LITMIR.BIZ

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He was a sweet kid.”

      “I didn’t know him,” Reverend Blair said. “Eb said he was one of the finest techs he’d ever employed.”

      “One day,” Carson said, “we’ll find the person who killed him.”

      “Make sure you take a law enforcement officer with you if it’s you who finds him,” Reverend Blair said shortly. “You’re very young to end up in federal prison on a murder charge.”

      Carson smiled, but his eyes didn’t. “I’m not as young as I look. And age has more to do with experience than years,” he said, and for a minute, the sadness Carlie had seen on Rourke’s face was duplicated on Carson’s.

      “True,” Reverend Blair said quietly.

      Carlie was fiddling with her phone, not looking at Carson. She’d heard about the stewardess from one of the sheriff’s deputies, who’d heard it from Dalton Kirk. The woman was blonde and beautiful and all over Carson during the flight. It made Carlie sad, and she didn’t want to be. She didn’t want to care that he was going to a concert with the woman.

      “Well, I’ll be in touch.” He glanced at Carlie. There was that smug, taunting smile again. And he was gone.

      Her father looked at her with sympathy. “You can’t let it matter,” he said after a minute. “You know that.”

      She hesitated for a second. Then she nodded. “I’m going up. Need anything?”

      He shook his head. He took her by the shoulders and kissed her forehead. “Life is hard.”

      “Oh, yes,” she said, and tried to smile. “Night, Dad.”

      “Sleep well.”

      “You, too.”

      * * *

      SHE PLUGGED IN her game and went looking for Robin to run some battlegrounds. It would keep her mind off what Carson was probably doing with that beautiful blonde stewardess. She saw her reflection in the computer screen and wished, not for the first time, that she had some claim to beauty and charm.

      Robin was waiting for her in the Alliance capital city. They queued for a battleground and practiced with their weapons on the target dummies while they waited.

      This is my life, she thought silently. A computer screen in a dark room. I’m almost twenty-three years old and nobody wants to marry me. Nobody even wants to date me. But I have bright ideals and I’m living the way I want to.

      She made a face at her reflection. “Good girls never made history,” she told it. Then she hesitated. Yes, they did. Joan of Arc was considered so holy that her men never approached her in any physical way. They followed her, a simple farm girl, into battle without hesitation. She was armed with nothing except her flag and her faith. She crowned a king and saved a nation. Even today, centuries later, people know who she was. Joan was a good girl.

      Carlie smiled to herself. So, she thought. There’s my comeback to that!

      * * *

      SHE WAS TYPING up a grisly report the next day. A man had been found on the town’s railroad tracks. He was a vagabond, apparently. He was carrying no identification and wearing a nice suit. There wasn’t a lot left of him. Carlie tried not to glance at the crime scene photos as she dealt with the report.

      Carson came in, looking weary and out of sorts.

      She stared at him. “Well, it wasn’t you, after all,” she said enigmatically.

      He blinked. “Excuse me?”

      “We found a man in a nice suit, carrying no identification. Just for a few minutes, we wondered if it was you,” she said, alluding to his habit of going everywhere without ID.

      “Tough luck,” he returned. He frowned as he glanced at the crime scene photos. He lifted one and looked at it with no apparent reaction. He put it back down. His black eyes narrowed on her face as he tried to reconcile her apparent sweetness with the ability it took to process that information without throwing up.

      “Something you needed?” she asked, still typing.

      “I want to speak to Grier,” he said.

      She buzzed the chief and announced the visitor. She went back to her typing without giving Carson the benefit of even a glance. “You can go in,” she said, nodding toward the chief’s office door.

      Carson stared at her without meaning to. She wasn’t pretty. She had nothing going for her. She had ironclad ideals and a smart mouth and a body that wasn’t going to send any man running toward her. Still, she had grit. She could do a job like that. It would be hard even on a toughened police officer, which she wasn’t.

      She looked up, finally, intimidated by the silence. He captured her eyes, held them, probed them. The look was intense, biting, sensual. She felt her heart racing. Her hands on the keyboard were cold as ice. She wanted to look away but she couldn’t. It was like holding a live electric wire...

      “Carson?” the chief called from his open office door.

      Carson dragged his gaze away from Carlie. “Coming.”

      He didn’t look at her again. Not even as he left the office scant minutes later. She didn’t know whether to be glad or not. The look had kindled a hunger in her that she’d never known until he walked into her life. She knew the danger. But it was like a moth’s attraction to the flames.

      She forced her mind back on the job at hand and stuffed Carson, bad attitude and blonde and all, into a locked door in the back of her mind.

       4

      THINGS WERE HEATING UP. Reverend Blair went to San Antonio with Rourke. They seemed close, which fascinated Carlie.

      Her dad didn’t really have friends. He was a good minister, visiting the sick, officiating at weddings, leading the congregation on Sundays. But he stuck close to home. With Rourke, he was like another person, someone Carlie didn’t know. Even the way they talked, in some sort of odd shorthand, stood out.

      * * *

      THE WEATHER WAS COLD. Carlie grimaced as she hung up the tattered coat, which was the only protection she had against the cold. In fact, she was worried about going to the dance with Robin because of the lack of a nice coat. The shoes she was going to wear with the green velvet dress were old and a little scuffed, but nobody would notice, she was sure. People in Jacobs County were kind.

      She wondered if Carson might show up there. It was a hope and a worry because she knew it was going to hurt if she had to see him with that elegant, beautiful woman she’d heard about. The way he’d looked at her when he was talking to the woman on the phone was painful, too; his smug expression taunted her with his success with women. If she could keep that in mind, maybe she could avoid some heartbreak.

      But her stubborn mind kept going back to that look she’d shared with Carson in her boss’s office. It had seemed to her as if he was as powerless to stop it as she was. He hadn’t seemed arrogant about the way she reacted to him, that once. But if she couldn’t get a grip on her feelings, she knew tragedy would ensue. He was, as her father had said, not tamed or able to be tamed. It really would be like trying to live with a wolf.

      On her lunch hour, she drove to the cemetery. She’d bought a small plastic bouquet of flowers to put on her mother’s neat grave. A marble vase was built into the headstone, just above the BLAIR name. Underneath it, on one side, was the headstone they’d put for her mother. It just said Mary Carter Blair, with her birth date and the day of her death.

      She squatted down and smoothed the gravel near the headstone. She took out the faded plastic poinsettia she’d decorated the grave with at Christmas and put the new, bright red flowers, in their small base, inside the marble vase and arranged them just so.

      She patted her mother’s tombstone. “It isn’t Valentine’s Day

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