Chapter One

He stood in the biting January wind, just beyond the dubious protection of the striped awning, behind the last row of folding chairs, and watched. Old friends and strangers filed solemnly past the flower-burdened casket and murmured condolences to the new widow and her young son. He should feel something, Harper acknowledged. Grief, loss, anger. Something. After all, that was his brother they were putting in the ground.

He tried to picture Mike as a kid, blue eyes filled with mischief, always laughing, never a serious thought about tomorrow or the consequences of his latest prank. But another image kept getting in the way, and for once Harper was unable to block it.

It had been January then, too, cold and blustery like today. Also like today, Harper Montgomery had come home for a funeral. Back then it had been their father’s. His dad’s sudden death from a heart attack had shocked him. Jason Montgomery had been the bedrock of Harper’s life. Big and strong, all-knowing, a man who took pride in his sons and his farm. A man who was always there when a boy needed him.

Harper had been a hotshot undercover narc working with a federal task force in a three-state area when he’d gotten word of his father’s death. He’d rushed home, devastated, more shaken than any invincible twenty-four-year-old thought possible. The only thing that had kept him sane enough to drive that long trip home had been thoughts of Annie.

“I love you, Harper,” she’d sworn when he left in June. “I’ll be waiting right here when you come home.”

Yes, Annie would be there. She would hold him in her slender arms and ease the pain in his soul. She would love him, would let him love her, and somehow Harper had known that with her at his side, he would learn to live through his loss.

He had already made up his mind that he was through with undercover work. He’d had his fill of feeling dirty and living with the slime of humanity. He and Annie would get married, the way they’d planned right before he’d left. It had been early summer then. June. He’d been gone months longer than he’d intended. Any other woman would have been furious and hurt, but Annie loved him, and she knew how much he loved her. He’d reminded her in every letter he’d sent. She knew he was coming home to marry her. Annie would make everything all right.

Then there’d been Mike to consider. Two years Harper’s junior, Mike was more than capable of running the farm himself, but Harper knew how his brother hated farming. Mike had stuck around only because he knew if he left, Harper would come home for good.

Mike was funny like that, always wanting what Harper wanted or what Harper had. But Mike’s wants were always temporary. If Harper had a new shirt, Mike would borrow it. Without asking, naturally. Invariably the shirt would be ruined before being returned. If Harper had a good horse, Mike rode it carelessly until the horse was injured or someone stopped him in time. If Harper had a new car, Mike drove it until he managed to tear up the engine or the body, or at the very least, run it out of gas.

And if Harper wanted to stay home on the farm, well, everybody knew it was a two-man farm at most. There wasn’t enough work for three men, and Dad wasn’t about to retire. So Mike had moaned and griped and whined until Harper had finally taken the job with the feds and left. Mike would get tired of grubbing in the dirt soon enough. Then Harper could go home.

Now that Dad was gone, though, things would change. Mike would be lost, as lost as Harper felt. And despite the jealousy and friction between the two brothers, Harper knew what blood and family were worth. He wouldn’t trade his brother for anything. Mike was just…Mike. Harper loved him.

Mike and Annie. How Harper had needed them that cold January when he’d come home to bury his father. Mike and Annie would need him too. Somehow, the three of them would make it.

But what awaited Harper at home that day ten years ago had been even more devastating than the news of his father’s death. When Harper had walked through the back door that long-ago day, the first thing that hit him was the sense of something vital missing from the very air. His father was gone. Forever.

Before the pain of that realization had let go of him enough so he could breathe, the rest of his world had come crashing down around his shoulders. Annie, pregnant out to there, a bitterness he’d never seen before etched on her beautiful face. And Mike. Standing beside her, his arm around her shoulders; his stance, his eyes, his voice, defiant, triumphant.

“Annie and I are married, Harp. Been married five months.”

That was Harper’s last memory of Mike, the one that wouldn’t let him remember anything before. And there hadn’t been anything after, because the minute the last earthly remains of Jason Montgomery had been laid to rest, Harper signed over his share of the farm to Mike and Annie and walked away. In the ten years since, he’d never been back.

Until now. And this time he felt nothing. Even the hate that had kept him going when he’d driven away down that long gravel road for what he had sworn would be the last time had faded over the years. There was nothing left inside him, nothing at all.

A raindrop splattered in his eye and tore away the remnants of his bitter memories. The past was dead. As dead as his brother.

