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“I wouldn’t dream of it.” He set out two mugs, pulled out a chair at the table and motioned her into another one. He straddled his and stared at her. “Why a raven?” he asked abruptly. “And why those colors for beadwork?”
She bit her lower lip. “I don’t know.”
He stared at her pointedly, as if he didn’t believe her.
She blushed. “I really don’t know,” she emphasized. “I didn’t even start out to paint a raven. I was going to do a landscape. The raven was on the canvas. I just painted everything else out,” she added. “That sounds nuts, I guess, but famous sculptors say that’s how they do statues, they just chisel away everything that isn’t part of the statue.”
He still didn’t speak.
“How did you even know it was me?” she asked unhappily. “The gifts were supposed to be secret. I don’t tell people that painting is my hobby. How did you know?”
He got up after a minute, walked down the hall and came back with a rolled-up piece of paper. He handed it to her and sat back down.
Her intake of breath was audible. She held the picture with hands that were a little unsteady. “Who did this?” she exclaimed.
“My daughter, Melly.”
Her eyes lifted to his. He’d never spoken of any family members, except his brother. “You don’t talk about her,” she said.
His eyes went to the picture on the table. They were dull and vacant. “She was three years old when she painted that, in pre-school,” he said quietly. “It was the last thing she ever did. That afternoon, she and her mother went to my father’s house. They were going to have supper with my father and stepmother. My father went to get gas for a trip he was making the next day. Cammy hadn’t come home from shopping yet.”
He stopped. He wasn’t sure he could say it, even now. His voice failed him.
Winnie had a premonition. Only that. “And?”
He looked older. “I was working undercover with San Antonio PD, before I became a Fed. My partner and I were just a block from the house when the call came over the radio. I recognized the address and burned rubber getting there. My partner tried to stop me, but nobody could have. There were two uniformed officers already on scene. They tried to tackle me.” He shrugged. “I was bigger than both of them. So I saw Melly, and my wife, before the crime scene investigators and the coroner got there.” He got up from the table and turned away. He was too shaken to look at her. He went to the coffeepot and turned it off, pouring coffee into two cups. He still hesitated. He didn’t want to pick up the cups until he was sure he could hold them. “The perp, whoever it was, used a shotgun on them.”
Winnie had heard officers talk about their cases occasionally. She’d heard the operators talk, too, because some of them were married to people in law enforcement. She knew what a shotgun could do to a human body. To even think of it being used on a child … She swallowed, hard, and swallowed again. Her imagination conjured up something she immediately pushed to the back of her mind.
“I’m sorry,” she said in a choked tone.
Finally, he picked up the cups and put them on the table. He straddled the chair again, calmer now. “We couldn’t find the person or persons who did it,” he said curtly. “My father went crazy. He had these feelings, like you do. He left the house to get gas. It could have waited until the next morning, but he felt he should go right then. He said later that if he’d been home, he might have been able to save them.”
“Or he might have been lying right beside them,” Winnie said bluntly.
He looked at her in a different way. “Yes,” he agreed. “That was what I thought, too. But he couldn’t live with the guilt. He started drinking and couldn’t stop. He died of a heart attack. They said the alcohol might have played a part, but I think he grieved himself to death. He loved Melly.” He stopped speaking and drank the coffee. It blistered his tongue. That helped. He hadn’t talked about it to an outsider, ever.
Her soft, dark eyes slid over his face quietly. “You think this may be linked to the body they found in the river,” she said slowly.
His dark eyebrows lifted. “I haven’t said that.”
“You’re thinking it.”
His broad chest rose and fell. “Yes. We found a small piece of paper clenched in the man’s fist. It took some work, but Alice Jones’s forensic lab was able to make out the writing. It was my cell phone number. The man was coming here to talk to me. He knew something about my daughter’s death. I’m sure of it.”
His daughter’s death. He didn’t say, his wife and daughter. She wondered why.
His big hands wrapped around the hot white mug. His eyes had an emptiness that Winnie recognized. She’d seen it in military veterans. They called it the thousand-yard stare. It was the look of men who’d seen violence, who dealt in it. They were never the same again.
“What did she look like?” Winnie asked gently.
He blinked. It wasn’t a question he’d anticipated. He smiled faintly. “Like Jon, actually, and my father,” he said, laughing. “She had jet-black hair, long, down to her waist in back, and eyes like liquid ebony. She was intelligent and sweet natured. She never met a stranger …” He stopped, looked down into the coffee cup, and forced it up to his lips to melt away the hard lump in his throat. Melly, laughing, holding her arms out to him. “I love you, Daddy! Always remember!” That picture of her, laughing, was overlaid by one of her, lifeless, a nightmare figure covered in blood …
“Dear God!” he bit off, and his head bent.
