Kathleen Long - Christmas Confessions

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Title Page Christmas Confessions Kathleen Long www.millsandboon.co.uk

About the Author After a career spent spinning words for clients ranging from corporate CEOs to talking fruits and vegetables, KATHLEEN LONG now finds great joy spinning a world of fictional characters, places and plots. A RIO and gayle Wilson Award of Excellence winner, and a National Readers’ choice, Booksellers’ Best and Holt Medallion nominee, her greatest reward can be found in the letters and e-mails she receives from her readers. Nothing makes her happier than knowing one of her stories has provided a few hours of escape and enjoyment, offering a chance to forget about life for a little while. Please visit her at www.kathleenlong.com or drop her a line at PO Box 3864, cherry Hill, NJ 08034, USA.

Dedication For Writers At Play with love and thanks for your friendship, encouragement, cheers and commiserations. Unconditional love with an endless supply of laughter. What more could a girl ask for? This one’s for you.

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

Epilogue

Copyright

After a career spent spinning words for clients ranging from corporate CEOs to talking fruits and vegetables, KATHLEEN LONGnow finds great joy spinning a world of fictional characters, places and plots. A RIO and gayle Wilson Award of Excellence winner, and a National Readers’ choice, Booksellers’ Best and Holt Medallion nominee, her greatest reward can be found in the letters and e-mails she receives from her readers. Nothing makes her happier than knowing one of her stories has provided a few hours of escape and enjoyment, offering a chance to forget about life for a little while. Please visit her at www.kathleenlong.com or drop her a line at PO Box 3864, cherry Hill, NJ 08034, USA.

For Writers At Play with love and thanks for

your friendship, encouragement, cheers and

commiserations. Unconditional love with an endless

supply of laughter. What more could a girl ask for?

This one’s for you.

Unknown number.

Detective Jack Grant frowned at his phone’s caller ID and swore softly. He put down his case notes and took the call.

“If you’re about to read from a script, you can save your breath by hanging up,” Jack growled into the receiver, his throat tight and dry from too many hours without sleep or food.

He glanced at the clock over his kitchen table. Eightfifteen in the morning. He’d been working nonstop since he got home from the precinct the night before.

The caller hesitated before speaking, and for a split second Jack thought he might get lucky and avoid conversation completely. He thought wrong.

“I wondered if you’d seen the latest blog at Don’t Say a Word?”

Don’t Say a Word? The name rang a bell, but Jack couldn’t pry a connection loose from the jumble of facts and evidence his current case had planted in his mind.

“The confession site?” the caller continued.

The caller’s voice indicated he was male, older, and either a heavy smoker or someone with a serious bronchial condition.

“Buddy,” Jack said, “I think you’ve got the wrong number.”

The caller began to cough—a sputtering, choking sound that made Jack feel as though he was violating the man’s privacy by listening.

He thought about asking if the man was all right, but that would indicate concern on his part, and concern was something Jack offered to no one, not if he could avoid it. Concern indicated vulnerability, and vulnerability indicated weakness.

Jack hated weakness.

He held the phone away from his ear until the sound of coughing subsided.

“It’s about Melinda,” the caller ground out as if struggling for air between choking spasms.

Melinda .

Jack had no doubt there were millions of Melindas in the world, but the combination of the caller’s voice and the name Melinda shifted Jack’s thoughts from the present to the past—eleven years past, to be exact.

“How have you been, Mr. Simmons?”

“Have you seen it?” the man asked, ignoring Jack’s question.

Melinda Simmons had gone missing from a New Mexico university campus not long after Jack’s sister, Emma, had vanished from a college fifty miles to the east.

Unlike Emma, Melinda’s body had never been found.

Her case had joined a handful of others—unsolved, their connection suspected, but never proved. The man Jack had thought responsible for the rash of college coed abductions and murders had been a self-proclaimed photographer who’d been in possession of photos of Emma, as well as of Melinda and the others upon his arrest.

Boone Shaw had walked free after a trial that had blown up in the prosecution’s face. The press had blamed the acquittal on a lack of evidence and an airtight alibi the defense attorney had presented immediately before closing arguments.

Life for Jack had tilted on its axis the day his sister’s lifeless body had been found.

Life for the Simmons family hadn’t fared much better.

Melinda Simmons’s mother had succumbed to her lung cancer not long after the trial.

Her father, Herb, had dropped out of society instead of facing his daughter’s tragic disappearance and presumed death alone.

Jack had figured him dead years ago. But here the man was on the other end of the phone, resurrected like the heartache Jack had denied since the day he’d buried Emma, since the day Boone Shaw had walked free.

“Are you near a computer?” Simmons asked.

“Give me a second.” Jack settled in front of his PC, clicking the icon to gain Internet access.

He waited for the entry page to open, cursing the cable connection under his breath. He initiated a search for the Don’t Say a Word Web site, then clicked onto the site via the list generated by the search engine.

As the site’s entry page came into focus, Jack’s chest tightened.

Apparently Herb Simmons wasn’t the only family member back from the dead. Anyone looking at the modeling shot of Melinda would never guess the young woman had allegedly been strangled and left in the desert eleven years earlier.

“Is he back?” Herb Simmons asked, his voice faltering, his emotion palpable across the phone line.

Jack winced.

Damn Boone Shaw for causing so many families so much pain.

“Could be,” Jack answered as he skimmed the site for an indication of just who was responsible for posting the girl’s photograph.

Jack remembered now where he’d heard the confession site’s name. The Web site and its cofounders had been profiled a few weeks back in People magazine.

The site promised an anonymous means for the public to air their most personal secrets, the thought being that confession was good for the soul.

According to the feature story, the public visited the site in droves, their morbid curiosity no doubt driving them to salivate over the suffering of others.

So much for keeping a secret.

Broken promises. Broken marriages. Broken dreams.

As if any of the bull the confessor spouted was true.