Fatal Inheritance (5 page)

The dog whimpered at his name.

Becki slipped her hand free from Josh’s reassuring grasp and stood. She couldn’t let herself start leaning on him. “I’d better finish unpacking.”

Josh scraped his hand over his jaw. “How about I leave Tripod here with you tonight?”

She tilted her head and squinted at him, but she couldn’t read his expression. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“Bec, I don’t want you to worry unnecessarily.”

“O-kay...”

“Does Neil have call forwarding?”

“I don’t know.” A lump balled in her throat. “Why?”

“Because he’s not answering his door.”

* * *

You don’t belong here.

Becki surged from her bed and paced the bedroom floor for the umpteenth time.

Tripod whined at being disturbed yet again. Josh had left him with her—for company, he’d said, but more likely so the dog would bark if anyone tried to break in.

Becki scratched his ears. “I’m sorry, boy, but your master has my stomach in knots. First he convinces me it’s got to be Neil who’s terrorizing me. Then he tells me not to worry even though Neil never showed up at his apartment tonight.”

She inched aside the curtains and peered at the yard bathed in moonlight. Leafy shadows danced on the barn wall.
It
doesn’t scare you to be out the back of nowhere? With next to no neighbors? And who knows what kind of wild animals stalking those woods?

She took a deep breath and slowly released it. Neil had just been trying to manipulate her. No one was out there.

She wasn’t going to let Neil, or her sister, coerce her into leaving. First thing Monday morning, she’d call her old boss and tell him not to bother holding her job as Neil had suggested, and then she’d call Gramps’s lawyer to find out if Sarah had any chance of challenging the will. Relieved to have a plan of action, she crawled back into bed and mashed her pillow into a new shape.

Something creaked.

Her eyes flew open. The wispy white sheers fluttered at the window, looking ghostlike with the moonlight shimmering through them. Becki slanted a peek at Tripod. Still sleeping.

She reined in her galloping heart. If the noise had been an intruder, the dog would have been alerted. Surely.

The creak sounded again.

Only, it was more of a whistle. The wind sneaking through the eaves?

Fixing her gaze on the fluttering curtains, she listened more closely. How had she not noticed the peepers chirruping like a rock concert gone wild outside, punctuated by the bullfrog’s occasional
owooga?

She huffed onto her side and tried to ignore them. Then just as she’d gotten used to the “music,” the critters invited a new voice to the party—the thrumming bass strings of some other amphibian.

“Aaaah!”

Tripod instantly lifted his head and gave her a worried look.

“Sorry, boy. Go back to sleep.” One of them might as well. She snapped on the bedside lamp and shimmied up to lean against the headboard.

The phone rang.

She tensed. This couldn’t be happening. Not again. Not at—she peered at the clock—three in the morning. What had Josh told her to do?

She scrubbed her head, trying to clear her foggy brain.

The phone blasted again.

She snatched it up.

“Bec, you okay?” Josh’s sleep-roughened voice wrapped around her heart and slowed it to an even gallop. “I saw your light come on.”

She glanced back to the window. Through the sparse line of trees that separated her house from Josh’s, she could just make out a light.

He sounded as if he’d just awakened, and the thought that he’d been watching her place so diligently that he’d noticed her light come on in the wee hours of the morning chased the chill that had gripped her.

“Bec?” he repeated, concern pitching the question up an octave.

She tried not to read more into his concern than there was. He was, after all, a police officer. Protecting people from intruders was his job. “I couldn’t sleep for the frog noises. Do you have any idea how many different sounds they make?”

He chuckled. “And knowing your imagination, you sectioned them into orchestra parts.”

“A rock band, actually,” she admitted, heartened that he remembered their evenings sitting around the campfire with Gran and Gramps, making up stories about the night sounds.

Josh’s laugh eased the last of her tension. “Tripod okay?”

“Sleeping like a baby. I’m sorry I woke you.”

His snort suggested that he hadn’t been able to sleep, either, despite the gravelly sound of his voice. She really should let him try. No reason both of them should be tossing all night.

