Chapter 18

We woke at the same time.

I stretched, turned on my side, and then opened my eyes to find him doing the same.

The sleepy, sexy grin staring at me, coupled with the heavily lidded eyes and scruff of dark stubble lining his jaw, shot a wake-up alarm straight to my core. In less time than it takes for a heart to beat once, arousal pulled me fully awake.

“Morning.” Frayne’s rasp sent a shudder of want down my spine. He stretched his arms over his head, the sheet falling down low on his waist, tenting over a significant morning arousal.

I let my new bold best friend have free rein. She made me slide one leg over his thighs to straddle him.

Yup, he was as awake as I was.

With my hands flattened on his rock-hard chest, my naked lady parts sitting atop him, I leaned down and kissed him full on the lips, morning breath be damned. His fingers gripped my waist and held me in place.

“I missed you,” I said between kisses. “So much.”

“Missed you, too.”

Yeah, I was sitting on top of that proof.

In one deft move, he hauled my T-shirt over my head and flipped me onto my back. “All I could think about was you.” He kissed my chin. “Getting back to you.” He moved down my neck, over my breasts, stopping to lick my instantly hardened nipples. “Making love to you.”

He pulled up and pierced me with a look so filled with intensity and heat, it was a wonder he didn’t set me ablaze. The errant thatch of unruly hair fell in front of one eye and made me smile.

I pushed it back only to have it fall forward again. Then, I cupped his cheek. As he had numerous times before, he snuggled in and kissed my palm. My heart simply swelled.

“You’re here now,” I whispered. “That’s what counts.”

Our kissing grew fevered, deeper. I couldn’t touch him enough. My hands roamed and traced over every line of sinew and flesh on his body, glorifying in it. In no time at all, we were panting, moaning, frenzied.

In one effortless move, he slipped his hands under me, lifted my hips, and drove home, his breath hitching when he was fully encircled within me. My breath froze in my lungs.

“Cathy.” His voice cracked, choked with need.

I pressed my lips to his, shocked to discover him trembling.

“God, I missed you,” he whispered. “I want this to last, but I’m so close now I don’t think I can. I need you, Cathy. Now. Right now.”

I kissed him again, as the rhythm intensified with each plunge.

“Look at me,” he commanded. “Don’t close your eyes. I want to see you. I want to watch you.”

His pace quickened, and my thighs tightened as wave after wave broke within me with no warning. I struggled to keep my eyes opened and trained on him through it. Tears erupted from the force of the orgasm. My body knew what my mind had only just started to accept about this man, this wonderful, lovely man.

A low, cavernous moan roared from deep within him as he slipped over the edge and joined me.

An hour later, after a shower together that was more sexual than cleansing, we were dressed and at my kitchen table.

“So tell me what you discovered.”

“I’m not sure you’re going to like it. Or if anyone in Heaven will.” He cocked his head in his telltale way and took a long sip of his coffee.

“A blanket statement like that makes me want to know even more. Tell me.”

He leaned an elbow on the table, his cup in his hand. “Part of how I research a person is to look for mentions in periodicals of the time, not only court documents and county records.”

“What, like magazines? Newspapers?”

“Yeah. I happened to see a notation in one of the county archives about a foreclosure on a property owned by a J.E. Heaven. I couldn’t find any old bank records, so I thought a search through the local weekly newspaper might have mentioned something.”

“Kinda like the court and police log in our town paper.”

He nodded and drank some more coffee. “The library had copies of the old newspapers on microfiche, and I spent a day going through all they had available.”

“Your poor eyes.”

One corner of his mouth quirked. The sight of those lips and the memory of how they’d trailed across my body recently, made me squirm in my chair. Frayne, bless him, gave no indication he knew what was going on under the table.

“Yeah. Microfiche is torture on any day. Anyway. I found a reference in the paper of the foreclosure, and it confirmed the owner was one Josiah Ephraim Heaven, occupation listed as farmer, aged thirty-two. It stated he was a widower, his wife having died in childbirth shortly before the foreclosure.”

“Oh, that’s sad. No mention he’d been married before was ever made in any of our archival papers.”

“No. Not in his journals, either.”

“So now we know he came here by way of Virginia. Why would you think I wouldn’t like that news?”

“That’s not the news I mean.” He forked in some eggs, swallowed. “Josiah didn’t leave Richmond because of the foreclosure of his farm.”

“Then why?”

He paused, cocked his head, his soul-piercing stare doing all kinds of weird and wonderful things to my insides.

