“The tape’s down,” she reminded him. “It’s been down months.”

“It’s still a crime scene.”

She took another step and again her spine went straight. “Mr. Harker gave this wood to the city of Carnal ten years ago, Detective Keaton. It’s a park. Public property. I have every right to be here.”

There it was. The backbone again and even having seen it before, he was still surprised.

“City ordinance states all parks close to the public at ten o’clock unless they’re a campsite,” Chace shot back and through the moonlight, he watched her press her lips together.

Then she unpressed them and whispered, “Oh.”

And that one syllable was melodious and cute too, f**k him.

She went on, “I didn’t know that.”

“Now you do.”

“Maybe I should be leaving,” she suggested.

“No maybe about it, Miz Goodknight,” he returned.

“Faye,” she whispered, her eyes locked to his.

Chace didn’t reply.

Faye Goodknight didn’t leave.

Instead, she took two more steps toward him before she stopped only three feet away.

When she did, she asked softly, “Are you okay?”

He should have lied and said yes. Or maybe not answered and reminded her she was leaving.

He didn’t do either of these.

“Miz Goodknight, it’s two in the morning and I’m in the cold in the wood where my wife was murdered. Do you think I’m okay?”

Instantly, still soft, she replied, “No.”

He remembered himself then he reminded her, “You were leaving.”

She didn’t leave. She took another step forward, tipped her ear toward her shoulder but jutted her face slightly toward him and peered up at him, examining his features.

This, too, was cute.

While he was dealing with that, her soft voice came at him. “Did you love her?”

“You know the answer to that,” he returned immediately and she did. Everyone did. Chace Keaton made it abundantly clear how he felt about his wife and not only just to his wife.

She righted her head on her shoulders and advised, “Maybe you should talk to someone about, uh… what you’re feeling.”

“You volunteering for that?” Chace asked and his tone was cutting.

She didn’t even blink before she offered, “If you like.”

“No offense, Faye, but the person I pick to lay the f**ked up shit in my head on is not gonna be a woman who breathes and eats and works but lives in a fantasy world. You can’t handle your own life, which is a good life, far’s I can see, without escaping. No f**kin’ way you can handle the shit I got in my head.”

It was an ass**le remark but it worked. Her shoulders slumped slightly and she took a step back.

“I’m just trying to be nice,” she pointed out the obvious.

“What would be nice is if you’d haul your ass back up the trail and leave me be.”

She didn’t move. Not for long moments.

Then she leaned slightly into him and said gently, “I don’t think you should be left be. I think you’re dealing with something heavy, you’re obviously doing it alone.” She threw a mitten-covered hand out to indicate the area, “You need to unload it, Chace.”

Christ.

Fuck.

Christ.

That voice, quiet, gentle, so f**king sweet saying his name, her eyes soft on him.

Fuck.

Better than he could have imagined.

Better than he ever could have dreamed.

And not his.

Never to be his.

Which meant finally hearing her say his name was torture.

“All right,” he started, “I’ve been trying to be nice –”

Her head jerked and she cut him off, her tone surprised, and again, Christ, f**king cute, “You have?”

“Yeah,” he fired back. “I have and you’ll know I have when I say, Miz Goodknight, I do not want your concern. I don’t want your listening ear. I don’t want your company. What I want is for you to walk your fat ass up the trail and leave me the f**k alone.”

He watched her body lock and her pale face in the moonlight become even paler.

This lasted less than half a second before she turned on her boot and ran from the clearing. She did it so fast, he could see the midnight shadow of her long hair streaming behind her even after she’d left the clearing and hit the trail.

Chace Keaton’s eyes didn’t leave the trail for a long while after she’d disappeared.

Kiss me, Chace.

He heard it in his head and he closed his eyes.

You need to unload it, Chace.

That time he heard Faye and his eyes shot open.

Just what he did not need.

Another demon.

“Fuck,” he growled, his eyes moving through the clearing, seeing nothing, hearing nothing.

Nothing there.

It wasn’t talking.

Fuck.

Like he had, night after night, Chace Keaton strode though the clearing to the trail and went home.

* * * * *

Two days later…

“Would it kill you to come to dinner?”

Chace watched over the counter as Shambles made his coffee. He felt the muscle jump in his cheek as he held the phone to his ear thinking, yes. It would kill him to go to dinner at his mother and father’s house.

Or, more to the point, it would drive him to murder if he had to breathe his father’s air.

“Ma,” he said into the phone, “like I told you, I’m busy.”