“Have you tried counting sheep?” he asked.

“Just wolves.”

He groaned. “We’re going to catch this guy. I promise you.” His earnestness wound around her heart the way his strong arms had protectively wrapped around her earlier. Oh, boy, she should so not be going there.

As noble as Josh was, sentry duty was bound to get old quick. “Um, I think I’ll just read for a bit. Get my mind off...things.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.” Who was she kidding? She’d just traded one preoccupation for another. But thankfully, Josh took her at her word and said good-night. The last thing she wanted was for him to feel as if he had to constantly watch out for her like a big brother. She slipped the phone back onto the nightstand. “Or worse, like some rescued stray.”

Tripod lifted his head and whimpered.

“No offense, bud. Josh loves you. I’m sure he’ll never get tired of having you around.” Not the way her dad had forced them to give up their one and only dog after less than three weeks.

Not wanting to remember other things Dad had quickly tired of—including her—Becki pulled one of Gran’s photo albums onto her lap. Mom and Dad had never taken pictures of them, so Becki and her sister had relished posing for the camera whenever they visited Gran and Gramps.

Gran had written little notes beneath each one, too.

Becki traced her finger over a picture of Gramps carrying her on his shoulders in front of the house. She couldn’t have been more than five or six. Beneath the picture Gran had written, “Our Becki says she wants to live here always, even when she’s big.”

Not like her daddy.

Gran would never have written the words that whispered through Becki’s thoughts, but she knew that Dad’s restlessness had always tugged at Gran’s heart. Becki had never understood why her dad had loathed Serenity so much. He was the polar opposite of Josh.

She forced her mind away from Josh and back to her dad. He’d rarely stuck around for more than a day when they visited Gran and Gramps, leaving them time alone with Mom.

Before long, Gran had invited her and Sarah to visit without their parents, which had suited Becki just fine. Poor Gran must have grieved all over again when Mom moved halfway across the country and stopped sending them, too, with her default “it’s for the best” excuse.

Becki traced Gramps’s smiling face.
Becki wants to live here always.
Is that why they’d left her the place?

She’d loved everything about her grandparents’ home, from sliding down the banister to swinging on the big oak tree out back. She’d loved that Gran never lamented how impossible it was to pull the comb through Becki’s tangle of curls. She’d loved that Gramps never complained how many dishes she’d broken with her butterfingers.

When she would return from playing in the woods, covered from head to toe in mud, they would chuckle instead of scold. And she hadn’t minded at all that Gran hosed her down outside with the icy well water before allowing her to step foot in the bathroom.

Becki smiled at the memory of Josh getting a blast of that same water a time or two.

Stop thinking about him already!
She slammed the photo album shut and clicked off the light.

Somewhere between the frogs winding down their concert and her snuggling deeper under the comforter, thoughts of Josh must have turned to dreams, because the next thing she knew, a
ping
on the window jolted her awake.

She blinked at the bright sunlight beaming through the sheers.

“Hey, sleepyhead. You still in bed?” Josh’s amused voice filtered through her fuzzy brain.

Terrific.
He wasn’t helping. How was she supposed to keep her mind off him if he showed up at her window, jolting her awake as if fifteen years had evaporated overnight and they’d sneak in an early-morning fishing trip before church?

Then again, maybe they could just skip church. She pulled on her bathrobe. He’d simply taken for granted that she’d attend. She swept aside the curtains. “Don’t you know it’s bad manners to—” The rest of Becki’s thought flew from her head at the sight of Josh looking up at her second-story window wearing a handsome blazer, a crisply pressed shirt and tie, and a grin that turned her inside out.

FIVE

J
osh whistled as he waited for Bec to come downstairs with Tripod. He’d hated to wake her so early after the night she’d had, but if the dog didn’t get outside soon, she’d hate him more.

Tossing pebbles at her bedroom window had felt like old times. Good times. Times when summers were carefree and the worst they could imagine happening was falling from a tree.

