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“Again, it’s possible. But just because that dog was near the church yesterday doesn’t mean he’s the one who was at this notebook. We have no idea whether it was dropped near the church, or carried there by whatever animal had it.” He hated to mention it, but had to make sure the woman had all the facts and would remain on guard. “It’s possible the person had been near the church, watching you.” He hurried to ease her fears. “But not definite. And I don’t think this could have been out in the elements too long. The pages are nearly dry and the snow didn’t do much damage.”

  “No, just the drooly dog. What about fingerprints?” she asked.

  “Nothing traceable yet. Couple of partials. We haven’t hit anything on the crime database.”

  She nodded slowly. Sophie seemed to be taking this whole thing very well, not getting panicked, not asking a million unanswerable questions or getting even the slightest bit hysterical. She remained thoughtful, analytical. Pretty much what he’d come to expect from her.

  “So, do you know of anyone who might want to harm you?”

  “Nobody wants to harm me.”

  “The notes in here say otherwise.”

  She ran a hand through her hair, then pulled her ponytail off. “Look, whatever’s in that notebook, what on earth makes you think it’s about me?”

  He frowned. “There are specific mentions in here about the church, the office, the time ‘she’ would leave.”

  She muttered something under her breath.

  “What?”

  Crossing her arms, she raised a brow. “I’m not the only woman who works in the church office. How do you know it’s not referring to Miss Hester?”

  “Not likely.” He didn’t tell her why he didn’t think it likely—that being because the whack-job would have to be stupid to think of disposing of a woman the size of Miss Hester through a hole in the icy lake. Christ, to make a hole that big with a pickax would take days.

  She pressed him. “But how can you be sure?”

  “Trust me, Sophie. I know my job.”

  She blew out an impatient breath, rolled her eyes and plopped onto the couch. She didn’t exactly look like the patient, sweet and smiling secretary the town knew. She looked more like someone who seriously wanted to punch something.

  Probably him.

  But he wasn’t going to tell her any more than he had to. He didn’t want to talk to Sophie about the kind of stuff this sicko had written in the notebook. Right down to how he’d dispose of the body. She didn’t need to hear about things like pickaxes and wood chippers.

  “Fine. You won’t tell me anything. But, how can you possibly know it’s not just some big…misunderstanding? Or a joke?”

  “I tend to take things like entrance wounds, weapons and body removal very seriously.”

  She let out a nearly inaudible groan, looking down at her own hands. “I can’t believe this.”

  She was finally getting the point. She looked weary, so damn vulnerable it almost hurt to watch her. When he’d started this job, he’d resolved that nothing was going to happen to an innocent victim here, like it so often had in the crime-ridden big city he’d recently left. Not on his watch. Not in his town.

  And definitely not to this woman.

  THE ONLY WAY SOPHIE COULD get Daniel to leave that night was to promise to lock all her doors and windows, and keep her cell phone by her side at all times. When he finally accepted that she was not going to go visit friends for a day or two, he went over a long list of don’ts and do’s. Even after that, the stubborn man insisted on doing a final search of her house. She managed to keep him away from her office without threatening bodily injury, but it was a close call for a minute.

  “This is unbelievable,” she muttered when she looked out her front window the next morning, seeing the police car slowly cruise down her street. He’d said he’d have a patrol going by throughout the night. She’d seen it at least four times before she’d finally been able to fall asleep.

  This protective stuff was going to get old really fast.

  “And to think you wanted to meet a take-charge kind of guy. Next time be careful what you wish for,” she muttered.

  She had no idea how to handle this latest situation. She wasn’t in any danger, for heaven’s sake. Well, not for the reasons Chief Fletcher might think. Her physical well-being wasn’t threatened. But if the truth came out, her nice, anonymous, orderly world might well be.

  So much for keeping a low profile, maintaining both her worlds for as long as she could.

  “What a mess,” she muttered.

