“Well, uh…” Her head tipped to the side and her eyes remained on him. “What are you doing here?”
“My wife was murdered here,” he replied instantly, tersely and with obvious anger and immediately wished he didn’t. This was because he watched her face flinch at the same time she took a step back.
It took her a moment to call it up but she did. She straightened her spine and whispered, “I’m sorry,” he watched her swallow, “I’m so sorry about Misty, Detective Keaton.”
“No one’s sorry about Misty,” he returned.
For some reason he was unable to stop himself from being an asshole and he watched as she scrunched her nose, another flinch. This one cute.
Really cute.
Fuck him.
But he was right. No one in town was sorry his wife was dead. Not even, if he dug down deep, Chace. He wouldn’t have wanted that for her, not that. Not even if they just filled her with holes rather than beating her and debasing her before they did it.
That didn’t mean he didn’t want her way the fuck out of his life. In another state. Fuck, in another fucking country.
He did want that.
He’d even prayed for it, that was how much he wanted it.
And now she was very, very much out of his life.
“That isn’t true.” Her whispered words came at him and he focused on her again. “I mean, you know, she wasn’t, uh… Miss Popularity but what was done to her –”
Chace cut her off, “Let’s get to why you’re here, Miz Goodknight.”
He saw her moon-shadowed teeth bite her bottom lip and she looked around. He’d been a cop for a while. Because of this, he knew she was buying time to come up with a plausible lie.
So he prompted impatiently, “Miz Goodknight.”
She looked back at him and said in her quiet, appealing voice, “Faye.”
“What?”
He heard her clear her throat and she said, louder this time, “Faye. My name is Faye.”
“I know that,” he informed her, his tone no less short, maybe even more so.
“Well, you can, uh… you know, call me that,” she invited.
“Great,” he bit off. “Now you wanna answer my question?”
“No, actually, uh… not really.” she replied and Chace stared.
He did this because he was surprised.
She was pretty, fuck, unbelievably pretty. Thick, straight, long, dark auburn hair with natural red highlights. Hair that shined so much it fucking gleamed. A body she didn’t show off by any stretch of the imagination but that didn’t mean a man couldn’t see she had curves in all the right places and hers were attractively ample. She wasn’t tall, she wasn’t short. Tall enough she could wear heels and he’d still have to bend his neck to take her mouth. And she had a pretty mouth with full lips that were so pink it looked like they would taste like bubblegum. She also had high, rounded, extraordinary cheekbones that gave testimony to a fact everyone in town knew, she had Native American blood in her ancestry.
And her eyes. Clear light blue. Absolute. Not gray-blue. Blue. He’d never seen a blue so perfect, so pure, so beautiful and sure as fuck not the color of someone’s eyes.
But she was quiet. She was shy. It wasn’t like she was a hermit or invisible. She went to work. She had lunch at the diner. She went to the grocery store, post office, the Italian place, La-La Land for her coffees. She had friends. She had a huge-ass family and she was close to them.
But everyone knew she lived in a book. She didn’t date. She didn’t go to Bubba’s bar and tie one on. Chace saw her in La-La Land drinking a coffee and eating one of Shambles’s cakes, her nose in a book or her hand wrapped around one of those eReaders. Chace saw her at the diner, same pose. Christ, more than once in his years in that town, he’d seen her wandering down a grocery store aisle, walking out of the post office, out of the library, her head bent, eyes trained to a book.
Him catching her for whatever reason she was in Harker’s Wood at two in the morning, he would not expect she’d have the courage to do anything but answer his questions. Maybe haltingly. But she’d do it.
He would never expect she’d refuse.
“I’m afraid that answer’s unacceptable, Miz Goodknight,” he informed her.
“Faye,” she corrected quietly.
“Whatever the fuck,” he clipped. “Now, again, what are you doing here?”
For several long moments she studied him before she took half a step toward him but stopped abruptly and asked softly, “Do you come here a lot?”
“Not sure that’s your business,” he answered.
“But you are sure it’s your business to know why I come here?” she returned, not testy or sharp, just careful.
“It’s a crime scene, Miz Goodknight.”
“Faye.”
He leaned in and bit out a curt, “Faye,” and again wished he didn’t because her nose scrunched again. Another flinch. The cute kind. He buried his reaction to learning that the town’s pretty, curvy, probably virgin librarian, who he once marked as the women he wanted to make his before his life turned to shit, could be cute. Then he pressed on, “This is a crime scene.”
“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, fuck 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 fucked 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 fuckin’ way you can handle the shit I got in my head.”