Dangerous Read online

  Barbara smiled. “Coming up.”

  She left and Kilraven gave Winnie a bold appraisal. She was wearing a pair of dark slacks with a blue polo shirt, her blond hair in a neat braid. She looked very young, tired and disillusioned.

  “I heard,” Kilraven said.

  She met his silver eyes. He was wearing slacks and a black polo shirt with a wool jacket. He looked expensive and worldly out of uniform. She managed a smile. “We’re all still reeling. Up until the ambulances got there, we had hope.”

  “You did everything possible. It was a good effort.”

  “We did everything possible and he still died.”

  “That’s not your call,” he replied quietly. “People die. We all do, eventually.”

  She managed a weary smile. “So they say.”

  Barbara came back with his salad and sandwich and coffee. “You have to learn not to take things so much to heart, baby,” she told Winnie gently.

  The endearment was comforting. Winnie sighed. “I do try.”

  “It’s no bad thing to have a heart,” Kilraven interjected.

  “Yes, it is,” Winnie murmured. She drew in a long breath and pushed back her plate. “It’s very good, Barbara, I’m just sleepy and worn out. I almost went straight home, but I haven’t had anything since supper early yesterday evening.”

  “You have a canteen at the EOC,” Kilraven pointed out.

  “Yes, but in order to eat, you have to have time to eat,” she reminded him. “That wasn’t the only emergency we had. It was the busiest night we’ve had this month.”

  “It was a full moon,” Kilraven said as he dug into his salad.

  “It was,” Barbara exclaimed. “But what does that have to do with it?”

  “Beats me,” he said. “But it really does bring out the worst in some people.”

  Barbara just shook her head. “If you need anything else, let me know.”

  IT WAS AN INDICATION of how depressed Winnie was that she wasn’t dropping utensils or spilling coffee from nervousness at Kilraven’s unexpected company. She sipped coffee and stared at her discarded salad blankly.

  After a minute, she glanced at him and frowned. “What are you doing down here?” she asked suddenly. “We heard you were in San Antonio, working with detectives to find connections to our DB in the Little Carmichael River.”

  “I was, and I have,” he said. “I need a favor.”

  Her heard did jump, then. “What?”

  “Not now. Finish your coffee and we’ll take a ride.”

  She glanced around at the lunch crowd. They were eating and shooting covert glances at Winnie and Kilraven.

  “If I go for a ride with you, we’ll be the talk of the town all weekend,” she said.

  He chuckled. “I don’t care.” He looked into her dark eyes. “Do you?”

  She shrugged. “I guess not.”

  “While they’re talking about us, they’re leaving somebody else alone,” he pointed out.

  “I suppose.” She finished her coffee. “Do you think it’s going to tie into your own cold case?” she asked abruptly.

  His face tautened. “I think it may. We’ve got a lead. It’s a small one, but it may pay dividends down the road. Before this is over, some big-time feathers are going to get ruffled.”

  She cocked her head. “Now, I’m curious.”

  “Good. Let’s go.” He swallowed the rest of his coffee and picked up her lunch tab, despite her protests, as well as his own. Then he shepherded her out the door and toward a black late-model Jaguar sports car.

  She was taken aback. Used to seeing him in a prowler, this was new.

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t ever seen one.” He chuckled.

  “Of course I have. I just never pictured you driving one.”

  “Out of curiosity, what did you picture me driving?” he queried at the passenger door.

  “A squad car,” she said with a smile.

  He chuckled. “Point to you, Miss Sinclair.” He started to open the door and then hesitated, frowning. “Sinclair. Do you know your family history?”

  “Sort of,” she said, disconcerted. “My people came from Scotland.”

  His silver eyes twinkled.

  “Why does that amuse you?”

  “Lord Bothwell married Mary Queen of Scots after the suspicious death of her husband, Lord Darnley. Bothwell’s mother was a Sinclair.”

  “Why are you so interested in Bothwell?” she asked.

