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One step at a time, she reminded herself.
She’d start with a dog. She finished her drink and left the glass in the sink. A rescue dog. A big, unwanted mutt. Yeah, that’s what she’d do. She’d get herself a dog.
Maybe they could rescue each other.
* * *
Reed climbed the stairs to Nikki’s office. She looked up from her computer as he appeared and offered him the smile he’d found so intriguing all those years ago.
“Got an errand to run. I’ll be back in an hour or so,” he said.
“Want company?” she asked, but he knew she was neck-deep into plotting out her next story, that there was already interest in the Duval case from her publisher and she was trying to put the synopsis of the story line together.
“Not this time. I won’t be gone long,” he said, and didn’t want to pique her ever-present curiosity. “I’ll be back with takeout. What’d’ya want?”
“Ummm. Surprise me.”
“Impossible.” He’d been on medical leave since waking up in the hospital, his left arm pinned together by surgeons after his humerus had been shattered by Tyson Beaumont’s bullet at the Marianne Inn in August. He was “healing nicely,” the orthopedic surgeon had told him, and his physical therapist was putting him through his paces.
“What errand?” she pushed.
“I’ll tell you about it later.”
“Ooh, so mysterious.”
“It’s just that I’m late.”
“Then, go. Go. I’ll see you later,” she said as he kissed the top of her head. He started to walk away, but she grabbed his hand. “You okay?”
“Sure.” He nodded. “You?”
She hesitated a beat, her green eyes catching his for a second, a shadow passing behind them. “Yeah, there’s still time.” She smiled and he believed her. This morning she’d suffered the disappointment of realizing she wasn’t pregnant. Again. Each month it got harder and harder, but he told himself as he walked down the stairs, the dog following, Nikki was nothing if not resilient. “I’m letting Mikado out,” he yelled up two flights.
“Okay. I’ll get him in a few.”
Patting his pockets to make certain he had the things he needed, he slid open the door and Mikado took off like a shot, bolting and barking at a squirrel that had the audacity to cross his yard. Hastily the offending rodent scrambled up the magnolia tree to sit and scold the dog, who whined at the tree’s base.
Yeah, things were back to normal.
Almost.
He climbed into the Jeep and backed out, then headed across town. Currently he was not only not working yet, but still without a partner. It was his guess that Jade Delacroix, aka Rose Duval/ Beaumont, would never regain her job. He wasn’t even certain she wanted it.
It was complicated. Her biological parents, Margaret Le Roy and Baxter Beaumont, were still living, but they’d lost all of their other children, and Rose was a painful reminder of all that had been sacrificed.
The ironic twist was that while Tyson had worked so hard to ensure himself to be the sole heir to his family’s fortune once his father and mother had died, the girl he’d tried to kill, the half sister who had eluded him, could end up inheriting it all.
“What goes around, comes around,” he said, and looked over at the passenger seat as if Morrisette could hear him. He imagined her there, playing with the window buttons, glancing over at him.
“You got that right,” she replied as he turned onto the street of the apartment building and parked at the curb under the branches of a pine tree. Checking his watch, he settled in to wait and in that time he thought about Jade Delacroix. Their conversations after the night at the Marianne Inn had been intense.
“You should have been straight with me,” he’d charged, back at the station as they were wrapping things up and she was still seated at Morrisette’s old desk.
“I couldn’t drag you into it.” She’d been defiant, nearly belligerent, staring at him with eyes as blue as a mountain lake since she’d ditched her contacts.
“You put my wife’s life in danger.”
“No, man,” Delacroix had argued. “She did that herself. She didn’t need any help in that department! I was just trying to piece together my life. And keep her from exposing me before I’d figured it all out. And I wouldn’t have hurt her or let anyone else harm her.”
