Ms. Calculation

He cleared his throat, wishing he had loosened the top button of his uniform before he’d made his way to the door. Even his body armor felt tight, and he gave it a slight tug in an effort to dispel some of the discomfort he was aware wasn’t really physical.

“Actually, I’m here about Bianca.” As soon as the name fell from his lips, Gwen’s scowl disappeared, replaced by a wide-eyed look of fear.

“She’s upstairs,” Gwen said, absently motioning toward the wooden staircase that led to the second floor of the ranch house. “Do you want me to go get her up?” There was an edge to her voice, a sharpness that came with panic.

He moved to touch her, but stopped and gripped his hands together in front of him to keep his body and emotions under control.

“I’m afraid to tell you this, Ms. Johansen,” he said, moving slightly so he could look the older woman in the face as well. “Mrs. Johansen. I’m sorry, but in the early morning hours, we found Bianca’s body. She is...deceased.”

He knew he should have just said dead, but he couldn’t get the word past his lips. It was too harsh for Bianca, the veterinarian who’d been a regular at Dunrovin. He’d seen her so many times over the years, and they had a friendship based on their mutual attachment to animals—and her sister. In fact, Bianca had been kind to him, offering him tidbits about Gwen’s life and her dating status, and once in a while pushing him to make his move to get her back. But he’d always brushed away Bianca’s urging. He and Gwen had already had their chance—he couldn’t go through that kind of heartbreak. It nearly broke him once. He couldn’t risk something that raw again.

“Deceased?” Gwen said the word as though she tasted its full, bitter flavor and spat it out.

He wanted to look down at the ground, to escape that gaze of hers that made every part of him charge to life. “Yes. I’m so very sorry for your loss.”

Carla stared at him and blinked, the action slow and deliberate. “No.”

Gwen’s hand slid down the door with a loud squeak, like nails on a chalkboard...but he knew what the sound really was—it was the sound of a heart breaking.

She collapsed on the floor, her head hitting the wood with a thump so loud he rushed to her side to make sure she was still conscious.

“Gwen...Gwen, are you okay?” He touched her face and looked into her eyes. They were filled with tears, tears that wet his hand as they dripped over his skin and fell to the floor. There wasn’t blood or a bruise where her head had hit the ground, but she wasn’t okay. She wasn’t going to be okay for a long time.

He stroked away her tears as she lay on the floor and cried. Her body was riddled with sobs, hard and heavy.

He wanted to tell her everything was going to be all right. That she would get through this. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to lie.

Some people held the belief that time healed all pain, but he knew all too well it wasn’t true. All time did was push it further from the mind, but just like a deep flesh wound, any time he brushed the area the pain was just as all-consuming and powerful as when the blow first struck. That cliché about the healing power of time was for the weak—for the ones who couldn’t face the reality of a future filled with wounds that wouldn’t heal.

Regardless of the state Gwen was in, he knew how strong she was. How much it took to bring her to this point. And he’d been the one to break her.

He hated himself.

“Shh...” he said, trying to calm her and help her in the only way he knew how.

Carla opened the door wider and stepped by him and out into the crisp morning air. “Not again...”

Gwen looked at her mother and, moving his hand aside, she rubbed the tears from her face and took a series of long breaths. “I’m fine... I’m fine...” she said, as though she was trying to convince herself. She sat up and smoothed back her hair.

Wyatt stepped out of her way and tried to ignore his feelings of rejection at her pushing him away. “Currently, Bianca’s body is at the crime lab. As her death was unattended, she will need to undergo an autopsy in order for us to generate a full report.”

Carla hugged herself as she rocked back and forth. Gwen stood up, and, brushing off her red plaid nightgown, she stepped to her mother’s side and wrapped her arm around Carla’s shoulders. “It’s okay, Mom. It’ll be okay.”

At least one of them had the strength to feed Carla the lines she needed to hear.

Gwen looked at him, her eyes red and thick with restrained tears. “A full report? What does that mean? You don’t know how she died?”

He shook his head. “The coroner was unable to make a determination as to the cause of death. It will need to be fully investigated by the medical examiner.”

She frowned and her gaze flicked to the right as though she was remembering something. She opened her mouth to speak, but stopped, and then after a moment started again. “Where did you find her?”

The discomfort he had been feeling amplified. “She was found in the stables of the Dunrovin Ranch.”

