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“CAN YOU IMAGINE anything more gruesome than finding out you’ve been living in a house with a corpse?” Miranda Daniels’s snarling face dominated the enormous television screen in my family room. As usual, her platinum-blonde hair had been shellacked to a fare-thee-well, and she wore enough makeup to supply a clown convention. “I’m about to lose my lunch just thinking about it.”
“You’re not going to make me watch the whole show, are you?” Martin groaned. Well, it might’ve been more of a whine. He leaned toward the coffee table, speared a savory spinach ball with a bamboo hors d’oeuvre pick, and gave it a good dunking in spicy mustard sauce.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I just want to see what kind of spin she’s giving the case. I’ll turn it off in a few minutes.”
Sexy Beast, lounging between us on the horseshoe-shaped ivory leather sofa, seconded that plan with a poodley snort that can only be described as judgmental.
I don’t normally tune in to Miranda’s sensationalist nightly program, Ramrod News, but there was no denying it had a large and loyal viewership, and I couldn’t help but wonder what she’d have to say about the latest development in the Stu Ruskin “suicide versus homicide” question.
Not that Percival Ruskin’s long-ago demise was directly related to Stu’s more recent one, but the discovery of Percy’s skeletal remains on the same property two days earlier was juicy enough to keep Stu’s case front and center in the public’s imagination, and to help the network’s sponsors sell more car insurance and diabetes medication.
Miranda had already introduced her guests, Cherry and Alex Tagliaferro, the “brave young couple who just spent an entire weekend in the house of horrors where guests are dropping like flies!”
“Okay, first of all?” The padre gesticulated with his empty hors d’oeuvre pick. “Stu Ruskin was not a guest of The Gabbling Goose. He was a trespasser.”
“I suppose a case could be made that Percival Ruskin was a guest of the inn,” I said, “if it’s true that Sybille invited him over for a nice, bracing cup of Sybbie’s Punch. But that would be a stretch.”
“It would also be ancient history,” he said. “Do you think her viewers are buying this nonsense?”
“Probably.” I offered a tiny bit of spinach ball to SB, who gave it a skeptical sniff, accepted it just to be polite, then daintily deposited the half-chewed wad back onto my palm. I said, “Who was it who said you’ll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public?”
“The journalist H. L. Mencken,” Martin said, “and that’s not exactly what he said—or rather, wrote—but it’s close enough.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I read.”
Martin had shown up a short while earlier bearing the platter of homemade spinach balls: scrumptious baked tidbits that combined the healthy green stuff with enough unhealthy tasty stuff to make them irresistible, particularly when slathered with the zingy mustard sauce he’d whipped up to accompany them.
And if you’re thinking that the men in my life seem determined to feed me, you wouldn’t be wrong—although now it was the man in my life. Singular. I’d thought a lot about my conversation with Dom two days earlier, when I’d ended our romantic connection for good. I had yet to regret that decision, and somehow knew I never would.
Onscreen, Miranda turned to the Tagliaferros, who’d joined her at the show’s studio in Manhattan. Whoever designed the set had apparently decided that a scary-looking frosted-glass table with jagged edges would convey the appropriate tone for Ramrod News.
Actually, I have to say, they nailed it.
“So how terrible was it,” Miranda asked the couple, “going into that secret room and finding a disgusting, rotting corpse? How do you recover from something like that?”
“Well, first of all,” Cherry said, “we didn’t actually go into the room, we just looked through an opening. And the body was completely skeletonized, it wasn’t a, um... that is to say, the soft tissues had thoroughly decomp—”
“What about you, Alex?” Miranda said. “Was it just the most horrifying thing you’ve ever seen? The smell must have made you gag! Don’t leave anything out. Our audience can take it.”
“It wasn’t so bad,” he said. “We kind of knew what to expect because Jane had basically told all of us what was in there.”
“Ah, yes.” Miranda glared right into the camera. “That would be Jane Delaney, the corpse-obsessed weirdo they call the Death Diva. We invited Ms. Delaney onto the show. She declined.” Her raised eyebrows invited her audience to draw their own conclusions.
I saluted her with my beer bottle. “Love you, too, Miranda.” Which, as you’ve probably guessed, was a big fat lie. Miranda Daniels and I had had our run-ins.
In truth, I welcomed her over-the-top characterization of me. It was free publicity. I had no doubt some of her viewers were even now looking me up online, and that a few of them would, at some point in the future, decide they required the services of a corpse-obsessed weirdo to handle whatever icky death-related chore had fallen into their lap.
