Page 10 of Over the Flames

The air thickened between them as silence took up space. Stroking her thumb over the ring on her index finger, Arden sunk in on herself as though in defeat. She’d run from their marriage to emotionally protect herself, the same way he’d drowned himself in his work to avoid his grief. It would’ve been so easy to reinforce that construct, to make both of them miserable for the rest of their lives, but the truth was Lawson didn’t see his ex-wife. He didn’t see a killer. He only saw the caring, perfectly flawed, ambitious woman who fought for the people she loved. The woman who’d been forced to raise her siblings since she’d been eight years old because her parents hadn’t had time to do anything but try to keep the bank from taking the house. The woman who’d never been allowed to have feelings because she’d been taught they wouldn’t get her anywhere. Right then, he only saw Arden and everything she’d tried to hide from him. All the pain, the anger, the betrayal, and pressure built behind his chest. She might’ve sided with the enemy, but she wasn’t the killer he needed to be focusing on. He had to remember that.

“We need to speak with Rose Hindley about the accusation,” she said.

“I’ll have Sheriff Sanders make the call as soon as the phones are back online.” He moved the tablet off of his lap and stood. One step. Two. What the hell had happened to them? When had their relationship become so…foreign? His fingers tingled with the urge to reach out as she squared off with him. Notching her chin higher, she gave him perfect access to satisfy the ache pulsing in his chest, the one that had nothing to do with physical intimacy and had everything to do with being connected to the piece he’d lost of himself. “I’m sorry, Arden. About Baldwin. We’re going to find the bastard who murdered him. I give you my word.”

Her attention lowered to his mouth, and her tongue darted out as though she’d envisioned herself closing that small space between them. She set her hand over his heart in an effort to keep him at a distance. Shifting her weight between both feet, she pinched the ring he’d given her for her first Mother’s Day between her thumb and index finger. “Because it’s your job?”

“Not entirely. I’m sorry for not being there. I’m sorry for not being someone you could count on when you needed me. I can’t change the past, but I can solve this case.” He memorized the light freckles across the bridge of her nose. His heart threatened to beat straight out of his chest, hard enough he knew she couldn’t ignore it. “I’ve been holding onto this resentment toward you for a long time, and it’s taken a lot out of me I can’t get back. I don’t want to spend the rest of our lives at war with each other over something neither of us could’ve prevented. We lost our daughter. There has to be a point where we can admit we’re both to blame for not handling it well. It’s the only way we’re going to be able to move on with our lives.”

“You make it sound so easy.” She stared at her hand placed against his chest but didn’t pull away. “Like I haven’t been trying to move on with my life all this time. Like you haven’t been obsessing over medical journals and harassing physicians to get an answer as to why she’s not here anymore.”

An obsession that was tearing him to shreds night after night until Lawson barely recognized himself. He slid his fingers over her wrist, pressing his thumb into the raised scar tissue in her right palm. A scar she’d self-inflicted standing over their daughter’s coffin. A monumental shift rippled through him. His knees threatened to give out right there in the middle of the floor, and the only thing holding him up was her hand pressed against his chest. Even then, Lawson hadn’t been there for her. Hadn’t known how much pain was churning inside his own wife despite the fact he’d been standing right beside her. She’d been so desperate to escape the memories of what’d happened, she’d filed for divorce, moved out of their home, and started a new life without him, and he hadn’t seen any of it coming. Not in the wake of his own selfish need to ease his pain.

Her pulse ticked under his grip, and the world outside these four walls fell away. “I should’ve been there for you a long time ago, Arden. I can’t make up for not being the husband you deserved, but I can make damn sure to be here for you now. You won’t be alone this time. You might not have Baldwin to rely on anymore, but you still have me.”

He dipped his head low and crushed his mouth to hers. She gasped as an explosion of feeling and connection burned through him. Her fingers dug into his chest, her nails biting through his T-shirt, as she kissed him back with a wild desperation that matched his own. He penetrated the seam of her mouth with his tongue and stole her breath straight from her lungs. Cut off from the violent mind game of a killer outside these walls, Arden was all he knew in that moment. All he wanted. All he craved. He clung to her hips, the images of seeing her in that warehouse—so close to her mentor’s charred remains—fresh in his mind.