“Two days after the foreclosure, the newspaper reported Josiah was seen entering the home of the bank manager who’d ordered it. Witnesses stated they could hear the two of them fighting. The sheriff was called, and Josiah was escorted from the home. He wasn’t arrested but told to leave the bank manager alone or he would be.”

“Again, not seeing why this a problem.”

“The next morning, the bank manager and his wife were found dead in their bed. Stabbed, multiple times.”

“Oh, good Lord. And Josiah was a suspect?”

Frayne nodded. “I read every weekly newspaper edition for the next year I could find. Multiple mentions of the unsolved murders. The sheriff named Josiah as a suspect. Unfortunately, he’d fled the area and couldn’t be found. This happened in the late fall. Pretty soon winter erupted, and any trail or trace of him went dormant with the snow. Remember, back then the only way to track someone was by physically following behind them and interviewing folks who might be able to provide eye-witness accounts.”

The nosy parker in me asked, “Did you find mention of any other Heaven descendants living in the area? Josiah’s parents? Siblings?”

“None. There was no birth record for him, either. I pored through old church records but came up empty. Not unusual for the time. The only indication of his age was in the newspaper.”

My lawyer DNA started devising scenarios.

Frayne’s head-cock activated again. He stretched out his hand and took mine with it. “Watching your mind work is fascinating,” he murmured. “What are you thinking about?”

“Alternate theories.”

His eyes widened. “You don’t think Josiah committed the murders.” It wasn’t a question.

“I’m not saying he did or didn’t. But I have a very fact-based nature, and there’s no actual proof, no tangible evidence, that Josiah killed those people.”

“He loses his wife and baby; he loses his home. He fights with the person responsible for one of those things. That person turns up dead. Sounds plausible to me.”

“Circumstantial, at best.”

“Then why did he run?”

“We don’t know he did. It may be as simple as he decided to leave the area since it doesn’t seem there was anything to keep him there. Wife dead, home gone, no family. Maybe he wanted a fresh, new start in life.”

“And the day he leaves, the person responsible for his problems turns up dead? What do you think that was? Serendipity?”

I shook my head. “Josiah might not have been the only person with a grudge against the bank manager. His leaving town around the time of the murders could be purely coincidence. He didn’t change his name, which if he was guilty, you’d think he’d do so he couldn’t be found.”

Frayne stared at me, his expression circumspect and chary, almost disgusted. “You can’t believe that, Cathy.”

“I don’t know what to believe since, like I’ve said, we have no true facts of what occurred. People are named as suspects of crimes every day. It doesn’t mean they’re all guilty.”

His mouth turned downward.

Before he could challenge my thoughts, I added, “Or say he did commit the murders—”

“I think the facts as they’ve been presented assures he did.”

“And I believe there’s room for doubt. But say, for the sake of debate, he did. It may explain why, when he landed here, he spent the rest of his life atoning and dedicating his days to service and spirituality. He started a new life in a new place and set about doing everything in his power to do good. You know from your research about the ways he helped the community grow and prosper. There was never a hint of scandal or of any kind of wrongdoing. A tradition of service to the greater good filtered down to his family and the generations that came after him.”

Frayne shook his head, and his eyes drifted down to where he held my hand. He shook out of it. “You can excuse what he did simply because he never did it again? Because he lived a blame-free life from the moment he arrived here? Because he tried, to use your word, to atone for it with his newfound religious fervor and dedication?”

“That’s not what I’m saying—”

“It sounds like it. It sounds like you feel all his further actions of supposed service to man and God made up for the taking of two innocent lives.”

“I’m not saying it’s true; I’m merely offering it up as an explanation, a theory. And nothing excuses murder, Mac. I would never condone that. If the scenario is true, though, it would explain a great deal about why he set the town up the way he did, why he made the teachings of the Bible such a tenet of the town he helped build. Wasn’t one of the questions you wanted answers to why the streets all had to have ecclesiastical names and meanings? Why Josiah had such a religious bent?”

“Naming streets and preaching the word of God doesn’t excuse heinous crimes or behavior, Cathy.”

“I didn’t say excuse, I said explain.”

It was as if he hadn’t heard me.

“What about the families of the bank manager and his wife? How do you think they felt, knowing their loved ones were murdered with no one to take the blame, no one to prosecute for the crime? They didn’t get the chance for a do-over, like Heaven did. They didn’t get to run away and start over with no consequences for their past actions, wipe the slate clean. They didn’t get revenge on the person who took those lives—”

“Don’t you mean justice?”