Winnie was wary of most men. She was shy and introverted, and never forward. But she got up out of her chair, pulled him toward her and drew his head to her breasts. “Honest emotion should never embarrass anyone,” she whispered against his hair. “It’s much worse to pretend that we don’t care than to admit we do.”
She felt his big body shudder. She expected him to jerk away, to push her away, to refuse comfort. He was such a steely, capable man, full of fire and spirit and courage. But he didn’t resist her. Not for a minute, anyway. His arms circled her waist and almost crushed her as he gave in, momentarily, to the need for comfort. It was something he’d never done. He’d even pushed Cammy away, years ago, when she offered it to him.
She laid her cheek against his thick, soft black hair and just stood there, holding him. But then he did pull away, abruptly, and stood up, turning away from her.
“More coffee?” he asked in a harsh tone.
She forced a smile. “Yes, please.” She moved to the table and picked up her own cup, deliberately giving him time to get back the control he’d briefly lost. “It’s gone cold.”
“Liar,” he murmured when she joined him at the coffeepot and he took the cup from her. “You’d blister your lip if you sipped it.”
She looked up at him with a grin. “I was being politically agreeable.”
“You were lying.” He put the cup on the counter and gathered her up whole against him. “What a sweetheart you are,” he ground out as his mouth suddenly ground down into hers.
The force of the kiss shocked her. He didn’t lead up to it. It was instant, feverish passion, so intense that the insistence of his mouth shocked her lips apart, giving him access to the heated sweetness within. She wasn’t a woman who incited passion. In fact, what she’d experienced of it had turned her cold. She didn’t like the arrogance, the pushiness, of most men she’d dated. But Kilraven was as honest in passion as he was otherwise. He enjoyed kissing her, and he didn’t pretend that he didn’t. His arms forced her into the hard curve of his body and he chuckled when he felt her melt against him, helpless and submissive, as he ground his mouth into hers.
Her arms went under his and around him. The utility belt was uncomfortable. She felt the butt of his automatic at her ribs. His arms were bruising. But she didn’t care. She held on for all she was worth and shivered with what must have been desire. She’d never felt it. Not until now, with the last man on earth she should allow herself to feel it for.
He felt her shy response with wonder. He’d expected that a socialite like Winnie would have had men since her early teens. The way of the world these days was experience. Virtue counted for nothing with most of the social set. But this little violet was innocent. He could feel it when she strained away from the sudden hardness of his body, when she shivered as he tried to probe her mouth.
Curious, he lifted his head and looked down into her flushed, wide-eyed face. Innocence. She couldn’t even pretend sophistication.
Gently, he eased her out of his arms. He smiled to lessen the sting of it. “You taste of green apples,” he said enigmatically.
“Apples?” She blinked, and swallowed. She could still taste him on her mouth. It had felt wonderful, being held so close to that warm strength. “I haven’t had an apple in, well, in ages,” she stammered.
“It was a figure of speech. Here. Put on your coat.” He helped her ease her arms into it. Then he handed her the cup.
“Am I leaving and taking it with me?” she asked blankly.
“No. We’re just drinking it outside.” He picked up his own cup and shepherded her out of the door, onto the long porch, down the steps and out to a picnic table that had been placed there, with its rude wooden benches, by the owner.
“We’re going to drink coffee out here?” she asked, astonished. “It’s freezing!”
“I know. Sit down.”
She did, using the cup for a hand warmer.
“It is a bit nippy,” he commented.
A sheriff’s car drove past. It beeped. Kilraven waved. “I’m leaving next week,” he said.
“Yes. You told us.”
A Jacobsville police car whizzed by, just behind the sheriff’s car. It beeped, too. Kilraven threw up his hand. Dust rose and fell in their wake, then settled.
“I had some sick leave and some vacation time left over. I can only use a little of it, of course, for this year, because it’s almost over. But I’m going to have a few weeks to do some investigating without pay.” He smiled. “With the state of the economy what it is, I don’t think they’ll mind that.”
“Probably not.” She sipped coffee. “Exactly what do you do when you aren’t impersonating a police officer?” she asked politely.
He pursed his lips and his silver eyes twinkled. “I could tell you, but then I’d have to—”
A loud horn drowned out the rest. This time, it was a fire truck. They waved. Kilraven waved back. So did Winnie.
“Have to what?” she asked him.
“Well, it wouldn’t be pretty.”
“That’s just stonewalling, Kilraven,” she pointed out. She frowned. “Don’t you have a first name?”
“Sure. It’s—”
Another loud horn drowned that out, too.
They both turned. Cash Grier pulled up beside the picnic table and let down his window on the driver’s side. “Isn’t it a little cold to be drinking coffee outside?” he asked.
Kilraven gave him a wry look. “Everybody at the EOC saw me drive off with Winnie,” he said complacently. “So far, there have been two cop cars and a fire truck. And, oh, look, there comes the Willow Creek Police Department. A little out of your jurisdiction, aren’t you?” he called loudly to the driver, who was from northern Jacobs County. He just grinned and waved and drove on.
