His throat grew tight. He combed his fingers up through her hair. 'Yeah, you have. Every time you look at her, I can see how much you love her. That's thanking me, Caroline.'
They kissed. She was the first to pull back. 'When are you going to tell me?'
He kept his expression blank. 'Tell you what?'
'What's on your mind.'
'On my mind? Right now, you. You naked. What a turn-on your freckles are. I'm especially fond of the ones on your tits.'
She laughed but wasn't dissuaded by his joking. 'You're not going to tell me?'
'Nothing to tell.'
She searched his eyes for a moment, then murmured, 'Okay,' and returned her head to his chest. Except for a few whispered endearments, their conversation ended there. Occasionally Dodge would say something coarse that caused her to sigh, laugh, or blush. Or they used no words to express what they were feeling, and that was the most meaningful communication of all.
Finally she nuzzled his throat and mumbled sleepily, 'I don't want this to end, but I can't hold my eyes open any longer.'
He kissed her lips softly, then turned her away from him, pulling her hips up against his lap. 'I know you like to spoon.'
'And I know what you like.' She drew his hand to her breast and covered it with her own. 'They're not as pert as they were.'
'Pert is overrated. Now sleep.'
She did, falling quickly under. Dodge lay awake for a long while. He was bone tired, but, like Caroline, he didn't want to miss a nanosecond of this night together. He wouldn't waste a moment of it sleeping when he could be holding her, feeling her soft warmth, and listening to every dear breath she took.
And then there was that other thing, that niggling discontent that she had sensed in him, that unidentified something that lurked unseen at the back of his mind, gnawing at his subconscious like an insidious rodent, denying him physical repleteness and making peace of mind impossible.
In spite of her emotional turmoil, Berry had slept deeply and dreamlessly. However, she woke up at sunrise. She showered, dressed, and went downstairs to make coffee. Just as it finished brewing, Dodge joined her, looking sheepish and defensive at the same time. She looked past him toward the direction from which he had come--her mother's bedroom.
She curbed the temptation to tease him and instead offered him a cup of the fresh coffee. 'Thanks.' He added two spoonfuls of sugar, sipped, then said, 'That bracelet with the heart charm. Tell me about it.'
'It was one of several gifts Oren gave me over time.' She told him what she'd told Ski and Sheriff Drummond about Oren's refusal to take back his unwanted gifts. 'To avoid seeing him, I gave up trying to return them. Why do you ask now?'
'It crossed my mind that we never talked about it once we determined that Sally Buckland was wearing one identical to it. You didn't know that he'd given her one, too?'
She shook her head.
'Do you have yours here?'
'Upstairs. I brought everything Oren had given me when I came to Merritt.'
'Seems like you had an intuition. Like you might need this stuff for evidence.'
'Maybe that's a trait I inherited from you.'
The remark seemed to please him immensely. But he kept to the subject. 'Mind if I take a look at the bracelet?'
She went upstairs. When she returned a few minutes later, her mother was in the kitchen pouring herself a cup of coffee. She was disheveled but positively aglow. She gave Berry a shy smile and a mellow good morning, but rarely did her eyes wander from Dodge.
Berry had collected all the items Oren had given her into one small duffel bag. She unzipped it and dumped the contents onto the kitchen table, then sifted through the articles in search of the bracelet. When at first she didn't see it, she sorted through everything more carefully.
Then she looked at Dodge and Caroline with misapprehension. 'It's not here. How could it not be here? The last time I saw it, it was with all this other stuff.'
'When was that?' Dodge asked.
'I don't remember exactly.'
'Before you moved here, or since?'
'Since. I was trying to talk myself into making a clean sweep, getting rid of any reminders of him. I changed my mind, but the bracelet was here, I'm sure of it. It was the most personal of the gifts.'
'Maybe you removed it at some point and just don't remember.'
'Of course I would remember!' Then, immediately sorry for taking out her rising anxiety on her mother, she reached for her hand and gripped it. 'I would remember, Mother.' Sinking down into one of the chairs at the table, she moaned, 'You don't think--'
'That it was your bracelet on Sally Buckland's wrist?'
Dodge had finished the awful thought for her. She wanted to nullify it before it could become fact. 'It couldn't possibly have been. When would Oren have taken mine?'
Dodge cleared his throat. 'It's possible--just possible--that Starks was here.'
'Here? You mean, in this house?'
Berry and Caroline listened with incredulity as he told them about the photos that had been discovered in a trash can not far from the motel where Oren had been hiding until Davis Coldare walked in on him.
'Looked like he was getting the lay of the land, so to speak. There are shots of the house from every angle. Some of you,' he said uneasily. 'To get them, even using a telephoto lens, he had to be fairly close to the house. Maybe he was ballsy enough to have come inside when you weren't here and made himself at home.'
'He knew where to find your bedroom the night he shot Ben Lofland,' Caroline said.
Berry hugged herself, rubbing her hands over the goose bumps that had broken out on her arms. 'He went through my bureau drawers? Pawed through my things?' The thought made her physically ill.
'We don't know that he did. But it's possible.'
'I want to see the pictures,' Berry said.
'No you don't. Trust me.'
'I want to see them, Dodge.'
He cursed under his breath. Berry caught words of self-chastisement for telling her about the damn pictures. 'You'll have to ask Ski,' he said. 'He made me give them back to him.'
Just then his cell phone rang. He checked caller ID. 'Speak of the devil.' He answered, listened, then said, 'On our way.' He disconnected. 'Starks is showing signs of coming around.'
'It's an ugly scene,' Ski told them as they joined him outside the ICU.
Inside it, the hospital bed was surrounded by an attending physician and several nurses, all doing something different, moving with a sense of urgency while trying to give assurance to their patient, whose agitation was obvious. Oren was struggling against the restraints securing him to the bed.
A nurse, noticing them, came to the door. 'You can wait down the hall, Deputy Nyland. I'll come and get you if he starts to speak coherently.' It was a subtle suggestion for them to relocate.
They moved as a group to a small waiting room. Berry and her mother sat down on a love seat. 'This whole ordeal ...,' Caroline whispered, shaking her head remorsefully. She never finished the thought. Those words said enough.
Dodge took a chair. He removed a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, fiddled