“But I thought you said they were hiring new officers and things were getting back to normal,” she replied.

“They are but it isn’t normal. Things are busy. Very busy. When they cleaned house, we lost practically everyone. Those new officers have to be trained and after what went down and the time it lasted, the citizens of Carnal aren’t gonna adjust in a few months to a Force they can trust. They got a problem, they still call each other rather than the Police Department. Then, when that goes south, and it usually goes south, we have to clean up the mess. No way I could make dinner this week.”

“How about next week?” she pushed as Shambles poured frothed milk from the little stainless steel pitcher into his drink.

“How about the weekend after next, I come to Aspen and take you out to dinner?” Chace suggested.

Her voice was disappointed when she replied, “But, you know your father always goes to that golf tournament in Florida the third weekend in February.”

He absolutely did.

He also absolutely knew his father was not attending a golf tournament in Florida but doing something else that could, conceivably, require sporting equipment but its usages were not something his mother could comprehend.

Unfortunately, Chace could. He just tried not to.

Shambles turned, smiling at him and shoving the white lid on top of his coffee.

Chace jerked up his chin to Shambles but said into his phone, “Is Dad’s attendance required at our dinner?”

“Chace, you never see your father,” she replied quietly.

“And, Ma, you know that’s by design,” Chace returned just as quietly, pulling out his wallet, flipping it open and yanking out a bill. He handed it to Shambles, Shambles set his coffee on the counter and turned to the cash register as Chace kept talking. “Now, are we on the weekend after next?”

She ignored his question and whispered, “I wish you two would heal this breach.”

That was not going to happen.

Ever.

And this was because he and his father did not have a breach that could heal. It used to be just a breach, years ago when Chace just wanted out of the house that he grew up in and out from under his father’s thumb.

Now it was not a breach. It was a chasm he sure as f**k wasn’t going to cross and if his father tried, Chace would shoot him.

“Ma –”

“I’m worried about you, what with Misty gone. I mean, who’s taking care of you?”

His mother didn’t know this, she wasn’t Misty’s biggest fan either, though she tried to hide it just as Chace tried to hide from his mother the fact that he hated his wife, but Misty never took care of him.

She tried that for a while, after she finally figured out that he was not going to fall head over heels in love with her because she was great at giving head. This was mainly since he wouldn’t allow her to touch him and didn’t sleep in the same bed with her.

Once she realized that her usual tricks were not going to win his heart, she’d branched out. And her branching out came in the form of her trying to be a good wife. She was a decent housekeeper, a decent cook. All this went to shit when he eventually refused to eat her food, left the house more often than not before she got out of bed, came home late and never commented on her loving care or how she kept their home. Finally, she started to get nervous and f**ked everything up.

He’d been hard on her and, at the time, felt she’d deserved it. She had trapped him into marriage after having whacked, sick-fuck sex with his father, doing this while conspiring with a dirty cop to tape it. Then she’d blackmailed his Dad and forced Chace into servitude not only to his father and his cronies, all of whom were under a local man’s thumb, but also to a crew of dirty cops that were so dirty, they were made of pure filth.

Yeah, he thought she deserved that.

Now she was dead and how she got dead, he had that and his treatment of her for their very long, very unhappy, five year marriage living as demons in his head too.

“I’m thirty-five, Ma. I can take care of myself,” he told his mother while accepting change from Shambles and tossing a dollar in the tip bowl.

“But I worry about you.” She was back to whispering, this time sad and concerned and, because he loved his mother, it killed.

He knew she worried. He was an only child. She could have no more. She was lucky to have him and she felt that acutely. She was also flighty, sensitive and nervous by nature. Therefore, she’d smothered him growing up, terrified the very air had it out for him.

Her tactics for raising her son clashed violently with her husband’s.

Valerie Keaton was all about protection, love and care.

Trane Keaton was all about making his son a man.

This was not conducive to a loving, secure, understanding, supportive home.

Therefore, as he’d promised himself starting at around age eight, the minute Chace could get out, he did. He worked at it, hard, and he got it.

And he never went back.

“Don’t worry,” he assured her quietly. “I’m fine. Just busy.” He replaced his wallet, grabbed his drink and gave Shambles another chin lift. He got one of the undeniably talented but definitely a full blown hippie proprietor of the coffee shop’s goofy grins in return and went on, “Though, I’d be better, my mother let me take her out to dinner the weekend after next.”

He turned to the door just as it opened, the bell over it ringing and, her eyes to her eReader, Faye Goodknight wandered in.