Winnie hadn’t realized how much traffic had gone by until then. She burst out laughing. No wonder Kilraven had wanted to sit out here. He wasn’t going to have her gossiped about. It touched her.
“If I were you, I’d take her to Barbara’s Café to have this discussion,” Cash told him. “It’s much more private.”
“Private?” Kilraven exclaimed.
Cash pointed to the road. There were, in a row, two sheriffs’ cars, a state police vehicle, a fire and rescue truck, an ambulance and, of all things, a fire department ladder truck. They all tooted and waved as they went by, creating a wave of dust.
Cash Grier shook his head. “Now, that’s a shame you’ll get all dusty. Maybe you should take her back inside,” he said with an angelic expression.
“You know what you can do,” Kilraven told him. He got up and held out his hand for Winnie’s cup. “I’m putting these in the sink, and then we’re leaving.”
“Spoilsport.” Cash sighed. “Now we’ll all have to go back to work!”
“I can suggest a place to do it,” Kilraven muttered.
Cash winked at Winnie, who couldn’t stop laughing. He drove off.
Winnie got up, sighed and dug in her coat pocket for her car keys. It had been, in some ways, the most eventful hour of her life. She knew things about Kilraven that nobody else did, and she felt close to him. It was the first time in their turbulent relationship that she felt any hope for the future. Not that getting closer to him was going to be easy, she told herself. Especially not with him in San Antonio and her in Jacobsville.
He came back out, locking the door behind him. He looked around as he danced gracefully down the steps and joined her. “What, no traffic jam?” he exclaimed, nodding toward the deserted road. “Maybe they ran out of rubberneckers.”
Just as he said that, a funeral procession came by, headed by none other than the long-suffering Macreedy. He was famous for getting lost while leading processions. He didn’t blow his horn. In fact, he really did look lost. The procession went on down the road with Winnie and Kilraven staring after it.
“Don’t tell me he’s losing another funeral procession,” she wailed. “Sheriff Carson Hayes will fry him up and serve him on toast if he does it again.”
“No kidding,” Kilraven agreed. “There’s already been the threat of a lawsuit by one family.” He shook his head. “Hayes really needs to put that boy behind a desk.”
“Or take away his car keys,” she agreed.
He looked down at her with an oddly affectionate expression. “Come on. You’re getting chilled.”
He walked her back to her car, towering over her. “You’ve come a long way since that day you went wailing home because you forgot to tell me a perp was armed.”
She smiled. “I was lucky. I could have gotten you killed.”
He hesitated. “These flashes of insight, do they run in your family?”
“I don’t know much about my family,” she confessed. “My father was very remote after my mother left us.”
“Did you have any contact with your uncle?” he asked.
She gaped at him. “How do you know about him?”
He didn’t want to confess what he knew about the man. He shrugged. “Someone mentioned his name.”
“We don’t have any contact at all. We didn’t,” she corrected. “He died a month ago. Or so we were told.”
“I’m sorry.”
Her dark eyes were cold. “I’m not. He and my mother ran away together and left my father with three kids to raise. Well, two kids actually. Boone was in the military by then. I look like my mother. Dad hated that. He hated me.” She bit her tongue. She hadn’t meant to say as much.
But he read that in her expression. “We all have pivotal times in our lives, when a decision leads to a different future.” He smiled. “In the sixteenth century, Henry VIII fell in love with a young girl and decided that his Catholic wife, Catherine of Aragon, was too old to give him a son anyway, so he spent years finding a way to divorce her and marry the young girl, whom he was certain could produce a male heir. In the end, he destroyed the Catholic Church in England to accomplish it. He married Ann Boleyn, a protestant who had been one of Catherine’s ladies, and from that start the Anglican Church was born. The child of that union was not a son, but Elizabeth, who became queen of England after her brother and half sister. All that, for love of a woman.” He pursed his lips and his eyes twinkled. “As it turned out, he couldn’t get a son from Ann Boleyn either, so he found a way to frame her for adultery and cut off her head. Ten days later, he married a woman who could give him a son.”
“The wretch!” she exclaimed, outraged.
“That’s why we have elected officials instead of kings with absolute power,” he told her.
She shook her head. “How do you know all that?”
He leaned down. “You mustn’t mention it, but I have a degree in history.”
“Well!”
“But I specialized in Scottish history, not English. I’m one of a handful of people who think James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell, got a raw deal from history for marrying Mary, Queen of Scots. But don’t mention that out loud.”
She laughed. “Okay.”
He opened her car door for her. Before she got in, he drew a long strand of her blond hair over his big hand, studying its softness and beautiful pale color.
Her eyes slid over his face. “Your brother wears his hair long, in a ponytail. You keep yours short.”
“Is that a question?”