  In more ways than one. Yes, the current situation was bad. The police chief thought someone was going to murder her, and soon enough the whole town would know it.

  But somehow, the other issue—the personal issue—was what had really kept her up last night. She was way too interested in Daniel Fletcher for her own good. Cripes, she hadn’t even realized her notebook was missing from her pocket, probably because she’d been thinking of nothing else but the chief since the minute they’d met.

  She figured she must have lost the book when she fell on the ice outside the church. The big slobber-mobile masquerading as a dog had probably snatched it up before romping away with his owner.

  The fact that she hadn’t even noticed told her more than she wanted to know about where her mind had been since Thursday morning. Not on work. Not on her deadline, her P.R. campaign, her print run, her movie deal.

  No. She’d been thinking of one thing. Him. Mister hunky-nosy-over-protective-drool-worthy-helluva-kisser police chief.

  She had to figure out a way out of this mess, hopefully without having to interact too much with Daniel. Not that she’d necessarily mind interacting with him, in certain ways at least. But that was impossible.

  If she kept quiet about the notebook, he’d be darn well furious when he eventually found out. And he would find out.

  If she told him the truth about who she was, well, his reaction would probably be even worse.

  Sophie had had a few experiences with the big, strong, over-protective type of man. They all had one thing in common. They couldn’t wrap their arms—not to mention their minds or hearts—around the kind of woman who plotted and fantasized about gruesome murders all day long.

  Either way she lost. If she came clean and told Daniel who had really written the notebook, he’d back off, all right, in every way possible. Since she’d already decided she couldn’t possibly get involved with him, that should have been a relief.

  It wasn’t.

  Deep in her heart, during the dark, lonely hours in her bed, she had admitted the truth. She didn’t really want him to back off, except on this murder investigation nonsense. She hated the thought of him exiting her world completely, becoming just another townsperson she nodded to while in line at the grocery store checkout. She wanted him in her life.

  “Be honest,” she muttered. “You want him in your bed.”

  Well, that was true too. But it was more than that. She liked him, liked his wit and his smile. His intelligence and his courtesy. And good God she liked the way he kissed.

  “Maybe…”

  Then she shook her head. No, not maybe. Even if she told him, came clean, and he somehow, amazingly, didn’t mind, it would still ruin things eventually. Sure, she could ask him to keep what she told him in confidence, but just canceling the investigation would raise some eyebrows. His officers would want to know why. The rumors would start. Sooner or later, the truth would come out. And the way gossip spread in this town, she’d have a line of readers at her front door wanting autographs, and a group of picketers across her driveway protesting the violence in her books.

  Sophie almost preferred the physical threat of a real stalker. She knew how to take care of herself. Several years of self-defense courses, as well as visits with the FBI, DEA and State Police had exposed her to the world of personal protection.

  But she was clueless about dealing with fame. Or infamy.

  “Well, Mugs,” she sa
id as she absently gave her cat a good-morning scratch. “It looks like we’re about to get a crash course.”

  She just hoped that somehow, while she figured out how to deal with her professional life, she’d find some answers for her personal one.

  “CHIEF?”

  Daniel reached for the radio on the dash of his squad car Saturday morning. Usually he didn’t bother going on patrol on weekends, unless there was a particularly popular local band playing at the honky-tonk out by the interstate. Then he and every man on his squad worked overtime to make sure no one tried to drive home after a little too much celebrating.

  Today, however, with a genuine case to investigate, he’d been up and at work shortly after sunrise, learning everything he could about Miss Sophie Winchester. So far, he hadn’t found much he didn’t already know. She’d been born and raised here, moved away for a few years to go to college. Bought her house six months ago, had good credit, had never been arrested or even charged with as much as a speeding violation. No violent ex-boyfriends. No explanation about where she learned to kiss like an angel.

  Why the woman would have an enemy out for her blood, he had no idea.

  He told himself he’d be just as vigilant with any other potential victim in Derryville. But, deep down, he knew it was his concern for this particular one that had left him restless and unable to sleep the night before.

