“Possibly even Patrick. But Dante?”
“Supposedly none of them escaped the wrath.”
He shook his head. “The problem is, I just can’t see Dante standing for it, job or no job.”
“And you know what else I can’t see,” Breanne said slowly, “is Dante standing idly by while Edward treated either of those women badly.”
“Me, either.”
She tipped her head up to his. “So what does all this mean?”
It meant that there were too many motives, and too many suspects. It meant there were going to be lots and lots of questions once the authorities got here. It meant unpleasant times ahead for all of them. Exhausted at the thought, he leaned back against the door and sighed. “We need to round everyone up and start digging.”
“It’s still snowing.”
“I know, but we should do it now, while we have lots of daylight hours left. I don’t know how long it’ll take to reach town.”
“You really think someone can get that far on the snowmobile without a problem?”
“I’m counting on it,” he said grimly.
“Yeah.” She let her arms fall to her sides and stepped close. Reaching up, she touched his face, her fingers warm now. Her touch was so unexpected and sweet, he closed his eyes to savor it.
“I’m glad we happened, too,” she whispered, making him open his eyes again in surprise.
For her, it was equal to a shouted declaration of her feelings, and he felt his chest tighten, more so when she set her head against his shoulder and let him hold her.
“There’s two snowmobiles,” she said. “Who’s going?”
“Hopefully, Dante and me. I think he’d be more capable than Patrick if we got stuck out there.”
She slowly fisted her fingers in his shirt, staring at them as she said, “I dreamed about you.”
“Yeah?” His hands squeezed her hips. “Tell me.”
“I was running through the dark hallways here. Something was chasing me.” She frowned. “Or someone.”
“You should have woken me up.”
“You had me wrapped up in your arms tight and snug, and I knew I was safe.”
“You are safe.”
She’d been watching her fingers move in little circles on his chest, but now she lifted her gaze to his, and he could see her uncertainty, her fear. “Once you leave on that snowmobile, no one left here is safe.”
“Bree.” He sank his fingers into her hair, leaning in, but just as his mouth touched hers, the doors slid open.
Lariana stood there with a DVD in hand, staring at them.
“Whoops,” she said, and handed them the case. “Just found this and wanted to put it back. Uh . . . carry on.” With a smile, she slid the door shut again.
Breanne winced. She knew the staff was probably used to such indiscretions, but she sure wasn’t. “Well, that was . . . awkward.”
Cooper just lifted an oh, well shoulder. His shirt was wrinkled, from her. His hair stood up on end. Also from her. And he was wearing one of those after-sex expressions that there was no hiding. He looked thoroughly debauched, and so rough-and-tumble sexy that she wanted him all over again.
Oh God, she wanted him all over again.
But that had to stop. Sex was sex, and they’d just had it. The end. But wow, he was potent. And something else . . . with Cooper, it never felt like just sex.
At her nod, he slid open the door, and together they stepped out.
“I’m starving,” she admitted. “I need something before digging.”
He followed her down the maze of hallways to the kitchen. At least she was no longer getting lost. She figured if she didn’t get lost, she couldn’t find another dead body.
In the kitchen, she beelined directly to the refrigerator.
Cooper grabbed a glass from a cupboard and moved to the sink for water. Hands wet, he looked around for a towel, then finally opened the door beneath the sink. “You need to drink, too,” he said. “Before you get dehydrated—”
When he broke off so suddenly, Breanne turned from the drawers to look at him.
He was hunkered before the open cupboard, mouth tight, body tense. Absolutely still.
“Cooper?”
Turning only his head, he looked at her from eyes that were no longer lit with sexual prowess or good humor, but flat with concentration.
A cop’s eyes.
“What is it?” she whispered.
“Beneath the bathroom sink in the foyer there’s a brand new pair of rubber gloves, still in their packaging. I saw them yesterday when Lariana was in there cleaning. Can you go get them for me?”
She was so startled by the odd request, not to mention his cool, calm but utterly badass expression, she simply nodded and turned on her heels to do just that.
