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“Taylor.” Her fingers itched to punch him just once…okay, as many times as she could before his goons pulled her off. She wanted to hurt him, to make him pay for what he’d done to Jen.
That’s why you’re here. To make him pay. Never forget that.
“Were you planning to let me know you were back?”
“You knew. Our friendly neighborhood cop told you, did he? But even if he hadn’t, I would have called you today. Tomorrow. Sometime.”
He smiled thinly and lowered his voice to a chilling whisper. “It wasn’t nice of you to let us think you were dead.”
“Sorry about that. I was more concerned with recovering from my injuries than with what people back here were thinking.”
His jaw tightened, his gaze narrowing. “You took something that belongs to me. A lot of things. I want them back.”
When she’d walked inside the diner, it had been only a few degrees cooler than outside. Suddenly she was so cold that she thought she might never get warm again.
Whatever Jen’s evidence was, as long as he’d thought it had disappeared with her, it was only a minor worry. Virtually any type of evidence—paper, computer CD, flash drive, photographs—would have likely been destroyed in the storm.
But if Jen survived, so did the threat to him. And that made him an even bigger threat to Jessica.
“Sorry,” she said again. “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to get some breakfast.” With a polite nod—and a private sigh of relief—she moved around him, walked to the nearest empty booth and sat down.
Taylor stood motionless for a moment, staring where she’d stood. Abruptly he came out of it and actually snapped his fingers at his men. Everyone jumped to his feet except Mitch, who rose but slowly.
When he came even with Taylor, Taylor stopped him, murmured something, then followed the rest of the officers out the door. Jaw taut, Mitch returned to his chair, settled in and picked up his coffee. He didn’t look like a happy camper.
Hands trembling and heart pounding double time with delayed reaction, Jessica ordered the morning’s special, then downed a glass of water. It was foul but still left a better taste in her mouth than the encounter with Taylor had.
Jen had warned her that coming here would be dangerous, that Taylor would kill her if he got the chance. Their brief encounter had left Jessica with no doubts about that. Taylor Burton was one very angry man. His career, his freedom and his life were at stake. He wouldn’t lose a moment’s sleep if he killed his supposed wife to protect himself.
He might want her dead but not until he recovered whatever Jen had taken.
A group of diners left and another came in, a posse of old men wearing faded work clothes and gimme caps. They headed automatically toward the large table but stopped when they saw it was occupied. One of them flagged down the nearest waitress. “It’s after nine o’clock,” he grumbled. “That’s been our table for twenty years. They get to use it before nine. Not after.”
The waitress looked at Mitch—who was ignoring them and showing no intention of leaving—shrugged helplessly and headed for the kitchen with an armful of dishes.
While the men complained among themselves none too softly, Jessica slid to her feet and walked to the table. “I take it you’re the designated…babysitter? Spy?”
Mitch studied his coffee cup for a time before meeting her gaze with open hostility. It was his only response.
“I figured. Why don’t you keep tabs on me from over there—” she gestured to her booth “—and let these gentlemen have their table.” Without waiting for an answer, she returned to her seat and began eating the breakfast that had been delivered in her absence.
He slowly stood, dropped what looked like a ten on the table, then started her way. No one else from his group had paid, she realized. They’d left their plates mostly clean and walked out without so much as a quarter for a tip. Free meals and good service—two of the benefits of being a cop, Taylor the scum used to say.
Dear God, Jen had told her so much that she felt as if she knew the man.
A moment later, the air took on a shimmer of tension, then Mitch sat down across from her. She chewed a bite of ham, took a nibble of buttered toast, then sprinkled salt and hot sauce over her hash browns. “This is some job you have, Officer Lassiter. Surveilling the boss’s wife.”
“Estranged wife,” he corrected.
She allowed a small smile. Once Hurricane Jan had blown through, Hurricane Jen would have swept Taylor right into divorce court—and, hopefully, criminal court. He would have soon been her ex-husband and grateful to see the last of her. But she hadn’t gotten the chance.
“Would you like my schedule for the day?” she asked helpfully. “When I leave here, I’m going to the bank. That should take about ten minutes. Then I need to stop by the post office—five minutes or so, depending on the line. Then the grocery store. I cleaned out the refrigerator before the hurricane, so I need to restock. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if you already knew that.”
She raised her gaze to his face, watching the muscles in his jaw tighten. “Truthfully, I wouldn’t be surprised if you people had been in my apartment on numerous occasions in the past three weeks. Searching for signs that I’d planned to evacuate, looking for clues, for evidence, for…oh, whatever might catch Taylor’s fancy.”
His hard gaze turned even harder as she murmured, “No, I wouldn’t be surprised at all.”
Chapter 2
Mitch’s coffee had long since gone cold, so he quit pretending interest in it. He was pissed off at being assigned babysitting tasks, pissed even more by Jennifer’s condescending recital of her morning plans and most of all by her implication that he’d done something wrong in checking out her apartment.
“No response, huh?” She looked as if she expected nothing more. “What is it Taylor says? ‘Admit nothing. Deny everything.’”
