Janice Johnson - His Partner's Wife

She didn’t. Because she didn’t care enough? Because she didn’t feel she had the right?

Had she been the same with her husband? Or was he the one who’d taught her that what he didn’t choose to tell her was none of her business? The speculation seemed disloyal. Stuart Reed had been his partner.

The silence lengthened. John became aware of the quiet and darkness beyond the kitchen. He grabbed the edge of the counter. “Time to hit the sack.”

She did just what he was hoping to avoid. She touched him. “Are you all right?”

He couldn’t insult her by backing away. All he could do was wait until her hand dropped to her side. He sounded hoarse when he said, “Nothing a good night’s sleep won’t cure.”

Her expression relaxed. “I’ll see you in the morning.” Startling him, she brushed the lightest of kisses on his cheek. Then she left the room.

He stood frozen in her wake, conscious of the faint scent she’d left behind, something flowery that suited her.

Voice harsh and low, he said, “Damn, damn, damn.”

Dear Reader,

His Partner’s Wife was born out of the paranoia we all feel. (Come on, admit it!) One of the worst betrayals to us individually and as a society is a cop gone bad. Since I’ve been writing so much in the past few years about cops, it was perhaps natural for me to think of a creepy way one of them could use his power. I coupled his villainy with the story of a woman who, after her husband’s death, has to take a fresh look at her memories of him, understanding that he wasn’t the man she’d thought him to be. Bad enough to be widowed, but what if much of your life together had been a lie?

This story is the beginning of a trilogy, born because I had ideas for a number of stories that all had cops as heroes. If the cops were brothers, and had become cops because of a tragedy in their past, I had a whole, not just the parts. Interest sparked, I started to write.

I continue to write about police officers because their work holds all the drama, mystery, action and pathos so lacking in the everyday lives of, say, writers. They take unimaginable risks daily in every car stop, every domestic disturbance call. They’re heroes, and their motivations and emotions the stuff of novels.

Here’s hoping you find these brothers as compelling as I do.

Janice Kay Johnson

P.S. I love to hear from readers. You can reach me via www.superauthors.com

www.millsandboon.co.uk

This one’s for Mom, starting on a new stage of life. Your strength and independence have always been, and still are, my inspiration.

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

DINNER TABLE CONVERSATIONS about blood-spatter patterns and other minutiae of crime scenes didn’t faze Natalie Reed. Her deceased husband had been a homicide detective who talked about his job as if everyone hunted killers for a living.

The abstract, she discovered on the day when she found a dead man in her own house, was not the same as a gory here-and-now.

Nothing had been out of the ordinary at work. Natalie sold advertising space for the Port Dare Sentinel, a daily newspaper. The job would be easier, she suspected, in a larger city. Port Dare boasted fifty thousand citizens, but was relatively isolated on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Tourists from the urban areas around Seattle or Tacoma had a two-hour drive to Port Dare to catch the ferries crossing the Strait of Juan de Fuca for Victoria, British Columbia. Instead of being a suburb to a larger city, Port Dare stood alone, which was why it had a small-town atmosphere. In other words, you constantly tripped over your neighbor’s toes.

Today’s challenge had been persuading the annoyed owner of a sporting goods store that he’d be making a mistake to quit running his regular advertisement in the Sentinel out of ire because the editor had endorsed his opponent for the city council.

“Why the hell should I let you have my advertising dollars?” he’d asked sulkily.

“Because you get more bang for them with the Sentinel than you would anywhere else. Our rates are better than good. We’re focused—our market is yours. Your customers read the Sentinel.” She’d smiled wryly at him. “Come on, George. You were a businessman before you were a politician. The editor couldn’t make his decision based on advertising dollars, you know that. We would have had an unhappy advertiser whichever one of you we endorsed.”

He grunted and grumbled, but in the end grudgingly ran his standard insert in the Sunday edition.

It had been a close call, Natalie knew, so she was still metaphorically patting herself on the back when she parked in the driveway at home and locked the car. Thanks to her good mood, she felt only a tinge of annoyance at the fact that she couldn’t pull into the two-car garage. Stuart had filled the garage with so much junk long before she’d married him that not even her compact would fit. She kept meaning to do something about it, but Stuart had never thrown anything away, which meant she would be spending the next five years going through boxes of old magazines or clothes and drawers full of such useless flotsam as old receipts and stamps torn from envelopes. The garage was a low priority.

The house was quiet and fragrant with the smell of freshly baked bread. She had timed the bread machine to finish just about now. A warm slice would taste good with the leftover minestrone soup she planned to have for dinner.

First she intended to get out of her panty hose and suit and into jeans and wool-felt clogs. Dropping her purse on the entry hall table, Natalie headed up the stairs.

The house was a twenty-year-old tri-level: living room, kitchen and dining room on the ground level wing, a family room, unused by her, extra bedroom and the utility room down a few steps in the daylight basement, and above it the master bedroom and bath, her sewing room and Stuart’s den. Truthfully, Natalie still thought of the whole house as Stuart’s because he’d been so settled in it before their brief marriage. She had been trying very hard these past months to make first small changes and then larger ones that would put her stamp on what was her home until she chose to sell it.

The carpet muffled her footsteps. Taking out her hoop earrings, she started past her sewing room before pausing in exasperation. Darn it, the cat had obviously napped in the middle of the fabric and had torn the tissue pattern pieces she’d laid out and pinned. Clumps of long black fur clung to the material, too. Her fault—she’d meant to shut the door and forgotten.

Or had she? Natalie frowned. Strange. She’d have sworn… She gave her head a small shake and philosophically accepted reality. The door was open. The cat had undeniably napped, leaving plenty of trace evidence. Earrings in hand, she continued down the hall.

Natalie was two steps past the den before a wave of shock hit her. Terror smacked her next. She froze, her own accelerated heartbeat as loud as a snare drum through a thin wall. Had she really seen a man lying in Stuart’s den? With his head…

She didn’t want to think about his head.

Through the half-open door she could see into her bedroom. It lay still and empty, just as she’d left it. The bed was made, the pinwheel quilt without even a depression left by the cat. The closet doors were closed. What she couldn’t see was what lay—or stood—behind the door: her dresser, the second closet that still held some of Stuart’s things, the doorway to the master bath. Somebody could be in there, waiting, listening to her heartbeat, her choked breathing.