They measured everything out, front and back. Everything went well until they stepped inside for a drink. The cat took one look at her and her dog, hissed, and ran off. Bing held Peaches’s leash, as a precaution, but Peaches behaved like a gentleman, going where he was told, sitting when asked. She was so proud of him.
Even as her world started spinning.
The feeling that she’d been inside the house before was overwhelming. She could swear she knew where the bathroom would be, and when she asked to use it, she was proven right.
He must have caught the bewilderment on her face when she came out, because he asked her if she was all right.
“Just some really strange déjà vu. I could swear I’ve been in this house before.” She shook her head to clear it.
He lifted an eyebrow.
“
When I moved out of the city, I was looking for a townhome in Kennett Square. I didn’t even mean to move to Broslin. But I got turned around on my way to a showing. I drove by your house.” The pull had been so strong she had to turn around at the end of the street and come back to look at it again. “I had this weird feeling.”
She’d driven around the block several times. “Then I saw the cottage with the for-sale sign down the road. A single home for the price of a townhouse. That’s how I ended up living in Broslin. If your house didn’t stop me, I would never have seen my cottage. I’d be living in Kennett now.” They would probably never have met.
The look on his face was patiently skeptical. “Are you thinking previous lives here? This house is not that old.”
“Never mind.” She didn’t want to discuss body memories with him. She refused to accept the stories, for the most part. She didn’t want to think that her newfound love for peanut butter came from the stranger whose heart beat inside her. She wanted her tastes, her dreams, and her memories to be her own.
She’d been “sick girl” for most of her life. She refused to go straight to “weird girl.” All she’d ever wanted was to be normal.
She set her empty glass on the kitchen table and stood. “All right. Let’s finish this. I can give you a list of things you can do while I work up a blueprint for new planting.”
He pulled her into his arms—“Yes, ma’am.”—and gave her a quick kiss.
Okay, she thought. I could get used to this.
They started with the backyard, which needed basic cleanup and removal of some boxwood bushes that were old and dead on one side. “Plus the shed could use a paint job,” she told him. “Green, to match the house’s trim.”
He nodded.
Her gaze kept catching on the azalea bush in the middle of the yard, an odd place. It didn’t match anything back here. If anyone wanted to put in a pool or a vegetable garden, it’d be in the way. And a pain to drive around with the mower, probably.
“You need to take that out,” she told him. “You could move it to one side of the front door, then buy a matching one for the other side and save some money—”
His posture stiffened, his good mood disappearing in an instant.
She blinked. “Okay, what did I say?”
* * *
Planting that bush had been the last thing Stacy had done on this earth. Bing swallowed the bitterness rising in his throat. The bush stood out in the middle of the yard, a dark blob on the bright green spring grass. Some days he thought it looked like a gravestone. He had no right taking it away.
He probably had no right starting something with Sophie. But he wanted to anyway. He wanted too much, too fast. Maybe he needed to slow things down a little.
“The azalea will have to stay.”
Sophie glanced at him with a puzzled expression. But then she shrugged. “Okay. I’ll figure out a way to make it better. Maybe we could add a birdbath and some other things.”
From his pocket, he pulled a bag of treats he’d gotten for Peaches and tossed him one. “Why don’t I play with him a little while you sketch? I think it’s safe to let him off leash back here.”
The dog followed orders pretty well, and he’d come running back to him at the sight of that treat in a second.
So he tossed some branches for him while Sophie designed. He tried to teach the dog to roll over, and even tried to put a treat on his nose and make him wait for his “okay.” Well, that didn’t work. But, after a while, Peaches mastered the rollover trick.
“Hey, look—” He started to call out to Sophie, then stopped and stared.
She stood by the back flower bed, forsythia blooming a cheerful yellow behind her. Birds chirped in the dogwoods that flanked the yard to the side. Sunshine played on her face, her eyes bright and lively as she planned, a half smile on her lips.
She was full of life. Way too cheerful for him. And way too young. He was an old, jaded cop. Yet here was the truth: he wanted that light, her light, in his life.
