      That’s how it was.

      Wasn’t it?

      Cole had tried to kill her….

      “Bastard,” she whispered, shuttering her mind. She couldn’t go there tonight.

      Walking into the master bedroom, she tossed her dirty clothes into a basket and hung the others up, wrinkles and all. She took one last trip downstairs, found Samson and held him close, listening to his deep purr rumbling against her body, feeling his long tail wrap around her torso.

      “I’m sorry for that horrible, long drive,” she said. “You’re such a good, good boy. Forgive me?” The cat looked at her with wide gold eyes then rubbed his head beneath her chin and purred loudly. “So, here we are Samson. Now what’re we going to do? Hmm? Start over, I guess.”

      And face Cole. No matter what.

      The cat slid from her arms and hopped onto a window ledge near the kitchen table to peer into the night.

      “Don’t get on the counters,” Eve said as she always did. “Or the table.”

      After double-checking that all the doors were locked and bolted, she headed for the bathroom. Once inside, she locked the door, swabbed out the old claw-footed tub, filled it, stripped off her clothes, then climbed into the warm water.

      Heaven, she thought, lowering herself to her chin, feeling the water caress her skin, soaking out the knots of tension in her neck and back. She closed her eyes. The water enveloped her, and over the sound of her own breathing she heard the sigh of the wind rustling the leaves of the magnolia trees in the backyard and the creaks and groans of the old house.

      Cole’s image floated through her mind. A rugged if not handsome face, startling blue eyes that shifted color with the daylight, a blade-thin mouth that could flatten in silent anger or lift at the corners in amusement. She’d thought he was “the one,” if there really was such a thing—and she’d been wrong, she realized now as she reached for a cracked bar of soap.

      Dead wrong.

      “Son of a bitch,” Cole swore as he drove out of the city. Thinking of Eve was getting him nowhere.

      With a wary eye on the other traffic, he maneuvered his Jeep across the bridge spanning Lake Pontchartrain and was only vaguely aware of the miles of black water stretching in all directions. He tapped his fingers nervously on the steering wheel and, once he was across the wide stretch of water, drove through several small towns to a wooded spot where one of his few cousins still owned a mobile home. They’d played here as kids, but he suspected that Jim, long married and living near Philly with his wife and son, hadn’t been back in half a decade. He parked in the drive and waited.

      Five minutes.

      Ten.

      No one appeared.

      It was now or never.

      Grabbing the tool kit, he pulled out a flashlight and locked the Jeep behind him. The night was cool, a fine mist rising through the trees and undergrowth of this bayou retreat. Cole pulled on a pair of thick gloves then vaulted the fence and walked toward the old house. It stood long and low, a once-white behemoth in the otherwise dark woods. Chancing the flashlight, he ran the beam over the aging aluminum and glass. The curtains were drawn, stains visible in the lining, spiderwebs tucked along the dirty glass where moss seemed to have somehow taken root.

      No one had been here in a long time.

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