The instant her kitchen door opened and Tripod dashed out, Josh stepped up with the tray of coffee and bagels he’d brought with him. “Not as fancy as my sister’s breakfast, but after the trouble you had sleeping, I figured you could use a jolt of caf—”

The sight of her soft, sleep-rumpled face swept the words clean out of his head.

She pushed the door wider and motioned him inside. “Thanks.”

Struggling to ignore what the crackly, early-morning texture of her voice did to him, he carried the tray into the kitchen and helped himself to a mug of coffee. “Uh...” He hadn’t been able to really see her up at the bedroom window, and now that he could...

He finished his coffee in three burning gulps and set it back on the tray. “I’d better wait for you outside.”

Her brow creased. Then she swiped at the lines crisscrossing her cheeks from where she’d slept and scrunched together the neck flaps of her white terry robe.

He dropped his gaze to the floor, feeling bad that he’d made her self-conscious.

Her bare toes, with their hot-pink polish, wiggled.

The fact she painted her usually hidden toenails and yet didn’t seem to wear makeup sparked even more curiosity about this utterly grown-up version of the cute kid he used to rescue from the old oak tree.

She cleared her throat, jerking his attention back to her face.

His own flamed. Okay, this was definitely
not
a good idea. “Uh...” He hitched his finger over his shoulder. “I need to feed the dog. Come get me when you’re ready to leave for church. Okay?”

“Actually...” She stirred her coffee, her unsweetened, black coffee that didn’t need stirring. “I was thinking maybe I’d skip church today. I’m not really up to facing—”

“We can take the Cadillac,” he blurted on impulse. Anything to convince her not to stay home alone. He’d just have to call Hunter and alter their plan a bit.

Her eyes lit up. “You got it going?”

“Yup. Turns out it was just a bad connection. Finally found the problem this morning.” He wasn’t sure what had compelled him to work on the car again this morning. In the back of his mind, he must’ve known he’d need the carrot. He hadn’t told her what Wes had said about the jewelry theft.

Not that he believed for a second that Bec’s grandfather had anything to do with the robbery.

But the person who’d been poking around the place might. Might even have been poking around before Bec had arrived. Maybe even had tampered with the hot-water tank.

His stomach knotted. No, the service tech had insisted the squirrel nest blocking the chimney was to blame for the carbon monoxide.

“So...” he said, hoping his teasing tone didn’t sound as forced to her ears as it did to his own. “Want to change your mind?”

She bobbed her head from side to side. “We could just go cruising after church like we’d planned.”

“We could.... But do you really want me to worry about you being here alone all morning? I might get too stressed to drive this afternoon.”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re determined to guilt me into this, aren’t you? Or scare me.”

“Whatever works.” He gave her a wicked grin.

“Okay, okay. I’ll go. Just give me an hour to shower and dress. And wake up!”

“Perfect. That’ll give me enough time to pull the old gal out and dust her off.” And contact Hunter to put a new plan in place. Maybe Wes could stake out the church parking lot once they parked the Caddy, and Hunter could still keep an eye on the house, in case Bec’s prowler decided to take advantage of the time she’d be tied up in church.

With fifteen minutes to spare, Bec showed up on his doorstep dressed to turn every bachelor’s head within a hundred miles. Wow. The instant he stepped through the church doors with Bec in that frothy vanilla sundress with her hair tamed by the doodad accessories that let the most becoming tendrils slip free to frame her face, he’d be the envy of every guy in the place.

She tugged at a wisp of hair, which sprang back to its curly Q shape the instant she released it. “That bad? It’s impossible to do anything with it in the humidity.”

“It looks fine,” he said.

She frowned, and he winced at how gruff he’d sounded. It wasn’t her fault he’d suddenly noticed how attractive she was.

Oh, boy.
Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Not to mention how carpooling together to church and then sharing a pew was bound to wind up the rumor mill, especially when the favorite pastime of the church’s older ladies seemed to be trying to hook him up with a woman. As if he needed any more reminders of how big a failure he was at romance.

He gritted his teeth and reminded himself they meant well. How were they to know that every woman he’d ever dated chose something better over him?

