Cold Case Files on A&E flashed on the television screen and Maddie tossed the remote on the sofa beside her. She put her feet up on the coffee table and jotted down her impressions of Meg. Then she wrote a list of questions she intended to ask and got as far as “What do you recall about the night your parents died?” when the doorbell rang.

It was nine-thirty, and she looked through the peephole at the only man who’d ever been in her house or stood on her porch. It had been over a week since she’d kissed Mick inside his office at Mort’s. Eight days since he’d untied her dress and made her ache for him. Tonight he wasn’t wearing his happy face, but her body didn’t seem to mind.

A sharp tug pulled deep in the pit of her belly as she opened the door.

“I just talked to Meg,” he said as he stood there with his hands on his hips, all male belligerence and seething testosterone.

“Hello, Mick.”

“I thought I made it clear that you stay away from my sister.”

“And I thought I made it clear that I don’t take orders from you.” Maddie folded her arms beneath her breasts and simply looked at him. The first pale shadows of night painted him in a faint gray light and made his eyes appear a startling blue. Too bad he was so bossy.

They stared at each other for several prolonged moments before he dropped his hands to his sides and said, “Are we going to stand here all night staring at each other? Or are you going to invite me in?”

“Maybe.” She’d invite him in eventually, but she wasn’t going to be all happiness and sunshine about it. “Are you going to be rude?”

“I’m never rude.”

She lifted a brow.

“I’ll try to be nice.”

Which was kind of half-assed, Maddie thought. “Are you going to try and keep your tongue out of my mouth?”

“That depends. Are you going to keep your hands off my dick?”

“Jerk.” She turned and walked into the living room, leaving him to let himself in.

The yellow legal pad sat face up on the coffee table and she turned it over as he came into the room.

“I know Meg told you to call her.”

Maddie reached for the remote and turned off Cold Case. “Yes, she did.”

“You can’t.”

She straightened. It was so typical of him to think he could tell her what to do. He stood in her house, tall and imposing, as if he were king of her castle. “I thought you might have learned by now that I don’t follow your orders.”

“This isn’t a game, Maddie.” He wore a black Mort’s polo shirt tucked into a pair of Levi’s resting low on his hips. “You don’t know Meg. You don’t know how she gets.”

“Then why don’t you tell me?”

“Right,” he scoffed. “So you can write about her in your book?”

“I told you that I’m not writing about you or your sister.” She sat on the arm of the sofa and put one foot on the coffee table. “Frankly, Mick, you’re just not that interesting.” Lord, that was such a lie she was surprised her nose didn’t grow.

He looked down at her. “Uh-huh.”

She placed a hand on her chest. “I stayed away from Meg just like you wanted me to, but she approached me. I didn’t approach her.”

“I know that.”

“She’s a grown woman. Older than you, and she can certainly decide whether or not to talk to me.”

He moved to the French doors and looked out at the deck and the lake beyond. Light from the lamp near the sofa touched his shoulder and the side of his face. “She might be older, but she’s not always predictable.” He was silent a few moments, then he turned his head and looked at her over his shoulder. His voice changed: gone was the demanding tone when he asked, “How do you know my mother’s footprints were all over the bar that night? Is it in a police report?”

Maddie slowly rose. “Yes.”

She barely heard his next question. “What else?”

“There are photographs of her footprints.”

“Jesus.” He shook his head. “I meant, what else was in the report?”

“The usual. Everything from time of arrival to positions of the bodies.”

“How long did my father live?”

“About ten minutes.”

He rested his weight on one foot and folded his arms across his big chest. He was silent for several more seconds before he said, “She could have called an ambulance and maybe saved his life.”

“She could have.”

Across the short distance, he looked at her. This time a wealth of emotion burned in his blue eyes. “Ten minutes is a long time for a wife to watch her husband suffer and bleed to death.”

She took a few steps toward him. “Yes.”

“Who called the police?”

“Your mother did. Right before she shot herself.”

“So she made sure my father and the waitress were dead before she called.”

Maddie stopped. “The waitress had a name.”

