Free Still Waters by Tami Hoag

unladylike snort and shifted in her chair. “Looks like brass to me.”
    “And you with such a discerning eye for men. What did Jarvis look like to you—gold?”
    “He looked like the butt end of an ugly dog,” she said bluntly. “I don't care if he had money coming out his ears. I wasn't interested and I made that clear to him.”
    “So you walked up to the construction site to ask for a ride home. Jarrold suggested a ride of another sort—”
    “The only ride Jarrold might have suggested was a ride to the mortuary. He was dead when I got there,” she insisted, intent on steering the sheriff's line of questioning away from his overblown impression of her sex life, a sex life that was nonexistent in reality and notorious in the press. “I looked around for him, yelled my stupid head off, then saw he was sitting in the Lincoln. I was mad 'cause I figured the jerk had been sitting there looking at my backside the whole time, so I yanked the door open to give him a piece of my mind.”
    She stopped then and shuddered as the memory descended on her like an anvil. The image flashed before her eyes—Jarvis falling out of the car, his head hitting her feet with a sickening soft thud, his black eyes staring up at her with stark surprise, his blood splashing across her bare skin in macabre polka dots. She flinched and tried to swallow the revulsion crowding her throat as waves of heat and cold flushed through her, leaving her feeling dizzy and weak.
    With one shaking hand she combed back her hair, anchoring the thick mass at the base of her neck as she rocked forward on the chair, head down. “Oh, God,” she murmured, the beginning of a prayer for deliverance.
    Dane watched her struggle with the emotions suddenly threatening to overwhelm her. All her sass had deserted her, leaving them both in a dangerous position. He wasn't in the habit of harassing distraught women. He wasn't in the habit of harassing women, period. Leaning back in his chair, he steeled himself against the sight of this tough lady falling apart. She was a witch who'd left a trail of devastated males in her wake, he reminded himself. She could very well have had something to do with Jarvis's death. He told himself so, but he didn't really believe it. The shaking was too natural, the combination of terror, denial, and revulsion in her expression was too spontaneous to be a put-on. He doubted even the infamous Elizabeth Stuart was that good an actress.
    “I'm sorry,” she whispered, her breath hitching in her throat. She let go of her hair to press her hands together before her like a penitent sinner. “I'm sorry.”
    Dane watched the rise of tears in her eyes. He felt something like sympathy shift through him and he lashed out at it, telling himself he was doing them both a favor. “That's all right,” he said. “But you might as well save the waterworks. I don't go for the damsel-in-distress routine.”
    Elizabeth snapped her head up and gaped at him, stunned that he could be so cold, so uncaring. She pushed herself out of her chair and leaned across the desk, wincing as her skinned knuckles kissed the smooth wood surface. “It's not a routine, Sheriff Jantzen. I'm sorry, but I don't have a severed head fall on my feet every day of the week. I don't have a repertoire of witty things to say when I find murdered bodies.”
    “And the press said you had an answer for everything,” he said with mock surprise.
    She knew he was referring to the smear campaign instigated against her by Brock during the divorce. The power her ex-husband wielded over the press was awesome and terrible. The stain of his influence had spread all over the country—even to Still Creek, Minnesota, apparently—and had left her with a reputation blacker than Texas tea. Brock and his wizard lawyers had taken the truth and twisted it like a Gumby doll. But she wasn't going to fight Brock Stuart's lies tonight. She was too damned tired to care what Dane Jantzen thought of