Page 12 of Burning For You

It wouldn’t happen at his place where his neighbors were like hawks looking for any breadcrumb as a piece of gossip.

Which was why he was here tonight and not home where they’d be asking him if there was something to worry about.

There wasn’t.

4

TOOK SO MUCH FROM HER

“My girl is home,” Carrie Lancaster said, rushing over and giving Skye a massive hug the minute she walked into her old family home.

Not like it’d felt much like a home to her.

Crap. Who was she kidding?

It was more a home to her in the two and a half years she lived there than the fifteen she’d lived with her biological parents.

And when they’d asked if they could adopt her? If she wanted to change her last name to theirs?

She’d shyly said yes. More so because she didn’t want to feel as if she was alone in the world.

She needed something to hold on to.

To let her believe that if she needed someone, they’d be there for her.

Becoming a Lancaster gave her that comfort that she never took advantage of.

Not until now.

Because now it was time to come home and find out what went wrong all those years ago.

How that fire started and killed her parents.

She just didn’t believe it was an accident, but no one was going to listen to a kid back then. If she was even thinking straight, and half the time, she didn’t think she was.

She knew what she knew about her parents and their lives though.

Their habits. Leaving an unlit cigarette in the ashtray and going to bed wasn’t one of them.

They sucked those things down until it was out in their fingers.

But when she was fifteen, she couldn’t remember any of those things. Not in her grief.

It wasn’t until years later when she’d looked into arson more.

That she decided it was time to write her crime fiction book.

But she went down a rabbit hole of information that sent her in another direction.

That gave her a bigger, stronger drive than her story goals.

It was time to do it all. To write her book. To write it about her life and what happened to her.

It’d still be fiction.

But to do that, she needed to know the full truth, not just what her brain was telling her what could be true.

Because maybe her gut was wrong. Maybe it was just as the reports said, but now as an adult with more knowledge and clearer thoughts, she wanted to be able to close that chapter once and for all.