LITMIR.BIZ

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the kitchen pouring drinks, the music pounding, when she cornered him and, apparently tired of playing coy, took the direct route with a determined hand to his crotch.

      “Oscar passed out. Now’s our chance,” she murmured in the dream/memory and wrapped herself around him like a boa constrictor. She kissed him, her mouth hard and practiced.

      Short of telling her he was gay—which she could probably tell was a lie by his stupid body’s natural response to suddenly finding a lithe, soft female body pressing against all his most sensitive parts after months when he’d been too busy playing a damn role for any kind of social life—he couldn’t come up with a single way to get out of the situation.

      He was just about to try the gay card anyway when the worst happened. He heard a roar from the doorway and looked up to see Oscar, the prison tats on his face even more menacing than normal.

      “He attacked me,” the bitch cried out in rapid-fire Spanish. “I just came in for another drink and the next thing I knew, he grabbed me. I was trying to get away, baby.”

      Riley had stood there for just a moment too long, his brain stalled out, then Oscar lunged into the room, whipping out his Glock.

      “Puta,” he snarled and before Riley could say anything, he fired into Gabriela’s head from six feet away, splattering blood and brain matter all over Riley.

      In the dream, the moment moved frame by frame in slow motion, much as it had felt in real life.

      “She’s a slut,” the dream Oscar said, with a hideous grin on his face. “I’m sick of her shit. One cock after another. I can’t take it no more. She’s gonna give me crabs or something.”

      Riley stood there covered in another person’s bodily tissue. He didn’t know what to say, what to do. He was a cop and he’d just seen a woman murdered in front of him. Did he arrest the crazy bastard now or let things play out for another few weeks?

      “You messin’ with me?” Oscar asked. “You didn’t nail her, right?”

      He wiped a hand over his face. “No, man. I didn’t touch her.”

      The words scraped his throat raw, but he forced them out anyway. “I didn’t touch her. I wanted to but I didn’t. She was yours. Far as I’m concerned, you got the right to deal with her how you see fit. Ain’t my business.”

      Oscar smiled that hideous smile again. “That’s right. Knew I liked you, man.”

      In the dream, Riley stepped over the body and grabbed another drink, the norteño music throbbing through his chest, then watched while rats crawled out from the cupboards and started eating the half-gone face.

      The slide of something wet against the back of his hand jerked him awake, heart racing. He yanked his hand out of reach of the rats, going instinctively for his weapon before he was even fully awake.

      It took him about twenty seconds to realize there were no rats and he wasn’t in that miserable apartment in Oakland, pretending to be the kind of man who could watch a person’s violent death in front of him without any visible reaction.

      A dog was licking his hand. Ugly, stout, sorrowful-looking. Claire’s dog, he realized. He was at Claire’s house, with its pretty watercolors on the wall and the comfortable furniture and quiet sense of home surrounding him. He was in her house, in a chair by a dying fire, covered by a nubby-soft blanket. He could just make out a Claire-size shape stretched on the nearby sofa and see the blur of her face in the darkness, her eyes closed as she slept.

      He realized he was holding his weapon. Feeling foolish, he slid it back into the harness and drew in a shaky breath, disoriented by the jarring transition from hell to this warm, soft house that smelled of fresh-washed laundry and summer wildflowers and strawberry jam.

      It was a smell that was quintessentially Claire. Fresh and sweet. Delicious. Was it some kind of soap she used? Shampoo? Or maybe just her. He had a fragment of memory when he was a kid of walking into his house one day after school and this bright happiness blooming inside him when he realized Claire was there because he caught her scent in the air.

      He scrubbed at his face. He hadn’t thought about Oscar or Gabriela’s murder in months. Why now?

      Yeah, it had been the final straw. Two weeks later, as he was coming off the assignment after the task force finally moved in and arrested every freaking one of the Catorces because of the evidence he’d collected undercover, Riley had gotten the call from Dean Coleman about his impending retirement, asking him to apply for the job as police chief in Hope’s Crossing.

      He might not have considered it before, but at that particular point in his life he had been desperate for a little peace. A place where life meant something, where children didn’t sleep in filth and learn how to light a crack pipe by the time they were in elementary school.

      The discordance between the ugliness of the dream and the soft, pretty colors and textures of her house was still jarring.

      Had she covered him with the blanket? She must have done. He had no recollection of finding it for himself. Actually, he had no recollection of falling asleep. They had been talking about the town’s Angel of Hope, he remembered, mulling various theories as to the angel’s identity. He must have dozed off in the middle of their conversation.

      He shifted and automatically began to pet the dog beneath his droopy ears, fairly humiliated that he had relaxed his guard around her. Why had she let him sleep? And gone to the trouble to cover him with a blanket, too, when she could barely move from her injuries?

      He studied her sleeping form, baffled by the woman and by his twenty-plus-year attraction to her.

      What was it that drew him so strongly to her? Her generosity of spirit? That air of kindness a person couldn’t help but notice? He sighed. He wasn’t sure. He only knew that he’d had it bad for Claire Tatum Bradford since he was just a stupid kid, fascinated by his older sister’s best friend.

      Riley had grown up surrounded by women. Even before his father left, James McKnight had been a distant figure in their lives, busy with his career as a science teacher and school administrator, which left Riley possessor of the lone Y chromosome in his house most of the time.

      Until he was about ten or eleven, Claire had been just like one of his sisters, always bossing him around and getting after him for one thing or another.

      He wasn’t sure exactly at what point he figured out she was different, but he could definitely remember the first time he’d noticed her physically.

      When he was thirteen, she’d stayed over at the house one summer night, as she often did to escape what he could only guess must have been a depressing home life, knowing what he did of Ruth and how she’d fallen apart after her husband’s murder.

      He’d gotten up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. Claire had just been coming out of it and she’d been wearing soft sleep shorts and a tank top without a bra. It had been a cool evening and he clearly remembered being able to see the dark outline of her nipples through the thin, almost translucent cotton.

      She had smiled sleepily at him before heading back across the hall to Alex’s bedroom and Riley could still remember how he had stood there stupidly far longer than he should have, his mouth dry and his body reacting, well, like a thirteen-year-old boy’s does.

      That moment had been the highlight of a horny yet relatively sexually deprived adolescence, a memory he had savored far more than he probably should have.

      Come to think of it, that moment was still probably one of the hottest of his life.

      He stretched a little and glanced at his watch. Two in the morning. He’d been sleeping in Claire Bradford’s easy chair for going on three hours, probably the most he’d slept at a time since the accident nearly two weeks ago.

      The accident. A chill seeped into his shoulders, wiping away the last trace of any lighter thoughts like that wind blowing down the canyon. A familiar pain pinched under his breastbone.

      Layla.

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