  He pursed his lips. “My ancestors were Hepburns.”

  “Well, isn’t it a small world?” she exclaimed.

  “Getting smaller by the day. Climb in.”

  He went around and got in beside her, approving the fact that she fastened her seat belt at once. So did he.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Someplace without video cameras and an audience,” he said with a grim nod toward the faces peering out of the café.

  “We could go to my house,” she said.

  “Keely may be at work, but I expect your brothers are around the house somewhere.”

  “Boone is. Clark’s up in Iowa, looking at cattle for Boone.”

  “My point, exactly. I want to talk to you without an audience.”

  She turned her purse over in her hands. “Okay. I’ll try to stay awake.”

  “Poor kid,” he said sympathetically. “You work hard for minimum wage. You don’t have to work at all, do you?”

  She shook her head. “It’s just that we were all raised with a strong work ethic. We’re not the sort of people to sit around and play cards or go to parties.”

  “Your father has been dead for some time, hasn’t he?”

  She nodded. “He was a good man, in a lot of ways. But he had some terrible flaws. I suppose they were because our mother ran off with his brother. He never got over it.”

  “That would shatter a man’s pride,” he had to agree. He glanced at her set features. “No curiosity about where she lives, or with whom…?”

  “No,” she blurted out. She flushed at his sudden scrutiny.

  “People make mistakes, Winnie,” he said gently.

  The visit from her mother still stung. “Yes, they do, and we’re supposed to forgive them. I know that. But I could have happily gone my whole life without seeing her again.”

  “Has she remarried?”

  She glanced at him, frowning. “Remarried?”

  “You said she was married to your uncle. Your uncle died.”

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “How do you know that?”

  “It’s one of the reasons I came down here to talk to you. Your uncle may have been on the periphery of this case.”

  “Boone said something about that, but not that he was actually involved. Our uncle was a murderer?” she exclaimed, horrified.

  “We don’t think he killed the DB,” he said at once. “But they found a thermos bottle at the site where the car went into the Little Carmichael River. It was a match for one that your uncle was said to have in his house. A San Antonio detective who’s working with us on this case went to his house to check it out. She spoke with his roommate.”

  Winnie was stunned. It had never occurred to her that her uncle might be involved in murder.

  “His roommate.” She blinked. She looked at him. “Our mother said that his roommate was strung out on drugs.”

  He looked surprised. “That’s right. Well, I guess she had to go over there if she recovered your heirloom jewelry, right? Anyway, our detective also paid the roommate a visit and checked out the thermos. She was barely lucid—the roommate I mean—but she did identify a photograph of the thermos.”

  “My uncle’s thermos was on the bank of the river next to the car of a murder victim, and you don’t think he was involved?” she asked, blank from lack of sleep and shock.

  He drew in a breath. “That’s why I said I think he was on the periphery. I think he might have known the murderer.”

  She sat back in her seat,
wondering at the connection and interconnection of lives. She frowned. “Do you think my uncle was murdered?” she asked.

  He didn’t speak for a minute. “Now, isn’t that an interesting question. I don’t think we considered that his death might not have been natural. He was a heavy drug user.”

  “Sheriff Hayes’s brother was killed by an overdose that he didn’t know he was taking,” she said. “So was Stuart York’s wife’s sister. They were given a pure form of the drug instead of a diluted one and didn’t realize it.”

  “We’ll look into that,” he said at once.

  Winnie looked down at the purse in her lap. “So many dead people. What did they all know that got them killed?”

  “I don’t know, Winnie,” he said quietly. “But I’m going to find out.”

  He pulled into a small roadside park. It was deserted at this time of year. It was a pretty place in the other seasons, beside a tributary of the Little Carmichael River, where kids played in warm weather. The trees were bare and stark against a gray sky. The whole world looked dead. Even the grass.

  “It will be cold, but I don’t think we’ll be a tourist attraction here,” he chuckled as they got out.

