She blew out a breath and plunged in. “I was going to ask Peter for a divorce when he got home last night.” She addressed her words to her shoes, not feeling up to making eye contact with the detective who was doing all the questioning right about now.
But then, he’d probably take that as some sort of a silent admission of guilt, she realized. Blowing out another breath, she forced herself to look up at the man.
“Except that he didn’t,” she said quietly once she’d reestablished eye contact.
Something sharp pricked at his insides the moment their eyes met. Nick tried to shrug it off. It didn’t budge.
“I see,” he said without a shred of emotion evident in his voice, successfully masking his feelings.
It was at that moment that Detective Nick Jeffries made a stunning and rather uncomfortable discovery. He realized that he was attracted to this woman, deeply attracted. Moreover, it wasn’t just her delicate looks that had hooked and reeled him in, it was her underlying vulnerability, which he could see she tried to cover up at all costs.
But the very existence of that vulnerability had awakened his dormant protective streak, a streak he had thought he’d successfully laid to rest more than a few years ago.
Apparently, he’d thought wrong.
Chapter 3
As Nick tried to bury this unsettling and somewhat annoying realization, Juarez’s cellphone rang.
Juarez snapped to attention and seemed to go on high alert even before he pulled his phone out of his pocket. He blinked, clearing his vision, and then looked at the screen to identify the caller.
Rather than just answer it, the young detective continued to stare at the name, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
Finally, he glanced up at Nick and said numbly, “It’s my wife.” The next moment, he shivered as a sudden attack of nerves seized him. His mouth choked out, “This could be it.”
“It?” Nick repeated. Completely focused on the sheriff’s widow, he had no idea what his partner was talking about.
Juarez nodded, still staring at the phone. “The baby’s due anytime now,” he said, repeating what he’d said earlier—and the day before, and the day before that. “She could be calling to tell me that she’s in labor.” His voice took on a panicked note as it went up two octaves, then cracked.
“Don’t you think you should answer it, then?” Nick coaxed, utterly mystified at the way his partner’s mind seemed to work—if indeed it actually was working at all, which he was beginning to doubt.
“Yeah, right,” Juarez cried.
He fumbled with the cellphone, managing to almost disconnect himself from the incoming call before he finally hit the right key to answer it.
Juarez’s hands visibly shook as he put the cellphone to his ear. “Tina? Is it time?” His eyes grew huge as he listened to his wife’s answer. Literally stunned, his eyes shifted over to look at Nick. “It’s time,” he announced breathlessly.
He gave every indication that he was about to hyperventilate.
“Then I suggest you start breathing evenly, get in your car and go,” Nick responded, uttering each word slowly, as if he were speaking to someone who was mentally challenged.
“Right. Go.” As if someone had fired a starter pistol, Juarez scrambled for the door. But when he reached it, he suddenly came to a skidding stop. The rest of his brain—the part that knew it was on duty—kicked in. “What about you?” the younger detective asked. “If I take the car, you’ll be stranded. How are you going to get back to the squad room?”
Nick waved away his concern. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll call someone,” he told the other man, his tone confident. And then he ordered, “Go. Your wife needs you. And try not to hit anything on your way there,” he called after the swiftly departing detective.
“Okay,” Juarez yelled back.
When Nick looked back at the sheriff’s widow, she had an odd expression on her face. He couldn’t begin to interpret it.
“Something wrong?” he asked her.
Suzy shook her head. “I just envy his wife, that’s all,” she said wistfully. “He looked really excited about becoming a father.”
“He looked really clueless,” Nick corrected. “And so far, that seems to be pretty much his natural state,” he added in what turned out to be a completely unguarded moment. It was out of character for him. As a rule, he didn’t usually let on what he thought of the people he worked with—or the ones he questioned for that matter.
“Still, he loves her.” And love had a way of making up for a host of failings, she thought. “You can see it in his eyes.”
Nick took his cue from her wording, following it through. “And what did you see when you looked into your husband’s eyes?” he asked, curious as to what her answer would be.
Suzy shrugged in a careless manner that seemed a little too precise to him—and possibly practiced. “Barriers. Walls. Someone I didn’t know.”
And that, she knew, had been the true reason for the death of their marriage. Because she’d realized that after all this time, Peter was more of a stranger to her now than he had been when they’d first gotten married.
Was the woman saying that because it was how she’d actually felt, or was she laying the groundwork to distance herself from whatever the investigation would turn up about the sheriff?
She wasn’t as easy to read as he’d first thought. Nick felt himself being reeled in a little further, despite his resistance to the idea. He knew he was on slippery footing.
“Did your husband have any enemies?” Nick asked her.
Suzy thought for a moment, but it really didn’t matter how long she took, she decided. She would arrive at the same conclusion: she didn’t think so, but she didn’t know for sure.
With a sigh, Suzy shook her head. “Not that he ever mentioned, but to be honest, I really don’t know. I know that Peter was away at night more and more. When I asked him about it a couple of times, he said that he was working late on a case.” It had sounded like an excuse to her at the time, but maybe she was doing Peter a disservice. “Maybe he was,” she said out loud. “But at the time, I thought that there was another woman in the picture—or six.”
How had she arrived at that number, Nick wondered. Most women would have said one or two. “Six?”
When he said the number, it sounded foolish. Suzy shrugged. “Sorry, that was flippant. I really don’t know how many he was seeing—or if he actually was seeing someone else. My pregnancy had me pretty miserable and looking back, maybe I took it out on him.”
Added to that, she’d worked until a little more than a week before she delivered. What that translated to, Suzy thought, was that she and Peter hardly saw each other toward the end.
Nick wasn’t quite ready to allow this line of questioning to drop just yet. “Did you ever find anything concrete to back up these suspicions, something that might have got you thinking he was seeing someone else?”
“I didn’t look,” she admitted, unconsciously raising her chin again defensively. “I didn’t want to be one of those snooping, bitter women.” Besides, she thought, as long as she didn’t find anything, there was always the hope that she was wrong. Other times, she was fairly sure she wasn’t wrong. “To be honest,” she continued in a distant, quiet voice, “I was a little relieved when I thought that Peter was seeing someone else.”
Nick