Harper blinked. The back of Annie’s head came into focus. That’s all he’d seen of her since he’d arrived, the back of her head, but even that looked different. Her coal black hair had always fascinated him with its shine, its riot of curls, its silky softness. Now it looked lifeless and brittle as the cold wind tugged at it.

He let his gaze drift to the boy beside her. His nephew. She kept her arm around her son and held him close to her side. He’d be, what, nine? Tall for his age, like Harper had been. Harper had never seen him before, of course. Didn’t even know the boy’s name. The thought slipped past his guard and saddened him. Then a grim smile curved his lips. The boy had his Uncle Harper’s sandy brown hair. Mike’s had been as black as Annie’s. The boy was obviously going to have Harper’s height, too. It served them right. With a sudden shaft of viciousness that stunned him, he hoped Mike and Annie had thought of him and squirmed beneath the memory of their deceit every time they’d looked at their son.

He shook away the thought. He didn’t have any business thinking like that. He’d gotten over Annie years ago. Years.

He’d come here today to say a final good-bye to his brother. As soon as everyone left the graveside, he would do just that, then he would be on his way. He had no intention of going by the house. Annie wouldn’t want him there. Hell, she hadn’t even been the one to call and tell him about Mike. Asa Hardinger, the funeral director since as far back as Harper could remember, had been the one to let him know.

Old Man Hardinger approached Annie and her son now, the last to leave the graveside. The three of them started across the dry grass toward the white limousine waiting to carry them away.

Just then Annie stopped abruptly and turned her face toward Harper as if she’d known all along exactly where he’d been standing.

Harper’s muscles tightened. He had a fleeting impression of huge blue eyes, glazed and dull, when once they had sparkled with life. Skin, once flushed with health and tanned a soft gold by the summer sun, was now as pale as death. Lips that looked raw and chapped, naked and slack, rather than inviting and generous.

All those things, he thought, were not unexpected. She had, after all, just buried her husband.

But suddenly none of that mattered. His plans to leave town without going by the house vanished on a sharp slice of wind. The brother in him stumbled over questions. The ex-lover in him felt a flash of shock and rage. The cop in him tasted suspicion in the back of his throat.

He wanted to know why Annie Samuels Montgomery wore an ugly blue and purple bruise on her right cheek. A bruise just about the size of a man’s fist.

For a moment, Annie couldn’t make her feet move. All she could do was stare at the man just beyond the awning. He looked so cold standing there taking the full force of the biting wind, letting it whip his trench coat open as if the frigid air had no affect on him. Aloof. Solitary.

Harper.

His name started as a whisper that wended its way slowly through her mind. Then it whirled and shot through her brain with the speed and sound of a racing locomotive.

Harper!

Her knees threatened to give way. He had come. God help her, he had come. She fought back the surge of emotions brought on merely by looking at him from a dozen yards away. Grief, guilt…fear. And a rush of other feelings so strong and so personal and so totally inappropriate for a woman standing at her husband’s grave that Annie was horrified.

With a gasp, she turned back toward the waiting white limousine and forced her feet to move.

“Who’s that man, Mom?”

Annie looked down into the face of her son, her reason for living, and braced herself for questions she didn’t know how to answer. “That’s your Uncle Harper, honey.”

Jason glanced away. “Oh.”

Mr. Hardinger held the back door of the limo open for her, and Annie slid inside, welcoming the blast of hot air from the heater. Jason slid in beside her.

“Is that all you have to say?” she asked her son. “He is your uncle, you know.”

Jason raised solemn eyes to hers. “I know.”

Despite the heat, Annie shivered. He should have asked why she hadn’t talked to Harper. Why she hadn’t introduced them and invited the man to the house. Her innately curious son should have asked a dozen questions about the uncle he’d never met.

Annie felt her stomach clench. No, Jason shouldn’t need to ask questions. He should have always known Harper. Harper, the uncle his parents never mentioned, the uncle who never came to visit. It wasn’t right, and it was her fault, and she knew she had to do something about it. The time had come.

But not right now. Please, God, not today. Let me get through today.

Harper felt the pull of the farm before he even made the final turn off the two-lane blacktop onto the dirt and gravel road. The old two-story house, when it came into sight, stood proud, its white paint and green trim vivid against the gray winter sky and brown, brittle landscape.

A tire swing still hung from the big cottonwood in the side yard. Stubborn pecans still clung, as they had every year, to the top branches of the trio of otherwise bare pecan trees that stood sentinel in the front yard.

Funny, but the few times Harper had let himself think about this place over the years, he’d pictured it looking more rundown each time, aging relentlessly toward decay. Instead, it looked fresh and well cared for. It looked…like home. It made his chest ache.

