Lisa Childs - Return of the Lawman

Closing her eyes brought forth an image of Jimmy Matthews that night. Jimmy’s murder had stolen Dylan’s last relative. He was all alone now.

She inhaled a quick breath. Dylan wouldn’t want her pity, just as she hadn’t wanted his the day they had found her mother. He hadn’t known how far from reality her mother had drifted. But murder? Could he really believe her mother capable of murder? She had to prove Retha Warner wasn’t.

She pulled open the screen and knocked in rapid succession on the glass of the back door. The knob rattled with each strike of her fist. She grasped it in her hand and was surprised it turned beneath her palm.

He’d lived in Detroit for ten years. How did he dare to leave his door unlocked? She always made certain to dead-bolt hers.

“Dylan?” Cautiously she stepped inside. She automatically glanced to the floor, to the stain in front of the refrigerator. She shuddered. How could he live here?

“Dylan?” she called out again.

An assault of steel guitars and blows and guttural cries emanated from the basement. The maple floorboards vibrated beneath her feet from the racket. Was someone getting beat up to the accompaniment of music?

She found the door to the basement standing open and tiptoed down the stairs. The portable stereo on the bottom step vibrated with the volume of the heavy metal music pouring from it.

In the middle of the basement a huge bag hung from the rafters, and Dylan attacked the bag with his fists and feet.

He wore only the bottoms of his sweat suit and those were cut off at the knee. His muscular chest was bare and glistened with the perspiration of his labor as he hammered at the bag with his fists in boxing gloves. Muscles rippled in his arms and legs as he swung and kicked, the bag bouncing away from the strike of his worn-out running shoe.

She’d never seen him so focused but yet so out of control at the same time. As his fists and feet slammed into the bag with a frenzied speed, cries of rage broke through his lips. When she caught sight of his eyes, the glazed look of them frightened her.

Then his gaze tangled with hers, and the glaze vanished to be replaced by his usual impenetrable stare. “I’m following up my run with a workout on the bag,” he said between gasping breaths.

She nodded and popped off the radio with the toe of her sneaker. “Is that what you’re calling it? If I was that bag, I’d press charges against you.”

“Maybe I should press some of my own. Breaking and entering, Ms. Warner?” He lifted a brow. Then he snagged his sweat shirt from the rusted lid of an old freezer and pulled it over his head.

She bit her lip to stop her protest of his covering his magnificent chest. A soft sigh escaped her lips. Before the shirt dropped to his waist, she noticed a jagged scar across one of his wash board abs.

“You left the door unlocked. Must have been some run. Good thing you do it before sunrise—you’d scare anyone meeting you on the street.” She softened her words with a smile and held back the question about his scar.

He shook his head. “You don’t seem very afraid of me, and you’re exaggerating.”

She laughed. “No, I’m not, but thank goodness the gossips are wrong about you.” And thank goodness she’d been right. She’d always argued Dylan Matthews didn’t lack feelings; he just kept them hidden from the prying eyes of this town. She was glad to finally be right about a man. But that didn’t make him any less dangerous to her stupid heart. Actually, it made him more so.

“Should I care about the gossip?” His ironic tone suggested he didn’t.

“I thought you did. I thought that’s why you left this town a decade ago.”

“Looking for a story, Ms. Reporter?” He grabbed a towel from the freezer and mopped his glistening face and scrubbed it over his sweat-darkened hair.

“Naw, you’re old news,” she scoffed, but it was a lie. Dylan Matthews was still as hot a topic as ever for conversation and idle sexual fantasies. She sighed.

He glanced up at her from under his towel. “You have anything new?”

She grinned, and he laughed. But the intense moment wasn’t for got ten. Her nerves still tingled with excitement. Dylan Matthews was one smoking cauldron of hot emotions. She wanted to stir him up again.

“So smug, Lindsey. You must have something good. Can I trust you to make coffee while I grab a shower? The coffee and maker are on the counter.” He joined her on the stairs.

From her perch above him, Lindsey relished the height advantage, something she rarely had. She peered down at him. “I’m your guest. You should make the coffee. And I could use some break fast, too. Can you make eggs?”

He didn’t stay below her. He sidled up so they shared the same step and pressed her between the concrete wall of the basement and the muscular wall of his chest. The jersey material had darkened with his sweat and the musk of man and perspiration filled her senses. The cold of the concrete seeped through the back of her sweater while his heat scorched her front.

“Usually my break fast guests have spent the night, Lindsey. If that had been the case, I’d make you the most in credible break fast.” His voice had dropped to a low and intimate level.

Lindsey lifted her gaze to his face, only inches from hers, and batted her lashes. “If I’d spent the night with you, Dylan, you wouldn’t have the strength to make break fast.”

His chuckle sounded strained, and he quickly brushed past her to climb the stairs.

“Dylan?” she called out. “You’re walking a little funny. Did you strain something when you kicked that bag?”

“You strained something, you tease. Still playing, huh?” he grumbled.

“Who says I’m playing?”

DYLAN TWISTED THE FAUCET to cold and stood under the icy spray. But it wasn’t enough to extinguish the fire in his blood. Lindsey Warner did something to him, and what was worse than his reaction to her was that she knew it.

He had a murder to solve, and her mother was the prime suspect. He couldn’t get involved with her; it wouldn’t be ethical.

But Lindsey didn’t play by any rules. He stepped out of the shower stall to find the bathroom door half open. She reached around the door to place a mug on the rim of the sink. In the mirror, rapidly clearing of fog, he spied her wicked grin and dancing eyes.

“Lindsey,” he threatened.

“Need any help, Deputy?” Her naughty chuckle grew fainter as she moved down the hall.

He kicked the door closed and stepped back into the shower stall to twist the faucet on to cold again.

His teeth chattered when he joined her in the kitchen. He’d wrapped his hands around the warm mug, but his fingernails were still blue. “You are such a tease!”

She jumped away from the sink, and a tinkle of ice on stain less steel rang out. He drew close enough to watch an ice cube disappear down the drain. “Hot?” He lifted a brow and detected a slight damp flush on her beautiful face.

“I always put ice in my coffee. I’m too impatient to wait for it to cool,” she explained in a far-too-innocent-sounding voice.

He laughed. “I don’t think anything manages to cool off around you. You never said what I’d done to deserve your torture this early in the morning.”

“Torture? Not hardly. I came to make your life easier. I’m helping you solve your murder, Dylan.”

He shivered. “Not my murder, Lindsey.”

“You know what I mean.” But for once her tone was a bit more serious. He followed her glance to the stain on the kitchen floor.

“Chet was a good man as far as I’ve heard.”

“He was a baby thief,” she argued.

“That’s your mother’s story.” And her motive.

“And her motive.” Lindsey spoke his thought aloud. “Yeah, I know that. But other people had motives. I’ve found more suspects.”