The Trouble with Temptation (34 page)

You’re dismissed
.

Everything about her posture screamed it.

I don’t think so.

He caught her arm. “Fine,” he bit off. “We’ll talk now.”

She jerked away. “I don’t care to be manhandled, Brannon McKay.”

“And I don’t care to be totally shoved out without you telling me what the hell the problem is!” he shouted.

“Shoved out?” She stared at him and then, she started to laugh. It was a cold, brittle sound and it hurt his ears, his heart, to hear it. “Shoved
out
? Oh,
honey
. But that gives the implication you
even wanted in
.”

Time slowed to a pause as she leaned in. She pressed her lips closed to his ear.
“I’m not looking for any sort of relationship. Sex is all well and good, but I don’t want anything else.”
She settled back in front of him, one brow cocked. “Those words sound familiar, Brannon?”

Fuck.

“Hannah—”

“Hey.” She held up her hands, palm out. “It’s all cool, Brannon. I told you that last day, I’d find a way to stop loving you. I guess I should thank you. Lying to me the way you’ve done? You helped me figure it out—I think I can stop loving you now, Brannon.”

“I didn’t lie to you!”

“Didn’t you?”

She stared at him, her eyes empty.

He swore and shoved a hand through his hair.

“Look, Hannah—”

The radio on her collar squawked.

She jumped, the sound startling them both.

J.P. hopped out of the back. “Gotta roll, sweets!” he called.

He gave Brannon a grim look as Hannah ran around to the front. “You better fix this, you dumb shit,” J.P. said in a low voice.

Fix it?

He was still standing there in dull, dazed shock as the ambulance screeched away, sirens wailing.

*   *   *

“Any chance you’re being too hard on the guy?” J.P. asked.

It was nearly three hours later and both of them were exhausted.

Of course, anybody would be exhausted.

They’d been called out to Doris Waverly’s house and although they’d hoped that it would just be another false alarm, it had been an empty hope.

Doris Waverly was one of the sweetest ladies in town, with a heart the size of the entire state of Mississippi. Sadly, her body seemed to think it was supposed to keep up. She weighed nearly four hundred pounds and that great, massive heart of hers had given out.

She’d called in numerous times, claiming she was having a heart attack and this time, she’d been right.

They’d been able to get her heart started and now it was up to the doctors to keep her alive—and Doris herself, of course. If she didn’t get her weight under control, sooner or later, the heart attacks would kill her.

Hannah’s back was killing her.

Her thighs were killing her.

Everything
seemed to be killing her.

Giving J.P. a baleful look, she warned, “Don’t.”

“I can’t help it.” He shook his head. “Hannah, look … I can’t claim to know the guy well, but I know what a dumbass in love looks like. And he’s got all the symptoms.”

*   *   *

It was elbow to elbow inside Treasure Island and he all but had to shove his way through to get a seat by the window.

A couple of people hailed him.

One woman slid her hand along his back and smiled at him.

His ex-wife nodded at him and went back to her discussion with several other women.

He’d planned to be here to keep an eye on Hannah’s place. He knew she was working today and he’d wanted to see what she thought of what he’d left for her, but that was no longer his primary concern.

“Did you hear the news?” He glanced up to see Toot Fink look at him expectantly.

“The news?” He shrugged. “Hard not to hear it. Unless you’re in a coma.”

He was most certainly
not
in a coma.

Roger Hardee was dead.

Roger wasn’t
supposed
to be dead.

He certainly hadn’t
left
him dead.

Toot leaned in and whispered, “Doc Shaw found him. You know about her and her … problems, right?”

Because it was considered polite, he waited a moment before he nodded.

Toot gravely nodded back.

“She was over there. Had probably gone over for…” Toot shrugged in lieu of saying anything. “Then she found him. Called Beau. Man, that had to get him in the gut, his wife calling him from where she’d been planning to screw some other guy and then she finds him dead.”