Soon. But not yet.
She shoved her papers into the folder before turning to him. “That’s it. I think we’re done for today.”
He wanted to take her inside. Upstairs. He pushed the need away.
“I appreciate the help. How about we walk Peaches home and then I take you somewhere for an early lunch to thank you for spending your morning here?”
“You don’t have to. You don’t owe me anything. Any work I do here has already been prepaid.” She smiled. “You dug in my trees.”
“I didn’t mean lunch as payment. I meant it as I want to have lunch with you because I enjoy your company.”
Her green eyes went wide. Then narrowed. Her head tilted.
Was he really going to say it? Oh hell. He plowed ahead. “Like a date.”
Dating was okay. They could start dating and slowly get to know each other.
She bit her bottom lip. “I’m not very good at dating.”
“I doubt that.”
“I haven’t dated a lot.”
He hadn’t either. He’d had too many superficial hookups before he’d gotten married; then he was faithful in his marriage, and he’d focused solely on his job since Stacy’s death.
“The most stressful part for a guy is whether or not the girl is going to let him kiss her at the end. For a woman, it’s probably whether or not the guy will want to kiss her. We already kissed. It wasn’t that bad, was it?” he teased.
She gave him an uncertain look. “It makes me feel out of control.”
He put Peaches back on his leash and stepped closer to her. Slow. “That’s a good thing. You’re supposed to let go of control and just enjoy it.”
He stopped right in front of her and bent his head, just dragging his lips over hers. He put his arms around her, Peaches’s long leash tangled around his leg. She smelled like vanilla, pure and sweet. He nibbled on her bottom lip as desire shot through him.
Another moment and he would stop, he thought as his tongue swept inside her mouth to fully taste her. Then he lost control for a second and kissed her as if he was the last man on earth and she was the last woman, and, heaven help him, he wanted more. His hands snuck up her sides, on her rib cage, and stopped just under her breasts. Every cell of his body ached.
He was fully aroused and plotting the nearest route to the sofa inside. And that was when the last remaining vestige of sanity pulled him back at last.
“I’m sorry. We don’t have to rush this.” He drew a slow breath, unable to let her go fully, holding himself in iron control so he wouldn’t push for more right now. “I feel like there’s a connection between us.” He gave a strained smile. “You’re damn hard to resist.”
She’d been smiling too, but her face turned sober the next instant, her eyes going wide and horror-stricken, and she jumped back as if she couldn’t get away from him fast enough.
Her hands flew to her mouth. “Oh my God. There is a connection. I kept feeling it from the beginning. To your house and to you.” Tears gathered in her eyes.
He stared at her, not sure where she was going with this.
“Have you ever heard of body memories?” she asked weakly, reaching for Peaches’s leash.
He raised an eyebrow as he handed it to her.
“It’s when transplant patients get the memories of the donor.” A tear escaped. “They might remember faces or places or favorite foods or favorite music. You said last Saturday was the two-year anniversary of your wife’s death.” She took another step back, her face pale, a hollow look in her eyes. “I got my new heart two years ago on the same day.”
Cold spread through his stomach. His brain came to a screeching halt, even as she kept on speaking.
“These feelings have nothing to do with us. They’re not mine.” She wiped the tear angrily on her sleeve. “Your wife was an organ donor, wasn’t she? I got her heart. I know I did. It’s the only thing that makes sense.” She sounded absolutely stricken.
He tried to reach for her, but Peaches, seeing her distress, stepped between them, the hair standing up on his back as he growled, defending her.
Bing was smart enough to stay where he was. “Stacy wasn’t an organ donor.”
“Maybe the hospital made a mistake. I know I’m right about this. None of this is real.” She wrapped the leash around her wrist and ran.
He watched her leave, unable to believe what was happening. How had they gone from spending a great morning together and sharing the hottest kiss of his life to this?
* * *
He was calling after her, saying something, but Sophie couldn’t hear the words over the sound of blood rushing in her ears. She kept running, down the street and away from Bing, away from the terrible realization that not a thing she felt for him was real.
