had never seen the woman before. He had no idea what her problem was, but there was no way he intended to just stand there and get pummeled in public. Especially by a woman. He already felt the pressure of his eye swelling from the sucker punch she’d managed to land.
He grabbed her and trapped her arms at her sides, but she immediately started to use her feet as weapons. She kicked and thrust her knee upward in an attempt to make dangerous bodily contact with him.
Nick would never hit a woman, but he definitely needed to take control of the situation. He heard the low rumble of male laughter coming from the crowd, laughter that assured Nick he’d be fodder for the gossip mill the next day.
With Wendy’s murder, there was already enough gossip swirling around town with his name all over it. Nick drew a deep breath, dodged another knee to his groin, then finally managed to pick her up and throw her over his shoulder like a sack of squirming potatoes.
She smelled like lilacs and vanilla, he thought, even as she kicked and screamed and beat her fists on his back. He carried her through the bar and out the front door. He put her down on the sidewalk and then stepped back a safe distance from her.
“Lady, what in the hell is your problem?” he demanded.
For a long moment, she looked stunned, and tears streamed down her face. “It was you,” she finally said. “It was you who murdered my sister.”
It was only then that Nick realized the small firecracker standing before him, the pretty woman who had hit him hard enough to swell his eye almost shut, was Adrienne Bailey, Wendy’s older sister.
* * *
Adrienne stared up at the tall cowboy with his darkening eye and was appalled by her own actions. She’d never hit another person in her entire life. She’d just wanted to get a look at the man she believed had killed her sister, but the moment he’d turned to face her she’d completely lost her mind.
Anger and grief had taken control of her senses, and she’d reacted with raw, unbridled emotion, something she’d never done before in all of her thirty years.
Although still driven by rage and sorrow, a deep embarrassment now swept over her. She backed away from him and quickly swiped the tears from her eyes.
“I didn’t mean to... I’m sorry...” Those were the only words she got out before she turned and ran down the sidewalk.
“Adrienne, wait!” he called after her. “I didn’t kill Wendy. Do you hear me? I cared about her and had nothing to do with her death.”
Liar.
The derogatory name rang in her head as she headed for her car in the distance, cursing the heels that kept her from running all out. Tears started falling once again, but this time she didn’t bother trying to swipe them away, even as they trekked down her cheeks and blurred her vision.
Liar!
She glanced behind her only once to make sure he wasn’t following her. Seeing that the sidewalk behind her was empty, she slowed her pace, gulping in deep breaths in an effort to gain control of herself, but it didn’t work.
When she reached her car, she threw herself into the driver’s seat and locked the doors, then lowered her head to the steering wheel and allowed herself to cry until she couldn’t cry any longer.
When chief of police Dillon Bowie had contacted her the day before to tell her about Wendy’s death and that a positive identification had been made by Wendy’s boss at the café where she’d been working, Adrienne had gone through the first two stages of grief in the matter of an hour.
She started her car and pulled out of the parking space and headed for the Bitterroot Motel, where she’d checked in just an hour or so before. Wendy had been living at the motel at the time of her disappearance. Adrienne’s unit was two doors down from the one that now sported crime scene tape across the front.
Her initial reaction to Chief Bowie’s phone call had been immediate denial. Wendy couldn’t be dead. Murder happened to other people, but not to Wendy. She was too full of energy, too filled with the joy of life to be dead.
But she’d known that Wendy had been in Bitterroot, Oklahoma, and it had also been a month since she’d heard from her little sister.
Denial had transformed into a grief so all-consuming that she’d barely been able to think or do what needed to get done to leave her home and travel to the small town. It had been only this morning that she’d finally managed to pack up her car and make the drive from her home in Kansas City to Bitterroot.
She’d arrived much later than she had expected. By the time she had checked into her motel room and unloaded her things from the car, her grief had been overwhelmed with growing rage, a rage focused on the man she believed responsible for Wendy’s murder—Nick Coleman.
She pulled up in front of her motel unit and parked her car. She wiped at her eyes and grabbed her purse off the seat. As she walked to her door, she consciously kept her gaze away from the unit two doors down.
The sight of the crime scene tape would only make her cry again, and she’d rather feed her outrageous anger than her crippling grief.
Wendy hadn’t even been buried yet and Nick Coleman was in a bar having drinks with a friend. How cold could he be? How calculating? But, of course, wasn’t that what murderers did? They killed and destroyed lives and then went right back to their normal life as if nothing had happened.
That was how killers were able to hide in plain sight, but Nick Coleman couldn’t hide from her. She knew where he worked and where he lived, and she didn’t intend to leave this town until he was arrested for Wendy’s murder.
Every conversation, each text she’d received from Wendy had contained some little tidbit of information about Nick. It was obvious to Adrienne that the two were close.
Exhausted by the long drive and her overwhelming emotions, she changed out of her clothes and into her cotton, sleeveless nightgown. The motel unit came complete with a kitchenette, a small table and chairs, a television and a love seat. The bathroom was small, the bed was a double, and while everything looked worn and out-of-date, the unit also appeared to be spotlessly clean.
She shut off the light and got into the bed, the springs squeaking slightly beneath her. The only light in the room came from a slit between the curtains at the front windows, allowing in the faint neon red and yellow flashes from the motel sign advertising clean efficiency units.
Rolling over on her side, she squeezed her eyes tightly shut, afraid to sleep and suffer nightmares of Wendy, yet afraid to stay awake and wallow in thoughts of her sister.
Wild and wonderful Wendy. Impulsive and fearless Wendy. Who would have wanted to murder her other than the man she’d talked about in every phone call, in every text?
She must have fallen asleep, for when she opened her eyes again the light seeping into the room through the slight part in the curtains was sunshine.
She immediately jumped out of bed and got into the shower and then dressed in a pair of blue capris and a sleeveless white-and-blue patterned blouse.
She was disappointed when she got to the police station at one end of Main Street only to be told that Chief Dillon Bowie was out on a