  If he were a better cop, or a stronger man, perhaps it would have only been his concern about her that had filled his mind overnight. But that wasn’t the case. He’d also tossed and turned due to more erotic thoughts. Those thoughts had been present since the first time he’d seen her, back before Christmas. Their too-brief kisses had made things a lot worse.

  God, a woman had never affected him so instantly, so powerfully. He hadn’t so much as dated a woman in months, and throughout the night he’d thought of doing a lot more than dating the town sweetheart. He’d wanted to climb on top of her right there on her kitchen table and make love to her amid the bowls of chicken soup, with her cat watching from below.

  “Chief, are you there?”

  “Sorry. Go ahead.”

  “Goldilocks has left the cottage. Repeat. Goldilocks has left the cottage.”

  What the…. “Excuse me?”

  “Goldilocks…”

  “I heard you, I mean what the hell are you talking about, Chuck?”

  “It’s Skip, Chief. But I think in sensitive cases, we should maintain radio anonymity. So call me Papa Bear.”

  Okay, either some teenagers from the high school had hitched a joy ride in one of the squad cars and were goofing around with the radio, or else one of his officers had gone completely mental.

  “Skip, just tell me in plain English what’s going on. Who is Goldilocks?”

  “Our intended victim.”

  “Sophie Winchester?”

  “Affirmative.”

  Daniel responded with the first thing that crossed his mind. “Her hair’s not gold, it’s brown.”

  “Told you,” he heard from in the background. “She should have been Belle from Beauty and the Beast. She had brown hair,” Chuck, Skip’s partner in overactive imagination said.

  “But there wasn’t any big bad wolf in Beauty and the Beast,” Skip replied, obviously forgetting he was on the radio with his boss. “And no bears, either, so our nicknames would have been stupid like the French candle guy or the clock.”

  Daniel muttered a four letter word that he technically wasn’t supposed to say across an open radio channel. “For God’s sake, would you two shut up? There wasn’t any damn wolf in Goldilocks and the Three Bears, either, so just cut the fairy-tale crap and tell me what I need to know.”

  After a brief silence—during which Daniel figured Skip and Chuck were glaring at each other like two kids caught trading notes in the classroom—Skip finally replied. “Uh, Gold…I mean, Sophie, left her house a short time ago.”

  He was instantly interested. “Alone?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “No one followed her?”

  “That’s a negative, Chief. All secure on her street. No perps in sight. Perimeter is all clear.”

  God almighty, these two had been watching too many cop shows. “Where’d she go?”

  “Downtown. We’re parked outside Ed’s right now. Our source tells us she ordered a coffee, two cream, two sugar. And the Saturday Sunrise special, eggs scrambled, toast wheat, hold the scrapple.”

  Beyond having a quick thought that the two of them had one more thing in common—a dislike of an unidentifiable mystery meat called scrapple—he ignored the inane food details and focused on what else Skip had said. Lowering his voice, he wondered if his two officers could hear the anger in his controlled tone. “Your source inside?”

  Whether they heard it or not, they instantly went on the defensive. “Carol, boss. She knows the case and was going into Ed’s with her husband, so we have her keeping in contact on her cell phone.”

  Oh, that had to be inconspicuous. Carol spent her days fighting to be heard over her brood of children, or the noisy cops at the station. Even her normal speaking voice was a few decibels shy of being a hearing hazard. Ed would probably hear the woman’s phone conversation over the sound of the deep fryer in the kitchen.

  “Don’t do a thing,” he finally said as he turned his car toward downtown. “I’m almost at the diner. I’ll go in myself and see just how bad things have already gotten.”

  7

  DANIEL KNEW the minute he walked into the diner that his officers’ “source” had not kept quiet about their big case. He’d no sooner set foot in the crowded place before a number of heads went together and the whispers started. He heard the word “killer” and knew this little drop of a town had been stirred up into a great big boiling pot of gossip.