“Why did she want this young couple on her show?” Martin asked. “It’s not like they’re experts or anything.”
“The Tagliaferros were her last choice,” I said. “Everyone else who was in that basement had the good sense to decline. Even the beauteous Jankovics.”
His brows pulled together. “The who?”
“Oh, just...” I flapped my hand. “It’s not important. As for having a bona fide expert on the show, Miranda tried hard to get Carmen Hidalgo, the forensic anthropologist who examined Percy’s skeleton. Dr. Hidalgo offered statements to legitimate news outlets but gave Ramrod News a wide berth.”
The padre lifted Sexy Beast and settled him on his other side so he could move closer to me. I did not mind one little bit.
He said, “Obviously, Percy’s death isn’t a police matter.”
“Gee, I don’t know,” I deadpanned. “There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”
“I’d say his killer is beyond the clutches of the law. About three hundred fifty years beyond.” He stabbed a spinach ball, dipped it in mustard sauce, and brought it to my mouth. Those things were downright decadent.
Onscreen, Miranda had given up on her attempt to extract disgusting descriptions from her guests and was yowling about the unmitigated horror of the crime. “Walled up in the kitchen, if you can imagine that. Where generations of the Collingwood family prepared their meals! I personally can’t think of anything more stomach-churning.”
Cherry and Alex exchanged anxious glances, clearly wondering what they’d gotten themselves into.
The camera zoomed in on Miranda’s glowering mug. “And what did that poor man do to deserve a lingering death like that?” she asked. “Like something Edgar Allan Poe would’ve cooked up? Nothing, that’s what! Percival Ruskin was an innocent victim. His only crime was falling in love with the wrong woman. He was too trusting.”
“Executive decision.” Martin commandeered the remote and turned off the program.
“It’s my house,” I said. “I get to make the executive decisions.”
“Not when it comes to TV shows that make my brain hurt. I can’t sit here and listen to that loathsome woman rewrite history. For one thing, I wouldn’t call Percival Ruskin innocent.”
“His only crime was falling in love with Sybille Collingwood?” I scoffed. “How about setting up her husband to be killed so he could get his hands on the recipe for Sybbie’s Punch?”
“The Edgar Allan Poe reference is on target, though,” he said. “That’s how Fortunato meets his end in ‘The Cask of Amontillado.’ Montresor walls him up in his family’s crypt.”
“Gee, thanks for the spoiler,” I teased. I’d first read that old story back in junior high school. Like most of Poe’s work, it was calculated to impart a macabre thrill.
“You have to admit,” he said, “that’s a horrible way to go. You said it looked like Percy was trying to dig his way out?”
I nodded. “Shelley speculates that the little room back there was the larder, where they stored salted meats and other perishable foods. Can you imagine what Percy’s last hours must’ve been like?”
“More like days,” the padre said. “That’s not a quick way to go.”
“It must have been pitch-black in there, and all he had with him was that cup and punch bowl.”
“Didn’t Shelley say the constable was Sybille’s cousin,” he asked, “and that’s why she was never brought to justice?”
I nodded. “Also it was assumed he helped her dispose of the body. Here’s how I think it might’ve played out. Sybille Collingwood is devastated by her husband, Oswald’s, death.”
“Even though he’s a lazy good-for-nothing?”
“Yeah, but he’s her lazy good-for-nothing,” I said. “After he was gunned down by the king’s men, Sybille planted an oak tree on the very spot where he died and put a curse on anyone who might cut it down. The tree’s still there. It’s ginormous.”
“Once Oswald is dead,” Martin said, “Percy romances her to steal her secret recipe.”
“Which he probably accomplished the same way his descendant Stu did generations later,” I said. “By watching her make a batch. Whereupon he starts selling Peg Leg Punch, which is when Sybille finally puts two and two together.”
“And realizes Percy was involved in Oswald’s death,” the padre said. “That’s when she decides to get even by luring him to The Gabbling Goose and serving him poisoned punch. But obviously he survives—at least long enough to try and dig his way out of his tomb.”
“I think I have that part figured out.” I took a swig of beer. “Sybille gives Percy just enough poison to knock him out, maybe put him into a temporary coma, but not enough to kill him. That’s when she gets her cousin the constable involved.”
