Smoothing the rolled edge of her pajama top flat, Molly unbuttoned the garment slowly, making herself go through the simple, grounding motions. She couldn’t afford to think.
Skimming off her bottoms, she slid into jeans and a sweat shirt and ripped a brush through her hair. Red scrawled across her cheek as she tried to put on lipstick, and she flung the lipstick case back onto her dresser with a violence that surprised her.
Wiping the slash of crimson off her cheek, she shuddered.
She didn’t need any more red today.
She hurried down the stairs. “I called the police station,” she muttered as she opened the door.
“Good.” His voice was like hot chocolate on cold ice cream, just that edge of hardness under the smooth.
Bigger and more powerful than she’d realized, he filled the doorway and stepped into her house, wiping his feet carefully.
The bottoms of his expensive black slacks were mud spattered. Bayou mud and dried sand.
Backing up, Molly wanted to slam the door and run.
He must have seen something in her face, because he stopped. “Do we have a problem here?” He was all waiting stillness, power held in abeyance.
“No. No problem,” she said, hearing the lie, knowing he did, too, as he inclined his head toward her, listening carefully. She cleared her throat. “How can I help you? What’s happened?” She twisted her fingers together and sensed, rather than saw, his gaze behind the mask of dark glasses follow their movements. She stopped, let her hands lie easily along the side seams of her jeans.
And tried to breathe past the constriction in her chest. “What do you want?”
He slid a notebook from his shirt pocket. Underneath his jacket, she glimpsed his thin, black leather belt, the shine of its narrow buckle. Glimpsed, too, the edge of a shoulder holster.
As he flipped open the notebook with his long, thin fingers, Molly braced herself.
“You’re off the beaten path here, Ms.—” He checked his notebook, but she didn’t believe for a minute that he didn’t remember her name. Something about his careful stance, his slow turning of pages told her he knew.
She let him play out his game.
“Ms. Harris.” He nodded, but Molly didn’t answer. The sigh of an early morning wind filled the silence between them.
She couldn’t have spoken. Didn’t know what to say. She only knew she had to hold on to the center of her being with every ounce of energy she had or she’d go spinning apart.
He nodded again. His pen slid along the edge of his notebook. “Ms. Harris, do you remember seeing or hearing anything unusual last night?”
She wished she could. “Nothing,” she said, worrying the cuticle of her thumb with her finger. “I was asleep.” The lie trembled off her lips.
His pen moved steadily across the page. “Were you.” It wasn’t a question.
Reflexively glancing at the slash in her palm, she stopped abruptly. “Why? What’s happened?”
He reached out for her hand, turning it in his. His hand was strong, his fingertips rough. “Painful cut.”
“I was peeling vegetables, carrots. For soup.” Her throat gone dry, she swallowed and coughed.
“Sore throat?” he asked, still holding her hand palm up.
His fingers closed around her hand, capturing it.
“No.” She was afraid to tug her hand free.
He tilted her hand toward the light and studied it. “There’s a nasty virus going around.” He looked at her. The glasses concealed his expression as he said, “You want to be careful, Ms. Harris. You could be coming down with something.”
“No. I’m not catching a cold.” Molly knew he wasn’t asking out of concern for her health. “Why are you here?” She withdrew her hand, managing not to jerk it out of his light, careful grasp.
“There’s been a problem. Down at your part of the bayou. Near the boat pier.”
Feeling as if she were moving through shifting sand, Molly went to the living room window facing the bayou and looked out. Off in the distance she saw a van and several figures milling around the edge of the water. “What happened?” She turned back to face him, but the light was at her back and she couldn’t see him clearly even though he removed his sunglasses and hooked them into his pocket, but she had an impression of grim eyes, golden brown, watching her.
“Someone was murdered last night on your bayou.”
Murdered. “Are you sure? Murdered?” The word tolled through her, over and over, like the deep-toned bells of the First Presbyterian Church in town. Murder. Irrevocable.
“Oh, yes, we’re sure.” His thin mouth lifted. “No question. Two fishermen passing by early this morning saw the body and called us. Yes, we’re sure.” His long fingers curled around his notebook. “You know anything that could help us?”
“I told you. I was asleep.”
“Yes. So you did.” Threat, implicit. Explicit in the dark velvet of his voice, in the hidden gaze.
At some level, ever since she’d woken up on the kitchen floor, she’d been envisioning news like this. But it still short-circuited her brain and left her struggling for an answer while John Harlan’s golden brown eyes followed her every twitch and movement.
“Who?” Her heart pounding like a captured bird, she couldn’t hold his relentless gaze.
CHAPTER TWO
“Why don’t you put on your shoes, and we’ll go down to the bayou together? We believe you could save us some time if you can identify the body.” The detective’s mild voice coaxed her, his tone soothing. She didn’t trust him for a minute. He’d reached for her hand again and his thumb rested lightly, so lightly against the wound in her palm that she felt as if he’d manacled her to him. “Can you do that, Ms. Harris?” He released her wrist with an unreadable expression.
She shivered as his fingers brushed the edges of hers.
“Will you come down to the bayou, please, and take a look at her?” Relentless, his mild voice, deceptive in its honeyed assault that hid the sting.
“Her?” Needing breath, Molly tugged at the neck of her sweatshirt. Nightmare visions, bloodred, danced in her brain.
John Harlan’s gaze watched the nervous pulling of her fingers against the often-washed cotton. “Ah, I’ve distressed you.” His words were oddly old-fashioned. No sympathy in his deep voice, though, despite his polite words. He shifted, one hip slanting forward, the expensive fabric of his slacks flowing and tightening with the casual movement. “Something bothering you, Ms. Harris?”
“You said someone has been murdered. Murder bothers me,” she breathed through chalk-dry lips.
“I’m sure it does,” he said, stepping so close that the power in his looming form and wide shoulders made her claustrophobic. “Well, that makes at least two of us then. I don’t like murder, either.” His courteous expression, at odds with his tough face, never altered as his voice dropped so deep that Molly felt its vibration down to her toes. “Or murderers.”
Molly retreated. She couldn’t help her backward step. Not for the life of her could she have stayed unmoving in the face of his inexorable advance.
“Shoes?” he reminded her gently, his hands resting easily on his narrow hips, not touching her. Yet she felt the press of his broad palm hot at the base of her spine.
She