Mortal Crimes: 7 Novels of Suspense (76 page)

She blinked back the tears that threatened to overflow from behind her eyes.

“I haven’t been back here since then. What made you think I’d be here now?”

He searched her face.

“I knew you’d need to find a quiet place to think. A place to where you could see the sky and the water. I followed a hunch.”

She managed a tremulous smile. “Good tracker instincts.”

He grinned back. “I learned from the best.”

They looked at one another for a moment, and she let herself enjoy the warmth of their banter.

Then she tilted her head and said, “I thought you left town.”

He averted his gaze, looked out over the water and said, “I was going to. I saw you with”—he paused and tripped over the name but managed to get it out—“Mitchell in the hospital. You were holding his hand.”

Aroostine’s heightened emotions went flat. She was suddenly deflated, tired. “He’s a friend. A friend who helped me save your life, don’t forget. And if you have to know, I was telling him that I still love you.”

Her pride was screaming at her for making that confession, but she ignored it. She wasn’t going to let her desire for dignity blot out the truth. Joe wanted to make a life without her? Fine, she couldn’t prevent that. But she could make sure he made his choices with complete knowledge of what he was leaving behind.

She raised her chin and met his gaze levelly and unblinkingly.

His eyes reflected the pain she felt.

“I know that now, ‘Roo. Your bossy friend Rosie read me the riot act.” He reached out and stroked her hair. “I love you, too.”

Her breath caught in her chest, and, for a moment, hope fluttered in her belly. Then she remembered.

“Right. So much that you filed for divorce.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Really?”

He sighed. “Really. We had a good thing going. We built a life. You were the county’s most-respected lawyer. My business was good. We had Rufus, the house, our friends. Weekends out at the lake. Skiing in the winter. Fishing in the summer. But that wasn’t enough for you.”

She opened her mouth to protest but he kept talking. “I tried, I really tried to support what you want. But I can’t.”

Tears stung her eyes. “I just want to
do
some good, Joe. You know, make a difference. Change the world. Don’t you have those big, secret dreams?”

He smiled at her, a crooked, sad kind of smile.

“No, Warrior Girl. I don’t. My dreams are pretty humble, and they aren’t exactly a secret. Love my wife. Love my work. Maybe make a couple of little Jackmans to play with. Raise them right so maybe
they
can change the world. That was enough for me. That
is
enough for me.”

He reached into his pocket. He pulled out a crumpled white envelope and pressed it into her hands.

She peeked inside. It was filled with gray ashes.

“What’s this?”

“The divorce papers. I called my lawyer and told him to withdraw it. Then I burned my copy.”

She stared down at the fine, burned particles for what felt like a long time and listened to her heart hammer in her chest.

“What does this mean, Joe?”

She looked up into his eyes. He held her gaze.

“What do you want it mean?”

She wanted it to mean that her marriage wasn’t dead, that they could start fresh, that the mess she’d made of her life wasn’t permanent.

“I never wanted a divorce.”

“I know, ‘Roo.” He dug his foot into the hard earth and kicked at a clump of clay with the toe of his boot. “Will you come home?”

He wanted her back. Her entire body went limp with relief. She saw herself curled into his side on the couch, snow falling soft and deep outside, Rufus trying to snuggle in between them, flames dancing in the fireplace.

But.

She’d be admitting she couldn’t hack it at Justice. Proving Slater right. Could she really live with herself if she took off under a cloud of conduct unbecoming an attorney? Slinking out of town with Joe was tantamount to saying she didn’t have what it took to be a federal prosecutor.

She’d worked too hard to concede defeat.
Hadn’t she?

Her relief dissolved into a puddle of dismay and she felt utterly sick, like that time she wolfed down a corndog and then rode the Round Up at the county fair.

She remembered how Joe had held her hair back and rubbed her shoulders while she vomited into a rusty trash barrel conveniently positioned just outside the gate at the ride’s exit.

He watched her now with sad, resigned eyes.

“You won’t, will you?”

She closed her eyes and called up another image, this one of their wedding. A hot July Saturday. Bees hummed in the wildflower-dotted field behind their farmhouse. Her smooth cotton sundress, the daisies woven into her hair. His pressed slacks and the robin’s egg blue shirt that made his eyes sparkle like the clearest ocean. They’d recited their vows full of hope, and love, and joy. It seemed so long ago and, at the same time, it could have been just last month.

The sun-kissed memory dissolved, replaced by a sharp, clear picture of the beaver.

It stood on its hind legs in a small stream. Long grass grew on the hilly bank and an old elm shaded the water.

She knew that stream. It ran behind the barn where Joe had his workshop. She and Rufus loved to wade through it and look for frogs after she finished her work for the day and locked up the small office on the square.

Are you telling me to go home?
She formed the question silently in her mind.

The beaver turned its silver eyes and stared at her wordlessly. A bird swooped low just above its head, and the wind carried it away over the hill. The beaver didn’t move; its eyes were locked with hers.

“Aroostine?”

Joe’s voice jolted her back to reality, away from the stream in Pennsylvania to the craggy boulder in Virginia.

She’d spent most of her life distancing herself from her animal spirit guide and everything it meant. She’d ignored her nature to fit into the larger world. Was she now really going to let an imaginary beaver tell her what to do?

She looked at Joe for a moment before she slid down from the rock.

She stepped forward and slipped her hand into his.

“Let’s go home,” she whispered.

THANK YOU

I hope you enjoyed meeting Aroostine! I’m hard at work on the next book in the series (
Chilling Effect
). You can look for it this Fall. First, though, I’ll be releasing the sixth full-length novel in my Sasha McCandless legal thriller series (
Irrevocable Trust
, coming Summer 2014). While I’m furiously writing, here are some more suggestions to keep you busy:

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Melissa F. Miller is a commercial litigator. She has practiced in the offices of international law firms in Pittsburgh, PA and Washington, D.C. She and her husband now practice law together in their two-person firm in South Central Pennsylvania, where they live with their three young children. When not in court or on the playground, Melissa writes crime fiction. Like Sasha McCandless, she drinks entirely too much coffee; unlike Sasha, she cannot kill you with her bare hands.

SOLE INTENTION:

INTENTION SERIES BOOK #1

M. A. COMLEY

Copyright © 2013 M. A. Comley

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the author.

PROLOGUE

Sweat poured from her brow. Her clothes clung to her as she ran for her life through the ink-black forest. She’d already bumped into several tree trunks while looking over her shoulder for him.

Why me? Why is he so desperate to kill me?

She tripped over a half-hidden log and landed in a pile of autumn leaves, but she was up running again within a few seconds. Her life depended on it.

Stop thinking and just run!

She could hear him tracking her—the sound of crunching undergrowth getting ever nearer. She had no place to hide.
Is that why he brought me here? Of course.
The question was: would she ever leave this place alive?

Another stray branch slashed her cheek, distracting her. As she tumbled over a large fallen tree trunk, her heart almost shuddered to a stop. She tried to get up and continue running but winced as a sharp pain shot up her leg. She looked down at her ankle. It hung at an odd angle. “Fuck! Damn and fuck.”

The noise of leaves rustling behind her made her turn her head sharply. She didn’t see the flat head of the shovel until it was inches from her face.

“Run from me would you, bitch?”

Stars danced through her terrified brain. She tumbled back into the damp undergrowth, but her attacker quickly yanked her upright again and slammed her back against a wide tree. Everything was a daze, except the way he was glaring at her. She felt the rope slither around her torso, then groaned when it tightened, pushing the air out of her burning lungs. “Please don’t hurt me,” she whispered, fear tearing at her vocal chords.