The Quiet Storm

Ohthankyouthankyouthankyou. The words jumbled up in her head, in her throat, shoving together like boxcars on a derailed train. She froze for an instant, painfully aware he was watching her, expecting some response. Slow down. Think. With fierce concentration, she managed to sort the words out, after what she hoped wasn’t too awkward a pause.

Thank. You. Thank you.

She murmured the words, then rose. She had to get out of here. Soon. She could feel her composure begin to crack apart like fragile antique glass. If she wanted to get through this meeting without it completely shattering, she was going to have to wrap things up quickly.

Coming here, facing Beau Riley, had taken every ounce of strength she possessed. More. Her insides were shaky, hollow, and her head pounded from trying so hard to concentrate.

She didn’t do at all well with strangers or with confrontations. But she had to remember Alex. This was all for him. She couldn’t let that sweet child grow up with one more strike against him, the stigma and pain of believing his mother had committed suicide. As she well knew, he would have enough to deal with throughout his life. He didn’t need this, too.

Tina did not kill herself. Elizabeth knew it better than she knew the blasted alphabet.

If she had to face a thousand gorgeous police detectives to prove it, she would do it for Alex.

She wasn’t sure exactly how, but by some miracle she managed to say goodbye and to hold the fraying edges of herself together until she could escape from the dark-eyed, intense Beau Riley.

Somehow she made it out of the precinct and through the echoing parking garage to her car. She unlocked the door and slid inside, then sagged against the leather, wanting nothing but to stay right there in a boneless, quivering heap.

Beau Riley. She pressed a hand to her stomach, finally admitting that not all of the fluttering there stemmed from stress and nerves. An unmistakable sizzle of awareness was there, too, along with a huge dose of mortification.

She should have known. Beau Riley, the detective Grace swore would help her, was the same man she had encountered at the Dugans’ party a few months earlier.

Beau Riley was the man she had treated with such abominable rudeness, only because every single word in her head had vanished when he approached her, looking male and gorgeous and terrifying.

Rather than stand in front of him gaping like an idiot, she had chosen escape.

Did he remember her? Of course he would. Not many men could forget a major-league rejection like that. For one fleeting moment she wished she could rush back into the police station and explain why she had turned her back on him. If only she could assure him her behavior had nothing to do with him, but with her.

She couldn’t, of course. Even if she managed to find the right words, she could never explain to someone as self-possessed as Beau Riley how stupid and awkward she was. She could never tell him that no matter how hard she tried, she didn’t understand every word he said to her.

How could she blurt out to a stranger that the wiring inside her head sometimes decided to go haywire and when it did, she couldn’t even find a simple word like hello?

She blew out a breath. He must think she was the rudest person on the planet. The ice princess. She knew people called her that. It was a far better label than the ones she’d heard as a child.

Freak.

Moron.

Stupid.

She would take ice princess any day. The hand still pressed to her stomach clenched into a fist. She would just have to let him go on believing her cold. If he was willing to help her find who killed Tina, she didn’t care what he thought of her.

She closed her eyes but his image still burned in her mind, as it had far more often than she cared to admit since the night of the fund-raiser, until Tina’s violent death three weeks ago had pushed away anything as frivolous as thoughts of a gorgeous man.

Tina would have called him a major hottie. Elizabeth managed a smile even as grief pierced her again whenever she thought of her friend.

He was very different from the polished, smooth executives her father had paraded home in the months before his death a year ago, eternally hopeful that one of them would take his dimwitted daughter off his hands.

Beau Riley had little in common with those tame, docile men like her one-time fiancé, men who cared more about their manicures than about things like truth and justice. She knew it instinctively.

The bleat of her cell phone shattered the quiet inside the Lexus before she could dwell more on the detective.

She gazed at the phone as it rang a second time, tempted to ignore it. Talking on the phone was always a challenge when she couldn’t use body language and facial expressions as cues.

One look at the incoming number told her she had no choice but to pick it up. Luisa never called unless it was important.

“Hello?”

Silence answered her for a moment, then Luisa’s melodious, soothing voice reached her. “Mi hija? I worry for you.”

Elizabeth didn’t need to see the older woman’s sweet, plump face to comprehend the concern and love in her voice. Some of the tension in her shoulders began to seep out. “I’m fine. I’ll be heading for the…” Big. Water. Float. She could see the blasted thing in her mind but the slippery word evaded her.

“I’ll be home soon,” she finally said.

Ferry! That’s what she meant. The ferry. She almost blurted it out but she knew Luisa had enough experience with her conversational idiosyncrasies after all these years that the occasional lurch didn’t faze her at all.

“How is Alex?” Elizabeth asked instead.

“Taking a nap,” his grandmother answered. “Did you talk to the policia?”

“Grace’s friend agreed to look at the file. I think he will help me.”

The other woman didn’t answer and Elizabeth swallowed her sigh. Luisa wasn’t convinced that her daughter had been murdered. She wanted Elizabeth to let the whole thing drop, to allow the police ruling to stand. As painful as it was to think her daughter had ended her own life, Elizabeth suspected Luisa feared digging too deeply into Tina’s wild, troubled world.

“I’ll be home soon,” she finally repeated. “Give Alex a kiss for me when he wakes up and tell him I’ll take him down later to watch the…” Swim. Quack. This time she forced herself to concentrate until the word came to her. “To watch the ducks.”

She hung up the phone and stared out the windshield at the dim, unnatural light inside the garage. Despite Luisa’s reservations, Elizabeth knew she was doing the right thing by pursuing this investigation, no matter how difficult she might find it.

For Alex and for Luisa.

And for Tina, who had never called her stupid.

An hour after Elizabeth Quinn walked out of the precinct, Beau could swear her subtle perfume like just-ripe peaches still lingered in the air, sweet and fresh and oddly innocent.

Like her.

He frowned. Now why the hell would such a thought enter his head? He didn’t know about the innocent part but he knew for sure she wasn’t sweet. She was cold and snobby. The ice princess, who didn’t have the time of day for a cop unless she wanted something from him.

Somehow the nickname didn’t jibe with the quiet, solemn woman who had faced him with trembling hands and chewed-to-the-quick fingernails.

There was more to Elizabeth Quinn than her reputation. He had a feeling she was far more complex than the facts of the case she had asked him to look into.

With a sigh he turned back to the file. What did she expect him to find that the other detectives couldn’t? The file told a grim story of a troubled woman who had hit rock bottom.

Tina Hidalgo, age twenty-eight, had been found by a nosy neighbor peeking through open blinds. She was dead of a gunshot wound. The Glock with only her fingerprints on it—the Glock she had purchased illegally the day before she died—was on the floor, underneath her dangling fingers. The medical examiner said the bullet entry and exit were consistent with a self-inflicted injury.

She had powder burns on her hand.

And she had left a note, short and succinct.