RaeAnne Thayne Hope's Crossings Series Volume One: Blackberry Summer\Woodrose Mountain\Sweet Laurel Falls (15 page)

She considered the idea. “Okay, that's an option. Maybe whoever gave Caroline her car was only the one who started it all, then others joined it.”

“I like it. So, really, the Angel of Hope could be anyone. And everyone.”

They lapsed into an easy sort of silence while she mulled the likelihood of that. It did fit. She had always considered it a little unlikely that one person could be orchestrating everything.

How would such a group work? Would they act independently or gather for a vote on who to help? While the rain clicked against the windows and the wind howled in the eaves of the old house and the fire simmered in the grate, she imagined the scene. A group of mysterious do-gooders gathered in a room
somewhere drinking coffee and discussing the troubles of the people in Hope's Crossing like the court of Zeus on Olympus.

She smiled a little at the image and opened her mouth to share it with Riley when she noticed his eyes were closed—really closed this time.

His hand had stopped moving on Chester's fur and his chest was rising and falling in a steady, even rhythm.

“Riley?” she whispered. Her only answer was Chester's snuffly breathing.

Definitely sleeping this time. Poor man. He had all but admitted he was struggling to deal with his niece's death. She wished there was some way she could ease his pain. No basket of goodies or envelope full of cash could fix this. Even the Angel of Hope—or angels, as the case may be—wouldn't have any magic cure.

Nor should there be, she thought. Some pain was simply meant to be endured.

Riley looked a different person in the circle of light cast by the lamp at his elbow. When her children slept, they looked peaceful and sweet, but Riley somehow looked much more like the rowdy rascal he'd been as a boy than the contained adult he'd become.

What would it be like to have the freedom to kiss that hard mouth? To dip her fingers in that thick, wavy hair and brush her lips against his ear…

She pressed a hand to her trembling stomach. What on earth was the matter with her? This was
Riley!
She had no business entertaining those sorts of thoughts about him. Besides the age difference…her thoughts trailed off. Okay, three years didn't seem like a big
deal when she was thirty-six and he was thirty-three. But she could still remember him so vividly as a nine-year-old pest, driving her and Alex crazy.

She let out a breath. He wasn't that pest anymore. He was a man, tough and muscled, dangerously attractive. And she was a divorced mother whose love life consisted of watching lush, sweeping movies made out of Jane Austen books with a box of tissues and a bowl of popcorn.

The pain pills in her system must be messing with her. Sure, she knew they caused drowsiness and could lead to stomach upset. She found it more than a little disturbing that the prescription label hadn't once mentioned as a possible side effect inappropriate sexual urges—toward
completely
inappropriate individuals.

A smart woman would wake him up and send him home where he could stretch out on his own bed and take all that…maleness…with him.

She opened her mouth to do just that and then closed it again. He had looked so very tired when he came in. If he was comfortable and could rest, it seemed cruel to wake him and send him out into the cold rain.

Hadn't she just been thinking that she wished she knew some way to offer solace? Maybe a few hours' rest were just what he needed.

“Riley?” she whispered again, giving one more try.

He released a long sigh of a breath and seemed to settle deeper into the easy chair. Even though she had a strong feeling she would live to regret this, she didn't have the heart to wake him. Instead, she picked up an
other soft throw from the back of the sofa and carefully arranged it over him.

She would have done the same thing for Macy and Owen, she told herself as she settled back onto the sofa and tucked her own blanket around her aching leg. She was only being kind to an old friend. The gesture had nothing to do with the crazy, foolish part of her that liked having him there while the storm raged outside and the fire sizzled softly in the grate.

CHAPTER SEVEN

H
E HAD SOME HALF-ASSED
dream that he was back in Oakland, deep undercover, his hair shaggy and long and always in the way, the two-day stubble uncomfortable and itchy, wearing clothes that stank of vodka and God only knows what else.

