Chapter 2
Huntsville, Alabama
The Christmas tinsel tickled her breast.
She shivered.
The shiny silver strands slid down her sweat-dampened torso. Over her belly button. Along her inner thigh. The tip of a deliciously wicked tongue followed that same path.
A sigh whispered from her lips. Man, that felt good. But she was so ready to get on with it. This guy was evidently going for a foreplay record.
Adeline Cooper propped up on her elbows and peered down her nude body at the red and white velvet hat. She couldn’t believe she was about to say this. “Look, Santa, patience has never been one of my virtues.”
Her lover lifted his attentive face from the task of tugging down her skimpy panties with his teeth. His brown eyes were glazed with the same anticipation currently throbbing in her veins.
“I’d like my present now.” She crooked her finger. “Come on up here and show me what you’ve got besides that nifty hat.”
His well-shaped mouth split into a grin as he crawled his way up her tingling body, all those gorgeous male muscles bunching and rippling with the effort. “Baby.” He nipped her lips with his teeth. “I got the package you’ve been waiting for all year.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” he growled as he nibbled her chin.
Pounding on the front door dragged her attention from his hungry mouth. Damn. “I should get that.”
“It’s your day off,” he muttered between kisses.
“Yeah, well.” She reached for the cuffs on the table next to the bed.
“That’s the thing about being a cop, there’s no such thing as a real day off.
” She fastened one cuff around his wrist with a titillating click.
“Now, don’t move, because I’ll be right back to interrogate you, Mr. Claus.
” While she plundered his mouth with her own, she attached the other bracelet to the iron headboard.
Adeline scooted off the bed and grabbed his shirt. She poked her arms into the long sleeves and hugged the warm flannel around her. At her bedroom door, she paused, surveyed his long, lean frame stretched out on her bed, and made a sound of approval deep in her throat. Merry Christmas to me.
“Hurry on back, now,” he teased, “and you can unwrap your present.”
She would definitely hurry back.
Another round of pounding echoed from the front door.
“Hold your horses,” she shouted as she padded through the house. “I’m coming.” Or she would be if whoever was doing all the banging hadn’t interrupted.
She yanked open the door. “What?”
“Morning, Cooper.” The man in the FedEx uniform, Wesley McElroy, nudged his Ray-Bans down his nose and surveyed her from head to toe. “You look all relaxed this morning.”
“It’s my day off,” she said. She sent a pointed look at the large padded envelope under his arm. “That for me?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He held out his electronic clipboard. “You need to sign for it.”
She put her signature where he indicated. McElroy passed the padded envelope to her. “You have a nice day now.”
“You, too.” Distracted by the sender’s address, she bumped the door closed with her hip and leaned against it. Though she didn’t recognize the specific return address, the location surprised her. Besides her mother, there wasn’t a soul in Mississippi who would contact her. Not by mail anyway.
Both Christmas and her birthday were coming up . . . maybe her scumbag uncle had finally decided to forgive her for doing her job nine years ago.
“Yeah, right. And hell just froze over.” She stalked into the kitchen and placed the envelope on the counter.
“Santa’s waiting!” her cuffed lover shouted from the bedroom.
She ignored him. Her well-honed cop instincts were revving up, overriding all else.
Getting anything from anywhere in Mississippi was too bizarre to ignore—even for great sex.
She dug up a pair of latex gloves and scissors.
Pulled on the gloves and then slowly cut the envelope’s flap free.
Carefully parting the severed edges, she bent her head down and peeked inside.
Adeline jerked back. Her heart bumped her sternum.
“What the hell?” She tucked two fingers inside and pulled the item from the envelope. A white sheet of copy or printer paper with letters pasted across it.
More of that pulse-pounding adrenaline seared through her as she read the cut-and-pasted words.
Pretty, pretty princess. See her smile . . . see her die.
“Shit. Shit. Shit.” Adeline dashed back to the living room, almost slipping on the slick hardwood, and searched through the stack of old mail on the table by the door. In her haste she sent junk mail and monthly statements fluttering to the floor.
Where the hell was that other letter? Unlike this one, the first letter had been hand delivered to her mailbox at home. No return address, no postage. And no prints.
She’d nagged the guys at work, thinking one of them had been playing a joke on her related to her birthday and the fact that she was about to be promoted to lieutenant. She’d brought the letter back home that same day. It had to be here.
“Addy! What the hell are you doing?”
“Gimme a minute.” She shoved a handful of hair behind her ear. The letter wasn’t in the stack. Hand shaking, she yanked open the table’s only drawer.
There it was.
She picked up the single sheet of plain white printer paper. Stared at the pasted-on letters that formed the words which now carried entirely new significance.
She was born a princess for all to see. Her light was so bright that they could no longer see me.
Adeline returned to the kitchen to compare the two notes. Paper looked to be the same weight and shade of white. The way the words were pasted on the page, right side angled slightly upward, was the same. No continuity in the spacing.
She set the two letters to the side and looked in the envelope to see what else it contained. A newspaper clipping. Big article. Front page. She pulled it out. Hattiesburg Press. She read the headline.
City Attorney Cherry Prescott Missing
Heart rate rising, Adeline skimmed the article.
Prescott served as Hattiesburg’s city attorney.
Four years older than Adeline, Prescott was married with two kids.
A photo accompanying the article was in black and white, but the woman’s smile was nothing less than dazzling—oozing self-confidence.
Blond hair, pretty lady. According to the article she was a brilliant attorney with a great future in politics.
Prescott had gone missing three days ago.
Adeline braced her hands on the counter, analyzed the details a second time. The woman’s car had been discovered just outside Moss Point. Only a few miles from where Adeline had grown up.
There were no suspects as of yet. No ransom demand. Just the abandoned vehicle. Prescott’s family was offering a sizable reward for any information that helped to find her and the person responsible for her abduction.
Frustration soared through her and Adeline threw up her hands.
“What the hell is this?” Why would some perv send her these stupid princess letters and an article about a woman who’d gone missing near her hometown?
A woman Adeline didn’t know . . . had never even met?
She shook her head. Didn’t make any kind of sense.
And yet there had to be a reason.
Instinct prodded her.
There must be some kind of connection here that she just couldn’t see. This was obviously not just a joke about her thirty-first birthday.
This was . . . a piece of some kind of creepy puzzle.
After placing the newspaper clipping next to the letters, Adeline turned her attention back to the envelope and opened it wider to see if there was anything else she had missed.
A postcard or photograph was tucked deep into a corner. She frowned, then shook the envelope until the final item fell free and fluttered to the counter.
A Polaroid snapshot.
Adeline picked it up by the edges. Same woman, Cherry Prescott, pictured in the article.
Only in this color snapshot her eyes were closed and she definitely wasn’t smiling.
No way to tell if she was dead or alive.
No discernible injuries. Since only her upper torso and face were visible in the photo, there was no way to be certain of anything.
Her makeup job was overdone, clownish, she wore a tiara and nothing else as far as Adeline could see.
She read the words scrawled in tiny print across the bottom of the photo. As the ramifications of the statement filtered through her confusion, a new kind of tension ignited in Adeline’s veins.
One dead princess, two to go.