“They toss Percy into the larder,” he said, “and brick up the doorway while he’s still unconscious. But the thing I don’t get is, why leave him with the punch bowl and cup?”
“Think about it,” I said.
“I am thinking about it, but obviously not as hard as you are. Why don’t you explain it to me.”
“That punch bowl isn’t empty when she puts it in his makeshift tomb,” I said. “It contains the rest of the poisoned punch. She knows that when he wakes up in that tiny dark space, he’ll figure out what she’s done.”
Martin was getting it. “And he’ll know that the punch in the bowl will likely kill him. But eventually he’ll be so crazed by thirst, he’ll have no choice but to give in and drink it.”
“Just one more way to torment him while he dies,” I said.
He gave a low whistle. “That Sybille, I’ve gotta hand it to her, she didn’t mess around.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if she sat on the other side of that brick wall, calmly embroidering tea towels and listening to Percy’s desperate pleas for mercy.”
Sexy Beast roused himself from his nap, stretched, and climbed onto Martin’s lap, where he received all the scritches a little poodle could want.
“There seems to be a weird connection,” the padre said, “between dead Ruskins and The Gabbling Goose’s hot tubs. First Stu and now Percy.”
“Ty was really shaken when he saw that skeleton. ‘Poor devil,’ I said. Like he felt real sympathy for old Percy.”
“You’d have to be pretty heartless not to.”
“Ty has always blamed Percy for starting the feud way back when,” I said, “but there’s no denying he was shocked at the punishment Sybille devised. The fact that she was capable of that level of cruelty, well... I have to wonder if it’s altered Ty’s preconceived notions of his Collingwood ancestors and their supposed moral superiority to the Ruskins.”
“Good question,” he said. “It would be hard to argue there’s anything morally superior about what Ty’s ancestor did to Stu’s ancestor.”
“I know Ty was expecting to find the recipe for Sybbie’s Punch behind that brick wall,” I said. “Of course, it wasn’t there. I doubt it’ll ever be found. Both families probably committed it to memory way back when and never saw a need to write it down.”
“Yeah, probably,” Martin said, distractedly. He settled back against the sofa, staring straight ahead. He took a long swig from his beer bottle. To the casual observer, he would have looked totally at ease. The tension I felt radiating from him told a different story.
Finally he set down the bottle and said, in a serious tone, “There’s something I need to tell you, Jane.”
My heart banged. This was it. Whatever had been happening between us was over. Martin felt I was stringing him along and wanted no more of it. Not that he would put it that way. He’d think of some horribly kind way to say it.
So then, what was the point of plying me with those delicious spinach balls if he was just going to dump me? Was it his way of letting me down easy? If so, he could shove those darn things, and the hot mustard sauce—
“You okay?” He was frowning at me. “You look like someone just died.”
Sexy Beast deserted Martin to give me a doggie hug, leaning on my chest and staring into my eyes while fretting about the emotional stability of his alpha female.
I cleared my throat. “I’m fine, I just... What do you want to tell me, Padre?”
He took a deep breath. “You accused me of being secretive. Remember?”
I nodded, recalling the talk we had at The Gabbling Goose the night Stu died. “You told me there are some things you don’t share with anyone,” I said, “and that you’re not one of the bad guys. You asked me to trust you.”
“I’ve thought about that conversation a lot since then,” he said. “I might’ve been asking too much of you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’ve given you little reason to trust me.” After a moment, he added, “I’m not used to opening up about myself.”
“You mean to women you’re, um, involved with?” I asked.
“To anyone,” he said.
“Why?”
“I have what you might call a checkered past, Jane.”
Suddenly I dreaded hearing whatever he had to say. But I knew I had to. For better or worse, I needed to know who I’d fallen in love with.
Yeah, I said it.
Oh, you figured it out long before I did, huh? Well, give yourself a gold star.
“Okay,” I said, as SB curled up on my lap, “first just tell me this. Have you ever gone to prison?”
“No,” he said.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Because I never got caught,” he added.
“Oh.”
“Well, except for one time.” He paused to collect his thoughts. “Do you remember last year when I told you about my grandparents?”
“Yes,” I said. “Arthur and Anne McAuliffe. I also remember you telling me about their middle son, Hugh. Your father.”
“The fine, upstanding, married deacon who was getting some on the side forty-something years ago with a teenage exotic dancer.”
“Your mom.” I’d met Martin’s mother, Stephanie Borden, and I liked her a lot. “Hugh kept you a secret from his family, as I recall.”
