Criminal Deception

He parked his bike out of the dog’s range before asking what she wanted.

“My pockets are empty except for keys. Buy me a diet cherry limeade, and it’ll be my treat next time.”

He went to the window, where one of his after-school regulars greeted him with a smile too warm and friendly for a girl half his age. “Hey, Joe. You want your usual?”

“Yeah, plus a large diet cherry limeade.”

The girl-he remembered she ordered a tall caramel-drizzle frappucino every time but couldn’t recall her name-looked past him to the table, and her glossy pink mouth settled into a pout. “I’ve never seen her before. Who is she?”

“Her name is Liz. She’s…” His brother’s ex-girlfriend? Maybe current? The woman he would have gladly gotten hot and dirty with if she hadn’t said the magic words-Remember Josh. How the hell could he forget him? “She’s new in town.”

Caramel-drizzle-Carmie, that was her name-tossed her blond ponytail over her shoulder. “I hadn’t heard you were seeing anyone.”

“I hadn’t either.”

“So are you guys, what? Like, friends?”

He glanced over his shoulder at Liz, sitting now, with Elizabeth bracing her paws on her thigh. She was scratching the dog behind the ears, and the pup was quivering from the tip of her nose all the way down to her tail.

Joe imagined he might do the same if Liz got physical with him.

Tapping nails drew his attention back to Carmie, who was still pouting. “Yeah,” he replied. Friends was as good a description as any.

With a disgruntled sound, Carmie turned away to fix their drinks, then set the cups in front of him and made change. “The food will be out in a minute.”

He stifled the urge to offer to wait and returned to the table. Elizabeth immediately tried to climb into his lap, stopping only when Liz gave her a stern No.

“Teach me to do that,” he said. “She’s lived with me forty-eight hours and so far ‘dinner’ is the only word she’s acknowledged.”

“It’s all a matter of attitude.”

“Yeah. She’s got it and I don’t.” He settled into the plastic chair, crossed one ankle over the other knee and gazed into the distance. If he’d shown up at Ellie’s, Tia Maria’s or Chantal’s with Liz, the gossip would have spread across town by the time they got home. But none of these kids besides Carmie even noticed them, and she would have forgotten by the time she got home.

That was good. If people were going to gossip about him, he’d rather have them wondering if he was gay than what was between him and Liz.

Besides, of course, Josh.

“You never answered me.” With one elegantly slender hand, Liz gestured toward Charlie’s. “On the way here, you called leaving Chicago ‘running away.’ Is that how you see it? How you see yourself? As a coward?”

He had hoped she would forget the question or at least give him the courtesy of pretending to forget. He’d never talked about this with anyone-not that he had many people to talk to. It wasn’t exactly a topic he could bring up with his parents. Even the slightest reminder, and his dad teared up and his mom’s behavior bordered on frantic: cleaning, blathering, even spontaneous bursts of prayer.

His muscles were so tense that it felt as if shrugging might make them crackle. “Thousands of people are victimized every year, and they don’t pack up and run off to find someplace safer to live. They don’t break with their past and start all over someplace new. They don’t hide.”

She took a long suck on her drink before giving her own more convincing shrug. “You didn’t change your name or your appearance. You haven’t isolated yourself in the back of beyond. You don’t carry a gun or view everyone with suspicion. You have a business. You have friends and neighbors, and you’ve taken on new obligations. You go out at night. You talk to strangers. You’re not in hiding.”

“I’m not in Chicago either.”

Another delicate wave of those fingers, this time dismissing his argument. “Staying in Chicago wouldn’t have made you any stronger or braver. People there wanted your brother dead. Since you happen to look exactly like him, getting out was the smart thing to do, at least until those people are put in jail.”

“Josh isn’t going to make any effort to help with that, is he?” The bitterness was heavier in his voice than he’d intended. God knew, he felt a lot of resentment toward Josh, but he owed him at least a little fairness. If leaving town and staying away was the smart thing for Joe, then wasn’t it doubly smart for Josh since he’d been the Mulroneys’ target in the first place?

Carmie delivered his burger and fries, along with a handful of napkins and a long look for Liz, and the dog immediately returned to his side, greedily eyeing the food.