It could’ve been her in that chair. Could’ve been her who’d been forced to swallow the gasoline. It could’ve been her who he would’ve had to identify on the medical examiner’s slab. He could’ve lost her again and had no one but himself to blame. A soft moan escaped up her throat, and his entire body hardened in an instant.

Stepping back, Arden wrenched away and rubbed at her chest. The sweet hint of vanilla tickled the back of his throat as she increased the space between them. “We should…” She swiped her hand across her forehead as though trying to regain her balance. “We should look more into Baldwin’s device to figure out what he was working on. At least until Sheriff Sanders can get us the contact information for Rose Hindley.”

Right. The case. Lawson forced his hands into his sweats pockets to keep himself from reaching out for her. His heart tried to keep pace with his lungs, but it’d take a few minutes and a few feet of space to counter the heat searing his insides. His gut knotted. Hell, he shouldn’t have kissed her. This investigation was complicated enough without muddying the waters between them further. As much as he’d taken responsibility for their marriage ending the way it did, that didn’t change the fact she’d become a large part of a system he detested. A system that harassed, manipulated, and fear mongered for their own profit and ratings.

He crossed to the small kitchen and collected his phone from where he’d plugged it in to charge a few hours ago. Exhaustion pulled hard as he moved, but sleep would have to wait. Sending off a quick request to Sheriff Sanders for contact information for Baldwin’s accuser, he ran a hand through unkempt and tangled hair while another gust of wind ripped at the trees outside of the kitchen window. The perfect representation of this case, of the strain between him and Arden. Wild, unpredictable, terrifying. His phone vibrated, and a combination of surprise and relief replaced the uncertainty clinging to every second of the past twelve hours. The message had gone through to the sheriff. “Looks like the phones are back online. We should hear back from Sanders soon.”

His phone vibrated again with an incoming text. He read through Sheriff Sanders’s response. “Dr. Vanessa Moss, the chief medical examiner who performed Jacqueline Day’s autopsy, swears neither she nor anyone in her office leaked details from the autopsy report.”

“So it’s looking more like the killer used details from Jacqueline’s death to lure Baldwin to the scene with the promise of information.” Arden peeled her mentor’s tablet from the couch and punched in the winning combination a second time. “You should get dressed. I’ll see if I can figure out what Baldwin was working on before he died. There’s a chance the plagiarism accusation has nothing to do with what happened at the warehouse.”

She had a point. The accusation had been leveled against Baldwin Webb alone. There hadn’t been any mention of Jacqueline Day or what her role in this sick mind game had played. They still needed a connection between the two victims, but he couldn’t deny his need for a cold shower and space from the woman who’d carved her way back into his life and pushed at his internal boundaries. “I shouldn’t be more than a few minutes.”

Lawson hauled his duffel bag packed with toiletries and a fresh set of clothes over his shoulder then headed for the shower. Closing the door behind him, he secured the lock and set the bag onto the tile, and his nervous system immediately drained of pent up tension. He twisted on the water then unpocketed his phone. He took a seat on the edge of the bath-shower combo and wedged his elbows against his knees.

Baldwin Webb hadn’t been the man or the journalist Arden had believed him to be all these years. At least not according to the plagiarism accusation leveled against him two days prior his death. He stared at the victim’s photo from the background check the King County Sheriff’s Department had run after the ME confirmed identification of the remains. “What else have you been hiding?”

Chapter Nine

She could still taste him, still feel his mouth pressed against hers.

Lawson had broken the unspoken contract between them when they’d settled their divorce and pushed into the space where she’d locked their torturous past away. But what confused her more was the fact she’d kissed him back. Not with hesitation but a drive she hadn’t let herself fall prey to since before their worlds had been equally ripped apart. The kiss had been wild, rough, perfect. She’d lost herself in a haze of need and desire ten times more powerful than anything she’d felt during their marriage, yet those blistering few seconds hadn’t come close to easing the festering Ache she’d walked away with. There’d been desperation, connection. Peace.