Nostalgia. That’s all he was feeling. A perfectly natural emotion, especially in light of his increasing dissatisfaction with a job that was burning him out and a personal life that was admittedly…empty.

Cars lined the gravel drive and spilled over into the side yard. Harper drove around back and parked his three-year-old Ford beside the barn. As he threaded his way between the other cars and headed for the front of the house, he asked himself what the hell he was doing here.

In answer, a picture of Annie’s bruise flashed through his mind.

Dammit, that was the cop in him, and he was tired of being a cop. Had in fact been thinking seriously about quitting. The only thing holding him back was that he didn’t have any idea what the hell to do with himself if he left the bureau.

So he was still a cop. Did that give him any right to be sticking his nose into something that was none of his business?

After the brisk cold wind, the inside of the house felt stifling. So did the memories. His eighth grade English teacher greeted him at the door. Next to her stood the preacher’s wife, Mrs. Crawford, from the Calvary Baptist Church. They echoed their surprise at seeing him, and their sorrow for his loss. Harper swallowed the caustic response that came to his lips—he’d lost everything a man could lose ten years ago. Today was just a formality.

Mrs. Wilder, the teacher, took his coat and told him she would put it with the others out back in the laundry room. He must have murmured an appropriate response, for she and Mrs. Crawford smiled at him with pity, the way people always did at funerals, and walked away.

More than two dozen people were crowded into the living room, with still others in the kitchen. Annie was nowhere in sight.

“Montgomery.” A large, heavy hand clapped him on the shoulder.

Harper turned to find Frank Collier, former class bully and star fullback for the Crow Creek Crows, giving him a somber look. Frank and Mike had been classmates and buddies. Harper idly wondered if Mike had put on as much weight as Frank had. Frank’s beer gut hung out over his belt so far, it pointed the buckle toward the floor.

The uniform came as a surprise until Harper remembered hearing about Frank’s new job a few years ago. County sheriff. Who would have thought the guy who used to rough up the younger kids and steal their lunch money could have gotten himself elected as dogcatcher, much less sheriff. Made a man wonder who was counting the ballots in Crow County these days.

“Tough luck about Mike,” Frank offered. “I’m sure Annie’s glad you could make it.”

Harper wasn’t sure of any such thing. He didn’t care if she was glad or not. He merely nodded at Frank.

“How’s the OSBI treating you these days? Saw you on TV last year when you got called in on that murder case down in Carter County. Looks like you and me both ended up as big shots, huh?”

Harper muttered a reply and listened to the different conversations drifting around him in suitably somber voices. Behind Frank, Harper recognized the sheriff’s oldest brother, Willard. Another memory assailed him.

Harper and Willard were in third grade, Mike and Frank in first. Bill, Willard and Frank’s other brother, was between them, in second grade. That was the year Willard had taken a softball in the eye out on the old field at the edge of town. Something must have torn loose, because afterwards that left eye seemed to spend most of its time staring off into space regardless of where the right eye was aimed. The Collier family had been as dirt poor as everybody else in those days, with no insurance and no money for eye surgery.

Mike, the little jerk, had taken to calling the poor kid “Wild-Eye Willard.” Over the years the cruel nickname had stuck. And also over the years, that one eye of Willard’s continued to roam all on its own. Either it couldn’t be fixed, or Willard had never bothered about it, because as he met Harper’s gaze now with sympathy, Willard did so with only one eye. The other stared at the wall. Harper gave the man a nod, then turned to glance around the room.

Bill Collier was bemoaning the fact that the accident that killed Mike had taken place at his garage and body shop. Harper had already received the report. He didn’t need to hear again how Mike had decided not to wait for an available pit in the garage. He’d used a flimsy bumper jack to hike up the car he was working on. He’d pulled off the right front tire, then rolled beneath the vehicle on a creeper. When he’d finished whatever it was he’d been doing, he had grabbed the base of the jack to pull himself out.

Harper figured that in the instant before the car fell and the wheel crushed Mike’s chest, Mike must have known exactly what he’d done, exactly what was about to happen. Harper pressed his thumb and middle finger into his closed eyes and banned the image.

“Well, I won’t drive it again, I tell you.” Delores Polanski’s voice came in a hushed whisper. Harper wondered idly if she still worked at the bank. “You can just take it down to Willard’s car lot and have him sell it, Bill. Sure as God made blueberries, I’ll never be able to drive that car again.”