He stopped, brows pulled so close together I couldn’t see where one eyebrow ended and the other started.

“What?”

“You said revenge. Don’t you mean they didn’t get justice for what happened?”

“Christ. You argue like a lawyer—”

“I am a lawyer.”

“A fact that’s never far from my mind, believe me.” His face was a mask of loathing. “I thought you might be upset your town founder, the man who supposedly gave it all to God and country, could, in reality, be a murderer who fled arrest and eluded capture. I thought, erroneously it appears, you might feel wronged your beloved town leader, a man who all believed was a paragon of the love-thy-neighbor philosophy could be nothing more than a gutless killer. I thought you’d feel, I don’t know”—he swung a hand in the air—“betrayed that the man was a liar, a killer, maybe a psychopath. That you might feel something bordering on anger instead of this blind acceptance he’d somehow expiated himself for a great sin. I guess I was wrong on all counts.”

Frayne stopped, shook his head again, and stood, cup in hand. He brought it to the sink and then placed his fists on either side of the rim, his chin dropping to his chest. Somewhere along this discussion we’d slipped out of speaking about a 1700s crime and were brought much closer to one from the more recent past.

Like the loss of his family, my despised status—I’d come to understand—was never far from his mind. His indignation, be it for an unsolved, centuries-old double homicide or a present-day tragedy, was strong, and nothing I could say or do would change it.

I should have been angry at his continued revulsion of my profession, or at best, hurt. I’d thought we’d gotten past it. I should have railed in my own defense and for Josiah, who had no one to speak for him now, or it appeared, two and a half centuries ago. The need to comfort this tortured man who’d stolen my heart was stronger than those needs though, because I went to him, pressed my body against his back, and wrapped my hands around his waist.

He stiffened.

I ignored it and pressed in closer.

The breath he expelled a moment later was sonorous in the still room. His shoulders dropped, and he cupped my clasped hands with one of his own and squeezed. His reflection in the window above the sink showed a man stark with emotions and tragically sad.

“I’m…sorry,” he said after a while. “I don’t know why I snapped at you.”

I did, but those words were better left unsaid.

He twisted around to face me and slipped his arms around me as I had him. “It wasn’t my intent to start an argument about all this. I don’t want to fight with you.”

“Look,” I said. “As much as I love a good debate, I don’t want to fight with you, either. About Josiah or anything else. We’re never going to be one hundred percent sure what happened since it occurred long ago. Speculating about the info you’ve found is fine, but it’s not a definitive answer. Maybe we should just be happy you’ve found a link to Josiah’s past in Richmond for your research. That’s more than any other biographer has ever done. The reason he came here may not ever be proven, but you’ve gone further, historically, than anyone else ever has, and that’s something to be celebrated.”

His eyes were still heated, the expression floating in them wary and concerned.

“And speaking of your research, I have some news,” I said.

“What?”

“I finally called Leigh James yesterday and told her about the storage locker contents. She was wicked excited about the discoveries you’ve made. I invited her over this afternoon and told her how you’ve been instrumental in cataloging everything. She should be here about one-ish.”

“I thought you wanted to wait.”

“I did, but this overwhelming cleaning bug hit me last week, and I realized I wanted all that”—I cocked my head toward the dining room—“out of here so my house could look normal again. Besides, some of those pieces, the clothing and Josiah’s journals, need to be in an environmentally secure space so they don’t start to deteriorate from exposure.”

Frayne nodded. “It’s the right thing to do, I know. Look…” He slipped out of my hold and leaned back against the counter. “I’m tired, and I’m gonna head back to the inn. I’ve been gone for a week, and I need to get some stuff done. I’ll come back a little before one to meet with Dr. James. Okay?”

“Of course. You don’t need to ask permission. You’re the one who discovered the stuff was missing, after all. I’m sure Leigh will value what you’ve done and any further help and insights you can give her.”

He slipped his hands into his front pants pockets and nodded, his gaze hidden behind the fringe of hair dropping across his forehead. If I was forced to describe him right now to a third party, I’d have to admit he looked equal parts tired, upset, and anxious.

I could understand all those emotions, because in truth, I was feeling the same way. The shock that Josiah might have been an escaped murderer was one thing. Coupled with the continued animosity Frayne had for my career and how close to the surface his feelings about it were made me a little angry and a whole lot of nervous it would ever change.

“Cathy…” He shook his head, then pulled me back into his arms. His fingers trailed up and down my back as the solid, steady beat of his heart against my ear went a long way in calming my nerves.

My only wish was I could do the same for him.