“Maybe he’ll surprise everyone,” Liz said as he handed a pinched-off piece of hamburger bun to the puppy. “Maybe his conscience will force him to appear for the trial.”

Joe laughed, and the tension between his shoulders eased. “You’ve mistaken Josh for someone else. He doesn’t have a conscience.”

“He has one. He just doesn’t listen to it very often.” She pried the top off her cup, then fished out the cherry. “Do you intend to go back to Chicago once the trial is over?”

It was an easy answer, something he’d thought about and decided right after he’d moved to Copper Lake. But as he watched her dangle the cherry by its stem, raise it into the air, tilt her head back and open her mouth, all conscious thought left him. His mind went blank, his lungs burned for air, his skin heated and arousal rushed in his ears and through his body.

She closed her teeth around the cherry, pulled the stem loose, then chewed, making a soft mmm sound. Dots of sweat popped out on his forehead, and his hand was unsteady as he reached for his root beer, gulping half of it in one swallow.

“Is that a hard question?”

Question? Oh, yeah, Chicago. “No. I decided when I bought the shop that if I liked it here, I would stay.”

“And you like it.”

“I do.” And I’m liking it more every day. “It’s a different life.”

“Quieter,” she said with a nod.

“And slower.”

“You work long hours.”

“But I worked eighty-hour weeks in Chicago. I’m my own boss now. I get to make the decisions.” He chewed a bite of burger and swallowed slowly before continuing. “At the investment firm, I didn’t remember the names of most of the people I worked with. I talked to my parents every couple days, but I hardly ever saw them. I scheduled time for dates and sex. My focus was on my career above everything else.”

Like Josh’s focus had been on himself.

Maybe they’d had more in common than just shared genes.

“And here your focus is on living a fuller life. Quality versus quantity. You don’t have to schedule dating and sex anymore.” She paused only long enough to grab a handful of Elizabeth ’s leash as the puppy stiffened when kids climbed out of a nearby car. “So why aren’t you doing it?”

His throat required another gulp of root beer before he could speak, and then his voice was hoarse. “Having sex?”

“Actually, I meant dating,” she said drily, “but the other’s interesting, too. Are you doing it?”

If he’d been wearing a tie, as he had every day for years, he would have been choking on it. “None of your business.”

“Mrs. Wyndham thinks you might be seeing a girlfriend when you borrow her car for out-of-town trips.”

“I thought she wondered if I was gay.”

Liz shook her head, her curls rippling. “The possibility occurred to her, and she was probably prepared to be very PC and accepting of it if it were true, but she’d prefer to think you’ve got a sweetheart somewhere. Do you?”

He polished off the last bit of his burger and crumpled the cold fries in the greasy wrapper. “I’ll make you a deal, Liz. I’ll tell you all about my sex life right after you tell me why you’re looking for Josh.”

For an instant, he thought, she looked tempted, as if one bit of information might be worth trading for the other. Then she shook her head, a wry smile curving her lips. “See, that’s the problem,” she said, parroting his words from earlier that day. “I don’t care about your sex life.”

For two years, neither had he. This was a hell of a time for things to change.

And a hell of a person to cause the change.

Chapter 5

Friday started out bright and sunny, but by mid-morning, the sky had turned dark. The wind picked up, bringing rain in a gentle fall, exactly what Mrs. Wyndham’s newly planted flowers needed. Liz would have preferred a deluge. She would have kicked off her shoes, gone out into the grass and let it drench her, washing away the edginess and the attraction that was too damn close to becoming something more.

Important.

Real.

Something she didn’t need, didn’t want, wouldn’t have.

Her windows were open, and she was sitting cross-legged on the sofa, the wicker creaking each time she moved. It was a comforting sound, already growing familiar after so short a time. With her laptop balanced on her knees, she checked her e-mail, let her mother know that she’d be home for a visit at the first opportunity, then signed off to face the photograph of Josh that served as wallpaper.

He and Joe were identical, right down to the gleam in their blue eyes and the tilt to their smiles, but she’d never had a problem telling them apart, though it hadn’t been the obvious things like personal style. Josh had been cocky, sure of his appeal, comfortable in denim and leather, while Joe had been the poster boy for career success.

The difference for her had been simpler: Joe attracted her; Josh didn’t.