The Bodyguard's Return

She breathed a sigh of relief as they returned to the main office area. At least in here she could breathe without smelling the scent of him.

She sat at Raymond’s desk and motioned him into the chair on the opposite side of the desk. “Are you a wannabe true crime writer or what?” he asked.

The question irritated her. He knew nothing about her but was already making judgments. “No, I’m not. When I took the job here I decided it was a good idea to read as many of the back issues of the paper as possible to familiarize myself with both the newspaper I’d be writing for and the town where I’d chosen to live.”

“And why did you choose Cotter Creek?” His green gaze held hers intently, as if he were seeking answers to questions he hadn’t yet spoken.

“To be perfectly honest, I feel as if Cotter Creek chose me.” She broke eye contact with him, finding his direct gaze somewhat disconcerting. Instead she looked at the framed front page of the first copy of the Cotter Creek Chronicle that hung on the wall just behind him.

“I wasn’t sure where I was going when I left Scottsdale and eventually made it to Cotter Creek where my car transmission blew. It took a couple of days to fix and, while I was waiting, I just fell in love with the town.”

“And how did you meet Charlie?”

She looked at him again, fighting a wave of impatience. “I thought you were here to see the material I have, not to play a game of twenty questions.”

He smiled, one that lifted only a corner of his mouth with sexy laziness. “I like to know a little bit about the people I deal with.”

“Fine. I’m twenty-four years old. I love animals and candy bars, I hate superficiality and people who don’t have a sense of humor.”

She leaned forward, meeting his gaze directly. “I met Charlie on the first day I arrived in town. I’d just left my car at Mechanic’s Mansion and was looking for a hotel or motel to stay in while the car was being fixed. There were a couple of teenagers on the corner and I asked them about accommodations, and they told me there was a nice bed-and-breakfast on the edge of town.”

His eyes began to glitter with humor, obviously seeing where her story was leading. “Anyway,” she continued, “one of the boys offered to drive me there. He took me to the entrance to Charlie’s place and left me there.”

“I’ll bet you were horrified,” he said.

She laughed. “When I broke through the trees and saw Charlie’s place, I suspected I’d been had, but I wasn’t one hundred percent sure so I marched up to Charlie’s door and told him I’d heard he ran the best bed and breakfast in town.”

She smiled at the memory of Charlie’s face and a swift sharp grief pierced through her, stealing her smile and forcing the sting of tears to her eyes. She raised a hand to swipe them away.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.” His voice was gentle and she saw real regret in his eyes.

She nodded. “I’m just going to miss him so much. Other than your sister and Winnie, Charlie was my only friend in town. We used to spend hours playing chess.” She released a small laugh. “I never got a chance to beat him.”

“I could never beat him either.” For a long moment their gazes remained locked. It was a moment of connection, two people mourning for somebody they had both loved. This time he broke the eye contact and gestured to the papers in front of her. “Okay, show me what you’ve got.”

She cleared her throat, stuffing her emotions for Charlie back deep inside. “I noticed when I was reading back issues of the paper that there seemed to be an unusual number of fatal accidents in the area.”

“It’s a ranching and farming community, there are always accidents.”

“True, but Cotter Creek seemed to have more than its share, so two weeks ago I did some statistical analysis, comparing like-size ranching and farming communities. What I discovered was that the incidence of accidental deaths was three hundred times higher in Cotter Creek than anywhere else I compared it with.”

Joshua raised a dark eyebrow and took the sheet of paper that held her data. She watched him as he studied it. She’d met most of his brothers, each more handsome than the next, but Joshua seemed to have gotten the West good-looking gene in spades.

Savannah had been raised among the beautiful people of Scottsdale and if they weren’t beautiful by nature, then plastic surgery solved the problem. She’d been the anomaly, a busty redhead with a snub nose covered in freckles, who had no interest in beestung lips or liposuction.

By nature she didn’t particularly trust handsome men. She knew she was the kind of girl handsome men took home only when all the pretty blondes and brunettes had left the party.

She’d had one relationship with a man who’d been so attractive he’d taken her breath away, but it had turned out to be a cliché. He’d left her for a gorgeous woman who had taken his breath away.

But she needed to trust Joshua West. She needed him in her corner.