  Winnie pulled her gray Berber coat closer because the wind was sharp and cold. She walked beside Kilraven, in his dark wool jacket, to the stream. She noted as she looked down that he was wearing black boots, so highly polished that they reflected the sky. She smiled. It was like him to be fastidious.

  “What are you smiling at?” he asked.

  “Your boots,” she said. “Not a speck on them. You’re elegant for a cattleman turned law enforcement officer.”

  He chuckled. “I guess so.”

  She wondered why. She was too polite to ask.

  He stared at her with a faint smile. “You’re curious, but you won’t ask. I like that about you.”

  “Thanks.”

  He put his hands in his pockets and looked at the bubbling stream in between the shallow banks. “My mother was white,” he said shortly. “She left my father when I was about two years old. She took me with her, but she liked to party. She couldn’t afford a housekeeper, but she didn’t consider that it was dangerous to leave a child alone. In fact, she seemed to forget that she had me, from time to time. My father came looking for me after he got a call from the police in a little town outside Dallas. A neighbor had heard screaming from inside a deserted house that my mother had rented. The police broke in and found a card with his name and telephone number on it, and they called him.”

  She waited. She didn’t insist.

  He drew in a breath. “My mother had been partying with a man, apparently one who liked alcohol and didn’t especially like women. He beat her to death. I guess I was lucky that he didn’t kill me, but he probably assumed that I was too young to identify him. He locked the door and left us both inside. It was two days before I got hungry enough to scream.”

  “Dear God,” she whispered.

  He glanced at her with hollow eyes. “My father carried me home and cleaned me up. He was going with a younger woman who loved kids. She latched on to me as if I were the only child on earth.” He chuckled. “He married her, and they had Jon. But I never felt as if I were his half brother. My earliest memories are of Cammy. My stepmother.”

  “Cammy?”

  “Her name is Camelia, but nobody calls her that.” He drew in a long breath. “She’s very conservative and deeply religious, so Jon and I had a strict upbringing. Our father was out of town, sometimes out of the country working for the FBI, so Cammy basically raised us both.” He glanced at her with some amusement. “She’d probably make mincemeat out of you, little canary bird. She’s hard-going, as at least one of our former girlfriends could attest.”

  “Your, plural?” she queried.

  “Jon and I once had an attachment to the same girl. It ended in a rather enthusiastic altercation, from which we both emerged with dental bills. The girl, predictably, discovered that she was really in love with her former boyfriend. Too late to do us any good.” He laughed.

  “Your stepmother must be one nice lady,” she commented.

  “She is. Difficult to live with, but nice.”

  “I’m sorry about your mother.”

  “I’m sorry about yours,” he replied. He turned to her and moved closer. “I’ve never told anyone about my mother.”

  She was flattered. She smiled. “I’ve never told anybody about mine, either. Just family.”

  “Does she look like you?” he asked, curious.

  “Pretty much. She’s older.”

  “She must live somewhere nearby.”

  “I wouldn’t know.” She closed up.

  “Now, don’t do that,” he teased gently. He drew her against him. “We were making progress and then you turned into a sensitive plant and closed your leaves up.”

  She smiled. “Sorry.” She flattened her hands against his broad chest, under the jacket. She could feel the warmth of his body through the soft fabric of his shirt.

  The touch, light as it was, built fires deep inside him. His breathing changed. The scent of her body was in his nostrils, seducing him. It had been years since he’d felt a woman’s body against him in the darkness, since he’d known what it was to be a man. And here he was with a woman who didn’t even know what happened when the lights went out, except for what she’d heard or read.

  She looked up. “What’s wrong?”

  His eyebrows lifted. “Well, I was just considering how nice it would be to lay you down on the grass and…” He cleared his throat. “Sorry.”

  She laughed, delighted. “Were you really?”

  He cocked his head. “Not offended?”