He was hanging with Oscar Ayala, a major player in the
Catorce
gang's drug distribution network. Loud Latino music played over the rockin' stereo in Oscar's crib, its steady, incessant
norteño
rhythm making his head spin.

They were close, so close to dismantling the network. For six months, he'd been playing the part of a midlevel distributor. He had seen horrible things. Done horrible things. A few more weeks and the interagency task force would be ready to move in—if he could only keep his precarious position as confidant to Oscar Ayala. That position was in serious jeopardy because of one reason—Oscar's
chica,
Gabriela, a hot little number from Venezuela who had set her slumberous eyes on Riley.

He'd been discouraging her furtive advances for weeks, but it was getting harder and harder to tactfully keep away from her. Her influence on Ayala was powerful and while Riley couldn't let the man think he
was screwing his girl, he also couldn't afford to have a scorned Gabriela whispering trash about him to the dealer he was trying to bring down.

He was in the kitchen pouring drinks, the music pounding, when she cornered him and, apparently tired of playing coy, took the direct route with a determined hand to his crotch.

“Oscar passed out. Now's our chance,” she murmured in the dream/memory and wrapped herself around him like a boa constrictor. She kissed him, her mouth hard and practiced.

Short of telling her he was gay—which she could probably tell was a lie by his stupid body's natural response to suddenly finding a lithe, soft female body pressing against all his most sensitive parts after months when he'd been too busy playing a damn role for any kind of social life—he couldn't come up with a single way to get out of the situation.

He was just about to try the gay card anyway when the worst happened. He heard a roar from the doorway and looked up to see Oscar, the prison tats on his face even more menacing than normal.

“He attacked me,” the bitch cried out in rapid-fire Spanish. “I just came in for another drink and the next thing I knew, he grabbed me. I was trying to get away, baby.”

Riley had stood there for just a moment too long, his brain stalled out, then Oscar lunged into the room, whipping out his Glock.

“Puta,”
he snarled and before Riley could say anything, he fired into Gabriela's head from six feet away, splattering blood and brain matter all over Riley.

In the dream, the moment moved frame by frame in slow motion, much as it had felt in real life.

“She's a slut,” the dream Oscar said, with a hideous grin on his face. “I'm sick of her shit. One cock after another. I can't take it no more. She's gonna give me crabs or something.”

Riley stood there covered in another person's bodily tissue. He didn't know what to say, what to do. He was a cop and he'd just seen a woman murdered in front of him. Did he arrest the crazy bastard now or let things play out for another few weeks?

“You messin' with me?” Oscar asked. “You didn't nail her, right?”

He wiped a hand over his face. “No, man. I didn't touch her.”

The words scraped his throat raw, but he forced them out anyway. “I didn't touch her. I wanted to but I didn't. She was yours. Far as I'm concerned, you got the right to deal with her how you see fit. Ain't my business.”

Oscar smiled that hideous smile again. “That's right. Knew I liked you, man.”

In the dream, Riley stepped over the body and grabbed another drink, the
norteño
music throbbing through his chest, then watched while rats crawled out from the cupboards and started eating the half-gone face.

The slide of something wet against the back of his hand jerked him awake, heart racing. He yanked his hand out of reach of the rats, going instinctively for his weapon before he was even fully awake.

It took him about twenty seconds to realize there
were no rats and he wasn't in that miserable apartment in Oakland, pretending to be the kind of man who could watch a person's violent death in front of him without any visible reaction.

A dog was licking his hand. Ugly, stout, sorrowful-looking. Claire's dog, he realized. He was at Claire's house, with its pretty watercolors on the wall and the comfortable furniture and quiet sense of home surrounding him. He was in her house, in a chair by a dying fire, covered by a nubby-soft blanket. He could just make out a Claire-size shape stretched on the nearby sofa and see the blur of her face in the darkness, her eyes closed as she slept.

He realized he was holding his weapon. Feeling foolish, he slid it back into the harness and drew in a shaky breath, disoriented by the jarring transition from hell to this warm, soft house that smelled of fresh-washed laundry and summer wildflowers and strawberry jam.

