LITMIR.BIZ

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cheerleader’ you mentioned—”

      A barely veiled sneer curved Harrison’s thin lips. “Let me guess, another relative?”

      Malloy had just spotted the woman the new owner had to be referring to. She was the only female in the area, and, from what he could see at this distance, whoever she was, the slender blonde was nothing short of a breathtaking knockout.

      All memory of Bunny, the woman he’d spent his extremely energized weekend with, completely vanished.

      “Lord, I hope not,” Malloy commented under his breath. “I’ll get back to you,” he added without sparing the owner another look.

      “Who can I call to make this go away?” Harrison asked.

      “You don’t,” Malloy answered with finality, tossing the words over his shoulder.

      Putting the abrasive owner temporarily out of his thoughts, Malloy made his way toward what was the only center of activity within the area—if he didn’t count a neighbor’s rooster.

      The lone fowl was housed in an opened coop facing the northern perimeter.

      Flapping his wings and moving about in what could only be called an agitated manner, the rooster crowed intermittently despite the fact that the sun had long since been up and the current hour was quickly approaching noon.

      Obviously the rooster’s inner clock needed some adjusting, Malloy absently thought.

      For the moment, his attention was not on roosters, or the dead bodies. It was strictly and exclusively on the attractive woman with the killer figure. Despite her appreciative male audience standing a few feet away, watching her every move, the woman appeared to be absorbed by the bones she and two of the CSI agents were digging up out of the ground and arranging on a long, extended roll of burlap.

      The annoying owner had been right, Malloy noted, scanning the immediate area. The construction crew Harrison had hired really were, for all intents and purposes, immobilized, no doubt ordered to remain that way by his uncle.

      But the crew definitely didn’t appear to be suffering any discomfort because of that edict.

      Instead, the idle four men looked to be quite entertained as they took in every nuance, every movement made by the young woman studying the various excavated bones.

      Malloy approached the young woman and placed himself between her and the sunlight that had, until that moment, been highlighting the collection of bones she had been assembling.

      “Hi, I’m Malloy,” he told her.

      The voice and sudden distracting shift of light caught her attention. After a couple beats, Kristin finally looked up.

      If the exceedingly handsome, exceptionally confident-looking man with the sexy grin momentarily threw her off her game, Kristin Alberghetti gave no indication of that reaction.

      Instead, her eyes met his, and she silently waited for him to explain why he was here blocking her light.

      The name he offered nudged at something in the back of her mind. After a moment, recognition set in.

      Malloy Cavanaugh. One of the Cavanaughs.

      His reputation had preceded him.

      “Of course you are,” she replied, turning her attention back to her work.

      “And you are?” he asked after several seconds went by and she still didn’t volunteer her name, even though he had given her his.

      “Busy,” Kristin answered crisply without looking up. “And you’re in my light,” she added rather impatiently.

      “Funny, I would have thought that you cast enough light on your own to brighten up anything you needed to look at,” Malloy observed.

      The blonde looked up again, her expression telling him that the remark—and his charm—left her more than just merely cold.

      “Sorry, no,” she replied. Ice chips formed around each word. “Would you mind stepping to the side? I got the impression that the owner of this nursery wanted me to be done before I even got here, so if you move out of the light, I can try to accommodate him.”

      “Sorry,” Malloy apologized, following her request. “My bad.”

      “I imagine you probably say that a lot,” Kristin commented, sounding as if she were addressing the observation to herself instead of to him.

      Feisty, Malloy thought. Ordinarily, he probably would have backed away. This was, after all, a case, and he wasn’t the type to waste too much time trying to break through a woman’s barriers. For one thing, life was too short. For another, he was being paid to be a detective, not a lover. And there were a great many willing women out there to choose from.

      But, on the other hand, there was a certain appeal to the concept of “feisty,” especially when it was coupled with someone who looked the way this woman did.

      Exactly who was she?

      What was her official position in the department, and how did he get her to open up to him?

      “You’re new,” he said, hoping to initiate a conversation.

      Kristin spared him just the minutest of glances before she went back to her work. “Actually, I’m not,” she told him.

      “I haven’t seen you around,” he told her. “And I always notice beautiful women.”

      “Well, I guess you missed one this time,” she responded, carefully separating two bones that looked as if they had been fused together by grit and time.

      Rather than annoying him, the flippant way she’d answered what was clearly a line—he hadn’t been trying to be subtle—seemed to oddly attract him to an even greater extent.

      Crouching down beside the woman, he said, “Let’s start over.”

      The look she gave him would have withered a lesser man.

      “Maybe later. I’m working now.” Her expression turned impatient. “And you’re in my light again.”

      “Right.”

      To accommodate her, Malloy rose to his feet, taking care to allow the sunlight to stream over and bathe the bones laid out before her.

      This one, he told himself, was going to be a tough nut to crack.

      And he couldn’t wait to get started.

       Chapter 2

      But for now, as tantalizing as the woman kneeling over the boneyard was, Malloy knew he had to place his private plans on the back burner.

      A really distant back burner.

      For now, he had a crime to begin to unravel and, from the looks of it, a number of dead people to identify.

      Growing up, Malloy had always loved puzzles, both the mental kind and the kind that came inside boxes that were labeled with intentionally daunting numbers like “1000 pieces.”

      The older he got, the higher the number of pieces stuffed into the box became. But back then, no matter how many parts the puzzle came in, with enough tenacity on his part, they always wound up fitting into one another to form a unified whole.

      He had come to learn years ago that life didn’t always imitate art. If he were being honest with himself, “hardly ever” was more the case. But each of these bones now spread out on the cloth went into forming a whole person. All he needed to do was find out who that whole person was, so that he or she could be laid to rest.

      All he needed to do.

      The words echoed in his head, mocking him. There was no “all” about this job, unless the word referred strictly to the number of bones that were even now piling up next to the medical examiner.

      As he

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