Bec flounced past him toward the car. Her exotic scent caught him by surprise. As a kid she’d always smelled like sunshine and flowers, except for the time...

He bit back a grin. “You sure smell better than the time you fell into that stagnant pond.”

She stuck out her tongue. “Thanks for reminding me.”

“No problem. What are friends for?”

“Neil actually gave me this perfume.”

The grin slipped off Josh’s face.

Bec waved her wrist in front of his nose. “Do you like it?”

No.
“To tell you the truth,” he hedged, “I always pictured you more of a sunshine-and-roses kind of girl.”

She drew back her arm. “Well, in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not a girl anymore.”

“Yeah, kind of noticed,” he muttered under his breath and stopped alongside the car. “So Miss Grown-Up, does that mean you do or don’t want the car’s top down?”

“Oh, I almost forgot!” She rummaged through her purse and drew out a cowboy-style kerchief, which she draped over her head and tied under her chin. In an instant she went from runway worthy to schoolgirl.

Josh couldn’t help it. He laughed.

“Oh, if you think this looks funny, you’d bust a gut over what the wind would do to my hair if I didn’t wear it.”

“I’ll leave the top up.”

“Doesn’t help much when the car has no side windows!”

“Good point.” He opened the passenger door, and Bec climbed in. He quirked an eyebrow. “You driving?”

She squinted up at him. “Not until you teach me how this thing works.”

“Well, then...” He motioned to the driver’s side—the right side of this particular car—where the would-be door was blocked by the stick shift and brake lever. “You going to let me in?”

“Oops.” She scurried out. “I forgot.”

He slid across the seat, and she climbed back in. “Okay. First lesson.” He quickly showed her the positions of the gearshift, then moved it into Neutral and pushed the red ignition button on the dash.

The engine sputtered to life.

“That’s it?” she asked.

“When all goes as it should, yes.”

“And when it doesn’t?”

He gunned the gas. “It’s a lot more complicated than we have time for right now.”

They settled into a rambling forty miles per hour, and Bec inhaled deeply. “I’ve missed the smell of country air.”

“Cow manure?”

She swatted his arm. “I’m serious. As soon as the smell of hay and clean air and, yes, animals wafted through my car windows yesterday, I knew I’d found my way home.”

The wistful way she said
home
made his heart skip a beat, but he couldn’t help but wonder if her feelings would last. Lots of people fell in love with country living in the long, lazy days of summer, but their attitudes changed come February when winter entrenched itself in the community and showed no sign of releasing its grip for another two months.

“But I’m preaching to the choir. Right?”

“Yup,” he confirmed and reminded himself that she was a city woman now. Not the girl who’d begged not to have to leave at the end of every summer and who’d always been humming one Sunday-school chorus or another.

She chattered on about various day trips she and her grandparents had taken in the car, but the closer they got to the church, the quieter she grew.

“You okay?” he asked finally.

“I’m not sure I can do this.”

“It’s okay to cry, Bec. I know I did at more than one service after my dad died.”

“You did?” She suddenly sounded so lost.

“Yes,” he said gently. He shifted the gear stick into First, so a kid couldn’t accidentally start the car rolling, then pulled up the brake lever. “Trust me. Everyone understands.” He reached across the seat and squeezed her hand. “You’ll be okay.”

She dragged the scarf from her head, took a deep breath and released it slowly. “Okay, I’m ready.”

As he waited for her to climb out ahead of him, he nodded to Wes, who’d positioned his truck near the exit where he could easily intercept a possible car thief.

When Josh looked back at Bec, Bill Netherby, a local farmer who had a knack for instantly turning strangers into friends, was pumping her hand.

“Becki, welcome back. We were so glad to hear that your grandparents’ place is staying in the family, and—” he gestured toward the Cadillac “—I’m glad to see you didn’t take that fella up on his offer to buy the old car.”

Josh clambered out of the front seat to join Bec. “What fella?”