  “Oh, no. I have all these deep questions about how it feels and what happens,” she confided. “I did almost find out, once, but my brother Boone walked in and knocked the boy down the front steps into a mud puddle.” She sighed. “I was fifteen. Boone felt I was too young to be the target of a twentysomething cowboy. So the cowboy went to work for somebody else and I went back into cold storage, and so did my physical education.”

  He burst out laughing. “Good for Boone.”

  “He’s always looked out for me. So has Clark, in his way.” She sighed. “Neither of them knew what it was like at home when they were gone, and I couldn’t tell. My father hated my mother, hated her more than ever after they met and talked a few weeks after she left. He came home cursing her. We weren’t told what happened.”

  “Sad that they couldn’t work it out.”

  “I would have liked having a mother,” she agreed. She looked up at him. “I was horrible to her when she showed up at the house. I guess I could have been more forgiving.”

  “It’s hard to forgive people who sell us out,” he said.

  She nodded. She drew in a long breath. “All of this is very interesting, but it doesn’t have much to do with why you came looking for me. Does it?”

  He framed her face in his hands and lifted it. “Maybe it does.” He looked at her mouth for a long time, so long that her heart raced. “Sorry,” he murmured as he bent his head, “but I’m having withdrawal symptoms…”

  His mouth hit hers like a wall, opening and twisting, hungry and insistent, warm against the cold that whirled around them on the bank of the stream. She melted into him, sliding her arms around his broad chest. Her fingers dug into his back, feeling the solid muscle there, drowning in the hunger he raised in her so effortlessly.

  He liked her response. It was immediate, unaffected, totally yielding. He loved the way she felt in his arms. He drew her closer, feeling the sudden, familiar surge of desire that corded his powerful body, no longer hidden from her.

  She gasped as she felt it. She tried to draw back, but his hands went lower and pressed her hips into his.

  He lifted his head and stared into her wide, shocked eyes. He didn’t say a word. But he wouldn’t let her step back, either.

  “You mustn’t…!” she whispered.

/>   “What happened to all that talk about wanting to know how it felt?” he asked, pursing his lips. He wasn’t smiling, but his eyes were.

  “Well, I do,” she stammered. “But not right now.”

  “Not right now.”

  She nodded. She flushed.

  He chuckled wickedly and let her move away a discreet distance. He liked her high color. He liked a lot of things about her. “Chicken,” he teased.

  “Chook, chook, chook.” She imitated a hen and grinned up at him.

  “Actually,” he said, looping his arms around her waist, “I was thinking of a way for you to indulge some of that curiosity.”

  “You were?”

  “Not to excess,” he said then, feeling cautious. It would be too easy to go in headfirst, and have to repair the damage later. “You have a summer house in Nassau.”

  The sudden shift in subject matter hit her like a brick in the head. “Uh, yes.”

  “It borders on property owned by the junior senator from Texas.”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “His wife doesn’t like him. He plays around with very young girls and it hurts her pride, so she goes to the summer home to escape the media spotlight. And the senator.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard.”

  “Have you ever met her?” he asked suddenly, hopefully.

  “Actually, I have,” she replied. “We were at a party once, thrown by the American embassy, and I’ve gone to parties at her house, before her husband was a senator. She’s very nice.”

  He smiled. “How would you like to go down to Nassau with me and stay in the summer home while we see if she might be even more talkative about her brother-in-law?”

  She cooled down at once and pulled away. “I’m not like that.”

  “Excuse me?” he asked, disconcerted.

  “I mean, I flirt a little too hard with you, and maybe it looks like I’m worldly and I’m leading you on. But I’m not. I can’t, I mean, I won’t… My brother would kill you,” she added, blushing.

  He understood at once and burst out laughing.

  “It’s not funny,” she muttered, glowering at him.

  “That’s not why I’m laughing. I don’t have an illicit weekend in mind,” he assured her. His eyes smiled, too. “I’m pretty conservative myself, in case you haven’t noticed. I don’t have women. In fact,” he said with a sigh, “I’ve only ever had one woman and I was married to her.”