Harlequin Love Inspired Suspense March 2021--Box Set 2 of 2 by Dana Mentink (novels to improve english txt) 📗

He looked different: his tall frame thinner. His face was gaunt, his dark hair cut prison short. Her breath caught at the damage to his face: blackened eye, a cut across the bridge of his nose. What happened? she wondered, but she would not ask.

“Laney,” he said, breathing fast from his run. “Are you sure you’re not hurt?”

The sheer irony of the question. She blinked, staring, unable to process. How could he even ask it? “I told you I’m okay, but you haven’t explained what you’re doing here.” She couldn’t stop the bitterness from spilling out. “Checking to see if I signed the divorce papers yet?”

The word divorce burned like poison in her mouth. In fact, the papers still sat in her desk drawer, waiting for her signature, a scrawled name that would mean an end to a relationship she’d thought was God ordained. Her head began to pound.

Jude Duke pulled up in his patrol car, stepped out and hustled over. He shot Beckett a hostile glare, the sun glinting off his sheriff’s badge. He was a few inches shorter than Beckett, his eyes hazel to Beckett’s brown. “Mom wanted me to bring you some jam, Laney.” He must have seen the distress on her face because he asked, “What happened?”

Beckett explained about the snake.

“Are you bitten?” Jude asked.

Laney shook her head, hoping her voice sounded steady. “I brought supplies back from the park for one of the guests. The snake must have crawled into his pack before we loaded it in the back.” Was she really calmly explaining things in front of her soon-to-be-former husband?

Jude nodded. “Snake hitchhiked out of the park, huh? I’ll call animal control.” He stepped away to speak into his radio.

Beckett kept those chocolate eyes on her until she thought she would scream. They were not the same eyes she remembered. They were harder, duller and missing something she could not identify. “I need to talk to you, Laney. Privately,” he said.

Oh, how she’d wanted to talk, begged him through letters and stilted jail phone conversations. She would have done anything to talk to Beckett and make him see she believed in him no matter what, that she’d stand by him every day of his life. Now it was too late. She shook her head, willing herself to return his gaze. “You made it clear what you wanted, Beck. There’s nothing more to say.”

The muscles in his throat worked. “This is important. You’re in danger.”

She could not help darting a look at him then. “What?”

His expression was something she’d never seen in him before, something wild and desperate. In danger? Beckett was many things, but he was not a murderer, of that she was dead certain. Someone else had killed Pauline Sanderson.

A killer…the real monster…had never been caught, though no one would ever believe it. The murderer was undoubtedly long gone, had probably left the tiny town of Furnace Falls far behind. There was no criminal on the loose here. Was there?

* * *

Beckett felt Jude’s hard stare as he finished his radio conversation and rejoined them, handing Laney a jar of jam. He squared off with Beckett. The distrust radiated off him in palpable waves. Beckett had learned the hard way that Jude was a cop first and a cousin second. As the evidence had piled up against Beckett after Pauline’s body was found, Jude had put him squarely in the enemy camp.

“You haven’t explained why you’re here,” Jude said.

“I need to talk to my wife.”

He arched an eyebrow. “She doesn’t seem at all eager to talk to you, now that you served her with divorce papers. Classy act to do that to her.”

Beckett would have vented his simmering rage if Laney hadn’t been there. She wrapped her arms around herself and pressed her lips together. She was pale underneath the freckles, perhaps from the shock of seeing him, the unforgiving Death Valley sun, the snake or a combination of all three. He didn’t want to upset her any more. He bit back his ire.

Jude bobbed his chin. “Why don’t you go find a place in town to stay if you must?”

Laney was like a sister to Jude and he understood his cousin’s protectiveness, but Laney was Beckett’s to take care of—for a while longer, anyway. He fisted his hands, teeth grinding together. “This is still my family’s land.”

And legally it was, since they had not yet finished the process of transitioning it to joint property when he was arrested. Nothing had been finished, nothing at all, before Pauline was murdered. He wondered if it ever would be. “I won’t stay long.”

“Better if you didn’t stay at all, but I can’t force you to leave. I’m asking you to think about Laney.”

“I am,” he snapped. “I have to talk to her, that’s all. And there’s something you need to know too, as a cop, so you can get some plans in place.”

Jude’s shoulders tensed. “You just stroll back into town and start telling me how to do my job? You got some nerve. The only reason you’re out is because one of my officers mishandled evidence and broke the chain of custody. We messed up. That doesn’t mean you deserve to be a free man.”

“I am going inside,” Laney said suddenly, drawing their attention. “Jude, please let me know when the snake’s taken care of.”

She left them there staring at each other. When she passed, Beckett thought he noticed her blinking back tears.

As he went after her, he heard Jude’s low remark, cold and guttural. “Haven’t you hurt her enough?”

Beckett did not acknowledge Jude’s comment. Doing so might crack through the infinitesimally thin sheet of glass that kept him from complete despair. The other barriers had shattered already. He was not sure how his fragile protection would hold up walking back into the cozy dining hall after Laney, but there was no other option. In order to protect her, he’d have to add more pain,