Yeah, he’d gone to her apartment, gotten the key from the manager, let himself in and searched the place, but it had all been part of a missing-person investigation. Taylor had met him there, and they’d looked through her closet, her drawers, her cabinets. Taylor had made a list of the obvious things missing—some clothing, two suitcases, makeup and photographs—and then he’d asked Mitch to leave him. He’d wanted time alone in the apartment.
And Mitch had left. Separated or not, Jennifer was still Taylor’s wife. He’d feared the worst from the beginning. He’d been emotional. Though not too emotional this morning upon seeing her for the first time since he’d thought she’d died.
Mitch studied her, making no effort to hide it. She looked pretty damn good in a married-minivan-soccer-mom sort of way, but he liked her better in last night’s tight jeans and snug top. There was something entirely too demure about the over-the-knee skirt and the prissy top.
Seeing that she was married, estranged or not, he should find “demure” good. He shouldn’t be thinking that she needed to show more leg, more skin in general, or that she should only wear clothes that hugged her curves.
He shouldn’t be thinking about her as a woman at all.
“You don’t have much to say about your work, do you?” Jennifer asked. “Let’s try something else. Where do you come from? You’re obviously not from around here.”
“‘Obviously’?” he echoed cynically. “I lived in Belmar from the time I was nine until I went away to college. You’d think Taylor would have mentioned that.”
Her cheeks tinged a faint pink that quickly faded. “Taylor tells people what he wants them to know when he wants them to know it. All he ever said was, ‘Bubba and I go back a long way.’ With Taylor, that can mean a month or twenty years.”
“Twenty-four years, to be exact.”
That was an accurate description of Taylor, though. Hadn’t he talked to Mitch a half-dozen times after his wedding before he’d mentioned it? Even then, he’d been stingy with information. Jennifer Randall. From California. No one you’d know. Over the next couple years he’d offered little more: they’d met on a cruise; she’d taught grade school in California; she had an older sister; she wasn’t much of a cook.
Taylor liked holding his cards close.
“Does your family still live here?” she asked.
“They never did. I lived with my grandmother. She died while I was in college.”
“I’m sorry.” She sounded as if she meant it. “So where does your family live?”
“My mother’s in Colorado. My brothers live in Georgia.”
“And your father?”
“Died when I was nine.” The child-support checks had stopped coming, and his mother had sent him to her mother. It sounded an awful lot like abandonment but hadn’t felt that way. He’d liked his grandmother and she’d liked him. Living with her had been easy.
“So you came here, but your brothers didn’t. Were you a problem child?” She asked it with a wry smile that he couldn’t read. Because she was stating the obvious or because she didn’t really believe he’d been bad enough to send away?
He smiled thinly. “I was an illegitimate child. When the old man died, his sons—my half brothers—continued to live with their mother. My mother sent me here.”
Except for the monthly checks, his father had never acknowledged him. His brothers and their mother hadn’t known he existed until Sara had come across the record of those checks when settling his estate. She had invited Mitch for regular visits, given him time with his brothers and treated him more like a son than his own mother had. She had even asked him to live with them, but he’d chosen to stay with his grandmother. Even so, he considered Sara more family than his mother.
“I’m sorry,” Jennifer said again, and he realized he’d just told her more about himself than even Taylor knew. Not good.
“Why did you come back?”
He turned the question on her. “Why did you? Half the town was betting that the storm would be the shove you needed to leave Belmar and Taylor for good.”
“And what did you think?”
“I didn’t. Frankly it didn’t matter to me either way.” A lie. He’d been curious. Had thought it one hell of a waste if she was dead. Had hoped if she was alive, she was smart enough to stay gone. Had thought she deserved better than Taylor.
“You didn’t answer,” he reminded her. “Why did you come back?”
She poked her fork at the last bits of hash browns on the plate, then laid it down and pushed both away. “I had unfinished business here.”
Her only business in Belmar, unfinished or otherwise, was with Taylor. Settling matters between them? Divorce? Reconciliation? Revenge?
He figured Taylor’s interests lay more in line with revenge. People didn’t go without his say-so. If an officer decided to leave the department, Taylor fired him before he got the chance. Back in college, when word had gotten out that he was going to be cut from the football team, he’d quit first. He wouldn’t have liked that Jennifer had left him. He’d want to win her back, if for no other reason than so he could turn around and leave her.
Hey, no one had ever accused Taylor of maturity.
“You should have gone back to California with your sister,” Mitch said flatly.
She glanced at the check, then left a generous tip on the table before meeting his gaze again, hers straight, blue, steady. “Is that a threat, Officer Lassiter?”
He kept his gaze just as straight and steady. “Why, ma’am, I’m an officer of the law. I don’t make threats.”
Her snort showed just what she thought of that. His brief experience with the Belmar Police Department—two months and counting—supported her opinion.
There had to be some advantage to a job that paid what this one did, Billy Starrett often repeated.
