Meredith Fletcher - No Escape

“I know magic.”

“Sure you do.”

He studied her with indolent eyes, not saying anything until she recited his address.

His defenses went up. “How do you know so much about me?”

“Like I said, magic.” Lauren raised her right hand, palm forward so he couldn’t see the driver’s license trapped by its edge between her first two fingers.

“I’m not a big believer in magic.”

With a flourish, Lauren shook her hand and his driver’s license appeared at the end of her fingers. For a moment, Heath didn’t know what to say. Before he could recover, she flicked her wrist and sent the plastic rectangle spinning at him.

Heath caught the license in his left hand. His free hand slid down to his pants pocket, then he looked surprised. “You picked my pocket at the morgue.”

MEREDITH FLETCHERlives out West where the skies are big, but still close enough to Los Angeles to slip in for some strategic shopping. She loves old stores with real wooden floors, open-air cafés, comfortable boots, the mountains and old movies like Portrait of Jennie while sipping a cup of hot cocoa on a frosty day. She loves action romances with larger-than-life heroes and heroines with pithy repartee. She has pithy repartee herself, but never when she seems to need it most! She’s much more comfortable at the computer writing her books. Please contact her at meredithfletcher@hotmail.com or find her at www.whatmakesmyheartbeatfaster.blogspot.com.

Meredith Fletcher

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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For Matt and Alyssa, who found each other.

“I’m sorry about your friend.”

Throttling the urge to scream in rage and pain, Lauren Cooper stared down at the body of Megan Taylor. “She’s— She wasn’t my friend. We were sisters.”

On the other side of the stainless-steel table that supported Megan, the coroner consulted a small spiral-bound notebook. Intensity clung to him like a second skin. He didn’t look like a guy who smiled much, but he was handsome and would have had a nice smile when he put himself to it.

Being a coroner wasn’t a profession that lent itself to a lot of smiles, though. Not even in Jamaica.

His white lab coat was stretched tight across broad shoulders. The notebook nearly disappeared in his big, callused hands. A faded half-moon scar showed on the left side of his cleft chin. He was over thirty, but not by much. He was six feet plus and lean. His sun-streaked bronze hair was short and neat, professional, but a little long now, a little out of control. Maybe he hit the beach a lot when he wasn’t in the morgue. His accent was Southern, somewhere in the lower forty-eight.

Lauren turned her attention from the coroner and focused on Megan. Looking at her lying there on the table was the hardest thing Lauren had ever had to do. Mornings filled with pillow fights, nights packed with shared secrets, all the things sisters did made the reality even more confusing.

Megan’s short-cropped platinum-blond hair was tangled with seaweed, and Lauren knew that she would never have wanted to be seen like that. She had to resist the impulse to comb the debris from Megan’s hair.

You can’t. It’s evidence. It’s all evidence . Tears burned the backs of Lauren’s eyes .

Megan is evidence now .

The thought almost wrung a howl of pain from Lauren. She curled her hands into fists and made herself breathe, made herself push the air out and slowly let it back in. She had to keep the air going out. It was too easy to hold it in.

Looking at Megan’s body lying on the table and covered to the neck by the white sheet was a nightmare. She’d been twenty-seven years old, the same age Lauren was. Both of them were similarly built, athletic with curves.

With her fair hair and dazzling blue eyes, Megan had been the one of them that was the light. Dark haired and dark eyed, Lauren had been the shadow. Megan had always fearlessly rushed in, and Lauren had always waited on the outside, watching before she dove in.

That had changed later. Megan had remained fearless, but Lauren had learned to seize the limelight whenever she needed to. Success in her job had depended on that. She was suddenly aware of the silence in the morgue, and that the coroner was staring at her.

She thought back frantically, trying to remember any question she might have missed. There were so many questions swirling through her head right now. “I’m sorry. Did you ask me something?”

“I did. Which of you is married?”

The question surprised Lauren. It didn’t seem like the kind of information a coroner would want. But this was Jamaica. She didn’t know how things worked down here. She’d never been to the island country.

“Neither of us is married.”

The coroner’s eyes were gold with green flakes that stirred restlessly. He didn’t blink. “Different last names. Is one of you divorced?”

“No.”

“But you said you’re sisters?”

“Yes. I was adopted.” Rescued was more like it. Lauren still had nightmares about the orphanage and foster homes. Her adoptive mother told her those memories would fade, but they hadn’t. Lauren had always been thankful for the second chance she’d gotten, and being orphaned once had made losing her adoptive father to a heart attack four years ago even harder. Megan and her mother were all that Lauren had left.

And now Megan was gone.

“You kept your birth name?”

“Yes. It was all I had left of my parents.” Lauren had wanted to keep something from them. They had died tragically. It hadn’t been their fault that they’d left her. From everything she remembered of them, they had been good people.

“Do you know who Ms. Taylor came down here with?”

“She came by herself.” Lauren looked down at her sister. There had been so many wild things Megan had gotten her to do when they’d lived at home and during college.

“Was she in the habit of doing things like that?”

Lauren kept her voice soft. “She liked her adventures.”

“Adventures?”

“That’s what she called them. Her adventures.” Lauren’s eyes burned, but she refused to let the tears fall. She wasn’t going to do that in front this stranger. She had always been emotionally reserved.

Except with Megan. With Megan she’d always been able to just be herself.

Now that was gone.

“Coming down here by herself was risky.”

The flat tone in the coroner’s voice stopped just short of insulting, but that somehow made the statement worse. He winced, as if he’d just realized how harsh he’d sounded.

“Sorry. Something like this, it’s hard to take even if you’ve seen it dozens of times before.”

The morgue, for all its stainless-steel and tiled-floor impersonality, suddenly seemed too small. Lauren made herself breathe out. He’s just here to do his job. Just answer the questions . She worked to unclench her fists and failed. She wanted to defend Megan, wanted to explain how her sister loved life and new experiences, and she wanted to lash out at the coroner all at the same time.