Dark Burning: Dark Falls, CO Romantic Thriller Book 6 Read online

“Collin’s been giving me fits about going to sleep lately. He’s out, but we need to listen for him in case he gets up. Or in case he decides to launch an offensive attack.”

  “He’s attacking?” he asked, one hand trailing lazy trails up and down her spine. He was going to put her to sleep if she wasn’t careful. She couldn’t let that happen. Not with Collin in the house.

  She chuckled. “It’s probably not technically considered an attack. He’s just not thrilled about the move out here and he’s still finding ways to let me know.”

  “Why did you move here?”

  She thought of asking why he cared but decided having an adult to talk to was nice. “It’s a long story, but the short version is that my parents and sisters were getting confused about who Collin’s parent was. I overheard them all talking about which school they wanted to enroll Collin in. It was clear they planned to make the decision and then tell me, knowing I’d go along with it. I realized they were right and also knew that was no way to raise my son.”

  “So, you needed some space?” His hands were still doing their thing and it felt incredible to melt into the heat of his body and the warmth of his strong hands running over her skin.

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “I didn’t know you had to make choices about a six-year-old’s school,” he said.

  “You don’t if you’re like me and you send them to a public kindergarten. They wanted to put him into a private school.” She was speaking into his chest now as she rolled her neck while he rubbed the muscles in it.

  “And they didn’t ask your opinion or if you wanted theirs?”

  Merritt made a sound deep in her throat. “In their eyes, my judgement is not the best. I came home pregnant without a husband in tow. That about proved I couldn’t be trusted to be an adult. And honestly, I was happy to let them help with Collin in the beginning. My sisters each had kids so they could give me advice and having my parents’ support was an amazing blessing for a single mom. I didn’t have to pay for daycare. I could go to work and know Collin was safe with my mom. We even lived with them. A pretty cushy life for a single parent.”

  She turned her head and rested her cheek on his chest. “I hadn’t realized how much I let them take over until that conversation. They mean well and I love them all, but it was a wake-up call. I started to assert more authority over Collin and they started to push back, wanting to be the ones to make the decisions where he was concerned.”

  He murmured a response and kept rubbing her back in slow circles. The heat from his hands felt incredible. Merritt let her eyes drift closed under the weight of the wine, the sex, and his hands.

  Sometime later, he shook her awake, hands gently squeezing her shoulders. “Wake up, Mer. You need to go to bed and I need to take off. As much as I’d love to be beneath you for the whole night.”

  Merritt started, pushing up. “Did I fall asleep?”

  One side of his mouth tilted. “You did. It’s after midnight.”

  She took a deep breath, knowing she must look like hell and surreptitiously doing a drool check.

  He handed her the not-an-ex-boyfriend’s sweatshirt and ran a hand down her bare hip.

  “Did you sleep at all?” She asked, wondering if he was one of those people who could set some kind of internal alarm clock and wake up at will.

  He shook his head no.

  She felt her eyes go round. “You were laying there trapped by me for three hours? You should have woken me up.”

  His answering grin spread slowly across his face. “I was pretty happy there. I would have moved you if I wasn’t.”

  Merritt didn’t know what to say. She was embarrassed she’d fallen asleep on him.

  “I’ll, um, walk you out?” she turned, heading for the front door, but he caught her and tugged her back.

  She stood, toe-to-toe with him, looking at his tousled hair and the dancing eyes that always made her melt. She had said having sex again wouldn’t mean she liked him, but it had been a lie. She was starting to like this man just fine. He was kind to her kid and he was funny and sweet. He would probably hate to be described that way, but it was true. He had a good heart.

  Oh, this was bad. Very, very bad. This man was not available. He’d made that abundantly clear. She needed to clear her head of the fog he was inducing. She needed to get rid of the dregs of fantasy that were starting to form. The fantasy that maybe this man might offer her more than he was able to give. She’d made that mistake once before with Collin’s father.

  She didn’t regret having Collin. He was her heart. He was everything. But still, she wouldn’t make the mistake of hoping, pleading for more from a man again.

  She blinked, ready to turn to the door again.

  His hands on her shoulders stopped her. He leaned in and kissed her. Not the hot passionate kisses of earlier. This was more a kiss like a friend might give. And yet, there was still something utterly lovely in it. Something she craved and wanted.

  He leaned back, looking her in the eye. “Your son is adorable and you’re a damned good mom. Don’t you forget that.”

  Merritt went still with the surprise of his words. He laughed and let himself out of the office. She stood listening to the sounds of his feet crossing the living room and then the snick of the front door as he opened and closed it.

  It opened again and she heard him call out in a raised whisper so he wouldn’t wake Collin. “Lock this door behind me, Mer.”

  Yeah, she was in trouble. A whole lot of messy, heart squashing trouble.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Did you call Merritt?”

  Eric looked at his partner, wondering how the hell John could have known he had called Merritt the night before. Sure, John had seen him leave the bar, but how did that translate to him going over to Merritt’s for a… A what? A hookup?

  He guessed that’s what it was. Still, he didn’t like thinking about her that way for some reason.