“God forbid the world should learn he sired a bastard.”
“But your grandparents eventually found out about you,” I said. “I think you said you were eleven then? And you became very close with them.”
Martin’s expression softened with the memory. “Yeah, we became close. Grandma and Grandpa were appalled when they found out their son had been treating his son like some kind of shameful secret. Those few years I got with them were... well, they were special.” He grimaced. “Then Irene came along.”
“And broke up their marriage.” Which is how Irene Hardy McAuliffe, the high-maintenance homewrecker who gave me my start as the one and only Death Diva, ended up owning Anne’s dream house after Arthur’s death. Irene, in turn, bequeathed the house to her little poodle, Sexy Beast. Okay, technically, she bequeathed it to me, but SB holds what’s called a life estate, which means it belongs to him during his lifetime. And of course, I get to live there with him as his guardian.
“Grandpa divorced Grandma,” the padre said, “and married Irene right away. Eight months later, Grandma was dead. I was fifteen then. It tore me apart, losing her.”
I recalled Martin telling me she died of a broken heart. I was trying to figure out what this had to do with his so-called checkered past when he said, “That’s when I turned into a little thug. If you ask my mom, she’ll say it’s when I started ‘acting out.’ A euphemism if ever there was one.”
“What form did this thuggery take?” I asked.
“Rocky Bay didn’t have any gangs per se, but it had its share of rough characters, and I sought them out.”
Rocky Bay was the working-class town on the South Shore where Martin grew up. His mom still lived there.
“We’re talking small stuff at first,” he said. “Graffiti, knocking down mailboxes, your basic minor vandalism. I’d cut school and go joyriding, call in fake bomb threats. Before long, I graduated to shoplifting, picking fights, criminal trespass.”
“Where did you trespass?” I asked.
“Office buildings in the middle of the night. A catering hall. We tossed stuff around, pilfered a few items. You’d be surprised how lax security is in some of those places.” He was watching me closely to gauge my reaction. I managed to keep my expression neutral.
“You were able to get out of the house in the middle of the night without your mom knowing?” I asked.
“That was the easy part,” he said. “I also ran away a couple of times. Both times, I took her car.”
“You were old enough to drive?”
“Sure I was old enough to drive,” he said. “I just wasn’t old enough to have a license.”
“You said you got caught once,” I reminded him.
“My new friends, if you can call them that, introduced me to the fine art of burglary.”
“You broke into people’s homes?” I didn’t like the sound of that.
“For kicks, yeah,” he said, “when the owners were away. I never took anything, but I did come away with some useful if not altogether lawful skills.”
I was familiar with those useful skills, having witnessed the padre deploy them in the service of goals far loftier than burglary. He’d even coached me through my first ever lock-picking session in the inky depths of a tunnel, when every second counted and our survival depended on mutual trust. We very nearly became food for worms that hair-raising day.
“It didn’t take long for me to get bored with that new game,” he said, “so I decided to up the ante.”
I really didn’t like the sound of that. “What did you do?”
“I broke into my dad’s house in the middle of the night.”
My jaw dropped. “Hugh McAuliffe? Irene’s son? I mean stepson.”
He nodded. “The pillar of society who, sixteen years earlier, sicced a squadron of high-priced lawyers on the teenage girl he knocked up, ensuring that he’d never be held accountable, financially or in any other way. That Hugh McAuliffe.”
“But why?” I asked. “What did you hope to gain by doing something like that?”
“You’re assuming I worked it all out beforehand, went in there with a plan.” He wore a self-deprecating smile. “I was just this dumb kid harboring a lifetime of resentment and looking to stir up trouble.”
“Which I assume you accomplished,” I said.
“Hugh had an alarm system for the doors, but not the windows,” he said. “That’s how I got in, through the window of what turned out to be his study, or office, or whatever he called it.”
“But no one was home, right? You said you chose vacant houses.”
“Not this time,” Martin said. “I was tired of being ignored, tired of that SOB pretending I didn’t exist—living his life as if his son was just one more nuisance he could eradicate by throwing money at it.”
“Did you ever meet him?” I asked.
“Not until that night,” he said.
“So he caught you.”
“I wasn’t exactly trying to be stealthy. I ran around on the first floor, throwing things, making a mess.”
“You’re lucky he didn’t have a dog,” I said.
“He had a dog.” Martin grinned. “Whupper. That’s what his tag read.”
“You got close enough to read his tag?”