She’d been an idiot not to have figured this out before now, with all the stupid déjà vu she’d been experiencing.
She didn’t stop until she turned down her street and was sure Bing could no longer see her if he was looking. Then she collapsed onto the grass, her eyes burning. When Peaches licked her face, she threw her arms around him.
“We’ll be fine without Bing,” she whispered into the dog’s fur. “Better to find this out now than after I’ve fallen in love with him.” Although, just now, she wasn’t sure if it wasn’t already too late, because it sure felt like her heart was breaking.
The dog buried his big head into the crook of her neck.
She held him a little tighter. “Wonderful things are on their way.” It was important to say the words even if, at the moment, she didn’t believe them.
But as she sat, clinging to the dog, the sea of sadness inside her churned into waves of anger.
None of this was fair.
She reached once again for the positive but came up empty.
Dark despair washed over her. She was a freak. Maybe she was an unnatural thing. Maybe taking the heart had been a sin, and now she was being punished. Maybe her mother was right about everything.
* * *
It wasn’t Stacy’s heart. He knew that for a fact.
Bing let Sophie go. She was upset. If she needed time before she could be rational about this, he could give her a little time. But they would have a talk.
Okay.
He rubbed the back of his neck as he looked at the turn in the road where she’d disappeared. He was going to have to figure something out here, because she was hurting and he couldn’t stand the thought, frankly. And he couldn’t stand the thought of them not seeing each other again.
He’d been thinking that it was too soon for him to move on, but somehow, when he hadn’t been looking, part of him already had, whether he deserved a second chance or not.
He wasn’t stupid. He knew a woman like Sophie didn’t show up in a man’s life every day. He wanted a new life, he registered with surprise. And he wanted Sophie Curtis, specifically.
He was going to find Stacy’s killer. And he was going to sell the house. But he didn’t need to wait on those things to move forward with his life. He was going to start over, now, and he was somehow going to convince Sophie to be part of that.
He walked to the back and stared at the azalea bush. It was in the wrong place. Keeping it there wasn’t going to change anything about the past, wasn’t going to bring Stacy back.
The garage was open behind him. He went in, grabbed a shovel, strode to the azalea, and started digging.
The physical exercise was a good way to work off his frustration while giving him time to think. He would give Sophie time to calm down, then call tonight to talk to her. She was wrong about the heart. She needed to hear him out on that. The tenuous links forming between them….
People fell in love. He had been in love before. It happened. Hell, it’d happened to Jack Sullivan, his top detective, and he’d been as morose a bastard as Bing had ever seen before love had clobbered him.
He got the bush out, but something caught his eye at the bottom of the hole. He poked at it with the shovel and pulled up some weird contraption. He shook the dirt off, then stared as he realized what it was—a holster.
Not standard police issue; he registered the fact immediately. This was an inexpensive starter holster, the kind gun manufacturers sometimes even gave out free with a new handgun purchase if they were running a promotion. What was it doing here?
His heart rate picked up as he dropped his find to the side, then went back to digging. Two more turns of the shovel before the tip hit something metal. He was on his knees next to the hole in a second, going at the dirt with his bare fingers, but stopped himself before he could pick up his next find bare-handed. He yanked off his shirt and grabbed the handgun with that, carefully. He didn’t expect fingerprints at this stage, but he wasn’t taking chances.
A gun in the hole that’d been dug the day Stacy had died.
He had the murder weapon.
He stared at it as he sat back on his heels. The first significant clue he’d had in the past two years.
Chapter Nine
Sophie walked up to her front door with tears in her eyes, her vision so blurry she could barely fit her key into the lock. She glanced behind her before she opened her front door, relieved that Bing wasn’t coming after her. She couldn’t talk to him right now, not about this.
She collapsed onto the rug in her living room, her back braced against the couch as she sat. Peaches immediately lay next to her and put his head on her lap. This was what unconditional support felt like. She’d always been too sick to have a pet of her own, so she hadn’t really understood that—the kind of love that was possible. Now she soaked up every bit of it.