“I know.” A sad smile curved one corner of his lips. “Growing up, my grandmother always called her ‘the waitress.’ It’s just a habit.”

“You didn’t know any of this?”

He shook his head. “My grandmother didn’t talk about things that were unpleasant. Believe me, my mother murdering my father and Alice Jones were at the top of the list of things we didn’t talk about.” He turned his gaze outside. “And you have photographs.”

“Yes.”

“Here?”

She thought about her answer and decided to tell the truth. “Yes.”

“What else?”

“Besides the police reports and crime scene photos, I have interviews, newspaper accounts, diagrams, and the coroner’s report.”

Mick opened the French doors and stepped outside. Soaring ponderosa pines cast black shadows across the deck, chasing away the muted grays of dusk. A slight breeze scented the night with pine and lifted strands of Mick’s hair where it touched his forehead. “I went to the library when I was about ten, thinking I’d get a look at old newspaper reports, but the librarian was a friend of my grandmother’s. So I left.”

“Have you seen any accounts of that night?”

“No.”

“Would you like to see them?”

He shook his head. “No. I don’t have a lot of memories of my parents, and reading about what happened that night would ruin those that I do have.”

She didn’t have a lot of memories of her mother either. Recently, with the help of the diaries, a few had come back. “Maybe not.”

He laughed without humor. “Until you blew into town, I didn’t know that my mother watched my father die. I didn’t know she hated him that much.”

“She probably didn’t hate him. Both love and hate are very powerful emotions. People kill the people they love all the time. I don’t understand it, but I know that it happens.”

“That isn’t love. It’s something else.” He walked to the dark edge of the deck and his hands gripped the wood railing. Across the lake, the moon began to rise over the mountains and reflected a perfect mirror image into the smooth water. “Until you came to town, everything was buried in the past where it belonged. Then you started digging and prying and it’s all anybody around here can talk about now. Just like when I was growing up.”

She moved toward him and leaned her butt into the rail. She folded her arms beneath her breasts and looked up into the darkening outline of his face. She was so close, his hand rested next to her behind on the railing. “Other than in your own house, I take it the subject of your mother and father used to come up a lot.”

“You could say that.”

“Is that why you fought all the time?”

He looked into her eyes and laughed without sound. “Maybe I just liked fighting.”

“Or maybe you didn’t like people saying unkind things about your family.”

“You think you know me. You think you have me all figured out.”

She shrugged one shoulder. Yeah, she knew him. In some regards, she imagined they’d lived mirror lives. “I think it must have been hell to live in a town where everyone knows that your mother killed your father and his young lover. Children can be very cruel. That’s not just a clichй, it’s true. Believe me, I know. Kids are mean.”

The breeze blew a few long strands of hair across Maddie’s cheek and Mick raised a hand and brushed them from her face. “What did they do? Not pick you for kickball?”

“I didn’t get picked for anything. I was a little pudgy.”

He pushed her hair behind her ear. “A little?”

“A lot.”

“How much did you weigh?”

“I don’t know, but in the sixth grade I got a really awesome pair of black boots. My calves were too big and I couldn’t zip them up all the way. So I folded them down, deluding myself that everyone would think they were supposed to be worn that way. They weren’t fooled and I never wore the boots again. That was the year they started calling me Cincinnati Maddie. At first I was just so happy they weren’t calling me Fattie Maddie anymore. Then I found out why they called me that and I wasn’t so happy.” Through the dusky space that separated them, he raised an inquiring dark brow and she explained, “They said I was so fat because I ate Cincinnati.”

“The little bastards.” He dropped his hand. “No wonder you’re so ornery.”

Was she ornery? Maybe. “What’s your excuse?”

She felt his gaze touch her face for several moments before he answered, “I’m not as ornery as you.”

“Right,” she scoffed.

“Well, I wasn’t until you moved to town.”

“Long before I moved to town you were giving Sheriff Potter hell.”

“Growing up in this town was sometimes hell.”

“I can imagine.”

“No, you can’t.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “People have wondered my whole life if I was going to lose it like my mom and kill someone. Or if I’d grow up and be like my dad. That’s a hard thing for a kid to live with.”