Carol Ericson - Her Alibi

Fear made her flee the crime scene.

Desperation drove her to another man’s doorstep.

Savannah Martell has no memory of how she ended up next to her philandering ex-husband’s dead body. Facing too many unanswerable questions, she turns to Connor Wells. Years ago, their romance burned hot and deep, and the flame still smolders. But when the death count rises and evidence leads back to Savannah, will Connor still provide an alibi for the woman he never stopped loving?

CAROL ERICSONis a bestselling, award-winning author of more than forty books. She has an eerie fascination for true-crime stories, a love of film noir and a weakness for reality TV, all of which fuel her imagination to create her own tales of murder, mayhem and mystery. To find out more about Carol and her current projects, please visit her website at www.carolericson.com, “where romance flirts with danger.”

Also by Carol Ericson

Delta Force Defender

Delta Force Daddy

Delta Force Die Hard

Locked, Loaded and SEALed

Alpha Bravo SEAL

Bullseye: SEAL

Point Blank SEAL

Secured by the SEAL Bulletproof

SEAL

Single Father Sheriff

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk

Her Alibi

Carol Ericson

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-09378-1

HER ALIBI

© 2019 Carol Ericson

Published in Great Britain 2019

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

® and ™ are trademarks owned and used by the trademark owner and/or its licensee. Trademarks marked with ® are registered with the United Kingdom Patent Office and/or the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market and in other countries.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Version: 2020-03-02

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Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Epilogue

About the Publisher

The sea crashed on the rocks, and the tide tried to drag her back under but she resisted its pull. She forced open one eye, the lid weighted like a manhole cover.

To keep it open, she focused her dry eyeball on the filmy white curtain billowing into the room from the French door ajar to the balcony. Another wave from the ocean below made its presence heard as it broke and then clawed at the rocky shore. She could almost taste the salt from the sea spray on her tongue.

She licked her lips. The air in the room lay heavy upon her, and she still hadn’t managed to open her other eye. She lifted a lethargic arm and rubbed her closed eye, hoping to stimulate it.

She blinked against the stinging sensation and rubbed again, smearing moisture across her cheek to her ear. Had she been crying in her sleep? That deep, dark slumber she couldn’t seem to shake?

Raising her hand in front of her face, she wrinkled her nose. Not tears, blood. She hadn’t had a bloody nose since she was a kid. She pinched the bridge of her nose with two fingers, sniffing, and her nostrils flared at the tinny smell that seemed to invade every pore.

The odor revived her, stunning her like a prod. She jerked her bare limbs beneath the silk sheets. She bolted to a sitting position, the back of her head hitting the headboard. Pain, all out of proportion to the tap of her skull against the wood, coursed through her body, and she gagged.

As if that bump had awakened every nerve ending in her body, her right hand began to throb. She spread out her fingers, the red cuts on her hand standing in stark relief against the white sheets.

What the hell happened? Why was she bleeding, and why was she naked in her ex-husband’s bedroom?

She scrambled from the bed, tripping over something soft on the floor in the semidarkness. Gasping, she fumbled for the light switch on the wall next to the bed and jabbed at it with her thumb.

Her gaze dropped to the floor, and she staggered back, her mouth agape. A scream gathered in her lungs but lodged in her chest, choking her instead. Closing her eyes, she drew in a deep breath. Somewhere deep down inside, she knew vomiting would only make this situation, whatever it was, much, much worse.

Her self-preservation, one of her strongest instincts, took control of her brain and her eyelids flew open. She extended her leg and with her big toe, she prodded the shoulder of her ex-husband, crumpled on the floor.

Her investigatory digit met cold flesh, and the reality rushed in on her, just as surely as those waves were rushing to shore outside that window. She clapped a hand over her mouth and hissed through her fingers, “Niles?”

The s hung in the air and only the drapes floating into the room whispered a response.

She fell to her knees and crawled toward Niles’s still form. Covering two fingers with the bedspread that hung to the floor, she placed them against his neck. The once-vibrant man, who couldn’t seem to sit still for a second, didn’t have one ounce of life left in his body.

She sat back on her heels and surveyed the opulent bedroom she’d painstakingly decorated a lifetime ago. What had happened in this room?

She dug a knuckle into her temple. She couldn’t remember coming into the bedroom with Niles last night. She’d come back to the house with him in his car after the drink they’d shared at the Marina Sports Bar. He had the file she’d wanted to see in his home office.