Toot’s watery blue eyes narrowed and he added, “Some people are saying it’s a conspiracy. That Beau actually killed him and they fixed this all up so Beau would look innocent, because who’d believe she’d actually
call
him like that.”

“Officer Shaw didn’t kill him,” a man next to him said with a snort.

He flagged down the bartender, a solid-looking black man with an easy, affable smile. “Glenlivet.” He paused, then said, “A double. Neat.”

A smile creased the man’s dark face. “Been a lot of that goin’ around today. Now the man who could really use a drink can’t really have one, though.”

“I’m sorry?”

The bartender’s brows shot up. “Roger Hardee, man. He’s dead.”

“Dead.” He said it slowly and then shook his head before looking over at Toot. The old man grimaced.

“You heard me.” Nodding, the bartender set him up with his scotch and after he put the whiskey down, he braced his elbows on the counter. “It’s why we’re so crazy busy in here. Everybody’s here to speculate, make no mistake.”

“Poor bastard.” He lifted his glass to his lips and took a slow drink, even as he fumed inside. Miserable bastard was more like it. “What happened? He didn’t…” He grimaced and then added, “Well…”

“Wasn’t suicide, I don’t think.” The bartender shook his head and then looked up as a big, bearded man shouted from the other end.

“Chap!”

The black man grimaced and shoved away from the bar. “Gotta move. You running a tab?”

He nodded and turned his attention back out the window.

Hannah’s lights were still out.

It was a mild irritation, but only a mild one. He’d put a great deal of thought into that but now, he had other concerns.

What had gone wrong?

“Well, I heard it was his heart.”

Tensing, he shifted his attention to the mirror that ran the length of the bar, following the voice, waiting until he could assign it to an owner.

The old bat who let her dog shit everywhere. Mouton.

She had her hand pressed to her chest as she leaned in, talking to the stooped old figure that was Janet Stafford. Her daughter-in-law, Jennie Hayes Stafford, now owned the bookstore that had been a fixture in town for years. Janet and Mrs. Mouton were fixtures themselves, gossips. Fountains of information, really.

Janet Stafford nodded, her frail hand gripping a glass similar to the one the man at the bar held. There would be no fine Scotch in it, though. She preferred her whiskey cheap, akin to paint thinner. Claimed it kept her young and her mind sharp.

Nobody would argue with her, either. She was ninety-five years old and sharp was just the tip of the iceberg.

“His heart, alright,” she said, sipping her whiskey and shaking her head. “In more ways than one. His daddy died of a heart attack. Wasn’t even sixty. Should have tried having two fingers of whiskey a day instead of the crap red wine everybody talks about these days.”

Mrs. Mouton leaned closer, looking around. Secrets, of course.

But then her voice carried.

Everybody sitting within ten feet made a show of doing something else, talking to their neighbor, checking the time.

As soon as she looked back at Janet, the matron said, her voice strong and clear, “My granddaughter was getting some bloodwork done a few months ago when he had to get one of them stress tests. His ticker was shot. He didn’t do it here, though. Went into Baton Rouge. She had to—her insurance and all…”

She waved a hand, dismissing her granddaughter’s reasons for not getting whatever she needed done here, although everybody knew the likely reason.

Bethany Mouton was five months pregnant.

Nobody cared about that.

They all latched onto the other key bit of information.

A stress test.

Blindly, he stared into the amber liquid in his glass. The surface trembled slightly and he lowered it, then pressed his hand to the surface of the bar.

His hands were shaking.

It was a fine tremor, likely unnoticed by anybody.

He’d noticed though.

Roger Hardee’s heart had been bad.

That was why he’d died.

It wasn’t that much of an issue, not really.

But it was a fact he should have known.

He’d missed it.

He’d messed
up
.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Hannah pressed her back against the door and closed her eyes. She stood inside her dark, quiet apartment and took a moment to just breathe. That was all she wanted.

A few moments of quiet.

She had had days from hell but nothing like this.

Brannon …

Her heart ached, like a gaping, open wound and there was no emergency medical treatment in the world that could provide any relief for this pain.