It was a smell that was quintessentially Claire. Fresh and sweet. Delicious. Was it some kind of soap she used? Shampoo? Or maybe just her. He had a fragment of memory when he was a kid of walking into his house one day after school and this bright happiness blooming inside him when he realized Claire was there because he caught her scent in the air.

He scrubbed at his face. He hadn't thought about Oscar or Gabriela's murder in months. Why now?

Yeah, it had been the final straw. Two weeks later, as he was coming off the assignment after the task force finally moved in and arrested every freaking one of the
Catorces
because of the evidence he'd collected
undercover, Riley had gotten the call from Dean Coleman about his impending retirement, asking him to apply for the job as police chief in Hope's Crossing.

He might not have considered it before, but at that particular point in his life he had been desperate for a little peace. A place where life meant something, where children didn't sleep in filth and learn how to light a crack pipe by the time they were in elementary school.

The discordance between the ugliness of the dream and the soft, pretty colors and textures of her house was still jarring.

Had she covered him with the blanket? She must have done. He had no recollection of finding it for himself. Actually, he had no recollection of falling asleep. They had been talking about the town's Angel of Hope, he remembered, mulling various theories as to the angel's identity. He must have dozed off in the middle of their conversation.

He shifted and automatically began to pet the dog beneath his droopy ears, fairly humiliated that he had relaxed his guard around her. Why had she let him sleep? And gone to the trouble to cover him with a blanket, too, when she could barely move from her injuries?

He studied her sleeping form, baffled by the woman and by his twenty-plus-year attraction to her.

What was it that drew him so strongly to her? Her generosity of spirit? That air of kindness a person couldn't help but notice? He sighed. He wasn't sure. He only knew that he'd had it bad for Claire Tatum
Bradford since he was just a stupid kid, fascinated by his older sister's best friend.

Riley had grown up surrounded by women. Even before his father left, James McKnight had been a distant figure in their lives, busy with his career as a science teacher and school administrator, which left Riley possessor of the lone Y chromosome in his house most of the time.

Until he was about ten or eleven, Claire had been just like one of his sisters, always bossing him around and getting after him for one thing or another.

He wasn't sure exactly at what point he figured out she was different, but he could definitely remember the first time he'd noticed her physically.

When he was thirteen, she'd stayed over at the house one summer night, as she often did to escape what he could only guess must have been a depressing home life, knowing what he did of Ruth and how she'd fallen apart after her husband's murder.

He'd gotten up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. Claire had just been coming out of it and she'd been wearing soft sleep shorts and a tank top without a bra. It had been a cool evening and he clearly remembered being able to see the dark outline of her nipples through the thin, almost translucent cotton.

She had smiled sleepily at him before heading back across the hall to Alex's bedroom and Riley could still remember how he had stood there stupidly far longer than he should have, his mouth dry and his body reacting, well, like a thirteen-year-old boy's does.

That moment had been the highlight of a horny yet
relatively sexually deprived adolescence, a memory he had savored far more than he probably should have.

Come to think of it, that moment was still probably one of the hottest of his life.

He stretched a little and glanced at his watch. Two in the morning. He'd been sleeping in Claire Bradford's easy chair for going on three hours, probably the most he'd slept at a time since the accident nearly two weeks ago.

The accident. A chill seeped into his shoulders, wiping away the last trace of any lighter thoughts like that wind blowing down the canyon. A familiar pain pinched under his breastbone.

Layla.

Ah, Layla.

He closed his eyes, picturing Maura as he'd seen her earlier. He checked on her daily, always hoping for a change but his laughing, free-spirited sister was gone. She had aged a decade in the past two weeks, her skin pale and dry, her features gaunt and drawn.

She said she didn't blame him for her daughter's death. Just the day before, she had taken his face in her hands and told him so. “It wasn't your fault, Ri. Don't you dare think that. You were doing your job.”