  He knew he couldn’t blame Carol. Considering the Derryville grapevine, the story of the notebook had probably circulated two minutes after Mrs. Madigan, the woman who’d found it, had turned the thing in at the police station. He imagined the Friday night bridge games, movie dates and bingo parlor had been abuzz with nothing else but the news that a killer was on the loose in town.

  So much for keeping a lid on things and doing some quiet investigation. Damn, he hadn’t even had twenty-four hours to get ahead of this thing before it became public knowledge.

  But if he had it bad, well, the person sitting at the booth closest to the black velvet Elvis portrait had it a lot worse. Sophie looked ready to commit a murder, not become the victim of one.

  “Morning, Chief. You here to protect Sophie? Don’t you worry, we’ve been keeping a close eye on her. Any time you need to start up a posse, or a SWAT team, or something like that, you just let me know. I already got a half-dozen volunteers.”

  He merely sighed and shook his head as he walked past old man Shin, former town barber and current head of the citizens’ patrol group.

  He reached Sophie’s table just in time to hear Deedee, the waitress, say, “Hey Sophie, honey, you sure you don’t want anything else? Stay a while, pumpkin, no need to go out on the street. You stay right here where you’re nice and safe.”

  “No, thanks, Deedee.”

  The waitress shrugged and walked away, probably not hearing Sophie mumble, “Who’s going to keep you all safe from me when all this concern sends me postal?”

  Daniel plopped down in the empty seat across from her. “Would I do?”

  She flushed, obviously realizing she’d been overheard. “Can you get me out of here?”

  He nodded once. Then he reached across the table, took her hand and pulled her to her feet. Conversation in the diner ceased and every set of eyes turned in their direction.

  “Good plan, Chief. You be her bodyguard,” Mr. Shin said with an approving nod.

  Knowing it was probably a vain effort, he responded, in a louder than normal voice. “Miss Winchester isn’t in need of a bodyguard. I don’t know why there’s so much talk circulating, but she’s not in any dan
ger here in Derryville.”

  He took Sophie’s arm and began leading her toward the door.

  “Then why’s she holding on to you like she’s Linus and you’re her blankie?” the waitress, Deedee, asked, her expression speculative.

  Daniel paused, looking down at Sophie who was, indeed, holding tightly to his arm, focused only on the door. Then he smiled, figuring he’d give the gossipers something else to carry out to the town. Giving Deedee a confident look, he replied, “Well, why do you think?”

  Then, in spite of the crowd, the whispers, the voice in his head that told him he was reacting on a personal level, rather than a professional one, he turned to face Sophie. Tracing the tip of his finger against the fine, smooth skin of her jaw, then her mouth, he forced her to look up at him.

  And right in front of everyone, he dropped a possessive kiss on her surprised lips.

  SOPHIE HAD TO HAND IT to Daniel. If there was one way to get the patrons of Ed’s Diner to stop gossiping about a potential murder on a busy Saturday morning, it was to get them talking about a potential romance. Her romance.

  Good grief.

  “You do realize what you’ve done, don’t you?” she asked him as they walked toward his patrol car. And she wasn’t just talking about the way he’d almost stopped her heart and made her jeans feel uncomfortably tight.

  “Yep.”

  “They’ll be planning for a Valentine’s wedding before we have our seat belts buckled.”

  He didn’t seem too concerned. “Valentine’s Day is overdone. I always thought if you were going to have a holiday wedding, you should go for something more unique.”

  She chuckled. “Like Halloween, with all the guests in costume.”

  “Yeah,” he said as he unlocked the passenger door of his car. “Or April Fool’s Day with everyone playing practical jokes during the reception.”

  She couldn’t believe she was sharing this easy, casual conversation with the man who’d just publicly branded her as his back in the diner.

  Somehow, when she thought of it that way, she wasn’t quite as dismayed. There was something rather delicious about the thought of being his. In the most elemental way possible.