Paula Graves - Forbidden Temptation

He turned his gaze to her, his brow creasing as if nobody had thought to ask that question before. “I guess, I did, on some level, or I’d never have asked her to marry me. But I didn’t love her enough to make it last. That’s what I realized that night. So I went to talk to her.”

Rose closed her eyes, filled with pity for Tina. “She must have been crushed.”

“That was the odd thing,” he said softly. “She wasn’t so much hurt as furious. I think that was the moment when I knew, for sure, I was right to break it off.”

“Because she was angry?” Rose stiffened with indignation for the girl. “Don’t you think she had a right?”

“Of course,” Daniel answered. “But her anger was about the wedding, not the engagement. She wanted her big, beautiful fairy-tale wedding and I was screwing it all up.”

Rose couldn’t believe that was the girl’s only concern. “Maybe that’s what she said at the time, but I’m sure-”

“I’m not,” Daniel said. “I’m not sure she loved me nearly as much as she loved the idea of being married. I’ve wondered about that for thirteen years.”

“Why didn’t you just ask her about it later?”

He turned slowly to meet her gaze. “Because when she ran away from me that night, it was the last time I ever saw her alive.”

A chill rippled over Daniel as he waited for Rose’s reaction. The day was quickly waning, purple shadows creeping across the floor of Rose’s foyer. Her dark eyes glittered in the dimming light, wide and liquid with a chaos of emotions.

“She’s dead?” Her voice sounded fragile.

He forced the word out. “Yes.”

“How?”

“She was murdered. Her face was carved up and her throat slit.”

Rose’s gaze fell. She released a slow, shaky breath.

“They found her the next morning in a nearby park. It wasn’t far from here, actually. Just off University Boulevard.” He watched her carefully, waiting for her to put it together.

“Orion,” she whispered.

“That’s what I want to find out.”

She looked at him. “You must’ve been the prime suspect.”

He could let her think that. It would have been the obvious suspicion, that the fiancé who jilted her the night before she died might have tried to end the engagement in the most permanent way possible. He could nod and skim over that aspect of what happened, and Rose would never know. After all, nobody else knew what he’d done that night.

But the sympathy in her eyes was more than he could bear.

“I might have been, if anyone had known about the breakup,” he said. He pressed his lips together, watching the slow metamorphosis of her expression from pity to confusion to horrified realization.

“You didn’t tell anyone?”

He closed his eyes. “She’d run away, into the night. I’d thought she was going to a friend’s house down the street. I’d let her go, relieved the confrontation was over. I’d gotten in my car and drove home.”

“So nobody knew she was gone.” Her voice was faint.

“She’d had a room at the back of the house. There had been a wraparound porch there where we’d meet at night after her mother had gone to bed. I’d knock on the window. She’d climb out to meet me.” The sudden sweetness of the memory caught him by surprise. There had been good times. He’d let himself forget them. “That’s what I’d done that night, so nobody else had known I’d been there. When she’d run away, I’d thought about knocking on the front door to let her mother know, but-” He stopped short, ashamed of his motives.

“You didn’t want to face her and explain everything.”

“That was my usual M.O. in those days,” he admitted, remorse burning a hole in his gut. “Taking the easy way out. Danny Hartman, dragging everyone else into trouble while he slid out of the noose with a smile and a smooth explanation. Keeping quiet seemed…easier. So that’s what I did then.”

Rose leaned heavily against the wall. “And they had had no idea at all-”

“Until she showed up in the park the next morning.”

Rose’s eyes closed again. She looked ill.

“I knew, I should’ve told, but her mother had been a mess. She’d leaned on me a lot. Said she’d thought of me as her son.” He shook his head. “I was an extension of Tina to her. I was what she’d felt she had left of her daughter, and I couldn’t take that away from her by telling her what had really happened that night.”

“But it could have affected the police investigation.”

“It wouldn’t have.” He sank against the wall opposite Rose. “Of course, I can’t claim I knew that at the time. I’d let myself get caught up in the lie and, after a certain point, when guilt began to get the best of me, I was trapped. I couldn’t change the official history of Tina Carter and Daniel Hartman. Too much had already been built on that foundation. The truth would have hurt a lot of people.”

“Including you.”

He hated the disappointment in her voice. “Don’t worry. I didn’t get away unscathed.”

“I guess, it explains your obsession with Orion.”

“I just want to know if he’s the one who killed her.”

“What if he’s not?”

Daniel didn’t know. He hadn’t thought that far ahead.

Rose rubbed her temples as if she had a headache. She looked tired, and he remembered that neither of them had had much sleep in the last couple of days. They were in no condition to have this conversation.

He pushed himself away from the wall. “You need food and sleep, in that order.”

She started to demur, but he took her arm and turned her toward the kitchen. “It’ll take a minute to heat up dinner. We can talk in the morning after we’ve both had some sleep.”

He got the take-out from the refrigerator and spooned the food onto a pair of plates. While Rose sank into a chair at the kitchen table, watching him with her chin resting on her hand, he filled a couple of glasses with iced tea and finished heating the food.

“Why did you tell me?” Rose asked as he pulled the second plate from the microwave oven. He didn’t need her to clarify; he knew what she was asking.

He picked up the drinks and put them on the table, looking down into her curious eyes. “Because I needed to.”

Her gaze softened. “And I was in the right place at the right time?”

He tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “You were the right person at the right time.”

She caught his hand, threading her fingers through his briefly before letting go. She turned her head toward the window, her profile outlined in tangerine light from the dying sun. “Detective Carter didn’t even let on that Tina was dead.”

“Frank has…issues about Tina,” he said, wondering how much of his old friend’s secrets he should reveal.

“It can’t have been easy to lose his sister so young.”

“There was more.” Daniel sighed, realizing he needed to talk about the past more than he knew. “Tina was his mother’s favorite. She didn’t even try to hide it. When Tina died, it was like she’d lost her only child.”

“Poor Frank.”

“Mary Frances made a shrine of her daughter’s room. Kept it immaculate. All her old clothes pressed and hung in the closet. All her stuffed animals and cheerleading trophies lined up where she’d left them. Frank hated that room. Couldn’t bring himself to go in there. Kept expecting to see Tina’s ghost, sitting on her bed like always. And then he’d know he was the ghost. The kid nobody remembered.”

Rose shook her head. “That’s horrible. Does her mother still keep the room the same?”

“Mary Frances died earlier this year. That’s why Frank moved back to Birmingham.”