Cold Pursuit - Carla Neggers [54]
He glanced back at her. “I’m glad for that, Jo.”
“I wish you’d been the one walking among the cherry blossoms with your father. I’m sorry it wasn’t.”
“Don’t be sorry.” He turned from the fire. “I want you to have a good memory of my father.”
“I never hated him,” she said quietly.
“I know. I didn’t, either.”
“He loved you, Elijah. He knew you butted heads with him as much as you did because you were both so much alike. And he didn’t drive us apart. If we’d been meant to be together, we’d have found a way. We were kids. We weren’t ready for what we thought we wanted.”
He kissed her on the forehead. “I still broke your heart, sweet pea.”
He didn’t wait for her response—not that she could have mustered one—and crossed the dark wood floor to the slider. He opened it and walked out onto the deck. “A half-moon tonight,” he said.
Jo joined him in the cold night air. “It’ll still be dark up on the mountain.”
“Maybe one night up there will give Nora her taste of winter camping and get her over the initial shock of her stepfather’s death, and she’ll head back in the morning.” He glanced sideways at her. “Her father asked you to look in on her. That’s it, right?”
“That’s it.”
“You didn’t know Ambassador Bruni well?”
She shook her head.
“And he and Thomas Asher didn’t hate each other?”
“I gather they tried to stay friends or at least get along for Nora’s sake. Thomas was concerned about her even before her stepfather was killed, because she’d dropped out of Dartmouth.”
“If she was afraid, would she go to him?”
Jo leaned against the railing. “Why would you ask that?”
“Because it’s a common-sense, routine question.”
“No.” She paused. “Something’s bothering you.”
“Coincidences,” he said. “Lots of coincidences.”
“You just said—”
“That was about my father thinking he knew I’d be shot. He was in Washington two weeks before he died—two weeks before Thomas Asher and his daughter happen to show up in Black Falls for a visit. Then Nora drops out of college, moves to Black Falls and takes up with a local boy. Now money’s gone missing, and her ambassador stepfather’s dead in a suspicious hit-and-run.” Elijah’s eyes were black in the night air as he faced Jo. “And you turn up.”
“Want to throw the wild turkeys into the mix, too?”
He gave her a sudden, quick smile. “Maybe.” But he gestured toward the deck stairs. “You should leave or I might kiss you again just to get that scowl off your face. You look like you want to arrest someone.”
“Elijah—”
He cut her off. “I need time, Jo,” he said quietly. “The thought of you and my father among the cherry blossoms…” He didn’t finish.
She nodded. “I’ll see you in the morning, unless the bogeyman comes in the middle of the night and you need a federal agent.”
“Right, Jo.” The sardonic smile was back. “I’ll scream for help.”
“Because you wouldn’t have any illegal firearms left over from your military career, now, would you?”
“Who says my military career is over?”
“No one around here. You’re the subject of lively rumors.”
“To be expected, I suppose. Make yourself that salad, Jo. I’ll open up a can of green beans to go with my chicken. Dinner another time.”
She got out of there, appreciating the cold air after being around Elijah. Her cabin was freezing. It was barely winterized—the propane heater couldn’t keep up. She sat on the ratty couch and wrapped herself in a fleece throw that a colleague had bought as a thank-you gift, or for self-preservation, in October.
Had someone been through the place?
It wasn’t the sort of call she planned to make to her boss. Gee, Mark, I got suspicious after the turkeys went nuts in the woods….
Truly, she thought, selling the cabins and the land to the Camerons made sense.
But that wasn’t what Drew Cameron necessarily had wanted.
“You’ll do the right thing…I know you will, Jo.”
He’d apologized, with a quiet emotion she’d never seen in him, for driving her and Elijah apart and told her he’d been seeing