Free Betrayed by a Kiss by Kris Rafferty Page B

a chance to have a normal life again. Be a detective again. Yet nothing was free. He worried what life would take from him next.
    He climbed the porch stairs. Harper was waiting for him, exhausted. Her shoulder-length red curls were secured in a ponytail, and her usually smiling face was tense as she held the door open for him. She’d been crying. He knew she was afraid and didn’t blame her. She was twenty-four and had been forced to shoulder a lot for one so young.
    “Who is that?” Harper kept her voice to a whisper.
    “I’ll explain later. Is Elizabeth asleep?”
    “Yeah. Upstairs. We arrived an hour ago. Anything I should know?”
    “We’re safe here.”
    She nodded to Marnie. “Is she sick?”
    “Just tired. Do you have any rooms set up?”
    “I changed the sheets in yours.” She led him inside. The worn rug muffled his footsteps as he climbed the stairs. Not much had changed since he bought the farmhouse. The electrical still needed updating. The furniture came with the house, run-down but serviceable. Harper must have swept and dusted, because everything looked clean. Dane wasn’t big on details like that. When he came here, which wasn’t often, he spent most of his time in a side bedroom upstairs, poring over boxes of files he’d compiled on Alice’s case.
    Marnie was warm in his arms. He liked how she pressed her face against his neck, and the desire it prompted. Her hand rested on his chest, bringing back memories of a simpler, happier time in his life. The quiet of the night enticed him to pretend, but he resisted. He didn’t know her. She’d survived the shootout at the cabin with him, and it had created a camaraderie he’d felt only with his unit in Afghanistan. Adrenaline was working his libido, and he’d waited too long to find pleasure in a woman’s arms. He didn’t know why he was looking for reasons for wanting her when reason enough was staring him in the face. She was fascinating, and gorgeous, and she wanted him back. Why? Who the hell cared? He missed feeling anything other than alone.
    Dane forced himself to lay her on the bed. The moonlight streaming in the windows gave enough light to see she was shivering, still damp from earlier. She needed a hot shower, but he suspected she needed sleep more, so he covered her with a thick quilt and then stripped her by touch. He was quick about it, gentle, but she shifted restlessly, dislodging the blanket and exposing her long, muscular legs and the tiny black panties he remembered from the last time he’d had to undress her. His hands shook as he covered her back up, and he wondered if this was the universe balancing accounts, sending her to him when he needed her the most. He hoped so.
    He left her there, quiet and asleep, amazed that he had the capacity to hope again.
    …
    Dreams of faceless men shooting at her startled Marnie awake, and even the faded floral wallpaper and trappings of the unfamiliar bedroom didn’t convince her heart rate she was safe. Neither did the morning sun. Nightmares were for children, she reminded herself, and she hadn’t been a child, well…ever. She blamed last night’s excitement for harshing her calm. It wasn’t that dead bodies were new for Marnie. Exposure to them was inevitable with an addict mom who dragged her from flophouse to flophouse before abandoning her in one, but overdoses were peaceful compared with last night’s deaths. She hated guns.
    Marnie rubbed her eyes with her palms, yawning, displacing the threadbare quilt from her body and stretching out the soreness from yesterday’s tussle with the creek bed. A chill was in the air, and it cut through MacLain’s borrowed T-shirt. Tugging the quilt about her, she blinked, trying to adjust, wondering where the hell she was. The last thing she remembered was being in MacLain’s truck.
    Something moved out of the corner of her eye. Marnie jumped. “Shit!”
    Elizabeth was staring. Her straight brown hair was tucked into a long ponytail