Page 15 of Smoke and Roses

The ranch looks worse in daylight than it did last evening. Two hundred acres of black ground. The barns made it. The old stone homestead in the middle of the meadow was able to withstand the flames.

Lindsey points at it. “There’s a root cellar under that house. Mrs. Hollister used to send me and Danielle down for jars of peaches, and we screamed at the spiders every time. She said they could hear us in Huntsville.”

Yellow tape runs along the rim of the ravine. Lindsey ducks under it before I can say a word. I follow her down.

The car’s gone, towed to the county lot. All that’s left is the long dent where it sat all those years. She stands at the bottom with her hands jammed in her coat pockets and stares at it.

I don’t look at the dent because I’m looking at the bank. I knew something was off yesterday. I didn’t have time to think about it then.

“Lindsey. Come here.”

She comes. I point up the bank at the oak along the rim.

“A car goes off that road up there and comes down this bank, it tears through all of that. Branches snapped. Trunks broken. It leaves a scar a blind man could follow.”

She looks. “There isn’t one.”

“No. There’s this.” I climb a few feet and crouch by a row of stumps along a narrow gap in the oak, just wide enough for a car. I brush the ash off one with my glove. The top under the char is flat. Clean. “Somebody cut these with a saw. A long time ago. Cut a lane down the bank and brought the car down on purpose.”

“On purpose?”

I climb back down and kick through the ash where the back bumper sat. It takes a minute. Then my boot catches something, and I dig it out. A length of rusted chain, five or six links fused into one lump.

“Rear tow hook still had a piece of this on it,” I say. “Somebody chained that car to something with a lot more pull than a Honda—probably a truck or a tractor—and dragged it down here slow. Then they cut brush and piled it on top so nobody would find it.”

Her eyes widen as she looks across the bank. “Someone hid her car,” she whispers.

“Someone hid the car.” I turn the chain over in my hand. “That’s not the same as hiding her.”

“You don’t go to all that trouble in a panic,” I say. “You do it carefully, in the dark, because you don’t want anybody to come looking for whoever was driving it.”

Hope appears on her face first, fast and bright. Then something more careful right behind it, like she’s afraid to hold it too tight.

“You think somebody helped her,” she says.

“I think somebody did this on purpose and took their time. That’s all I know.” I hold out the chain. “It’s more than you had yesterday.”

She takes it—closes her fingers around the rusted links and holds them against her chest, next to the gold half heart.

I’m not expecting what she does next. Lindsey grabs the front of my shirt with her other hand, leans up on her toes, and kisses me.

Good god. I stop breathing and hold still as a stone column from the shock of it.

I am a grown man and a former Ranger. That means I’ve been shot at in multiple countries, but nobody has ever surprised me like this.

I snap out of my shock and do what comes natural to me. I take over. With a growl, I put one hand on the back of her neck and the other on her low back, and I pull her in.

She gasps against my lips as her hand opens on my chest and slides up around my neck.

Fuck, she tastes good.

There’s nothing hurried about the kiss. I take my time getting to know the way she feels, exploring her like she’s tasting me. It’s exactly the way I thought about taking those pale pink lips for two hours sitting in my window watching her porch light.

When I finally lift my head, we’re both breathing hard. Her cheeks are pink. Her mouth is pinker.

“You said you had bad timing,” she says. “I think maybe I do too. I just kissed you in a crime scene.”

“Yeah, you did.”