Scarlet Vows

Maybe it hadn’t been her.

Who was he trying to kid? Four years or forty, he suspected she would always incite emotions so elemental they gripped him like a vise. Brianna Dudley was the only female who had ever had the power to scramble his brains. How had he managed to forget that about her?

Edgy and out of sorts, he followed the others onto the range absently, lost in memories he’d put aside a long time ago. He jerked back to the present when he saw they’d been assigned to the last four stands on the end closest to the woods.

The firing range itself was built into a bowl-shaped depression surrounded by dense woods on three sides. He stared at the trees. The disquiet he’d been feeling all morning intensified. While a credible shot, Drew hadn’t been able to summon up any enthusiasm for this tournament. Instead, his desire to leave was strong enough to surprise him.

“Something wrong, Drew?” Nancy asked as Carey took the stand beside him.

“No.”

Carey eyed him strangely. Zach frowned. “Come on, Nancy, you’re between me and Carey,” he told her. “I’ll help you get set.”

“Oh, no, I’ll help her,” Carey said smoothly. “After all, I promised to show her how it was done.”

Drew tuned them out. He gazed at the target down-range. It had been almost four years since he’d seen Brie, yet she could still set his pulses racing from a distance. How crazy was that?

He sought another focus for his wandering attention. The brooding string of trees on the hill offered nothing helpful. He was here to compete. Inattention on a firing range was dangerous and stupid.

The call went out that the line was live. As people began firing their practice shots, the scent of cordite filled his nostrils. Blue clouds of smoke already hung in the heavy air. Shots thundered in his ears despite the requisite protective headgear. Sweat gathered at his hairline, beginning a lazy trickle down his face. He checked and loaded his weapon.

Drew lined up his sights and fired, wishing he were elsewhere—preferably an air-conditioned elsewhere, but Nancy had mapped out an entire program of places he needed to go over the next few days even though the real campaigning wouldn’t begin until after the July Fourth festivities. With his father’s blessing, Nancy had met with the float committee to discuss Drew’s role on the family float. She’d scheduled him to give the short speech before the picnic, a job his grandfather and father generally handled, and she’d lined up a press interview immediately afterward.

His family had been right. She was good at her job. She’d done her homework on Moriah’s Landing and she’d planned a solid strategy for getting his name in front of the community.

She was extremely attractive, and more than once he’d caught a hint of sensual awareness slumbering in her serious gaze. He gave her points for the subtle way she made her interest in deepening their relationship clear without coming on to him. They had a lot in common. Drew genuinely liked Nancy. She’d make a good political partner, but as tempting as she was, Drew hesitated to change their status. Resisting his family’s attempts at matchmaking had become a habit. He knew his father and grandfather had decided Nancy was an ideal choice for more than his campaign manager.

Drew watched as she took careful aim at her target. Her first two shots went wide. The next shot hit the black outline on the outermost fringe. Carey had talked her into competing in the novice category even though she’s said she’d never done any shooting before.

Because he was concentrating on Nancy, he never saw the figure pelting down the steep dirt incline until he turned back to take aim at his own target. He released the trigger instantly.

She ran like a puppet on a string—or someone at the tail end of their stamina. Her long, dark hair tangled around her face, hiding her features.

Drew yelled for everyone to hold their fire. But at the opposite end of the range, someone was shooting what sounded like a cannon. His voice had no hope of carrying over that sound.

Drew didn’t stop to think. He sprinted toward the woman.

She stumbled and fell, taking his heart down with her. In seconds she was up again, but staggering.

A barrage of bullets passed so close Drew could practically feel the displaced air. The woman jerked to an abrupt stop. She twisted to look behind her, her features contorted by a mask of sheer panic. She took a faltering step and went down again. This time she made no move to rise.

He reached her, crouching over her still form. Red blossomed on her dirt-stained, cotton-print blouse. The deep, dark color spread rapidly across her chest. He sought for the pulse in her neck. Weak. Thready. He could hear each ragged breath she took. The shallow bursts sounded as if each one might be her last.