“Oh, Whupper and I were instant buddies,” he said. “Friendliest pit bull I ever met. He led me right to the cabinet where they kept the dog treats. Once he had his fill of those, he kept bringing me toys to throw. We had a great old time, until Hugh came downstairs with his twelve-gauge.”
A soft gasp escaped me. “He pointed a shotgun at you?”
The padre shrugged. “Beats a handgun for home protection.”
“But you’re his son,” I said.
“At that moment I was just some punk who broke into his house,” Martin said. “He’d never met me, never even asked my mom for a picture of me. Not that he exchanged two words with her after she told him she was pregnant. He let his lawyers issue the threats.”
“Did you tell him who you were?” I asked.
“He figured it out soon enough. I taunted him, cursed him out, belittled his manhood for how he’d treated my mother. And the funny thing? Even after he realized who I was, he never lowered that shotgun. Just kept yelling at Whupper to get out of the line of fire.”
I close my eyes briefly, hurting for Martin, for the angry, aggrieved kid he’d been.
“Eventually his wife crept downstairs,” he said. “She heard all this hollering and deduced it wasn’t a simple break-in. Hugh tried to order her back upstairs, but by then their daughter, Claudia, had joined them, and the women wanted answers.”
“How old was Claudia?” I asked.
“A few years older than me,” he said. “College age. Later I found out she was enrolled at Harvard. She was home for the summer then.”
“I’m assuming Hugh had never told his wife and daughter about you,” I said.
“He’d never told anyone about me. I lost no time bringing the ladies up to speed. Hugh tried to bluster his way out of it, of course, but anyone looking at the two of us would know instantly that we’re related.”
“Claudia and her mom were shocked, no doubt,” I said.
“Yes and no,” he said. “They didn’t know about me, but they knew what kind of man Hugh was. I could see it in their eyes.”
“So that must’ve made for a fun family confab,” I said, dryly. “All of you getting acquainted in the middle of the night.”
“Hugh’s wife was sobbing and carrying on,” Martin said. “Claudia was screaming at her father to put the damn gun down. I think she was afraid he’d shoot me.”
“By accident?” I asked.
“Or not. The man was apoplectic. He was used to being in control. That much was clear. He had no idea what to do about me. Well, he had one idea. He started to call the police to report the break-in.”
“Started to call?” I said.
“Claudia stopped him,” he said. “She told him that reporting it would ensure that everyone would find out about me. It was a family matter and should be handled as such. I have to hand it to her, she knew how to defuse her old man.”
“Do you think she actually cared about her dad’s reputation?” I asked. “You know, protecting the family name and all that? Or was she trying to protect you? Her half brother.”
“I’ve asked myself that question many times,” he said. “I’d have liked to ask Claudia herself, but we don’t have anything to do with each other. None of the McAuliffes have any use for me. It goes both ways.”
I thought that was terribly sad, but I kept it to myself. What I said was, “So did you keep on the same path after that? Hanging with the criminal element? A burglar in training?”
“For a little while,” he said, “a few more months. At least the ‘criminal element’ accepted me for who I was. It was comfortable in a dysfunctional sort of way.”
“And you never got into trouble with the law?” I asked.
“I had more luck than brains, as the saying goes.”
“What made you stop?” I asked.
A gentle smile curved his mouth. “Lexie.” His daughter.
I returned his smile. “When did you find out you were going to be a father?”
“Four days after Christmas,” he said, “which happened to be my seventeenth birthday. Erin told me as soon as she found out.”
“That’s some birthday present.”
Erin Davey had been a high-school friend of Martin’s. They weren’t in a serious relationship back then; it was more like friends with benefits. I’d met Erin and their daughter, Lexie, a year earlier at Lexie’s wedding to Dillon Kovac, when Martin had proudly walked his daughter down the aisle. The young couple were expecting their first child in September. Martin was going to be a grandpa. I was still trying to wrap my brain around that.
“It was like a switch flipped inside me,” he said. “All the stupid decisions I’d been making, the selfish, self-destructive hole I’d plunged into after Grandma’s death, that was all over. I had this precious little life to take care of. I was determined not to let my child down. Or Erin. As scared as I was, I knew it was worse for her. She needed me to be strong.”
“That’s a lot to take on at seventeen,” I said. I knew that Martin had worked hard to be a good dad, to do his part to help support and raise Lexie, even after Erin got married and gave their daughter two siblings.
