Chapter Eight
He shouldn’t have touched her.
Because now he didn’t want to stop.
And that kiss… It’d been nothing but a performance to put Darby and Henry Forbes in their places, but Adrial could still taste the slight hint of Winnie’s peppermint ChapStick that’d rubbed off on his lips.
His mouth tingled and cooled, a constant reminder that’d he somehow caught himself on the wrong side of the line he’d drawn between them.
Hell, seeing her at the mercy of those two had cracked his entire plan to keep things professional.
There’d been far too many times he hadn’t gotten between Winnie and Darby over the years.
He just hadn’t expected he still needed to play referee.
She kept pace with him easily enough despite the difference in their heights, as though muscle memory had kicked in from back when they’d been inseparable.
Walking these same sidewalks to dinner, hitting up the library at the end of their workdays, ducking into the bakery to grab cupcakes for one of their birthdays.
“You didn’t have to interfere back there. I can take care of myself.”
“I wasn’t worried about you.” Adrial finally had the sense to drop his hand from her lower back, but her body heat had seeped into his fingers too deeply to dislodge the sensation fully.
“You looked feral enough I was convinced you were two seconds away from pulling their hearts from their chests with your bare hands.”
“They’d deserve it.” A close-lipped smile crept across her face.
She was picturing it, probably every minor detail from the feel of a half-beating heart in each hand and the stupid expressions etched into her victims’ faces.
In Winnie’s world, the more gore, the merrier.
It’d always been a problem, especially on movie nights, when she’d failed to pick anything other than horror flicks and he’d just wanted to escape with mindless action.
She smoothed her hand down her frizzed braid, looking perfectly chaotic and beautiful and wild.
“I spent most of the night putting the file together before I fell asleep face down on the kitchen table. I didn’t get a chance to change before our meeting. ”
“I didn’t mean to offend you. You look great.
” And she did. Her style had changed over the years, evolving into button-down blouses in colors that brought out the intense hazel of her eyes and jeans that met every curve of her lower half.
In the past decade, she’d gone from her grunge era of old band T-shirts stolen from his closet, to a woman who looked as though she was ready to take on the world.
Even standing against her childhood bullies a few minutes ago, she’d held her chin high in a way she never had before.
Adrial locked down the blitz of heat that flared at the thought.
Every cell in his body demanded he turn back around and pull Henry Forbes’s tie tighter until the bastard got on his knees and apologized for coming near Winnie, but Adrial didn’t play those kinds of games anymore. “What’d they want?”
Her laugh filtered through him in a crushing wave of detached ice. Not like her at all. Fake but practiced.
“The usual. I’m ugly. I’m poor. My dad is the town villain.
” Winnie seemed to gauge their location by taking in the row of houses branching off the center of town.
Houses that competed with each other by putting up the tackiest Halloween and Christmas decorations, installing the ugliest mailboxes and hosting the worst cocktail parties.
His childhood home looked the same as it always did as they passed.
Abandoned, overgrown and sad, and he had no intention of stepping over the threshold again. “This isn’t the way to your office.”
She was right. He’d silently directed her toward the one last place he should consider bringing her, but it’d almost been automatic.
A need he couldn’t explain. The walk wasn’t far from the agency office, one he made every day when he managed to drag himself home instead of crashing on his office couch.
“You might not remember this about Black Hollow, but people around here are extremely nosy. Figured you’d want somewhere more private to talk about the case. ”
She crossed both arms around the file pressed against her chest. “Your office isn’t private enough?”
With Baxter hanging around and wanting every detail about Winnie to hold over his head for eternity? “No.”
“I take it you haven’t been to your parents’ house since you moved back.
” She scanned the black wrought-iron fence that failed to corral the rose bushes his mother had loved and spent years cultivating.
Dead blooms and buds had turned brown and died off and never been pruned in the years since her passing.
His father wanted nothing to do with them, had hired a landscaper to take over the yard duties once Adrial moved away to Chicago.
Mayor Shane Tucker wouldn’t have been caught dead doing something so beneath him as yard work.
That was for the working people. “You haven’t sold it? ”
“Not yet.” As much as he hated every memory of growing up in that house, with its staff and nannies and tutors, he couldn’t bring himself to get rid of it.
So the house sat here, decaying year by year, void of life and a future.
A perfect reflection of the hollowness living in his chest. “Henry Forbes has been trying to convince me to let him sell it since I came back, but I’m not willing to give him the satisfaction or any of my other business.
Unfortunately, the only other Realtor in Black Hollow is his wife. ”
“Say no more.” She swept her fingers across the tops of the wrought iron—just as she done every time she’d come to his house—and moved on.
Passing the hollow shell holding all those expectations and pressures Adrial had grown up with as the mayor’s son.
“I guess I have no idea where you live then. I’d always assumed you’d taken over the Tucker estate. ”
Hell, he hated that word. Estate. Then again, that was exactly what it was while he’d been growing up.
The place the most powerful people in Black Hollow lied, manipulated and schemed to get into.