Her head lolled to the side, giving him a clear glimpse of the red furrow that had plowed its way along the side of her skull, disappearing beneath her tangled hair. Without moving her, he couldn’t tell if the bullet had entered her head or not, but she was still alive.

The sudden silence was almost as deafening as the noise had been. Drew raised his face to yell for an ambulance.

Pressed against the fence at the top of the hill, Dr. Leland Manning drilled him with a stare of absolute hatred.

Shocked, Drew took a second to realize how the scene must look to the man. He was crouched over the woman’s body, gun in hand.

Footfalls pounded up to him, snapping the spell. Voices shouted. People surrounded him, with more rushing forward. Carey Eldrich elbowed him aside, squatting beside the woman.

“Ursula?”

Of course. Ursula Manning, Leland Manning’s beautiful new young wife.

“Don’t move her,” Drew cautioned, feeling ill.

The words came too late. Carey cradled her against his chest and stood. Blood streaked his arm, smearing his shirt.

“Where’s the ambulance?” Carey roared. He ran with her, trailing a path of bright red droplets in his wake. Drew glanced over his shoulder up the hill. Leland Manning was gone.

Bits of excited, disjointed conversation bounced around and through him as Drew rose unsteadily. He pushed his way through the crowd, following Carey.

“…call an ambulance?”

“…still alive?”

“Who is it?”

“…anyone called the…?”

“What was she doing out there?”

And that last question stuck in his head. An excellent question. What had Ursula Manning been thinking to run onto a live firing range like that? And where had she come from? Had she been running from her husband?

Someone gripped his forearm. He realized it was being shaken hard in an attempt to get his attention. Nancy Bell swam into focus. Her wide, pale eyes looked enormous. She looked from him to the gun still clutched in his hand.

“Oh, my God, Drew. Do you think you killed her?”

Chapter Two

Yesterday, news of the shooting had reached the diner less than half an hour after Brie started her shift. Details had been vague and wildly exaggerated as usual, but Brie couldn’t imagine anyone, let alone the perfectly behaved Andrew Pierce, standing on the gun range with an Uzi submachine gun.

He was back in town to stay. Excitement warred with fear. She tried to tell herself it didn’t matter. In four years he’d only made one halfhearted attempt to contact her after he left town for graduate school. Still, she was extremely thankful she’d left the firing range when she had. What if she’d run into Drew there?

Her heart gave a foolish lurch. Not that it had been likely, given the size of the crowd.

She hadn’t slept much last night as a result of her chaotic thoughts and today she had agreed to pull a double shift. Tiredly, she lifted the laden serving tray. The diner had been filled since she’d come on duty. People stopped by for a quick bite or something to drink or simply to share the news with anyone who hadn’t yet heard about yesterday’s incident at the gun range. The town had seen too much of this sort of excitement lately. Evil seemed to have set up housekeeping in Moriah’s Landing.

Three women had been murdered since the start of the year, their bodies brutally displayed for her friend, Elizabeth Douglas Ryan, to discover. Then, when a stalker went after another of her friends, Katherine “Kat” Ridgemont, people learned that the town’s prodigal son, Jonah Ries, was an undercover FBI investigator looking into the secret society that most of the local scientists were rumored to belong to. And now Jonah and Kat planned to marry. While happy for Kat, Brie couldn’t understand what was happening to their once peaceful town.

She set burgers and fries in front of Dodie and Razz. The local youths delighted in their reputation as the terrors of the neighborhood. Hard to believe Razz was her age. Even harder to believe that she had once accepted a date with him. She hated waiting on him and he knew it.

Normally, the two hung out at the arcade, but occasionally they came in for a sandwich. They were rude, noisy and never tipped. Razz liked to leer at her because he knew it made her angry, but he was careful not to take it any further than that. He hadn’t forgotten how successfully she’d fought him off that night in his car any more than she had. And she’d made it perfectly clear she’d do a lot worse if he bothered her again.

She suspected the pair were behind a lot of the mischief that had been going on here at the waterfront. It defied logic that they hadn’t been caught doing something illegal by now.