Her mind flashed with an image of him standing in the bathroom doorway, his chest splendidly naked and tautly muscled. A wave of warmth fluttered through her at the memory. Her last relationship had been almost a year ago, long enough that she’d almost forgotten what it felt like to have a warm naked chest pressed against her own. Almost…but not quite.

“Okay.” He set the paper back on the desk and looked at her, no trace of humor in his gaze. “You’ve got my attention.”

“Trust me, that’s just the beginning,” she said. She handed him the next paper she’d printed off. “This is a list of all the deaths that have occurred in Cotter Creek in the past two years.” She focused on her subject and tried to forget the vision of his naked chest that had popped unbidden into her head.

“If you take each one separately, they don’t seem so ominous…a tractor accident, a fall from a hayloft, a gas heater malfunction. You know Gray Sampson’s death had initially been ruled accidental. Sheriff Ramsey assumed he’d been thrown from his horse and had hit his head on a rock.”

She talked faster and faster, needing to get everything out. “It was only when Gray’s daughter and your brother Zack began to investigate that they realized it wasn’t an accident, but instead was murder.”

Joshua held up a hand to stop her. “Take a breath before you pass out.”

She felt a blush sweep up her neck. “Sorry, I’ve just been waiting so long for somebody to really listen to me. For the last week and a half I’ve been telling anyone and everyone that something isn’t right here, but nobody is interested in hearing me out.”

“Right now all you’ve convinced me of is that in the past year and a half the people of Cotter Creek were either more careless or more unlucky than others.”

“I’m not finished yet,” she replied. “By the time I am, you’ll see that something terrible is happening in this town, and unless somebody does something about it, more people are going to die.”

Joshua had yet to make up his mind about Savannah. He wasn’t sure if she was a drama queen looking for excitement or was really onto something.

She’d surprised him with her statistical analysis and the sharp intelligence that gleamed from her amber-colored eyes.

The one thing he did know was that something about Savannah Clarion made him a little bit jumpy, made his thoughts race in directions they shouldn’t be going.

As she’d talked to him, he’d found himself wondering if her red curls were soft and silky or wiry and coarse. He’d wondered if her full mouth would be soft and yielding beneath his or fierce and demanding?

Those kinds of thoughts irritated him. Hadn’t he learned his lesson in New York? He focused his attention on the next piece of paper she shoved over in front of him.

“I made a list of all the people who have died. As you can see, all of them are men,” she said.

He read the list of names, then looked back at her. “Look, this is all very interesting, but I don’t see any big conspiracy here.”

She frowned, her lower lip jutting out slightly in what appeared to be a small pout. “I’m not finished with all the investigating I intend to do,” she said. “Help me, Joshua. Please help me find out exactly what happened to all these men. With two of us working together it will take half the time to get some answers.”

He leaned back in his chair and swiped a hand through his hair. “I’m not sure what the questions are that need to be asked.”

“We need to look at each individual incident and see if there are any anomalies, anything that doesn’t fit with it being an accident. Like I said before, Gray Sampson’s death would have been ruled an accident. It wasn’t until your brother picked up the rock where Gray had supposedly fallen off his horse and hit his head and saw blood on both sides that they realized the rock had been used to bludgeon him to death.”

She paused to draw a deep breath and he tried not to notice the rise and fall of her breasts beneath the light lavender sweater she wore.

“As far as I’m concerned, Charlie buying ice cream an hour before he supposedly committed suicide is a huge red flag,” she continued. “Joshua, you were his friend. You should know Charlie didn’t have a suicidal bone in his body. Don’t you want to know the truth? Isn’t Charlie worth a little of your time?”

Joshua sighed. He had to admit that the fact that Charlie bought groceries then went home and blew his brains out, didn’t make sense. Charlie’s wife Rebecca had been gone a long time and Charlie seemed to have made peace with the fact that he would live out the rest of his years alone.

Surely if a man was going to commit suicide to be with his departed wife, he wouldn’t wait eight long years. Charlie’s suicide just didn’t make sense, although any other scenario didn’t make sense either.

What else do you have to do with your time, a little voice whispered inside his head? He didn’t want to work the family business and he wasn’t interested in continuing as a stockbroker, but had no idea what he really wanted to do. He had nothing but time on his hands at the moment.