Free After Midnight by Merline Lovelace Page A

replied with a credible show of nonchalance. “Why?”
    “I reeled in a twelve-pound this redfish afternoon. It’s all fileted and ready to grill. I thought you might want come over to my place tomorrow and compare my culinary skills to Pampano Joe’s.”
    “To your place?”
    “Yes, ma’am.” His mouth curving at her obvious surprise, he conducted a leisurely inspection of her curls. “I like your hair like that, by the way.”
    “Thank you.” Jess pasted on a smile. “I appreciate the invitation, sheriff, but…”
    “Steve. The name’s Steve.”
    “I appreciate the invitation, sheriff, but I’m still learning my job. Aside from official functions like this, I don’t have time for socializing.”
    “Don’t think of it as socializing,” he said, his eyes glinting. “Think of it as Sunday dinner.”
    So much for polite pretenses.
    “Let me put it another way, then. I’m not interested. In you or in Sunday dinner.”
    “Sure you are. You just aren’t ready to admit it yet.”
    She didn’t bother to dignify that with a reply. With a small nod, Jess walked away.
    Shoving one hand in his pocket, Steve held his drink with the other and treated himself to the pleasure of watching her walk. The swish of her long blue skirt and accompanying flash of leg put a kink in his groin that stopped just short of painful.
    Correction. It hurt like hell. He might as well be honest. He’d had a hard on for the colonel since the first night she’d opened her door to him wearing those skimpy cut-offs and half a T-shirt. The woman fascinated him, almost as much as the mystery of her link to the dead realtor. He was chewing over that link again when a ripple of throaty laughter brought his head around.
    “My stars, darling.” Maggie Calhoun sauntered over, her eyes bright and brittle. “I couldn’t help overhearing. The colonel certainly put you in your place.”
    “It happens every once in a while,” Steve admitted with a careless shrug.
    “Oh, well, that’s how it is with these Yankees. They just don’t appreciate our native charm.”
    “This one should. She lived down in Choctaw Beach for a few years in the late eighties.”
    “Really? That wasn’t in her bio.” Maggie tapped her lower lip with a pointed, pink-tinted nail. “We’re the same age, give or take a year or two. We must have gone to school together, but I sure don’t remember any Jessica Blackwell.”
    “Her mother’s name was Yount. Helen Yount.”
    “Yount! That’s Jessie Yount?”
    His companion swung around to shoot an incredulous glance at the woman in uniform, slopping her champagne over the sides of the flute in the process. With a muttered, un-Maggie like curse, she dabbed her napkin at the spot on her silk sheath.
    “You knew her?” Steve asked when she tossed the crumpled napkin onto a near-by tray.
    “Not really. She was a couple years behind me in school and everyone pretty much steered clear of her. Not just because she was an outside. Truth is, she was the skinniest, scrappiest kid you ever saw. Seemed like she was always getting into fights.”
    “Why?”
    “Probably because of her mother.” Maggie’s nose wrinkled delicately. “Much as I loathe to put people in boxes, Helen Yount really fit the definition of trailer trash. There were all kinds of rumors about what she served the customers out at the Blue Crab.”
    “The Blue Crab?”
    “Oh, that’s right. You wouldn’t know it. The place burned down years ago, long before you moved here from Atlanta.”
    Steve didn’t correct her. He knew the place, all right. He’d tramped past its vine-covered remains just last week.
    His gaze slid past Maggie and found a tumble of warm brown curls. No doubt it was only a coincidence that Reverend McConnell’s body had tangled in the weeds of Harry’s Bayou, just a few dozen yards from the ruins of the roadhouse dive where Jess Blackwell’s mother once worked. And it might have been mere coincidence that Jess’s name was