the door. When he saw the crowd, he stayed at the top of the stairs. “No need to be hiding yourselves in the cellar for a snowstorm—that’s for tornados.”
“Patrick.” Lariana’s voice shook slightly. “We found Edward.”
“Dead,” Shelly wailed.
At that, Patrick moved down the stairs, his lean body in coveralls, his tool belt low on his hips. He inspected the body himself, then whistled low in his throat. “Well, fuck me. He is dead. Mean old bastard.”
“What are we going to do now?” Shelly asked tearfully. “We can’t all just stay here—we have to get out.”
“We can’t just leave him here like this—”
“Yes, we can,” Cooper said. When all the faces turned in his direction, he added, “Nothing gets moved.”
Everyone started talking at once but he lifted a hand. “Look, I’m a cop. Or I used to be. Either way, I’m aware I’m out of jurisdiction, but no one is moving the body or any possible evidence until the proper authorities come.”
“No one’s coming,” Dante said. “No one can come.”
Patrick agreed with that. “We haven’t seen this much snow in all the years I’ve been here, and it’s still coming down. I’m telling you meself it’s going to be a while. Days.”
“Breanne was able to get a signal on her cell outside the library a little while ago,” Cooper said. “Someone needs to go there and try again.”
“I will,” Patrick said, rocking back on his heels. “But don’t be holding your breath.”
Shelly sniffed quietly.
Lariana stood still, pale.
Breanne’s heart was still thumping.
“Everyone needs to get out of the cellar,” Cooper said, rising, standing in front of Edward, standing for the dead. “And stay out.”
“But—”
“No one comes in here,” he said firmly. “No further contamination of the scene, period.”
Dante turned to Patrick. “Let’s get the ladies out of here.”
“Will do.” Patrick slipped an arm around Lariana, and Dante did the same for Shelly. With his free hand, he reached back for Breanne.
She allowed herself to be led up the stairs. At the top, she took a last look over her shoulder at Cooper.
Once again he was crouched by the body, expression grim, his big body gripped with a tension she hadn’t seen in him before as he looked Edward over with careful precision.
He was a cop. Had been a cop. And though she had no idea why he wasn’t one right now, she would bet it hadn’t had anything to do with competence, because just watching him kneel on the floor and deal with a dead body—good God, a dead body!—with cool efficiency told her everything she needed to know.
He’d done this before. A lot.
It made her ache for him, not physically as she had in the library, but deeper. Odd how it felt as if she’d known him for more than just the one night. Odd how it felt as if maybe they’d known each other forever.
In that moment, he lifted his head. For a beat in time, his eyes warmed, and he gave her a small nod. It’ll be okay.
She only wished she believed it.
Breanne sat in the great room, trying not to think about Edward. About her life being in the toilet. About Cooper. About anything.
Dante had stoked the fire, then left without a word. Equally silent, Lariana brought a tray with bagels, cream cheese, and fresh fruit, and after setting the food down in front of Breanne, moved to the door.
“Wait.” She couldn’t stand the thought of being alone. “Where’s Shelly?”
“In the kitchen.”
“Is she all right?”
“She will be.”
“What does that mean?”
Lariana let out a breath but none of her tension. “Patrick couldn’t get a signal on his cell phone. Shelly’s upset at having to be here with . . . the situation.”
No one wanted to say it. Dead body. There was a dead body in the house. Breanne’s heart clutched as she remembered how Shelly had sobbed in the cellar. “I didn’t get the feeling that she was close to Edward.”
“Oh, no. We all hated him,” Lariana said forcibly. “But because of the way she is—too sweet for her own good—she hated him less than the rest of us.”
“I see.” But she didn’t. She didn’t “see” anything about these crazy past two days. “What are those rooms on either side of the wine cellar?”
“Servants’ quarters.”
“Do any of you actually live here?”
“Honey, we’re all living here. At least until Mother Nature decides to give us a break. Could you excuse me? I’ve got a long list of stuff I have to get to.”
“Oh. Sure.”
“Stay by the fire. No use getting cold if you don’t have to,” Lariana said, and left.
Breanne kept her eyes on the flames rather than look around her at all the shadows and corners. She really hated shadows and corners. She’d been afraid of them before Edward had been discovered. Now she was terrified. It was only midmorning, but with the snow still coming down, the light in the windows and skylights was muted at best. It felt like perpetual gloom.
In contrast, the fire radiated a nice, warm glow. She had nothing but those crackling flames for company as she contemplated the fact that she was entirely alone and a possible murderer walked around unencumbered.
A murderer. Her heart started pounding, and then a sound scraped behind her and the poor organ practically stopped.
Fourteen
Sometimes I just want to stop the merry-go-round that is my life and take a nap.
—Breanne Mooreland’s journal entry
Breanne leapt to her feet and whipped around, nearly falling to the floor in a relieved pile of Jell-O when she saw Cooper standing in the doorway.
At just the sight of him, tall and big and sure of himself, she began to shake. Delayed shock, she knew.
He strode across the room toward her in his loose-legged stride, looking deceptively lazy and completely at ease. He always did, as if all motion was effortless.
Somewhere deep inside, she hoped he would haul her close. Instead he lifted her chin with a finger and peered into her eyes. “You okay?”
Since her teeth were rattling in her head, she simply nodded.
“I need you to hang in there a little bit longer.”
No problem. She didn’t need him. She didn’t need anyone.
Especially a penis-carrying human.
“The phones are still out,” he said. “No cell service at all now, which means until I can reach the police, I’m it.”
She stared into his set face, so determined to do the right thing, and felt something deep within her give. She was desperately afraid it was her pride, which meant that any moment now she was going to throw herself at him. “What do you have to do?”
