Free Still Waters by Tami Hoag Page A

her.
    “Don't believe everything you read, sugar,” she said softly, straightening away from him.
    That one mocking brow sketched upward again, and Elizabeth had to clamp down on the urge to fling herself across the desk and rip it off his face.
    “That's an interesting piece of advice coming from a reporter,” he said, the calm words belying the fact that she'd struck a bull's-eye.
    Don't believe everything you read
. Didn't he know that better than most people? Christ, the press had had a field day with his divorce—the divorce from his profession and his wife. And as a professional athlete, he had learned long ago that the differences between reality and journalism laid end to end could reach Mars. He knew better than to believe everything he read at face value, but another part of him knew better than to believe an ambitious woman. His sense of fair play pulled him in one direction, his sense of self-preservation pulled him another.
    He watched her move to the end of his desk, her attention on the framed documents on the wall. She had fought back her tears, pushed herself past the panic that had had her shaking in the chair. He had to admire her guts, if nothing else.
    His gaze drifted down to the faded denim cupping her ass, and he decided there was definitely more to admire than inner strength. She shifted her weight restlessly from one booted foot to the other and raised both hands to comb her hair back. Her T-shirt tightened across her breasts.
    “If I believed only half of what I read about you, I still wouldn't like you,” he growled, pushing himself up out of his chair.
    “Like I give a rat's ass.”
    Dane stepped closer, so close that her shoulder brushed his breastbone and the high curve of her cheek was only a breath away from his mouth. “You'd better care, honey, because if I find out you're even remotely mixed up in this murder, I'll nail your pretty ass.”
    “That's harassment, Sheriff Jantzen,” Elizabeth murmured. She wanted to move away from him, but she wouldn't give him the satisfaction.
    “It's the truth,” he said softly with a chilling smile. “Nobody's going to commit murder in my county and get away with it.”
    “Are you charging me with something? If you are, do I get to call a lawyer, or don't you have them up here in the Great White North?”
    “Oh, we have them. Can't get rid of them any more than we can get rid of welfare cheats and outsiders.”
    Ruthlessly checking the fine tremors shuddering through her, she turned very slowly, very deliberately, and sauntered away from him. “Oh, for the days when the sheriff could ride undesirables out of town on a rail!”
    “Here, here,” Dane grumbled, though he had a hell of a time thinking of her as undesirable.
    He retreated to his chair again. He picked a red pencil out of the ceramic holder and drummed the eraser end absently against the blotter. “What happened after you found the body?”
    “I threw up,” Elizabeth admitted candidly. “I imagine one of your lab boys is out there right now scraping up the remains of my Snickers bar, putting it in a Ziploc bag to be microanalyzed or carbon-dated or whatever it is they do with stuff like that.”
    She dropped back down into her chair, exhausted and tense from trying to act as tough as she talked. The truth was, she could have used a shoulder to cry on, but it had been so long since anyone had offered one, she wasn't sure she would even remember what to do with it. Probably shove it away out of habit and old suspicion, she decided sadly.
    She leaned forward and grasped the edge of the seat with both hands, rocking slowly from side to side to relieve a little of her nervous energy as the rest of the memory played through her mind.
    She had stood staring at Jarvis, and it had suddenly occurred to her that whoever had killed him might still be there, hiding in the cover of the woods that surrounded the construction site, watching her. And as the tall cottonwoods and oaks seemed