“Your family’s place? Again?” Gwen asked, like she was calling him out for somehow being party to her sister’s death.

He nodded, guilt rising in him as her poorly veiled accusation struck. “One of my mother’s mares had come up lame. Last night, Bianca came to assess the animal and determine a course of treatment. We found Bianca’s body at about 1:00 a.m. From our estimates she had been dead for at least an hour.”

“No one found her until then?” Gwen’s voice rang with disgust. “How is that possible? You have more hands and staff than most working ranches. Someone had to have found her before then.”

He heard the slam at the fact that his family’s place was merely a guest ranch and not a working cattle ranch like theirs. Her words were flecked with pain, anger and denial—whatever she said now couldn’t be held against her.

“I don’t know the ranch’s current schedule. I’ve been out of that world, or at least a casual bystander, ever since I went to work for the department.” He realized he was answering her and defending himself against her allegations when all he should have been doing was being compassionate and taking the verbal hits she chose to let fly.

“You’re a bastard,” Carla spat out. “You and your dang family. You’re a scourge on the valley. You are the reason...you’re the reason my daughter’s gone. And now you tell me you don’t know how she died. You’re about as good at police work as your family is at ranching.”

Gwen sucked in an audible breath at the sting of her mother’s lashes. “Mother, stop.” She let go of her mother’s shoulders, repulsed.

Carla pointed at him with an unsteady finger. “You can’t tell me I’m wrong. He is doing a piss-poor job. How dare he come here without answers. If he was a real cop, he’d be able to tell us what we need to know. He’d be able to tell us about Bianca.”

It was as though her mother’s words had pulled Gwen back from the platform of anger she’d been standing on a moment before, a platform that had been targeted at him.

She looked at him with a mix of pity and pain. “Don’t say that, Mom. Just go inside. Go to bed and sleep off the booze.”

Carla shook her head, but staggered inside and toward her bedroom at the back of the house.

Gwen leaned against the porch’s white railing. “Did she commit suicide?” she asked, the question coming out of nowhere...almost as though she knew something he didn’t.

“Right now we believe that may be so, but we are unsure as to the cause of death—we’ll have to wait on the results of her autopsy. But may I ask if you believe Bianca had motive to kill herself?” he asked, wondering if Gwen knew something that would help him make sense of Bianca’s death.

She shrugged. “Vets have high rates of suicide—more than a lot of other professions.” She said it like it was just another fact from a book she read and had nothing to do with her reality.

“Was she having some mental health issues? Issues you believe would have led to her taking her own life?”

Gwen sighed. “She’s been unhappy, and with the holidays coming up... But I don’t think she’d have the power to do something like that. She wouldn’t.” She shook her head, like she could shake the idea from her mind.

But now the cat was out of the bag and there was no going back. His investigation had just moved from what some had assumed was a natural death to something else entirely. Why would a woman like Bianca, who had a family who loved her and a mother who clearly needed her, be that unhappy—was it her mother’s drinking, or something more? What had been going on in her life?

His gut twisted with a nagging feeling that everything wasn’t as it seemed—and that his life, as well as Gwen’s, was about to get turned upside down.

Chapter Two (#uf5321fc3-07ee-5aa7-a2d7-4b60ff9ba702)

She couldn’t even look Wyatt in the eyes. Why did he have to be involved with the investigation of her sister’s death? There had to be at least a dozen other guys on the force who could have stepped in on this one—at least to notify Gwen and her mother of the death. Yet, there he stood...with his broad shoulders, honey-colored skin, scruffy jaw and those cheekbones, all of which often found their way into her dreams. It only made the news worse.

Regardless of what he said, there was no way Bianca could be dead. Gwen had just seen her yesterday at the dinner table. They’d had grilled steaks and Bianca had cooked the potatoes—if Gwen looked, she was sure the knife Bianca had touched was probably still sitting unwashed in the sink. How could it be possible that the woman she’d talked to, and shared a bottle of wine with, was gone this morning? No.

She dabbed her eyes. It wasn’t real. A fresh tear twisted down her cheek.

It was stupid, but as she cried, she couldn’t handle the thought that Wyatt had seen her turn into a blubbering mess. When he saw her after the last time, she was supposed to be at her best—maybe down a size or two, hair perfectly colored and flung in symmetrical curls over her shoulders like one of those models from the pages of Country Living. But no...he had to break her heart—though admittedly, the last time she’d seen him, she may have been the one doing the breaking.