Parties, political functions, birthdays.
His mother had spent months on the guest lists and thousands of dollars on the decor, food and alcohol—catered, of course—while Adrial had been expected to stay in his room night after night listening to the sounds of life happening one floor below.
Tucker Mansion might’ve been the biggest house in town, but the walls closed in on him every night.
And it’d only gotten worse as friends he’d made in school, or at the park on the rare occasions he convinced his nanny to take him, learned his last name and who his parents were.
But not Winnie. She’d never cared about the Olympic-size pool in the backyard or the theater room in the basement.
She’d never even asked to hang out at his house until he’d invited her.
For the first time in his life, he hadn’t had to worry about someone else’s agenda or what they wanted from him.
She’d never had one, and he’d fallen in love with her long before he’d asked her to marry him because of it.
“We’re almost there.” Tucking his hands into his pockets to keep himself from reaching out to her again, Adrial nodded down the tree-lined street.
Cracked curbs, a few straggling Halloween decorations and dead leaves created a sense of otherworldliness as they moved farther away from Main Street.
The houses here got smaller the closer to town center, the yards a little more worn from years of kids jumping through sprinklers or playing tag.
There’d been thousands of times when he’d fantasized about being a regular kid able to do regular things rather than spend his summers and weekends skiing with adults, whose conversations rarely pointed his way, or sitting with his Mandarin tutor hour after hour until he got his pronunciation right.
This section of town had given him a glimpse of what life could look like if parents engaged with their kids and friendships were built off playing “truth or dare” and after-school trouble. “Just a couple more streets.”
“We’re going to your house?” Winnie’s eyes couldn’t have gotten any wider at the idea of him bringing her home. Then she pulled up short. “Wait. Is this a setup? Is your wife going to be waiting for me with a kitchen knife because we used to be engaged?”
His brain struggled between two extremes: laughing at the ridiculous notion he’d lure her to his home to kill her and the darkness clawing through his chest that refused to be forgotten.
He sucked in a sharp breath, prepared for the emptiness to follow as it usually did when thinking of Katie.
“I see you’re still watching too many horror movies.
” Her expression didn’t crack under his attempt at humor.
He used to make her bust out laughing with jokes like that, but that was before his life had gone to hell.
He was losing his touch. “If you must know, my wife’s not home. ”
“Adrial, I’m not interested in being your dirty little secret.
” Color that had nothing to do with the steady cold sinking into his joints shot into her face.
She threw out one hand. “Not that we’re anything more than coworkers while we look into Lila Mercer’s case, but I’d rather we meet somewhere public if having me in your home is going to make your family uncomfortable. ”
Adrial took a single step forward. Logic was losing its hold on him, drawing him closer to her. “You say that like you know what it’s like to be on that side.”
“I do.” She notched her chin higher, just as she had in facing off with Darby and Henry Forbes, and Adrial didn’t like that one bit. Didn’t like that she might consider him a threat. “And it’s not a position I would put any woman through. Even if it meant losing your help with this investigation.”
He looked down at her, grabbed her left hand and smoothed his thumb over her ring finger. Where her wedding ring should’ve been. “Where is your husband, Red? Why didn’t he come to help you deal with your father’s funeral and house?”
“You shouldn’t call me that.” She ripped her hand from his but didn’t seem to know what to do with it after that. “We’re not together anymore. You’re married, and it’s inappropriate to pretend otherwise.”
“You think I’m the kind of man who would try to seduce you while still married to my wife?
” Hell, maybe this wasn’t going to work between them.
Ten years wasn’t long enough to heal the wounds he’d caused.
He needed her to trust him if they were going to work this case together, but so far he hadn’t given her any reason to. That was clear now.
“That’s the problem, isn’t it? I don’t know you, Adrial.
Not really.” She took a step back from him, countering the proximity he’d created between them.
“I thought I did. I thought I knew everything about you, but then you disappeared to Chicago without even saying goodbye or breaking up with me to my face.”
“I’m sorry, Winnie. I didn’t want to hurt you.
I just… I couldn’t stay. Not with the way things were going, but it had nothing to do with you.
” He couldn’t stop himself from regaining the distance she’d put between them.
To just get a hint of her favorite vanilla shampoo and feel the brush of her hair against his arm.
“But I’m not married anymore. My wife… She’s in Chicago with her family. Where she belongs.”
“You’re divorced.” Her throat worked on a deep swallow. She lost a bit of the fight he couldn’t seem to help but instigate in her. He liked it, the stubbornness and the fire. Not this meek little thing who felt the need to protect herself from the world. “I’m—I’m sorry.”
It was all too easy to let her assumption slide, but he didn’t have it in him to get into the details of his marriage. They had more important things to focus on. The Lila Mercer case, for one.
“Nothing to be sorry for.” Adrial motioned toward the house, which was set back off the street by a large yard with a giant willow and a floor-to-ceiling window at the front. The house he’d made his home since moving back. The house he’d bought. For her. “We’re here.”