  John cut into his thoughts. “Hey, did you call her?” He was gesturing to the fire scene in front of them.

  Damn, his partner was talking about the case. “No. I figured I’d call her as soon as we know this is connected to our other scenes.”

  John nodded as they moved under the first line of crime scene tape and logged in with the officer keeping the entry log.

  “You seem pretty relaxed this morning,” John said. “Have a good night last night?”

  Eric didn’t answer, focusing instead on donning the disposable booties they would wear into the scene. In the past, he would have grinned at his partner and said he’d had a very fine night. John would have taken it to mean Eric met someone at a bar and took them home. He didn’t kiss and tell, but he wasn’t above letting his partner know he’d had a good time.

  That didn’t seem right this morning.

  If he did that and then Merritt mentioned seeing him last night in front of John, John would know she had slept with Eric. He didn’t want to invade her privacy in that way.

  “This one’s different,” he said instead, nodding his head toward the house.

  John nodded his agreement and they moved toward the house, crossing under the second red crime scene tape and going through the logging in ritual again.

  Even if they hadn’t been told there was a body in this fire, he would have known immediately. The sickly-sweet smell of burning flesh is not something you forget. He’d heard people say they assumed burning flesh would smell like cooking meat, though why anyone would spend time thinking about that was beyond him. It was one of the things he wished he had never learned, but he had.

  The firefighters had cleared the scene and their arson investigator was joined by one of the death investigators. Both looked up as John and Eric entered.

  Demetrius Johnson spoke first. “The body is in the bedroom.”

  He waved them down what had been the hallway and pointed to a line of ash.

  “What are we looking at?” Eric asked.

  “I’m not one hundred percent sur
e, but I think it could be rope. See how it goes from where one doorknob would be to the other?” Demetrius pointed from one door to a door on the opposite side of the hallway. “I think he tied the doorknobs together so the victim couldn’t get out this way.”

  Eric felt his eyebrows go up. “He planned this out?”

  “Maybe more than we know,” Demetrius said. He pointed to the room on the right and its burnt-out doorway. Half the room was burned but they’d gotten there in time to put out the fire before the outer wall burned.

  Demetrius continued. “This is the bedroom where your vic died. The windows are nailed shut. It’s entirely possible the victim did that himself for some reason or it could have been the killer came in at some other point and did it.”

  “Or had access to the house?” Eric asked.

  Noelle spoke up. “Entry was made at the back door. We’ve got techs on the way.”

  Demetrius showed them the position of the victim. He lay under the bed, arms covering his face, folded in on himself like he could stop what was happening.

  “Do we have an ID?” John asked Eric. Their dispatcher usually gave them records for the house when they were on the way to a scene, but they were still waiting for some reason this time.

  Eric pulled his emails up. “Shit,” he breathed out. “The house is owned by Peter Gamet.”

  He messaged back asking her to confirm that it was the same Peter Gamet who owned the insurance business.

  “It’s possible this guy is related to one of our other fires,” John said to the others as Eric sent his message. “The insurance agent’s name was Peter Gamet.”

  They would need to try to confirm ID as soon as they could. It could be that Peter Gamet wasn’t the one in the bedroom. Someone else could have been staying here or something. They needed to be careful not to make any assumptions.

  John and Eric backtracked from the house. They would wait for Demetrius and Noelle to do their jobs. Eric pulled his cell phone back out and pulled up Merritt’s phone number. He started to text her but the first of the new vans was arriving.

  “You’re in trouble,” John said in a singsong voice.

  He wasn’t kidding. Eric walked up to the outer line of the crime scene tape just as a streak of burnt rust hair headed his way.

  “What happened to keeping me in the loop?” Her eyes would slice him open if they could.

  He tilted his head away from the rest of the press that was crowding in and drew her away from them. “I was going to call you as soon as we knew this was connected to our other fires. I had just started to text.” He held up his phone to show her.

  She looked slightly mollified. “Is it?”

  Eric glanced at John who was answering questions for the rest of the press. “Yeah, it is. But there’s a body this time.”

  Merritt seemed to slow for a few seconds as she processed what he had said. Then her face went white and she looked at him with haunted eyes. It took him a few minutes to realize what she was thinking.

  “It’s not—” he started to say.

  She spoke over him. “Is this my fault?” She looked at the house behind him then back to his face, eyes imploring. “Is this because of what I said on TV, Eric?”

  He wanted to take her and pull her into him, to hug her and tell her this wasn’t her fault. But there was no way the rest of the press would miss that if he did. And she would never forgive him if he put any kind of shadow on her career like that. It would ruin her credibility with the other reporters.

  He did the next best thing. He stepped closer to her and lowered his voice, leaning down to catch her gaze. “This is not your fault, Merritt.” He waited until she looked him in the eye and then he said again. “This is not on you. This guy is sick. This is all on him.”

  Her chin was shaky and she looked at the house again, tears in her eyes.

  “Merritt,” he said. “I promise you, this guy was headed this way all along. He’s been working up to this. This wasn’t because of anything you said on a talk show. He probably didn’t even see it.”

