“That’s a lie!” he bellowed. “Freddie can’t be dead! What are you trying to pull here, Sheriff?”
Melba spoke up then, her voice firm, but kind, too. “It’s the truth, Mr. Lansing. We’re sorry, but your son is gone.”
Gretchen wailed again, and the sound chilled Eli. It was primal, despair so heavy and so dark that it was crushing her.
“We can drive you to the funeral home,” Eli offered quietly. “Freddie’s there, if you want to see him.”
Gretchen’s agony was terrible to hear, and it was continuous.
Fred, Sr., held her against his side, though, paradoxically, he seemed entirely unaware of her existence. “Freddie wouldn’t have done that,” he said, with desperation. “He wouldn’t have killed himself!”
“I’m sorry,” Eli repeated. “There will be an investigation, as I said, but it doesn’t look as if there was foul play.”
“Get off my land,” Fred ordered, his eyes wild and covered in a sheen of tears. “Both of you! Just get off my land before I turn these dogs loose on you!”
Eli held out both hands. “Take it easy, Fred. We’re going.”
Melba made a beeline for the SUV, opened the passenger door and climbed inside the rig, shutting the door hard behind her.
Eli, backing slowly away from the two people glaring at him from their porch, lowered his hands. “If you need anything,” he said, “or if you have any questions, call me. I’ll help if I can.”
Neither Gretchen nor Fred, Sr., spoke.
Eli got behind the wheel, closed the door, fastened his seat belt.
“Damn,” Melba said, as he started the engine and backed the SUV into a three-point turn. “That was awful.”
Eli nodded, said nothing. He was bothered by something about the Lansings’ response to the news of their son’s death, though he couldn’t have said for the life of him what that something was.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ELI’S TEXT ARRIVED at ten thirty that night.
Still invited? No pressure. I know it’s late, and I’ll be okay with a no.
Brynne smiled at the message and replied immediately, Still invited.
The reply: Be there in five minutes.
He was right on time, pulling in behind the restaurant in his truck, with Festus riding in the passenger seat.
Brynne, standing on the small back porch, hugged herself against the cold.
When Eli had parked and shut off the engine, he stepped down and gave a low whistle, which prompted Festus to leap down after him, tail wagging, tongue lolling.
Clearly, Eli had been home and changed; he was wearing different clothes, jeans, a T-shirt and a long-sleeved wool shirt. His Western boots were well-worn but clean, and his hair was still damp from a recent shower.
Festus rushed Brynne and was overjoyed to receive a good reception—a warm laugh and a ruffling of his floppy ears. His mismatched eyes gleamed in the dim glow of the porch light.
Eli walked toward Brynne, stood looking up at her for a moment before mounting the steps.
“You look like an angel, complete with halo,” he said, and his voice was husky.
Coming from any other man, Clay included, Brynne would have written those words off as a hokey pickup line. Coming from Eli, who, in her experience at least, tended to be straightforward to the point of bluntness and utterly lacking in poetic inclinations, they were something to be pondered and cherished.
Oddly stricken, Brynne was silent.
Eli mounted the steps, closing the space between them, and bent his head, brushing his cheek—freshly shaven and smelling faintly of soap and toothpaste—against hers.
Brynne shivered, and Eli immediately wrapped her in his arms.
“You’re cold,” he said.
Just then, with her body in such close contact with Eli’s, she was anything but cold. Things were melting inside her, tipping and flowing, leaving a warm ache wherever they touched.
She barely had the breath to speak. “Come in,” she said, the fingers of both hands clasping the front of his shirt. Pulling.
He gave a low, ragged laugh and kissed her.
It wasn’t a deep kiss, like the one they’d shared to mark the coming of a New Year, but it sparked new fires just the same.
With something dangerously close to desperation, Brynne grasped Eli’s hand and half dragged him in from the porch.
She closed and locked the inside door behind them, then led the way up the stairs to the landing, where Festus was already waiting, still wagging his tail.
Inside the apartment, where it was deliciously warm, Brynne turned to face Eli, wondering if she was rushing things, if she’d gotten in over her head.
In the final analysis, she didn’t care.
Tonight was all that mattered. Now was all that mattered.
Who even knew if there would be a tomorrow?
When the silence grew too long to bear, Brynne asked the first question that came to mind. “Are you hungry?”
After all, she owned a restaurant. Feeding people was what she did.
Eli’s grin smoldered, right along with his eyes, as he took her in. It was leisurely, like a thirsty man taking a long, slow drink of the purest water.
“Oh, yeah,” he drawled. “I am very hungry.”
Brynne blushed, and then blushed because she’d blushed, revealing too much by her reaction.
Eli chuckled. “Damn,” he said. “I love it when you do that.”
“When I do what?” she asked, though she knew.
He didn’t reply. He simply came to her, took her into his arms again.
“How many kids do you think we’d have by now, if we’d gotten married right out of college? Or, better yet, high school?” he asked.
Brynne pretended to shove him away, though her hands remained on his chest, resting lightly there, feeling the hard warmth beneath the fabric of his shirt. “I think we’d be divorced—especially if we’d married right after high school.”
Eli’s expression was one of exaggerated surprise. “Divorced? What makes you think we’d be divorced?”
“It’s simple,” Brynne answered lightly. “Neither one of us would have had time to become who we are. Did you know a person’s frontal cortex doesn’t stop developing until they’re twenty-five years old?”
“Excellent reasoning,” Eli replied, “but I think all that legitimate sex would have made up for an underdeveloped frontal cortex, at least a little.”