Page 13 of Lone Star Rescue

Other than the dispatcher, Millie would need to man the office until she got back. Hopefully, there wouldn’t be another crisis before the other swing shift deputy came in for duty.

Rafe and she went out to the cruiser, and Bree had to do something she rarely did. Glance around for a potential threat. A threat that could be right here on Main Street in front of the police station. But she did plenty of glancing today. So did Rafe, and that let her know he was on alert as much as she was.

“If it’s not Tessa’s remains, then whose are they?” Rafe asked her the moment they were in the cruiser. “Any ideas?”

That was the million-dollar question, and Bree didn’t have an answer. “There haven’t been any unsolved missing person cases since Tessa. And she wasn’t technically a missing person because of those texts she sent to Wade and you. I mean, he filed a report, and my father and the deputies looked for her, but after a while, the search ended, and everyone assumed she’d gotten on with her life elsewhere.”

“Yeah, I thought the same thing.” Rafe paused. “Wade pulled out all the stops looking for her, and for months, he called me nearly every day, hoping I’d heard from her.”

“But you didn’t, right?” she pressed.

Rafe was quick to shake his head. “No. Nothing other than that one text, and it came from her number. So, if she didn’t personally send it, someone else used her phone to message me.”

Bree considered that as she drove. “Did the text sound like something Tessa would send?”

“It did. She even ended with her usual kiss, kiss. Well, that was usual for the texts she sent to me,” he added when Bree lifted her eyebrow.

She hadn’t recalled Tessa ever putting that in a text to her, but then, that was something Tessa likely reserved for her lover.

And Bree had to shove that aside.

Fast.

No way did she want that in her head. The mental images of Rafe and Tessa naked and rolling around in bed. Then again, there were other things she didn’t want in her head when it came to Rafe. Too bad those things—like this heat and attraction for him—didn’t seem to want to be pushed away. That didn’t matter though.

She wouldn’t act on it.

She hoped.

Normally, it was easy to avoid Rafe since he didn’t come into town that often. In fact, before she’d driven up and spotted him at the grave, Bree hadn’t seen him in nearly two years. That’d been at a party for a mutual friend, and she had made the serious mistake of dancing with Rafe. Body to body. Heat to heat.

Yes, a big mistake.

Before that, she had only vague thoughts as to how it would feel to be in his arms. But with that long, slow dance, she’d gotten a taste of the man she had lusted after for as long as she had felt such things.

Thankfully, she didn’t have time to dwell on that memory because she pulled to a stop in front of the entrance to Ollie’s office. Just seeing the sign, Morgue, was extremely effective in aligning her thoughts to where they should be.

They stepped inside and immediately entered a small reception area. Unmanned at the moment, probably because the woman who usually worked here, Cicily Mendoza, was married to Deputy Carson Mendoza, and she was no doubt with him since he would be staying the night in the hospital.

“Back here,” Ollie called out.

He’d obviously heard them come in, and he stuck his head around the door behind the reception desk. Motioning for them to follow him, Ollie led them into the autopsy room.

Bree had been here a couple of times, on those rare occasions when Ollie had wanted to give her a post-mortem report in person. Before today, only one of those visits had been because of a murder. A domestic dispute that had gone very wrong, and a man had been stabbed to death. However, the body that was beneath the sheet on a metal table would likely turn out to be murder victim number two.

“I’ve been working on her,” Ollie said as he followed her gaze. “Her fingerprints have already been sent to the database so we might have an ID on her soon.”

Good. Even though the worst had already happened to this woman, she’d died or been killed, Bree hated that she didn’t have a name. Right now, she was just the body in the morgue.

“Did either of you take anything for the big assed bruises that I know you have?” Ollie asked, leading them toward a small office.

“No,” Rafe and she muttered in unison. Though if Rafe felt the way she did, they should have.

Ollie sighed and pulled out a bottle of ibuprofen from his desk. He handed it to Bree and filled a cup of water from the small cooler in the corner. Both Rafe and she downed a couple of pills and thanked Ollie.

“Those are the photos,” Ollie announced, pointing to the wall.

Bree had expected the CSI pictures to be on his desktop computer, but they were on the large screens. It reminded her of the way a doctor would review X-rays.

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