She encountered no one in the hallway on the way there or back, and when she re-entered the kitchen, Cooper was no longer by the sink.
“Here,” he said from behind her, startling her into a gasp as she whirled to face him, a hand to her chest as he took the gloves from her. “What—”
His finger went to her lips. Then he pulled a chair in front of the double doors, so no one could come in on them unannounced.
She could only stare into his extremely tense face. “What’s going on?”
He looked at her for a long moment, and she knew she wasn’t going to like it. “Cooper, you’re scaring me.”
“Not as much as this is going to.” He put an arm around her shoulders and walked her toward the kitchen sink. “Take a deep breath, but don’t scream. Promise me you’re not going to scream.”
“Okay.” She gulped in a deep breath, then crouched down with him and looked beneath the sink. At the towel shoved behind the pile, covered in something dried a brownish color. They both stared at it for the longest moment of Breanne’s life.
“Fuck,” Cooper finally said on a sigh.
Yeah. Her thoughts exactly.
Twenty-four
I suppose the word “calm” would lose its meaning if it wasn’t sandwiched between moments of terror.
—Breanne Mooreland’s journal entry
“Gee, that’s funny,” Breanne heard herself say. “It almost looks like a bloody towel.”
Cooper didn’t say a word, just began to put on the rubber gloves.
“Shelly probably cut herself chopping vegetables,” she said through the roaring in her ears. “You should see how fast she chops. And then she probably shoved the towel down there and forgot about it. Probably.”
Cooper flicked on his flashlight and stuck his head in the cupboard, carefully not touching the towel but trying to see around it.
“Or it could be ketchup,” she said inanely, her mouth running away with her thoughts. “Maybe she spilled ketchup. That could have happened, right?”
Cooper pulled his head back out of the cupboard and looked at her. “Are you breathing? Because you don’t look like you’re breathing.”
“Oh.” She gulped in a few breaths and tried a smile, which quickly wobbled. “That’s not ketchup, is it?”
Cooper slowly shook his head.
“Something really bad happened here.”
“Something,” he agreed. He turned off the flashlight and shut the cupboard door. Then he removed the rubber gloves and reached for her hand.
“What are we going to do?” she whispered.
“Shovel. Shovel like hell.”
They’d found the towel.
That was bad. They shouldn’t have found the towel.
What would happen now?
If only it would stop snowing. If only they could all get out, get away from here.
If only, if only, if only . . .
For Breanne, getting outside felt like a culture shock, not to mention an actual physical punch to the chest. Her poor lungs weren’t adapted to the altitude, much less this biting cold.
At least inside the house, though sometimes equally icy, she’d been in somewhat of a cocoon. There s
he could see the snow, but had been distanced from it by the huge, frosted windows, buffered by the warm fires.
But standing on the front porch, the ramifications of their situation, with the storm still dumping more precipitation every passing minute, hit her hard. Twelve feet of snow had fallen, setting records, shutting down airports and businesses, closing roads, breaking electrical and phone lines.
The Sierra mountain range, spanning some two million acres of national forests and wilderness land, had come to a screeching halt.
Terrific time to almost honeymoon.
Way out on the outskirts of civilization as they were, this unbelievable storm was apparently accepted as a part of the life here. People were prepared for it with extra food, water, and gasoline for their generators and snowblowers. They’d become an independent entity.
Everything had taken on a whole new meaning these past few days, and it wouldn’t have been a problem but for two things. One, the occupants of this particular house weren’t as prepared as they should have been, and two—and this was the biggie, in Breanne’s opinion—there was a dead body.
Dead bodies changed everything.
No longer did the house feel cute and quaint—if it ever had. And getting out of here, storm of the century or not, had become a requirement. She stood wrapped in a borrowed stadium-length down coat, a leftover from some forgotten guest. She also had on one of Dante’s beanies, and wool socks courtesy of Patrick.
Ever so helpful, her staff.
Huddled in her borrowed gear, she let out a breath that crystallized in front of her face as she took in the scene.
White as far as the eye could see.
And more white.