When it came to paternal commitment and sacrifice, the contrast between Martin and his own father could not have been greater.
“Lexie reordered my priorities.” His expression softened. “Grandpa doted on her.”
“How old was she when he died?”
“Just two,” he said. “She doesn’t remember him, unfortunately. He left me some money. Not a fortune, but enough to help pay for college, combined with work study.”
“I didn’t know you went to college. What school?”
“John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan.” He smiled at my astonished expression. “After graduation, I became a PI.”
“Is that how you got your start as a bodyguard?” I knew that private investigators often take that kind of assignment.
“Yep,” he said, “though I prefer ‘executive protection.’ Sounds so much swankier. I found I enjoyed protection work more than spying on cheating spouses. There’s often some overlap, though, so I still do a little investigating on occasion.”
“So you have two completely different jobs,” I said, “bartender and bodyguard-slash-PI.”
“They’re not so different,” he said. “I’ve long believed that bartenders make the best investigators. Think about what people tell their bartender. You can get a lot of information out of someone without offering anything in return.”
“Except maybe a free beer or two,” I said. “I’m thinking of your buddy on the force. The one who blabs about ongoing cases.”
“It’s actually a couple of buddies,” Martin said, “and I’ve known them forever. There are times when a PI has to coordinate with the local police, so you get to know each other.”
“Is that how you met Ben?” Ben Ralston, a local private investigator, helped me out from time to time. He was currently living with Martin’s mom. “You once told me you knew him back when he was still a cop.”
“Yeah, Ben and I go way back. And then after he set up shop as a PI, we collaborated on a few cases. Most of my bodyguard work involves legit folks with legit reasons to need protection. Often it’s high-profile types like celebrities, foreign dignitaries and their families, business leaders, that sort of thing.”
I made a mental note to demand names later. For now, though, I was curious about another kind of client. “Mobsters?” I asked. “Drug dealers? Do they hire you, too?”
“They try,” he said. “If a prospective client seems sketchy, I turn down the job. Sometimes, though, you don’t know until you’re already involved. And it’s not cut-and-dried. There are gray areas.”
“Like with Stu?”
“Stu Ruskin seemed like easy money at first,” he said. “He’d call me for occasional protection, but like I said, he refused to provide the info I needed to do my job right.”
“Meaning the name of the person who supposedly tried to kill him,” I said.
“Which turned out to be a big yawn.” He went all Humphrey Bogart. “A good old-fashioned tussle over a dame.”
“You make a fistfight sound downright wholesome.”
“A client who doesn’t listen to you,” he said, “who doesn’t accept his bodyguard as the alpha dog, that just spells trouble. I should’ve walked right then.”
“Why didn’t you?” I asked.
The padre shrugged. “Stu was paying top dollar, and it seemed like a simple, once-in-a-while gig. I learned my lesson.”
“Georgia Chen told me you were very... understanding when things came to a head with Stu. She said she was in a rough place, mentally, and that you really helped her.”
He looked me in the eye. “I didn’t sleep with Georgia.”
“I actually know that,” I said. “I mean, I came to that conclusion, though I do admit I wondered at first.”
“Taking advantage of a woman who’s in a vulnerable emotional state,” he said, “is no better than if she were drunk or on drugs or whatever. I don’t do that. Plus, I like Georgia well enough, but she’s a bit hyper for my taste.”
“Not to mention,” I said, “she’s still hung up on her ex.”
“Not that you know what that’s like,” he said.
“Okay, just so you know,” I said, “it’s official. Dom and I are history.”
“This is news?” he said. “You’ve been saying that for a while now.”
“Yeah, and you never really believed it,” I said. “Well, believe it. We’re done. For good.”
The padre studied me, gauging my sincerity. Finally he said, “Does he know this?”
“He knows,” I said. “He’s not happy about it, but he knows.”
I could see him thinking about it, about the barriers that had fallen away that evening. My ex. Martin’s own mysterious past.
When he met my gaze, he looked more contented than I’d ever seen him. The corners of those astonishing blue eyes crinkled as he lifted his hand to cup my cheek. I turned my head to press my lips to his palm.
Martin leaned closer and kissed me, a sweet, deep kiss full of promise. Then he glanced at his wristwatch and groaned.
“I know,” I said. “You have to go to work.”
He gave me one last, quick kiss and stood up. “This conversation isn’t finished, Jane.”
I grinned. “You bet your killer booty it isn’t.”