Soldiers of Fortune (6 page)

Ida Belle hopped up and gave me a nod, then headed for the front door.
 

“We can let ourselves out,” Gertie called. “But let’s do breakfast. That whole vicarious thing…”

I stared after her and Carter laughed at my dismay.
 

“Do you think video would work for her?” he asked.

“Don’t give her any ideas,” I said. I turned around and reached for the wine, figuring a big, tall glass would calm me down, but Carter pulled the bottle away and grabbed me around the waist with his other arm. He sat the wine on the counter and pulled me close to him, then lowered his head.

“I’ve wanted to do this all day,” he said as he lowered his lips to mine.

Against all common sense and training, I didn’t even try to resist. Kissing Carter was as thrilling as an assignment and, in my case, held the same level of danger. No matter how many times I’d gone over the reasons for why getting involved was a horrible idea, I found myself drawn back in, as if my heart and body had my mind held hostage.
 

I wrapped my arms around him as I pressed my body against his, my hands running over his muscled back and shoulders. He deepened the kiss, and I felt my knees weaken. Another couple of minutes of this, and I was going to rip his clothes off right there in the middle of the kitchen.
 

Then my cell phone signaled I’d received a text message.

Under normal circumstances, I would have ignored it and carried on, but nothing about my existence in Sinful was normal, so I was afraid to let it slide. Not to mention that I’d never be able to enjoy the kitchen undressing because I knew my mind would keep slipping off to wonder what the message was.
 

“I need to get that,” I said as I broke away and reached for my phone. I held in a sigh of relief when I saw it was from Ally and completely innocuous.
 

Staying in town for fireworks. Will be home after.

“Anything wrong?” Carter asked.

“It’s just Ally. She’s staying in town for the fireworks.”

“No chaperone. Yikes. We better move outside where the neighbors can see before I suggest things I’m not medically cleared to do.”

I laughed and grabbed some plastic wineglasses out of the cabinet. “Cookies?”

“Hell yeah.” He lifted the plate off the kitchen table, grabbed the bottle of wine, and headed out the back door. I grabbed a corkscrew from the kitchen drawer and followed him out, an odd range of emotions coursing through me.

On the one hand, I was relieved that Ally’s text had interrupted our moment in the kitchen. On the other hand, I was disappointed that we’d been interrupted. It seemed my entire relationship with Carter had been that way—one step forward, ten seconds jogging back. And that was all on me. Carter had been clear about his intentions from day one. Even when he was only flirting, I knew he was interested. I may be socially inept, but my female parts still worked fine, and they had a normal response to a sexy man putting out the signals.
 

The problem was the lie. The great, big, enormous honking lie that created the chasm between us that only I could see. I knew it wasn’t fair to get involved with Carter without telling him the truth, but it was better for Carter’s safety if he didn’t know, at least not until the situation with Ahmad was resolved. Sometimes I worried that simply getting involved at all put him at risk. If Ahmad’s men made me in Sinful, Carter would be perceived as a threat. Given Ida Belle and Gertie’s age, and the fact that no one in Sinful knew the real story behind their military service, they would probably be safe.
 

Because she was currently living with me, I worried about Ally as well, but the construction company assured her the repairs to her house would only take three weeks. If they kept on schedule, she’d be back in her own space soon enough, leaving me the lone target. Well, and Merlin, but he seemed to have more than the requisite nine lives, so no matter what happened, I figured he’d come out fine.

Carter was dragging two lawn chairs over to the edge of the bayou when I walked outside. He grabbed a cooler from next to the hammock and put it over in front of the chairs to serve as a table. The sun was just starting to set, and it made pretty ripples of orange and yellow over the bayou. I sank into the lawn chair and Carter popped open the wine and poured.

Carter lifted his glass. “Here’s to that one day of peace and quiet we got yesterday.”

I tapped my glass against his. “If I’d known things were going to go south this quickly, I would have stayed awake for more of it.”

“Ha! Can you believe that before you came to town, I actually used to get bored?”

“Correlation does not equal causation.”

Carter smiled. “A lot of criminals use that same defense. But no, I’m not saying things happening around here are your fault. How could they be? Jeez, some of them have been going on for years or happened years ago. You appear to be a woman of many talents, but I don’t think time travel is one of them.”

“If it were, I’d have already won the lottery—twice.” I looked out over the bayou and frowned. It seemed so peaceful, but I knew firsthand that awful, deadly things lurked beneath the surface. In that way, the entire town seemed to be mimicking the bayous that surrounded it. On the surface, everything appeared fine, but clearly, Sinful was brimming with problems.
 

“Gertie, Ida Belle, and I were talking about that earlier,” I said.

“Time travel?”

“No. How things used to be quiet around here. Ida Belle seemed upset that so many bad things were happening right under her nose.”

Carter nodded. “The law enforcement part of me wants to say that little old ladies shouldn’t be crime fighters, but the practical, small-town boy in me knows that the little old ladies usually have the dirt on everyone. Ida Belle’s had her finger on the pulse of this town since she returned from Vietnam, practically running it if people were to admit the truth of things. I can see where it would bother her to be caught by surprise on the depth of issues here. It certainly bothers me.”

“I wish there were something I could do.” I held my hand in the air to stop Carter from interrupting. “Not about the crime. Just about Ida Belle and Gertie feeling bad about it. They’re not responsible, but I get the impression they feel that they are.”

“They love this place. I can understand that.” He turned a bit in his chair so that he could face me. “When I left here, I was thrilled and absolutely certain I never wanted to return. Then when I got to Iraq, I couldn’t think of anything but coming home.”

“You were fighting a war, Carter. It’s not like you were vacationing. Wanting to come home sounds perfectly normal to me.”