From the conversation, Harper surmised it must have been Mrs. Polanski’s car that fell on Mike.

Damn, did they all have to stand around and talk about it? Regardless of his feelings for Annie, he was glad she wasn’t in the room to hear the morbid conversations.

Then he opened his eyes, and there she was. Annie. His brother’s wife. His brother’s widow. She stood in the kitchen doorway, her arm around her son’s shoulders, her startled blue eyes riveted on Harper.

She looked as tired and worn-out as Harper felt. Her plain black dress with a black and white scarf tied at the neck hung loose from her shoulders and washed out her complexion. Odd, but she used to look good in black. Damn good, especially in the black sweater and short red skirt of her cheerleading uniform. Of course, the outfit had clung to her youthful curves like a lover’s hand.

Bad analogy, old man.

Still, he couldn’t help but compare that memory with the current way her widow’s weeds hung on her to mid-calf like a limp, overused gunnysack. Was it only the occasion and that particular dress, or had she let herself go to seed over the years?

But then, what did he care? His sister-in-law’s grooming habits were none of his concern.

He crossed the room, half expecting her to turn and flee, but she held her ground. The expression on her pale face was hard to read. Sadness was there, and resignation, but so was fear. Why fear? She closed her eyes a moment, and when she opened them again there wasn’t much in them at all as far as Harper could tell. Up close the bruise on her cheek was even more vivid. Being well and personally acquainted with bruises in all their various shades, he guessed this one was about three or four days old.

“Hello, Annie,” he said.

“Harper.” She lowered her gaze to somewhere around the level of his collar. “I’m glad you could come.”

Yeah, right. “I’m glad I heard about it in time to get here.”

She glanced up guiltily, then away.

Her son, whose head came to her shoulder, edged slightly in front of her, a protective movement if Harper had ever seen one. The kid had good instincts. The hostile look he shot Harper only reinforced that. The man of the house—the male of the species—protecting his own.

“You…” Annie paused and licked her pale lips. “You haven’t met Jason.”

A small ache bloomed in Harper’s chest. Dad would have liked having his first grandson named after him. “No, I haven’t. Hello, Jason.”

“Jason, this is your Uncle Harper.”

Belligerent eyes, the exact same wintery gray as Harper’s, glared up at him. “H’lo,” Jason muttered. He tossed Harper a challenging look and deliberately turned his back to him and looked up at Annie. “Come on, Mom. You said you needed to talk to Mrs. Crawford. She’s in the kitchen.”

Harper had no doubt the boy would have dragged her off to get her away from him. Why, he didn’t know, but he was saved from having to do anything about it by Reverend Crawford.

“May I borrow your mother a moment, young man?” the reverend asked kindly. “I promise not to keep her long, but I’d like to talk with her and your uncle. I think Mrs. Crawford is saving the last two deviled eggs for you in the kitchen.”

On his way out of the room, Jason tossed Harper another look, this one a warning that plainly said, Keep away from my mother.

“Harper,” Reverend Crawford said, extending his hand.

Harper shook hands with the man who’d been the family minister and friend as far back as Harper could remember.

“It’s been a long time, son. Too long,” the reverend offered. “I’m just sorry it took something like this to bring you home.”

Harper accepted the subtle criticism without comment.

“But the important thing,” the preacher said, “is that you’re here now. I can’t tell you how it relieves my mind to know Annie and Jason won’t be alone.”

Panic flashed across Annie’s face. “Oh, but—”

“Mike’s accident was such a shock,” the reverend continued. “You’ll be a great comfort to them.”

Harper might have protested the man’s assumption that he would be staying at the farm, but he didn’t. Couldn’t. Annie had craned her neck to look up at Crawford, who stood a good three inches taller than Harper’s own six feet. The action made her black and white scarf gap open.

Harper’s gut clenched. He couldn’t take his eyes from the line of bruises up the side of Annie’s neck. Three of them that he could see. He’d bet his badge that there was a fourth one, smaller, farther down. And a fifth, slightly larger—about the size of a man’s thumb—on the other side.

“…But we couldn’t impose on Harper that way,” Annie was saying.

Harper forced his gaze from her neck and met her eyes. “I’m the one who’s imposing. But I’d hoped you wouldn’t mind if I bunked on your couch for a night or two.”

“Excellent, excellent,” said the reverend.

At the trapped look in Annie’s eyes, Harper hardened his jaw. Too damn bad if she didn’t want him there. He wasn’t about to leave. Not until he found out who had tried to strangle her, and why.