From here, the humongous mountain peaks that surrounded them in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vista looked innocuous and breathtaking. The flakes fell with an odd gentleness, and utterly silently, stacking on top of the banks of snow that had already fallen, piling up against the house, against the shed, against the garage, so that the three-story log-cabin house appeared to be only a little more than one.
Thanks to the lack of electricity, the house itself was dark. No sparkling lights shining from the windows, no scent of cooking food, nothing but a rather disconcerting hollowness that made it seem lifeless. There was four feet of snow on the roofs despite the fact that they’d unloaded themselves at least twice, leaving huge drifts stacked alongside of each structure, some more than eight feet high, making it impossible to get close to the shed or the garage until they moved the snow.
There were two power lines along the driveway, coated in white and sagging nearly to the ground. The trees were completely covered, and swaying from the weight as if alive. Four of the pines in the front yard had split or collapsed under the tremendous weight of the snow, and would undoubtedly have to be removed. The windows on the north side of the shed had shattered inward.
And still the snow came.
They all shoveled. Or rather, Dante, Patrick, and Cooper shoveled, while Breanne, Shelly, and Lariana watched. Mostly because there were only three shovels, but also because it was damn hard work, and Breanne for one wasn’t very good at hard work.
“Look at that sky,” Shelly breathed.
Lariana and Breanne both looked up. In San Francisco, Breanne had rarely ever noticed the horizon. In fact, the last time she’d looked up at all had been on one of her first dates with Dean, when he’d taken her to the roof of his building to show her the summer constellations.
What he’d really wanted to do was impress her, and then get into her pants. Damn it, she had been impressed, but she hadn’t let him into her pants.
Not that night, anyway.
The point was, though, she wasn’t an anal person, or rushed for time on a daily basis, and still, she’d never really spent much time sky-gazing.
Leaning back now, she staggered back a step, found her balance, and stood there in awe as the flakes fell onto her face, cool to her heated skin. It was like an explosion in a mattress factory the way the white flakes, not round, not any particular shape, really, drifted down from the sky like fluffy pieces of cotton in no particular hurry.
Cotton that sure piled up into not-so-innocent drifts that needed to be moved.
By them.
“It’s making my mascara run,” Lariana said. “I’m going in.”
Watching the guys work, Shelly nodded. “Me, too, but wow, look at ’em. They’re all . . .”
“Hot,” Lariana agreed. “Very, very hot. But even the hottest of the hotties is not worth freezing to death. Let’s go.”
Breanne stayed behind. The cold temperature speared right through her but the guys were sweating. Dante wore a black sweatshirt nearly coated over in snow now. Patrick wore his Abominable Snowman outfit. He wasn’t as effective a shoveler as Dante, taking smaller shovelfuls and half the time dumping the contents in his own way, swearing with gleeful abandon as he did.
Cooper moved with a steady, easy precision that made it look extremely easy. He wore the blue sweatshirt he’d given Breanne that first night, now also crusted over with snow, but he didn’t appear to notice as he labored. Breanne felt entranced watching him, mesmerized by the way his body worked as if poetry in motion. He was like that in bed, too. She figured he was like that in everything he set his mind to, and for a moment, her mind wandered.
What would it be like to see him outside of here, in the real world? Before the answer could come to her, Shelly came back out with bottles of water for the guys.
Breanne looked at the shovel Cooper leaned against a post. Feeling extremely aware of his gaze as he drank, she lifted the shovel. Wow. All by itself, the thing was heavy. But he was watching her, so she dug in, filling the bucket, then attempting to lift it.
It didn’t budge.
Okay, no problem. She tipped half of the snow off. That worked.
By the third shovelful, she was panting. By the fourth, she couldn’t lift it one more time.
A big hand closed over hers. She raised her gaze to Cooper’s. “I’ll get it,” he said.
She could see the exhaustion in his face. “I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I wish you didn’t have to do this.”
“You feel bad?”
“Very.”
That seemed to perk him up. “Enough to make it up to me?”
She had to laugh at the teasing light in his eyes, but as he turned back to work, her smile faded. Because she found she did want to make it up to him. She wanted to do that, and more.
A lot more.