“Okay, Gard. I’ll be back in a couple minutes.”

“No rush,” Gard told her assistant. Elizabeth Hardy was in no hurry, and neither was she. She had farm calls to make in the morning, but one thing she had plenty of now was time.

Chapter Two

Jenna fumbled in the near dark on the bedside table for her jauntily jingling cell phone. She recognized the personalized ringtone. Alice. A garish rainbow collage, reflections from the neon signs and passing cars on the street below, shot through the open drapes and slashed across the ceiling. The first thin fingers of gold hinted at the coming dawn.

“It’s the middle of the night, Alice.” Jenna’s voice sounded scratchy and worn in the otherwise quiet room. They hadn’t slept, and her brain was hazy from the nonstop sex. When she wasn’t on the brink of orgasm, in the throes of orgasm, or breathlessly struggling to recover from an orgasm, she’d been busy repaying the favor. Brin was extraordinarily talented and Jenna did not want to be outdone. Satisfying her bedmates wasn’t so much a matter of pride as it was a matter of giving as good as she got, or better. She didn’t want to be beholden, not even in the bedroom.

“This is your wake-up call, sweet thing.”

“I’ve got fifteen more minutes.” Brin’s mouth teased between her legs and Jenna laced her fingers through the thick, damp hair at the back of Brin’s neck, tugging slightly to signal her to wait.

“I hope you got some sleep,” Alice said briskly. “The plane lands at eleven and we’ve got just enough time to collect our bags and stop at the hotel before the one p.m. Borders signing.”

“I know.” Jenna tried to shift away and Brin followed, ignoring her silent command. Brin continued with the maddening cycle of licking and sucking that had kept Jenna on the edge of coming for what felt like a century—driving her to the peak and then, just as she started to crest, easing the pressure until Jenna crashed back down again, whimpering and cursing while Brin laughed. Jenna’s thighs tightened and she started to climb faster.

“Did you fall back to sleep?” Alice asked.

“No. I’m here.” Jenna struggled to keep her voice even and calm but her toes were curling with the first whispers of release humming through her blood. So close now. So close.

“Jenna?” Alice said suspiciously. “Tell me you didn’t work all night.”

Jenna bit her lip and yanked on Brin’s hair. She didn’t care if it hurt—Brin knew she was torturing her, and she was not going to come with Alice Smith on the other end of the line. Brin finally relented and chuckled softly, her breath dancing over Jenna’s twitching clitoris. Jenna arched off the bed at the electric shock of pleasure. God she wanted to come.

Drawing in a breath, she said, “Alice Ann. Stop harassing me. I’ll see you in the lobby.” She disconnected and threw her cell phone onto the floor. “Oh my God. I was two seconds away from coming all over you with my agent listening.”

“Don’t wait any longer on my account,” Brin murmured and drew Jenna back into the warm haven of her mouth.

Jenna closed her eyes, her body on autopilot while she mentally reviewed what she needed to do before heading to the airport. She was prepared for Borders and she wasn’t reading until tonight at Wald—

“Oh!”

The sharp edge of orgasm penetrated her consciousness and pleasure swamped her synapses. The climax was raw, hard, blinding after the long delay, and she lost herself for a few seconds until she could refocus on what mattered. The galleys…she needed to proof them on the plane. She’d have just enough time.

At 5:15 a.m. Gard stored her emergency colic kit and med box in the back of her Ford F150, locked the cap down, and climbed behind the wheel. Bursts of pinks and purples flamed over the Green Mountains, and though she’d seen dawn break thousands of times before, she paused to watch. The pyrotechnic brilliance had eluded description by the finest poets and painters and songwriters for centuries, and as she sat absorbing the splendor, the tight place in the center of her chest eased a fraction. She knew the ache for what it was. A core of loneliness she’d learned to live with and could usually ignore. Still, simple pleasures like this helped assuage the distant pain that never left.

Frantic barking finally drew her gaze from the spectacle and across the hard-packed expanse of the paddock beside her two-story white Greek revival farmhouse to the open doors of a red wood barn three times the size of her house. Her yellow Lab raced toward the truck at breakneck speed, and she barely managed to lean across the front seat and shove the door open before the four-legged rocket propelled itself into the front seat.

“Beam,” Gard chided and reached over to close the door. “When have I ever left without you?”