  He didn’t know if it was true or not, but he needed her to believe it was true. He didn’t want her to carry guilt over this. He’d seen what guilt could do to a person. He’d seen it tear cops up. Shit, he was going to carry a hell of a lot of guilt himself over this, knowing if he had stopped this guy sooner, whoever that was in there would still be alive. He didn’t want her to share that burden.

  He saw her taking a measured, long breath and knew she was trying to come to terms with his words. She nodded at him.

  “Okay.” She nodded again. “Okay. What can you tell me?”

  “All I can say right now is we believe it is linked to our other fires. You’d have probably figured this part out for yourself, but the owner of this house is also the owner of one of the businesses that was hit previously.”

  “Wow,” she said. “That’s new. What do you think that means?”

  “I don’t know yet, but it’s the first big connection we have so it gives us more to work with than we had before.”

  He eased them back over with the rest of the press and watched as John took questions from reporters with cameras and microphones as well as those who worked for newspapers like Merritt. John was giving the standard line about ongoing investigation but he had confirmed that this fire was connected to the other arsons.

  Eric watched Merritt as she texted on her tablet and he wondered if she was already sending in the scoop he’d just given her. He didn’t know how that worked with newspapers, whether they really sent in stories that way or would wait to go back to the paper and write it up. Either way, he’d just given her a jump her competitors wouldn’t have. And even though he’d been told to do it by the higher-ups, it felt really good to help her out.

  Probably too damned good.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  John waited until they were back at their desks to ask. “You and Merritt looked pretty cozy out there.”

  “Uh-huh.” Eric didn’t offer more than that.

  “You don’t seem to be at each other’s throats anymore.”

  He shrugged. “I guess we’re not. Besides, the boss said to work with her, so I am.”

  John scowled and looked around. “The boss didn’t say it, Jackwagon did.”

  They’d all taken to calling Bill Lincoln from the mayor’s office Jackwagon. It was a proper designation now.

  Eric laughed. “True, but I’m listening to him because the boss lady echoed it.”

  He was still pissed about the suit thing. He’d had to dig a few suits out of his closet and now he had to deal with dropping off dry cleaning to his weekly routine. In the past, they only wore suits in court so he had only needed to get one dry cleaned every once in a while. With the way his clothes were soaking up the smell of fires at crime scenes lately, he couldn’t even re-wear any of them without dropping them off for cleaning now. And the dry cleaner had given him some strange looks when they got a whiff of the clothing.

  John’s phone rang and he picked it up with his typical, “You got Sevier.”

  John’s eyes shot to Eric and he mouthed, “Merritt McKenna.”

  Eric felt a hit in his chest at that. Why would Merritt call John, not him?

  He scribbled on a piece of paper. What? and pushed it across the desk to his partner.

  John held up a hand and listened for a minute, then covered the phone with his hand to whisper. “She got a call from Grant Starkey saying he’s a suspect and the police are focused on the wrong guy, that he’s innocent. She wants us to confirm.”

  Eric nodded. “Tell her he’s been cleared.”

  Grant Starkey had been frightened enough to take their advice and go through his old texts and calendars. It turned out, he had been with friends two of the nights in question and taking an online test for his real estate licensing exam for one of the others. It was enough to clear him as a suspect.

  John conveyed the information and hung up.

  Eric ignored
the looks his partner was giving him and started pulling up the reports they’d gotten on the list of people Peter Gamet had given them. So far, it looked like the man had a few people here and there who could be considered disgruntled clients, but they weren’t jumping out as suspects for this. They were people who’d had a bad thing happen and they vented on the guy who sold them insurance. All in all, there weren’t that many of them.

  “You were quick to share with her,” John said.

  Eric ignored him as he pulled up a web browser and started looking online for people who might have a beef with Peter Gamet. A uniformed officer had already cleared the man Gamet said came to his office yelling. He had a rock-solid alibi since he’d been arrested for assault during a bar brawl three days before the fire at Gamet’s insurance company. He hadn’t been able to post bail and was awaiting trial as a guest of the city.

  John laughed at him. “I’m just saying. You’ve turned a corner with Merritt McKenna.”

  Eric didn’t look up. He pointed his arm toward the Captain’s office. “That’s my boss. She said be nice. I am.”

  John laughed a little harder, but gave up and turned to his own computer.

  Eric waited until John was busy on his computer before pulling his phone out.

  Why did you call Sevier? he texted to Merritt.

  He could see the little dots indicating she was typing, then they stopped for a minute, then started again.

  When her text came through, the tone was cheeky. Hey jealous boy. I texted him so you wouldn’t think I was trying to take advantage of what happened between us last night.

  Eric scowled. Not because he didn’t like her answer. He did. It was because he didn’t know how to reply. It was his turn to do the little write, delete, write, delete routine that would show her the false starts of little dots on her end.

  In the end he settled for Ok.

  He was far from okay where Merritt McKenna was concerned. Really far from okay.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “Maybe my case load will clear enough someday for me to get here before Collin goes to bed. We could go on a real date.” Eric’s heart slammed in his chest as he said the words. He hadn’t taken a woman on a real date in more than a decade. Not since Tiff. It had been bar pickups only for a really long time.