“You’re impersonating a government agent,” she accused him, gesturing toward the badge Jed had lifted off Rowe Cusack when he had saved the DEA agent during the prison riot.
With a twinge of guilt, he slid it back into the pocket of his jeans. Rowe hadn’t mentioned it, so he probably hadn’t realized that Jed was the prisoner who had stolen it from him. The riot had been so chaotic and dangerous that the man had, no doubt, been more concerned about his life than his badge.
“That’s the least of the charges I’m facing,” Jed pointed out. “Thanks to you.”
“Me?” Her voice cracked with emotion, and she stepped back, as if cowering from him in fear. “I had nothing to do with any of the things you’ve done.”
“You had everything to do with it.”
She shook her head. “No …”
He followed her, closing the distance between them. “Why did you do it?”
For three years that question had nagged at him. He could not figure out what her motivation had been.
Greed? Revenge? Once he had thought her too sweet and innocent for either emotion, but he’d had three years to realize how wrong he’d been about her.
“Wh-what did I do?” she asked, as if she really didn’t know.
He chuckled at her attempt to feign innocence. But then those looks of an angel had probably always let her get away with her misdeeds. No one would ever suspect how devious she really was. “You set me up, sweetheart.”
He had once called her sweetheart and meant it; he had been such a fool. “What did you get out of it? Money?”
If she had, she hadn’t spent it on this place. There were cracks in the plaster ceiling and walls, and the hardwood floors were worn. The curtains even fluttered at the windows, as if the cold air blew right through the thin panes of glass.
He moved closer, trapping her between his body and the wall she had backed up against. “Revenge?”
He’d thought that she had understood why he’d had to break up with her before he left for Afghanistan. It wouldn’t have been fair to expect her to wait for him, especially when there had been a strong possibility that he might not even return.
But he shouldn’t have worried about her; she definitely hadn’t waited for him. When he had come back home after his year-long deployment, she had already been wearing another man’s ring.
“Revenge?” She echoed his question. “What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. She hadn’t seemed to care enough about his dumping her to want revenge on him. But then they hadn’t been going out long when he’d received his deployment orders, calling him from the reserves back into active duty. “I don’t know why you did it.”
“Did what?” she asked, her brow furrowing with confusion.
Jed leaned down, so that his forehead nearly touched hers. “I don’t know why you helped frame me for murder. Or was it all your idea?”
From having once interviewed her for a job, he knew her educational background and IQ. She was more than smart enough to have masterminded the embezzlement, murders and frame-up herself. And he wasn’t the only man on whom she might have wanted revenge.
She gasped, and her breath was warm against his face. “I didn’t. I had nothing to do with those murders.”
Jed eased back to study her beautiful face. No wonder she had fooled him into falling for her lies and for her; she was a damn good actress because she nearly had him believing she wasn’t involved. And he knew better.
“You had to be in on it,” he insisted. “Or you would have come forward when I was arrested. Instead you disappeared.”
She shook her head, tumbling her blond hair around her slender shoulders. In a bulky wool sweater, she looked so small and fragile. But he wouldn’t let her looks deceive him again.
“I didn’t disappear,” she protested. “My aunt Eleanor’s health was failing, so I came home to take care of her.”
“My lawyer couldn’t find you.” And Jed had told the man that she might have returned to Miller’s Valley where she’d grown up with her great aunt.
Her brow furrowed again. “Mr. Leighton definitely found me. I talked to him.”
“No …”
Marcus Leighton wouldn’t have lied to him. He was more than Jed’s defense lawyer; he’d been his fraternity brother, too. And his friend.
“If he found you, he would have made you come forward.” And provide the alibi that would have cleared Jed of all the charges against him.
“Mr. Leighton didn’t want me to testify,” she said, “because my testimony would only make you look guiltier.”
Now he knew she was the one lying. He chuckled at her weak attempt to fool him. “I was with you during the murders. Your testimony would prove my innocence. You were my alibi.”
Her face flushed bright red, but she shook her head again in denial. “I can’t testify to what I can’t remember.”
“What the hell …? You’re claiming amnesia?” There was no way Marcus would have believed that, and if he’d put her on the stand, the jury would have realized she was lying, too. Why hadn’t Marcus put her on the stand if he’d actually found her?
“I was drugged,” she said. “And I have the test results to prove it. I don’t remember that night.”
No matter how hard he’d tried over the past three years, he hadn’t been able to forget that night. Or her …
How could she claim to remember none of it?
“So if using me was part of your plan, it didn’t work,” she said, anger replacing the fear in her eyes as she glared up at him. “I can’t alibi you.”
“You’re lying.” She had to be, otherwise he had lost his one hope of proving his innocence.
“Why would I lie?” she asked.
That was the question that had nagged at him.
Why?
A board creaked behind him, alerting him to someone else’s presence. Had he been set up again?
He grabbed Erica, wrapping one arm around her waist and his other around her neck, so he could threaten to snap it if her backup had a weapon. Then he whirled toward the intruder.
And pain clutched his heart with all the force of a gunshot. But he hadn’t been shot; he’d just been shocked by the appearance of the child who stumbled down the hall, wiping sleep from her dark eyes.
“Don’t hurt her,” Erica pleaded in an urgent whisper. “She’s just a baby.”
The child was actually two—probably almost three years old. She blinked and stared blearily up at him and Erica.
“Mommy?”
“Sweetheart, you need to go back to bed,” Erica said, her voice tremulous despite her obvious efforts to sound calm and reassuring.
The little girl’s lips pursed into a pout. “I wanna a drink,” she stubbornly insisted.
Suddenly aware of how tightly he held her, Jed dropped his arms from around Erica’s delicate frame. “You can get her the drink.” He pitched his voice lower, so only she could hear him. “I won’t hurt her.”
Erica glanced from him to her daughter and back, obviously reluctant to leave him alone with her child.
But this kid was his, too. She was the spitting image of