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Bethenny doubted again whether he was ready for a relationship with her, but she found herself wanting it anyway. Maybe her heart would get shattered, maybe they would crash and burn, but as she looked at him, she decided he was worth the risk.
Bethenny exhaled a satisfied breath as he dropped her hands, picked up her mug, and took it to the kitchen. He craned his head, looking out the window as flashes of lightning lit up the room. He stifled a yawn and she realized then how tired he looked.
“You shouldn’t drive in this storm,” she said. Even though his house wasn’t far away, it still wasn’t safe. “You can stay in my guest room,” she said, watching him carefully. She didn’t know what he expected from her in this relationship; that was a conversation they would need to have, but not one she had the energy for tonight.
“It’s okay, I only live—”
His sentence was cut short by a crack of thunder so violent it shook the windowpane.
“Please don’t drive,” she insisted. “The guest room is set up and it’s no inconvenience for me. I’ll even make you another hot chocolate.”
He chuckled and winked. “Deal. And thank you,” he said with a sincerity that reminded her it had been a long time since he’d had anyone who cared about him.
She looked around, wondering what they should do for the next few hours, as they couldn’t go outside and they’d talked enough work for one day. “Do you like board games?” she asked.
He beamed a grin. “Do you have Risk?”
She nodded enthusiastically and he laughed.
“Game on,” Lachlan said with a challenging grin.
She loved that grin.
She quickly retrieved the board game, made two fresh hot chocolates, and sat down for the win of a lifetime.
She was startled from her sleep and it took a minute to realize why. Her phone vibrated on her bedside table and when she saw Mitch’s number she panicked for a moment. She never slept in, never.
But a second later she realized she hadn’t overslept at all.
She reached for the phone.
“Mitch,” she said, clearing her voice.
“Hey, sorry for the early-morning call. I need to run something past you, and I didn’t want to wait until you came in this morning,” he said.
Her stomach churned and she sat upright. She didn’t like the sound of his voice at all.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, throwing off the covers.
“We got a partial fingerprint match on the knife,” Mitch said.
Bethenny paused—that wasn’t what she’d been expecting. “Isn’t that good news?”
“Bethenny, the partial match is for Detective Lachlan Taylor,” Mitch said, and the floor shifted beneath her.
“What?” she asked, her voice hiding none of the emotions threatening to suffocate her.
“It’s a partial match. We’re going to call him in for questioning this morning. I mean... I can’t see it, I just can’t. But if these deaths are linked to his late wife’s case, maybe it was a revenge killing. Regardless of my doubt, I won’t deny the evidence.”
Bethenny pinched the bridge of her nose. “The blood on the knife,” she said so quickly she could barely make sense of her own words, “is it Jessica’s?”
“Yes, the coroner confirmed it’s a match, but the interesting thing is that the knife didn’t kill her. The coroner thinks she fell and hit the back of her neck on something as she landed. Her neck was snapped, and that would’ve killed her. We think the severed throat was used to throw off the investigation,” he said.
Bethenny’s mind was spinning.
“We’re going to his house now to pick him up for questioning and determine if he has an alibi,” Mitch said, and Bethenny blinked, suddenly remembering that he was asleep in her spare bedroom. If he’d killed Jessica, and he knew Bethenny knew... She squeezed her eyes shut. Everything she knew about him screamed that there was an explanation for why his print would be on the knife. But how had Jessica fallen? Lachlan said he didn’t know her.
“He’s not at home. He dropped me off last night and the storm was insane. I invited him to sleep in my guest room so he didn’t get caught in the storm—it wasn’t safe to drive,” she said.
