you,” she said and focused back on her plate.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“A little town just north of Kansas City. I work out of the Kansas City field office.”
“Married?”
“Nope.”
“Do you have a significant other?” he asked.
“Yeah, a cranky cat that showed up half-dead on my doorstep.” She gazed at him with narrowed eyes. “What’s this? Be nice to the FBI agent and maybe she’ll go away?”
“Something like that,” Matt agreed easily.
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re nice or mean to me, I’m here for the long haul,” she replied.
“Won’t your cat miss you?”
“Nah, we have no emotional attachment to each other. That’s why we get along so well. I have a friend who is taking care of her while I’m gone.”
The statement was definitely telling. He suspected that this was a woman who didn’t play well with others. What she had to realize was that when it came to an ongoing murder investigation in his town, he wasn’t willing to play well with her.
Plus, he wasn’t at all sure he believed in the whole profiling thing. As far as he was concerned, solving a crime happened only one way—through intensive investigation, intelligent interrogation and exhaustive interviews.
He thought profiling was a bit of hocus-pocus that might work in the case of serial killers, but there was absolutely nothing in the Harris murder that indicated this was anything but an isolated crime.
“How long have you been Sheriff here?”
“Almost five years. Before that I was a homicide cop in Chicago.”
She looked at him in surprise. “Really, what brought you to this tiny town?”
“I was born and raised here, but moved to Chicago to join the police force. I came back here after the death of my wife. It so happened that the sheriff was retiring, so I stepped into his shoes.”
There had been a time when he couldn’t talk about his wife, when even thinking about her brought a pain that nearly cast him to his knees. But that terrible grief had passed and over the last year he’d finally begun to look forward instead of backward.
For the next few minutes they ate in silence. She finished her meal but made no move to leave.
There was a part of him, a strictly male part, that found Special Agent Jenna Taylor extremely attractive. Definitely a fatal attraction, he told himself ruefully.
“Why didn’t you tell me about being Miranda’s beneficiary when you first met me?” she asked.
He eyed her with a touch of amusement. “If you’ll recall we didn’t exactly meet under the best of circumstances. I was trying to decide if I should arrest you for interfering with a crime scene.”
“I didn’t touch anything. I’m not exactly a novice around crime scenes.” She leaned closer to him and he couldn’t help but notice that she had the most kissable-looking lips he’d seen in a long time. “I could help you, you know. Catching killers is what I do for a living, it’s who I am.”
He finished the last bite of his meat loaf and then pushed his plate away. “If you really want to help me, then tell me a little bit about Miranda. You said the two of you were best friends. I didn’t know her personally, so any information you can tell me about the kind of person she was would help. You said you’ve known her since she was twelve, did the two of you meet in school?”
“No, Miranda’s parents brought me into their home as a foster child, but that was a long time ago,” she said with a touch of impatience. “Miranda and I were like sisters.”
“You look a lot like her,” he said.
For the first time since he’d met her she smiled, a real smile that warmed the blue of her eyes and lit her features from within. An unexpected flicker of desire ignited in the pit of his stomach.
“Miranda and I used to tell people that we were fraternal twins, not exactly alike but almost. We might have looked alike but in most things we were polar opposites.”
“How so?” he asked curiously.
“Miranda was like a big ball of sunshine. She never met anyone she didn’t like, believed that everyone had some good inside them.”
“And you don’t believe that?”
“It’s my job to look for the darkness in everyone,” she replied ruefully.
They fell silent as Sally brought Matt his lemon pie. Jenna slid off her stool and placed money on the counter. “Look, I’m going to head back to my motel room. I’m in unit seven. I’ll see you there in a few minutes?”
Matt nodded, then turned and watched her weave her way through the tables to the front door. He had to admit she intrigued him more than a little bit.
Certainly that rivulet of desire that he’d momentarily felt had stunned him. He hadn’t felt that for any woman for over five years. Just his luck that the first woman who stirred him on a physical level was one he didn’t think he even liked much.
Chapter Three
Jenna paced the short length of floor in front of the window of the small motel room window. It had been thirty minutes since she’d left the café. How long could it take him to eat a piece of pie?
Although she knew it would be painful, she needed to hear the details of Miranda’s death. She wanted to know how she’d died, who had found her body and what had been done since then to find the guilty.
She walked over to the small table where she had a notebook opened, ready to take notes. She had a laptop, but preferred handwriting things first, then transferring them to the computer. She felt like she thought better in longhand.
She flipped the pages to her to-do list and wrote down that she needed to visit the lawyer first thing in the morning. As Miranda’s beneficiary she’d have to figure out what to do with the house and all of Miranda’s personal belongings. The sooner she got started the better. She didn’t intend to stick around this place forever.
Sinking down in a chair at the table, she pressed her fingers into the center of her forehead where a headache threatened to blossom.
Stress. She’d suffered from stress headaches since she’d been little. Certainly the first twelve years of her life had been filled with stresses that children should never have to experience.
Sometimes she thought those early years of her life had formed the kind of woman she’d become, a woman who sought the darkness in others because she’d come from such a dark place.
She jumped up from the chair as she heard a car door slam outside. A glance out the window showed her Matt walking toward her unit. He walked with a slightly self-confident swagger that was both attractive and more than a little
