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He smirks and lifts his gaze to the dining room. “Not the table.”
I hold up a finger. “Stay away from that table. It’s an antique.”
As I sit up, he brings my head to his by gripping the back of my neck, and he kisses me. “So no sex on it?”
I shake my head as I stand up. “Absolutely not.”
“Where are you going?” he asks as he watches me travel around the couch.
Looking over my shoulder, I answer, “To get a shirt.”
His eyes skate my bare torso, and it gives me a thrill as I disappear down the hall and to my bedroom, riding that high from my orgasm and the fact that someone like me can turn him on so easily.
As soon as I open the door to my bedroom, my smile disappears. The breath I just gained back whooshes frommy lungs as if I’d been punched. What is this? What in the hell is going on?
All over my bed, littered amongst the petals, are roses. Actual roses. A shiver runs down my spine, and it has nothing to do with my previous pleasure.
“Oh my god,” I say, a hand flying to my mouth to cover my shock. “Cole!”
“What?” I hear him say calmly, but the way his footsteps thunder through the house tells me he heard the urgency in my voice.
He comes down the hall and takes in my stiff stance, my terror. Looking into the room, he whispers, “What the fuck?”
“Did you do this?” I ask, prying my hand away from my face a little.
“No,” he rumbles.
We stand there for a moment, staring at the mess of roses, before he moves past me and heads into the room. He picks up a rose and examines the stem. “They’ve been snapped.”
“Snapped?” I repeat.
His gaze meets mine, and it’s then he knows that I was telling him the truth, but just in case he wasn’t sure, I whisper, “It’s him. It’s Neil.”
His lips twist to the side for a moment before he carefully sets the rose back on my bed. “What does it mean?” he asks quietly.
I raise my gaze to the window, quickly throw on a shirt, and dash to it. My attention immediately goes to the mess of roses trapped by the barbed wire, but he isn’t there. He’s always there, in the dark, waiting while surrounded by . . .
And it’s then that it hits me. “Oh my god,” I whisper on an exhale.
“What?”
“The bed of roses . . .” My voice trails off.
He starts to make his way toward me, but I spin so fast that he stops. “His body. I mean, he’s always by it. The petals, and now the roses. Cole!”
“What?” he asks, frowning.
I head to him quickly and grip his elbow. “He’s buried under the roses.”
His frown flattens, and he looks out the window as if he needs evidence for himself. He won’t find any but their gentle sway in the breeze within their messy, trapped confines. “You know this for sure?”
I nod and squeeze his elbow. “I do.” I start to move past him. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
He follows me quickly out of the room. “You’re going to destroy that garden to find his body?”
I nod again as I head through the living room. My steps are determined because I know I’m right. It’s what he’s been trying to tell me, and now that I caught his brother, have evidence against him, he wants me to find the last piece: His bones. “Do you have a shovel?”
“No, but I have one at the trailer.”