Bill looked from Josh to Bec’s equally curious expression. “Didn’t he find you? The night before last, I was out on my bicycle down your way, and this fella asked directions to your place. Said he saw your grandparents’ death notice in the car-club magazine, alongside a picture of the car. I figured he wanted to make an offer.”

Bec’s gaze darted to Josh.

He nodded, silently acknowledging her suspicion that the guy might have been her attacker. “You catch the guy’s name?” he asked Bill.

“Afraid not, sorry.”

“Could you describe him?”

“Not much to describe. Average height, average build. Dark hair. Middle-aged. Can’t think of anything about him that really stood out.”

“A beard? A mustache? An accent, maybe?”

“Like I said, he was pretty average.”

“What kind of car did he drive?”

“An old green Plymouth.”

Josh’s pulse spiked. The same color and make they’d pulled out of the quarry. Had the guy known Josh spotted the car and decided to dump it? “Thanks, Bill. We’ll be sure to keep an eye out for him.” Josh prodded Bec forward.

She dug in her heels and whirled on him. “What are we going to do?”

“Like I said, keep an eye out for him.” Josh pulled out his cell phone and texted the new information to the officer investigating the abandoned car, then sent the suspect’s description—for what it was worth—to Wes and Hunter.

“This helps, right?” Bec’s voice hummed with nervous energy. “I mean, this has got to be the same guy who knocked me out and then made those phone calls and shot at the house. And it can’t be Neil. No one would ever peg him as average.”

Josh pictured the man’s horn-rimmed glasses and pointy nose. “No, probably not.” His background check on her ex hadn’t turned up so much as a parking ticket, either, and no Plymouths registered to him. For the first time since failing to locate Neil after yesterday’s visit, Josh could take a full breath. He’d rather deal with a thwarted car thief than an ex.

He turned to escort Bec inside, but the sight of Bart Winslow watching her with a predatory gleam from the front seat of his Maserati pitched his good mood into a tailspin.

If not for Netherby’s encounter with the stranger interested in the Cadillac, Josh could imagine, only too well, Bart being behind the attacks on Bec.

The thirty-year-old son of the town’s slimiest real-estate agent was the kind of jerk who would stoop to any tactics to help out his dad. And his dad’s current pet interest was snatching up rural properties for development.

Properties like Bec’s.

* * *

The rigid line of Josh’s jaw sent Becki’s pulse spiking. She tracked his gaze to a red car parked on the street. A casually dressed blond-haired guy sat inside. “Who’s that?” she asked.

Anne swooped up from behind them and hooked her arm through Josh’s. “The best-looking and most eligible bachelor in town.”

Josh gave his sister a withering look. “If you prefer the partying, fast-driving type. C’mon, let’s go inside and find a seat.” He grazed his fingertips across Becki’s back.

She started, caught off guard by the jitters his touch unleashed, and scrambled to gather her wits. She’d been so preoccupied with worrying about breaking down into a blubbering fool the moment she stepped inside the church that she hadn’t been paying attention to her inconvenient reactions to Josh.

It wasn’t as though the touch meant anything. Josh clearly didn’t want Mr. Maserati messing with her and was just being his usual protective self, again.

And it wasn’t as if she wanted it to mean anything.

Sure, she’d gotten all dolled up this morning, but
not
because she’d wanted Josh to notice her. Because the man had seen her with bedhead!

She had
some
pride.

She slanted a glance at his handsome profile. Okay, maybe she’d hoped he’d notice a smidgen.

As Anne led the way into the sanctuary, Becki remembered why she didn’t want to be here. A cheery melody instantly transported her back to Gran’s Sunday-school classes.

Becki drew in a fortifying breath. She blinked rapidly and tried to focus on something else. Anything else.

Sunshine gleamed through the windows, splashing rainbows about the room, nothing like the gray day when she’d buried her grandparents.

She avoided making eye contact with those who glanced her way, afraid she wouldn’t be able to bear the sympathy in their eyes. She lifted her gaze to the stained-glass image, on the wall behind the pulpit, of Jesus cradling a lamb.

Josh gave her shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “You okay?”