Arden pressed her fingernails into her palms as they approached the quaint yellow house with the bright green door and large porch. Thick trees and pops of pink wildflowers encroached on the long, wet walkway leading to the stairs. It was beautiful, the kind of home Arden had dreamed of having most of her life. Cottage-style house, a big front porch to have family dinners on outside, grass for her kids to play with one another, and a successful, devoted husband at her side. The white picket fence gate swung closed behind them as they made their way toward the front door, and the fantasy bled away. That part of her life was over. It wasn’t coming back.

“The sheriff called ahead. Rose Hindley should be expecting us.” Lawson’s navy-blue jacket succumbed to the deep ridges and valleys of his massive arms. Styled, dark hair battled the humidity that clung to Arden’s exposed skin, and she couldn’t deny the intensity in his expression heightened the lingering remnants of what they’d shared during that kiss. Interviewing suspects and witnesses, following the evidence, uncovering the truth—this was what he did for a living. This was what he’d been trained for, and an inner knot of interest enjoyed experiencing him in his authoritative element. “With any luck, we’ll find out if plagiarism is a strong enough motive to kill two journalists.”

“Any motive can be strong enough if it effects someone’s way of life. It just depends on what you have to lose.” And if she dared herself to make an assumption as he had about Baldwin, Arden would say Rose Hindley wasn’t keen on losing all of this. According to the background check she’d run through a friend in the Seattle Police Department while Lawson had been in the shower, Baldwin’s accuser had worked as an investigative journalist for the Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber for the past year. It wasn’t a large paper in any sense of the word, circulating only three thousand copies weekly compared to the hundreds of thousands of The Seattle Times, but Hindley’s articles had left a distinct impression on Arden. They were passionate, well-written, thoroughly researched. Arden had instantly been drawn into the narrative Rose Hindley had constructed with her writing and found herself more impressed than skeptical. But she couldn’t ignore the fact the single mother was currently buried under mounting medical debt and on the verge of losing everything she cared about.

Lawson punched the small round doorbell with his thumb then set both hands on his hips. The shoulder holster beneath his jacket followed long, lean lines down his torso, and Arden stopped herself from remembering how close she’d been to driving her fingers under his T-shirt less than an hour ago. They’d shared plenty of passionate nights together before and during their marriage. Why had that kiss felt different? Gray eyes cut to her, and the answer blindsided her Because she hadn’t let herself feel anything for so long. “Do I have something on my face?”

“No.” She shook her head, catching sight of movement through the stained-glass cutout of the front door.

The garden green door protested on old hinges as Rose Hindley centered herself in the door frame. Arden recognized her from her photo on the newspaper’s website, but the bio picture hadn’t done the woman justice. Platinum-blonde hair waved over a thin set of shoulders and petite frame. Green eyes, the color of pine, brightened as perfectly full lips lifted into a smile and exaggerated the bow above Rose’s mouth. Around five-foot-five, five-foot-six, the journalist stretched her flawlessly manicured hand toward Lawson. “Hi, you must be the FBI agent Sheriff Sanders told me would be stopping by today.” That all-too-bright expression shifted to Arden as she offered her hand, and a hit of surprise knocked Rose’s smile down a peg. Her mouth parted as though she’d expected Lawson to come alone. “Oh. I can’t… I can’t believe you’re here.”

Confusion crippled Arden’s line of thought as she shook Rose’s hand. “You know me?”

“Only by reputation. I’ve been reading your work since your first article for The Seattle Times, the one detailing how that mother from the island poisoned her son in order to get attention from her doctors and family members. You inspired me to start researching my own articles and put my journalism degree to use for once.” Calluses scraped against the inside of Arden’s hand as Rose motioned them inside. “Please, come in.”

Lawson stepped over the threshold first, Arden close on his heels.

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