“For starters, I’d like to know what happened. Tell me again what you know. You left me in the library and . . .”
“And I went running down the hallway. I made a couple of turns and got lost. I ended up in the wine cellar.”
“You tripped over him?”
“Yes, I had my eyes locked on the bottles. I was going to take as many as I could carry to my room for a pity party.”
“You didn’t move him at all?”
“No. Did he fall down the stairs?”
He looked at her for a long moment. “The body’s positioned just far enough away from the stairs that I don’t see how that happened.”
And then there was the hole in his chest.
“Have you seen any guns here?” Cooper asked.
She shivered. “Oh, my God.”
He put his hands on her arms and pushed her to the leather chair. “Have you?” he asked more gently.
Her chest tightened and she moved her head in the negative.
“Have you seen or heard anything strange?”
A harsh laugh escaped her. “Are you kidding me? Everything has been strange.”
He was sti
ll touching her, an oddly soothing gesture, considering she didn’t want to need him. “You know what I mean,” he said.
She sighed. “Well, yesterday I kept hearing odd noises.”
“What kind of noises?”
“Odd bumps. Humming. Then there was that face over my bed last night. And then today . . .”
“Today . . . ?”
“Just before I went into the cellar, I thought I heard more noises, but I’m losing it, so what do I know?”
“What do you think of the staff?”
“Why, do you think one of them . . . ?” Unable to finish, she trailed off.
He looked at her for a long beat. “I don’t know.”
She saw the tension in the lines bracketing his grim, unsmiling mouth, in the dark shadows under his eyes.
“You’re not making me feel better,” she whispered.
“I’m not going to lie to you, Breanne.” Their gazes locked. “Ever.”
And she knew. He was telling her that despite what she’d learned from the men in her life, he was telling her the truth and always would.
She could believe in him.
But she just wanted to be far, far away, where there were no dead bodies, where there were no sexy-as-hell strangers now that she’d given up men.
“Can you think of anything else I need to know?” he asked.
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“No, I’m not sure! The only thing I’m sure of is I’m scared to death.”
“Okay,” he said, and pulled her against him. “Stay close to the fire,” he murmured. “I’ll be back when I can.”
It took every ounce of courage she had not to cling to him when he pulled away. “Where are you going?”
“To talk to everyone else.” With a quick stroke of his finger over her hairline at her temple, he was gone, leaving her to obsess over how she’d thought she’d hit bottom yesterday, but she’d been very, very wrong.
She was hitting rock bottom now.
So much for being on vacation, Cooper thought. He had a dead body and a houseful of possible suspects, including one hauntingly beautiful, high-spirited, and happy-to-hate-all-men Breanne Mooreland.
And nothing added up.
Because it didn’t, he went back to the starting board—the cellar.
Edward lay exactly as he’d been left. He looked to be a man in his late fifties, and in prime shape for his age.
Except for the hole in his chest.
Several things were niggling at Cooper, the last of which was how Shelly had assumed at first sight that Edward was dead. In the dim lighting, Edward could have just been taking a damn nap, and yet she’d taken one look at him and had cried, “Not missing, but dead!”
A guess?
Or prior knowledge?
Another thing was that Edward lay on his back, sprawled out. Not a likely position for a person who’d fallen down the stairs and then crawled fifteen feet away to die.
Unless, of course, it hadn’t been the fall that had killed him.
And what about the hole in his chest?
Cooper pulled out a flashlight he’d lifted from the foyer closet and a pair of tweezers he’d gotten from the guest bathroom, and crouched before the body. “Sorry, buddy,” he murmured, and lifted Edward’s shirt, pulling it away from his chest to look at the chest wound.
A small, perfectly round hole. But not, as he’d first thought, a bullet hole. Or at least he didn’t think so. The hole was too small, too inconsequential. In fact, he’d have sworn that it had come from a BB gun, given that he’d had many such wounds himself, courtesy of his brother, when they’d been kids.
Which brought up another unsettling point. A BB might hurt like hell—but it wouldn’t have killed him, either.
So what had?
When Cooper left the cellar, he wasn’t too surprised to find the house quiet as a mouse, with no sight of any of the staff. They’d scattered like wild seeds in the wind.
Funny how good they were at disappearing. He just hoped they weren’t as good at being criminals.
He came to the main hallway, and heard a faint murmuring, which he followed to the dining room.
The empty dining room. “Hello?” he called out.
No answer, but he could still hear the voices, faintly but definitely there, coming from . . . the far wall? Odd, as there was no door there, no closet, nothing but drywall. Putting his ear to it, the voices became recognizable.
Dante and Shelly.
“Shelly, baby, please. Stop crying.”
“I c-can’t.” Her voice was more muted than Dante’s, as if maybe she had her face pressed to him.
Cooper pulled back and looked around the empty room. Where were they? Leaving the dining room, he strode down the hallway and into the kitchen, which shared the talking wall with the dining room.
The kitchen was also empty.
And yet the soft voices were still audible, coming from . . . the walk-in pantry.
“I just can’t believe it . . .” came Shelly’s voice.
Cooper lifted his hand to knock on the closet door, wanting to alert them to his presence, but Dante spoke again, his voice low and grim.
“He was cruel to you, Shelly. Christ, you feared him and you hated him.”
Cooper’s hand lowered.
“But I didn’t want him dead!” she cried. “My God, Dante. I don’t want anyone dead.”
“Shh.”
“I won’t shh!” Suddenly her voice was no longer muted, as if she’d pulled away. “This is bad, so bad—”
“Shelly,” Dante said again, softly, so gentle that Cooper had a