More and more memories were slowly churning their way free, like she’d dragged a rake through the soil of her brain and now all those little rocks were stabbing tiny holes into her heart.

But he’d looked at her like
he
was the one who’d been torn open. Like
he
was the one who’d had his chest cavity pried open, his heart ripped out and stepped on.

He’d been doing that to her for years. Then he’d
lied
to her.

All of these months. Coming over here.

Making her think he cared. Like they had a chance.

She swallowed and dashed at the tears that had started to fall.

Screw that.

Screw the tears.

Hadn’t she hurt enough over him already? All her damn
life
?

All he had to do was be honest. Tell her they’d slept together and if he wanted to be part of the baby’s life, she would have let him. Why did he have to mislead her like that? And he’d told her he loved her.

But all he’d been doing was making himself feel better or some shit like that. Assuaging his guilt, maybe. It wasn’t like she’d
blamed
him. He wasn’t at fault for what had happened.

Groaning, she dragged her hands up and down her face. Now she was thinking about Roger, too. And how
he
had looked at her. Her stomach twisted violently and she swallowed back the bile that had been threatening to rise all afternoon. She was well past the morning sickness stage, but her stomach had never exactly returned to normal and this was a little more than she could take.

That poor bastard.

She’d never really cared for Roger Hardee, but she knew he’d loved his wife. Now Shayla had annoyed Hannah something awful, had pushed all her buttons in the worst way, but Roger had just been a nuisance.

Then he’d been pitiful, and pitiable.

He’d loved his wife. Roger had loved Shayla and grieved for her and pushed to find who had killed her. Now he was gone, too.

He’d come to Hannah, all but begging her to help, to remember.

There was still a pit in her mind, a few holes left to be filled. The amnesia was nothing she could control and she knew it, but it didn’t help the knot of guilt she felt inside.

Tears burned her eyes while a headache pounded inside her skull and her muscles knotted with fatigue.

As a day, today had been a complete and total pain in the ass. Of course, it had been worse for others. Gideon had to have his hands full, dealing with everything going on from Roger’s death, not to mention still trying to tie up everything from Senator Robert’s strange suicide. The cops around the small town needed a bonus—and lots of chocolate.

She still needed to call the chief and update him, but she’d do it later, when she wasn’t so exhausted.

She couldn’t even find it in herself to shove away from the door or turn on the lights.

She was so tired. Resting a hand on her belly, she said, “It has to get better. Right?”

She laughed and the cynical sound of it bounced off the walls, came back to her.

For some reason, it sounded … wrong.

Slowly, she reached out a hand and flipped the switch for the lights but nothing happened.

At the same time, she took a step forward, bracing her body. For what, she didn’t know.

Something crunched under her work boot. Something fine and brittle. Like a light bulb.

The lights didn’t come on.

She pulled the pen light she used for work from the pocket on her cargos and flipped it on.

She sucked in a breath through her teeth.

Simultaneously, she jerked open the door behind her, letting light shine in as she grabbed her phone from her pocket. But she didn’t dial. She just stood there, fear a scream in her brain.

Hannah didn’t handle blind terror well.

She didn’t handle terror well
period
.

Most of it had been burned out of her as a child, at the hands of her stepfather, then it had been choked out of her as she’d watched him brutalize her mother even as Hannah begged the small, terrified woman to leave, to run away.

Years of watching that kind of abuse had strengthened Hannah’s core to one of tempered steel.

But she could still feel fear.

What she saw in the wedge of light shining in from the hallway behind her left her frozen with the soul-stealing numbness of terror.

She was staring at a threat.

Possibly more, but absolutely nothing less.

Nor was it an empty threat.

Her mind flashed back to the robe, to the rock that had been left in the robe’s pocket.

Such an innocuous thing, that rock. She had seen hundreds of them. Thousands. When she ran along the path by the river, especially down there by the house boat, she saw them all the time. How could she have forgotten something so simple as that?