“When I got back stateside, I told myself the same thing. So I headed home for a visit with my mom, then I took off again. For three months, I traveled around the US. Sometimes, I went to visit friends. Other times, I went to a place just because I wanted to see it. One time, I threw darts at a map and the first three places I hit, I went to.”

I stared at him for a moment, absorbing this information. It was a side of Carter I didn’t know, and it was an interesting thing that he’d done. “I guess nowhere else compared?”

“No. And I saw some pretty amazing things—beautiful coastlines, majestic mountains, those enormous trees that you can drive a car through—but no matter how great it was, it wasn’t home. So I came back. Sheriff Lee hired me on as a deputy and the rest is really boring history.”

“Until a month ago.”

He nodded.

“I have to ask, does Sinful still look as good now?”

His brow creased. “It’s still home. I’m not sure what it would take to change that. But I see it differently than I did before. It’s impossible not to.”

“Yeah,” I said. I knew exactly what he was saying. Every time I was on a mission, I thought about the end, when I’d go home to my quiet, safe apartment and decompress. Where I could relax with Harrison over a beer and a discussion of firearms. It was a pace so slow, sometimes it felt I was going in reverse, and a lot of the time I was bored and itching for that phone call from Morrow that would send me back into the field. But no matter what, I still looked forward to going home.
 

Except now, I had another basis for comparison. Living in Sinful had opened my eyes to what being part of a community was about. It had exposed me to true friendships and the sacrifices people were willing to make for them. Bottom line—it had shown me how hollow my life in DC was. When all of this was over and I went back to my old life, things would never be the same.
 

There was no way they could be.

“Have you heard anything from Dr. Stewart?” I asked, feeling the need for a change of subject. The current one was becoming too deep and far too depressing.

“You mean have I called Dr. Stewart to ask him about the thing I’m not supposed to mention and that you’re not supposed to ask questions about?”

“Yeah, that would be the one.”

He shook his head. “You never give up, do you?”

“In my defense, you never told me I couldn’t ask questions. You told me to stay out of the investigation. Since I’m here with you drinking wine and waiting for explosives in the sky, I’d say I’m definitely meeting that criterion.”

He raised one eyebrow.

“C’mon,” I complained. “I’m going to find out one way or another. I’m sure Ida Belle and Gertie know a nurse, volunteer, or janitor who owes them a favor, or have somehow linked their home computers to the hospital’s security feed, or maybe they’ll just dress up like hospital staff, stroll right in, and read the file over a cup of coffee. Bottom line, it’s just a matter of time.”

Carter sighed. “Given that Gertie was impersonating hospital personnel a week ago, your list is more plausible than one would hope. Yes. Dr. Stewart called right before I left to come over here.”

“And?”
 

“The leg tested positive for meth, both on the skin and in the bloodstream.”

“Crap. I knew you were right. You’re too good at your job not to be, but I still hoped…”

“Yeah. Me too.”

“I don’t suppose they had any way of identifying who the leg belonged to?”

“Unfortunately, no. No tattoos, no surgical implements with serial numbers, not even a unique scar.”

“So you’ve got nothing.”

“It was a white male, thirties to forties, approximately five foot ten to six foot two and fairly lean.”

“That doesn’t narrow it down much.”

“No, it doesn’t. And that’s assuming he was a Sinful resident, which is something we can’t be certain about. With the oil field work and all the construction after the hurricanes, plenty of people have come and gone around here. Any one of them could have scouted out a place for their operation and come back much later to fire it up.”

“It would be nice if it turned out to be a stranger. Or mostly one. You know what I mean.”

“Yeah. Well, we can hope.”

The words said one thing, but the tone of his voice said another. Whether it was instinct or a hunch or whatever mojo made Carter good at his job, he already knew that the problem was homegrown. Which meant I was going to be forced to hang out with teens and probably steal a boat, but in the big scheme of things, those weren’t the worst things I’d done since I’d arrived in Sinful.

A loud whistling sound disrupted my thinking and I looked up to see the first of the fireworks explode across the night sky. Carter reached over and took my hand in his, giving me a smile. I took a drink of my wine and relaxed. Tonight was all about enjoying the splendor of things that blew up.
 

Tomorrow I’d concentrate on the darker side of things going
boom
.

Chapter Four

I had just changed into my sleeping tee and pulled on shorts when I heard the front door open. I headed downstairs for my late-night snack and found Ally in the kitchen, dumping her purse on the table.
 

“You stayed out late,” I said. The fireworks show had ended around an hour before. Right about that time, the breeze stopped and the mosquitoes moved in for the kill. I invited Carter in but he declined, saying he needed to get some rest as he was on Walter duty tomorrow, per Emmaline. I guessed she figured having them in one place would make it easier to keep both of them from overexertion. I wished her all the luck in the world on that one.
 

I could tell Carter was tired, but the wistful expression he wore when I dropped him off in front of his house made me wonder if the real reason he left was because he knew Ally would be home soon and didn’t want to tempt either of us into a compromising position. It was just as well. I knew I wanted Carter, but I still wasn’t sold on it being a good idea. And even though I was rarely embarrassed, the thought of Ally sleeping across the hall with Carter and me only two walls away made me kinda squeamish. Since Emmaline had moved into Carter’s spare room until Dr. Stewart gave him clearance, his house was even worse on the “hell no” scale.

“I was talking with a couple of the vendors after the show,” Ally said. “I went to school with some of them, and people from other towns stopped by to comment on the festival and mostly on Francine’s pies. Then the mosquitoes moved in and everyone cleared out.” She began to yawn and threw her hand over her mouth. “I swear, I had all this energy just a little while ago, and now I’m about to fall asleep standing here.”