Scarlet Nights: An Edilean Novel Read online

  “No! And don’t you start on me too! Everyone has a right to privacy, and besides, I’ve heard enough complaints about him from my mother, from this whole town. I bet you have things you don’t want people to know about.”

  “Ask me anything. I’m an open book.” He removed the two Cornish hens he’d ordered that morning and quickly began to stuff them with wild rice and herbs he’d prepared before he went out to see Sara. One of the good things about his life of living undercover was that he’d had to work at a lot of jobs. One of the handiest was the eighteen months he’d spent as a sous chef for a restaurant in Arizona. He could whip out a fajita in ten minutes.

  “Where did you grow up?”

  “Akron, Ohio.”

  “Why does Tess refuse to talk about her childhood?”

  “I thought this was about me, not my sister.”

  “She’s my friend; you’re a stranger.”

  Mike tied up the hens. He’d once tied up a man in the same way, legs together, arms in the back, cord down his front. “You’re right. What’s about me is about Tess. Our parents were killed in a car wreck when I was twelve and Tess was five, so we were raised by our maternal grandparents.” He put the birds in the oven.

  “I’ve heard of your grandmother.”

  “I bet you have. They tell you what a bad-tempered woman she was?”

  “Yes,” Sara said quietly. “Was your grandfather nice?”

  Mike looked back at her. “We rarely saw him. Grans said he had to travel for his job, but after he died in ’99, I found out that he’d had a second family.”

  “Good heavens.” Sara paused with the fork on the way to her mouth and watched as Mike took the seat across from her.

  “Are you beginning to see why Tess doesn’t talk about her childhood?”

  “Yes,” Sara said, looking at him. “Please tell me more. I need something to take my mind off my own problems. My mother said you joined the police force when you were still a teenager.”

  Mike hesitated. Never in any of his undercover work had he been required to tell the truth about himself. But there were people in this town who’d known his grandmother, so if he lied, Sara would find out about it. “I was older, so I ran interference between little Tess and Grans, but there was only so much I could take. On the night I graduated from high school, I told the old woman that if she so much as touched Tess I’d kill her, then I left town.”

  “But of course you wouldn’t have. Killed her, that is.”

  Mike looked up from his salad, but he didn’t answer.

  “What did you do after you left?”

  “I’d always wanted to see the ocean, so I …” He smiled in memory. “I flipped a coin to see which one I’d go to and the East Coast won—or lost, I guess. I bummed my way to Florida and stopped in Fort Lauderdale.” He took another bite. “One thing led to another and I joined the police force.” He looked up at her. “And here I am now.”

  “What about Tess?”

  “She’s done well, hasn’t she?”

  “No, I mean, when did you get back with her?”

  “When she graduated from high school, I was waiting outside for her. I’d already picked up her bags from where she’d thrown them out her bedroom window. She threw her cap and gown in our grandmother’s face, got in my car, and we drove away.”

  “I guess you were the one who put her through college.”

  Mike had told all that he could without giving away any real information, so he shrugged. Miss Sara Hélèna Shaw was certainly a curious young woman. He knew that while he was out she’d gone through his room. Out of habit, he’d marked the drawers and aligned the little throw rug with the floorboards. When he returned, everything had been slightly askew. He was glad he’d left the case files with his weapons in the hidden compartment under the carpet in the trunk of his car.

  He got up to look in the oven window. “So who do you know more about now? Me or the man you’re planning to marry?”

  “What an odd question. Because I’ve never met my fiancé’s parents doesn’t mean I don’t know everything else about him. I know what he likes to eat, how he drives a car, what he wants in the future, about his last two girlfriends who broke his heart, his—”

  “What he wants for the future?” Mike asked sharply. “And what would that be?”

  Sara looked down at her hands. “The usual. A home and children.” She wasn’t about to tell him that birth control pills made her swell, that Greg was scrupulous in using protection, and that he was vague about when he wanted to start having children.

  “Is what he wants here in Edilean? Did he tell you that in those exact words? What did he say?” The moment he spoke, Mike cursed the eagerness in his voice and hoped Sara wouldn’t pick up on it.

  But she did.

  “They got Tess to send you here, didn’t they?” Sara stood up.

  “Tess to send me here? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said honestly. “Who is ‘they’?”

  “This town. They all think they own me. Other people come and go, but not me.” Her voice was rising. “Sweet little Sara Shaw stays at home and helps people. Everyone else goes away and does things, but I stay here and watch other people come back with their careers and their husbands and their adorable little kids. But good ol’ Sara is always here.”

  Putting her hands on the table, she leaned toward him. “You can tell all of them—your sister, Ramsey, Luke, everyone—that they may not like Greg but I do. He’s made me achieve things. He may be abrupt and rude at times, but at least he gives me hope for the future.”

  She leaned so far forward her face was inches from his. “As for you, Mr. Newland, you can forget about trying to get information out of me, or seducing me away from Greg, or whatever you have planned, because it won’t work. Do you understand me? I’m not interested in you or any other man, so you might as well leave now.”

  With that, she went down the hall to her bedroom and slammed the door.

  Mike fell back against the chair in utter bewilderment. He had no idea what he’d just been accused of. “Seduce her?” He hadn’t come close to her.

  Mike ran his hands over his face. His instinct was to knock on her door and try to talk to her, but as he had no idea what to say, that would be useless. Why couldn’t she have drawn a nice big gun on him? A revolver. A semiautomatic would have been a good choice. She could have said, “Get near me again and I’ll kill you.” He’d had that said to him multiple times, and he’d always handled it easily.

  The timer went off for the hens, Mike got them out of the oven, then went outside to call Tess.

  She answered on the second ring.

  “So what do you think of her?” Tess didn’t bother with preliminaries.

  “She’s stressed-out. And she knows I’m lying.”

  That astonished Tess so much she could hardly speak. “But you always lie. It’s what makes you so good at your job. You lie about … about what kind of toothpaste you use, but people never know it.”

  “Are you sure you’re on my side?”

  Tess didn’t laugh. “I don’t understand this. Sara believes every word of a guy the whole town knows is a jerk, but she doesn’t believe you?”

  “Who can understand it?” Mike’s voice conveyed his puzzlement. “I’ve treated her like I would a princess, cooked for her, cleaned up after both of us, but she still accuses me of … I don’t really know why she’s so angry at me.”

  “What about the people of Edilean? Not the newcomers, but the ones who know Sara. What’s going on with them?”

  Mike took his time in answering. “I talked to some of them this morning, and they’re genuinely concerned about her. They don’t want her to be hurt.”

  Tess well knew what he was saying. “That town is astonishing, isn’t it? Those people actually care about one another. Of course you have to be on the inside to get that caring, but it does happen.”

  “Not what we were told about this place, is it?”