Ryan came out of the front bedroom, Liz’s former bedroom. His thick dark hair was perfectly messy, and his navy Brooklyn Engine 205 FDNY logo T-shirt clung to his muscled torso like a second skin. Liz thought she saw a tattoo on his upper arm, but she looked away, not wanting him to think she was interested.
“You’re late,” he said brusquely.
“How can I be late? There was no set time. You said ‘morning’. This is morning.”
“Wow, you always go that extra mile to irritate, don’t you, Bossy Pants?”
Now who was being childish?
Ryan stepped into the kitchen, and Liz sat at the small, rectangular table in the tiny breakfast nook. There were marks in the wood from the impression her own pens and pencils had left after years of doing homework at the table. There was the faint indent of the cosine symbol, bringing back memories of her father sitting with her night after night as she tried to master trigonometry—her least favorite subject, unlike English.
“Want some?” Ryan held up a glass carafe of coffee, and she inhaled the rich scent of the dark roasted beans. “I make a mean cup of coffee, taught by the best.”
She thought about refusing, but this game they were playing was getting old. She didn’t have room in her world for a Ryan, or any other male. And if Pops had taught him how to make the coffee, then she wanted in. “Sure.”
He put the pot back under the coffeemaker, left the kitchen, sat at the table, and began thumbing through a file folder bulging with papers. Without looking up, he said, “Well, princess, what are you waiting for? Pour yourself a cup of joe and let’s get going.”
Liz banged her fist on the table, her face prickly with heat. “You say, the ‘P word’ one more time, you’ll be sorry. And that is a threat. You don’t want to cross me. You obviously know what happened when someone else did.” She didn’t care. Let him believe what he wanted. She had nothing to prove to anyone. Ryan had hit the largest of her many raw nerves. Travis’s nickname for Liz had been “Princess,” and because of their age difference, it had always made her feel uncomfortable. “Princess” was more of an endearment a father might call his daughter, not his girlfriend.
The same night when she and Travis had celebrated a year of being together, they’d both fallen apart. Liz had first met the Pulitzer Prize–winning author while at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, researching Let the Wind Roar. They met in the archives, both reaching for the same pencil to fill out a microfilm request. Travis was gathering information on WWII for the sequel to The McAvoy Brothers, and Liz was researching WWI for her novel.
Travis’s book The McAvoy Inheritance would never be published, and Liz was to blame. Or so everyone thought.
Liz looked at Ryan’s smug face. Jerk! She got up, stomped over to the kitchen, grabbed a mug from the cupboard, and poured herself some coffee. After returning the carafe to the coffeemaker with a thud, she opened the fridge, took out a carton of milk, smelled it, wrinkled her nose, and said, “Yuck,” even though the milk was fine. When she put the milk back, she slammed the door extra hard, rattling the contents inside.
She hated drinking her coffee black, but it was well worth it when she saw Ryan glance inside his mug for curdled milk. Score one for the good guys. Liz changed her mind about not playing games—let the jousting commence.
When she sat back down at the table, they faced each other like a married couple in a divorce proceeding. Ryan insisted they discuss her father’s case and what role each of them would play, before he would tell her what Captain Netherton had told him last night.
“Okay. I’ve fulfilled my side of the bargain,” Liz said a few minutes later. “I promise to work with you on Dad’s case, but I also know we might have to postpone it, especially after everything that happened last night.” She got up, went back to the kitchen, and filled her cup with coffee, then without thinking, she took out the milk from the fridge and poured it into her cup.
From behind, she heard, “Touché.”
She came back and sat at the table. “Okay. Spill it. Your turn. Start with what you learned from the first responders.”
Ryan opened the folder in front of him and took out a legal-sized piece of paper with handwritten notes. He noticed Liz looking at the paper. “I take notes on everything. A sign of a good investigator.”
What Ryan didn’t know was that Liz was looking more at what was sticking out of the folder—a ripped-out page from a newspaper. The header read The Daily Post, with a date that coincided with the morning after her and Travis’s night of terror. She would bet her life that the thick sheaf of papers in the folder had as much to do with her as they did with her father’s case and Regina’s murder.
Ryan said, “Captain Netherton made the nine-one-one call at seven forty. When the first responders got to the scene, a limo was waiting under the port cochere at the entrance to the hotel. The fire and rescue guy I talked to didn’t go inside, but he did see David Worth when he was carried out on a stretcher by the ambulance crew. He’d been stabbed once in the back on his right side below his shoulder blade. David seemed pretty coherent and kept asking about his wife. Then one of the officers from the sheriff’s department started asking him questions. My guy overheard David tell the officer that he’d
