Scene of the Crime: Bridgewater, Texas

Sally returned with the coffeepot and poured Matt a cup. “Anything new in the murder case?” she asked, her voice low as she leaned toward Matt.

He could almost feel Jenna holding her breath to hear his reply. “Nothing that I can talk about,” he said.

Sally shook her head. “It’s a scary thing. I’ve lived in this town fifty years and counting and I don’t remember a murder like Miranda’s ever taking place here. She was such a nice young woman, always smiling.” Sally shook her head again and walked away to fill another customer’s coffee cup.

Matt took a sip of his coffee. He’d believed Jenna was as cold as they came when they had spoken about the murder. She hadn’t blinked an eye at the crime scene nor had she shown any emotion at all when sitting in his office.

Until he’d told her she was Miranda’s beneficiary. It was only then that he’d seen a deepening of the blue of her eyes, a slight tremor in her full lower lip, and he’d realized she wasn’t as cold and unaffected as she’d pretended to be earlier.

Sitting this close to her he could smell her, the pleasant scent of clean with a touch of something slightly citrusy.

“Doesn’t your wife fix you a nice hot lunch?” she asked, breaking the silence that had welled up between them.

“My wife?”

“Yeah, I figured the picture on your desk of the pretty blonde was your wife.” She half-turned to look at him.

“She was. She died five years ago.”

“Sorry,” she replied.

“Yeah, so am I,” Matt replied. He fought the impulse to scratch his scar, the scar he’d received while wrestling with a madman, the same man who had killed Natalie.

“A man like you, surely you have a girlfriend who would be eager to fix you lunch, then.”

“Agent Taylor, if I didn’t know better I’d think that was a backhanded compliment,” he said with a half grin.

“Good thing you know better,” she replied. “And you might as well call me Jenna because I don’t intend on going anywhere anytime soon.” She picked up another fry. “You have to tell me something,” she said as she stared down at her plate.

She looked back at him and in the depths of her eyes he saw a shimmer of pain. “I wasn’t given any real information before coming here, just that she’d been murdered. I need to know the details. They can’t be any worse than my imagination.” She broke off as Sally arrived with his plate of food.

“I don’t want to talk about it here,” he said. He supposed there were some things he could tell her that wouldn’t compromise his investigation, although there were some details that hadn’t been shared with anyone and he wasn’t about to share those with her.

“Then where?” she replied.

“Why don’t we finish our lunch and then I’ll follow you back to your motel room. We can talk there without interruption, without anyone listening.”

“Thank you,” she said and focused back on her plate.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“A little town just north of Kansas City. I work out of the Kansas City field office.”

“Married?”

“Nope.”

“Do you have a significant other?” he asked.

“Yeah, a cranky cat that showed up half-dead on my doorstep.” She gazed at him with narrowed eyes. “What’s this? Be nice to the FBI agent and maybe she’ll go away?”

“Something like that,” Matt agreed easily.

“It doesn’t matter whether you’re nice or mean to me, I’m here for the long haul,” she replied.

“Won’t your cat miss you?”

“Nah, we have no emotional attachment to each other. That’s why we get along so well. I have a friend who is taking care of her while I’m gone.”

The statement was definitely telling. He suspected that this was a woman who didn’t play well with others. What she had to realize was that when it came to an ongoing murder investigation in his town, he wasn’t willing to play well with her.

Plus, he wasn’t at all sure he believed in the whole profiling thing. As far as he was concerned, solving a crime happened only one way—through intensive investigation, intelligent interrogation and exhaustive interviews.

He thought profiling was a bit of hocus-pocus that might work in the case of serial killers, but there was absolutely nothing in the Harris murder that indicated this was anything but an isolated crime.

“How long have you been Sheriff here?”

“Almost five years. Before that I was a homicide cop in Chicago.”

She looked at him in surprise. “Really, what brought you to this tiny town?”

“I was born and raised here, but moved to Chicago to join the police force. I came back here after the death of my wife. It so happened that the sheriff was retiring, so I stepped into his shoes.”

There had been a time when he couldn’t talk about his wife, when even thinking about her brought a pain that nearly cast him to his knees. But that terrible grief had passed and over the last year he’d finally begun to look forward instead of backward.

For the next few minutes they ate in silence. She finished her meal but made no move to leave.

There was a part of him, a strictly male part, that found Special Agent Jenna Taylor extremely attractive. Definitely a fatal attraction, he told himself ruefully.

“Why didn’t you tell me about being Miranda’s beneficiary when you first met me?” she asked.

He eyed her with a touch of amusement. “If you’ll recall we didn’t exactly meet under the best of circumstances. I was trying to decide if I should arrest you for interfering with a crime scene.”

“I didn’t touch anything. I’m not exactly a novice around crime scenes.” She leaned closer to him and he couldn’t help but notice that she had the most kissable-looking lips he’d seen in a long time. “I could help you, you know. Catching killers is what I do for a living, it’s who I am.”

He finished the last bite of his meat loaf and then pushed his plate away. “If you really want to help me, then tell me a little bit about Miranda. You said the two of you were best friends. I didn’t know her personally, so any information you can tell me about the kind of person she was would help. You said you’ve known her since she was twelve, did the two of you meet in school?”

“No, Miranda’s parents brought me into their home as a foster child, but that was a long time ago,” she said with a touch of impatience. “Miranda and I were like sisters.”

“You look a lot like her,” he said.

For the first time since he’d met her she smiled, a real smile that warmed the blue of her eyes and lit her features from within. An unexpected flicker of desire ignited in the pit of his stomach.

“Miranda and I used to tell people that we were fraternal twins, not exactly alike but almost. We might have looked alike but in most things we were polar opposites.”

“How so?” he asked curiously.

“Miranda was like a big ball of sunshine. She never met anyone she didn’t like, believed that everyone had some good inside them.”