He followed her to the counter, where she paid her ticket, then out the door. Her car was parked down the street; his was around the corner. She walked a few feet away, then turned back. “Remember—bank, post office, grocery store.” Then, with a smirk, she walked off.
Damn Taylor for giving him this order. Mitch had better things to do, things that actually fell under his job description. Using department assets to find out what the chief’s wife was up to wasn’t exactly appropriate. But, when compared to all the other inappropriate things going on within the department, this one didn’t begin to matter.
He climbed into his unit, switched the AC to high, then fastened his seat belt. He’d spent more years in a patrol car than he wanted to count at the moment. With a shotgun secured to the dash, a heavy-duty flashlight in the passenger seat, the radio, the computer and the extra handcuffs tossed onto the console, he felt comfortable here, more than anywhere else in Belmar.
There were three banks in town, but he didn’t have to guess which one Jennifer was going to. She tapped the horn as she drove past, just to make sure he didn’t miss her. She was entirely too accommodating about being watched to be up to anything. It promised to be a long, boring morning.
She went inside the bank and spent eleven minutes and got in and out of the post office, with a handful of mail, in six. Her next stop was the grocery store nearest the apartments. He parked behind her car and across the aisle and watched as she went in.
Ten minutes passed. Fifteen. The engine was running and so was the AC, but the temperature inside the car was steadily rising. Southern Mississippi was always hot and humid in September but seemed even more so that morning. Maybe it was Hurricane Leo, idling out in the gulf, deciding which way to blow. Maybe it was this assignment, being used as a babysitter—spy—on city time, that was making him hot. Or, hell, maybe it was the whole damn job.
Restless and needing to do something that felt productive, he called in the tag on her car to the dispatcher, Megan, who ran it and notified him, predictably, that it came back to a rental company. He asked her to call the company and find out who had rented it. She said something to someone there in the office before replying affirmatively, and he recognized her voice from last night’s call to Taylor.
So Megan was sleeping with the chief. Great for job security…until she did something to tick him off or he found someone he wanted more. Like his wife?
It took a few minutes for Megan to call back with the info, and she did so on his cell phone. “The car was rented by Jessica Randall, who lives in Los Angeles. You think she’s related to Taylor’s wife?”
You think?
“I know she’s back. What do you think she wants? Where has she been? What has she been doing?” Dispatcher and department gossip—Megan’s unofficial title.
“You’ll have to ask Taylor. Thanks for the info.” Mitch hung up as a vision of blond hair, golden skin and frilly clothing came out of the grocery store, only one small bag in hand, and started his way. He rolled down the window as she neared. “Why is your car rented in your sister’s name? Why didn’t you do it?”
Dark glasses covered her eyes, hiding their expression. He wore dark shades, too, but she wouldn’t be able to read any more if she were looking straight into his eyes.
“What do you need to rent a car, Officer?”
“Driver’s license and credit card.”
“And what did you find inside my washed-away car besides two suitcases, some jewelry, cosmetics and a few mementos?”
Her purse, with her driver’s license and credit cards.
“Jess rented it for me before she left. She knows I’m good for it. And speaking of good…” She held up the shopping bag a moment before depositing it in his lap. “I realized this is going to take me a while, so I thought you might need to cool off.”
One part of his anatomy was quickly turning ice-cold until he lifted the bag and looked inside. It held a bottle of chilled water and an ice cream sandwich.
For the first time in a long time, he was taken by surprise. Under the circumstances, she was the last person he would have expected a thoughtful gesture from. “I—thank you.”
She flashed a smile. “I’ll be out soon as I can.” She strolled back into the store, long legs taking long steps, hips swaying. When had he ever seen Jennifer Burton stroll? When had he ever watched her do anything?
God, he needed a break. A date. A woman.
Any woman who could make him forget all about his boss’s wife.
Jessica loaded more groceries and cleaning supplies than she could possibly use into the trunk of the rental, climbed behind the wheel and glanced at Mitch before backing out. He’d finally shut off the engine and rolled down the windows and he looked hot. Sweat dotted his forehead and likely dampened his shirt as well as his hair. Damp was a good look on him. Wet would probably make her steam.
The cell phone beeped and she punched the speaker button. “It’s about time you called.”
“How’s it going?” Jen asked, her voice ethereal and disembodied through the small speaker.
“I met Taylor this morning and he’s a jerk. What a loser.”
“Oh, I thought he was amazing when we met. He was so handsome and charming and adorable.” She sighed. “Of course, I didn’t know then what I know now.”
“I also met your next-door neighbor.”
“Mrs. Foster? She’s kind of a pain—oh, you mean Mitch Lassiter.”
Who was also kind of a pain, Jessica thought with another glance in the rearview mirror.
“You know you can’t trust him.”
“As if I need you to tell me that.” Bad cop or not, Taylor’s friend or not, Mitch Lassiter was the sort of man any smart woman watched out for. Handsome enough to make Taylor look like a toad, sexy enough, too, but lacking in charm, and adorable simply wasn’t in the vocabulary that applied to him. He was dark. Hard. Dangerous.