Sunbeam graced her with a wide doggy smile before planting her paws on the armrest and sticking her head out the open window.

“Hold on.” Gard shifted into gear and headed down the drive to the rutted dirt road that bordered her thirty acres to Route 7, a two-lane blacktop road and the closest thing to a highway to be found in the county. Her farm backed up against the Green Mountain National Forest and her nearest neighbors were a mile away. At night she couldn’t see their lights or hear any sound other than coyotes howling, owls hooting, and the sonorous rumble of bullfrogs in the small pond out behind her house. A far cry from the never-ending bustle of Manhattan. She reached over and stroked Beam’s back. The solid, warm body under her palm and the quick splash of a wet tongue over her forearm banished the familiar melancholy.

She had been looking forward to a morning of routine calls until John McFarland had called at 4 a.m. to say one of his broodmares was colicking. She was headed there now and hoped the situation wasn’t so far advanced she’d need to operate. Anticipating an easy day, she’d told Rob to take the day off since they’d been up half the night seeing to Elizabeth Hardy. Rob’s stint in the Navy Medical Corps made him an excellent surgical assistant and she primarily used him on the afternoons when she performed surgeries in her clinic. He rarely went out on field calls with her unless she expected to need help with a seriously ill large animal. The owners usually provided ample assistance. Sometimes they wanted to provide more help than she actually needed, but she had learned very quickly upon setting up practice in the countryside that the best way to keep her clients happy was to let them give her advice on everything from the proper way to birth a calf to the appropriate treatment for founder. Once in a while they actually listened to her advice. John McFarland, fortunately, was a savvy farmer who knew when to ask for help.

Just as she was about to turn onto the long gravel drive to the farm, her cell phone rang.

“Davis,” she said.

“Gard, it’s—”

“Hi, Rina,” Gard said to the county sheriff.

“I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not we talk so often you know my voice.” Rina laughed.

Rina had a nice laugh, deep and mellow like aged scotch. Gard imagined Rina’s blue eyes and short wavy brown hair, her quick smile, her small tight body. Rina had been flirting in a friendly, test-the-waters kind of way for the last few months, but Gard hadn’t given her any openings to take it further. She liked Rina, and she wasn’t interested in complicating a good relationship for casual sex. Since even casual demanded more intimacy than she could do, that didn’t leave much. Which was one reason she was celibate. She didn’t want to think about the other reasons.

“Pretty early for a social call,” Gard said, chasing away the dark memories.

“Believe me, I really wish it were. You busy?”

“In the truck.”

“Damn, I forgot how early you start.” Rina’s voice dropped. “Although I rather like morning people.”

“I’m your woman, then.”

“So you keep promising.” When she next spoke, her tone was more serious. “I’ve got the information on Elizabeth Hardy’s next of kin. At least I’m pretty sure I do.”

“Hold on.” Gard kept a small clipboard with a pad of paper and an old-fashioned wooden pencil stuck to her dashboard with a suction cup for taking messages on the fly. Sliding the pencil from the clasp, she said, “Go ahead.”

“I tracked down a Frank Hardy who seems to be the grandson of Elizabeth Hardy’s cousin on her father’s side, once or twice removed. He’s dead, there’s no wife listed, but there is a daughter, Jenna. At least I think she’s his daughter. I got lost in the interdepartmental computer archives trying to track birth records and can’t verify that until the records room at the courthouse in Harrisburg opens at eight and I can talk to an actual person. Looks like they lived somewhere out near Lancaster, PA. You want her number or do you want to wait?”

Gard thought about it. Based on her comparison of Elizabeth Hardy’s body temperature to the ambient temperature inside the old farmhouse, which was a good ten degrees cooler than outside, she had deduced that the elderly woman had died approximately twenty-four hours before. She did not like to delay informing the next of kin for a protracted period of time. Somehow leaving the dead in limbo, unmourned, bothered her.

“Give it to me. I’ll call after I finish at McFarland’s. I’ll contact you after I talk to her and let you know if she’s the right person.”

Rina rattled off a number and Gard scratched it down.

“Will there be an autopsy?” Rina asked.

“Not unless the family insists. I didn’t find anything suspicious about her death.”

“Okay then. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll call the courthouse and keep chasing the records.”

“Thanks.” Gard clipped the pen back on the dash. “Sorry to drag you out of bed so early for this.”