couldn’t tear his eyes off her….
“I think we can start to move ’im out, see if there’s anything important underneath ’im, and get everything to the lab now.”
The head of the forensic team’s voice yanked Josh’s attention away from Megan and his confused reveries, and back to what he was supposed to be concentrating on.
“Anything you can tell me yet?” he asked.
“Not much. So far there’s no obvious indication of cause of death—like a bashed-in skull. But these are hardly optimum working conditions. Hope fully we’ll be able to tell more at the lab and won’t need a forensic anthropologist. There are only a handful of those in the whole country. For now the best I can do is put the time of death at June, eighteen years ago.”
“Yeah, I saw the date on the news pa per, too.”
The team leader shrugged. “You probably already guessed it’s the skeleton of a man, too, from the clothes. I’d say he was in his midfifties. Probably Caucasian. Not well-off. We haven’t gotten into the knapsack yet, could be some thing in there will tell us more.”
Josh nodded. “Just let me know as soon as you find anything out.”
“Your case. You’ll be the first.”
The septic tank crew seemed to have finished up, too, because they were clearing out as Burt Connors stood talking to Megan Bailey at the card table. Josh crossed to them and drew both glances.
“Find anything out?” Burt asked without preamble.
“Not yet. But I’m going to need a few preliminary questions answered,” Josh said, aiming the statement at Megan.
“Can we do it inside? It’s getting kind of chilly out here,” she responded, crossing her arms over her middle to rub them with those long-fingered hands he’d been watching before.
Some thing caught in Josh’s throat at the sight, and what he really wanted to do was put his arms around her and warm her up himself….
He nixed that idea in a hurry, wondering where the hell it had come from in the first place.
Then he said, “Yeah, no matter how nice the days are this time of year, April nights cool off plenty. If you can’t take it, go ahead in. I’ll be there as soon as everybody out here is gone.”
Megan’s eyebrows rose slightly at the gruff ness in his tone but he couldn’t worry about that. She didn’t have to like him. He didn’t want her to like him. As far as he was concerned she was part of a murder investigation and that was it.
Josh turned back to the excavation site then. And as he retraced his steps he told himself to use this time before he went in to question Megan Bailey to get a handle on whatever this was that was going on with him.
She’s a flake, he repeated to himself as a reminder of why he had no business noticing the things he’d been noticing about her, or thinking the things he’d been thinking about her. Why he should know better than to notice those things or think those things.
But neither the fact that he considered her a flake nor the fact that she might be involved in some way with a murder, kept him from wishing the state patrolmen, Burt Connors’s crew, and the forensics team would hurry up and clear out of there.
Because the sooner they did, the sooner he could get back to Megan Bailey.
And be alone with her again….
Megan sat in her kitchen, trying to sort through what had happened today.
There was no denying that returning to Elk Creek had been fraught with complications. The house had been in such disrepair. Worse than room after room of cobwebs, four broken windows, and a need for new paint inside and out, there had been problems with the electrical wiring, old appliances that had refused to come out of retirement, and the need for a whole new septic system.
Not only had she and Nissa had to do all the home repairs they could possibly do them selves, they’d also had to set up their office on top of it—complete with more cleaning and painting and furniture moving—because they hadn’t been able to afford to hire help.
Certainly clients hadn’t been clamoring to their door and they hadn’t been met with a warm reception.
And now this.
Someone was buried in the backyard? Megan didn’t know what to make of that. Especially when Josh Brimley turned officious and contrary on her. As if she’d had some thing to do with it.
Did he think she and her sister had brought the skeleton with them and planted it behind the house for fun? Or maybe he thought it was part of some hocus-pocus or voodoo ritual since that’s what he considered the practice of acupuncture.
Well, fine. It was good to know from the start what kind of man he was. That he was not the kind of man she would ever allow to get close to her again. The next man she let into her life was going to be accepting and tolerant and receptive. He was going to be open-minded, liberal, enlightened and unbiased.
In short, he wasn’t going to be anything like Noel.
And so far, Josh Brimley seemed a whole lot more like Noel than not.
Hocus-pocus and voodoo, Megan thought, taking offense now to what she hadn’t taken offense to when he’d said it earlier. And that facetious, if you can’t take it…
As if she should stay standing out in the chilly night air as punishment. As if, under the circumstances, she didn’t deserve to come in out of the cold.
He might be incredible to look at, but now she knew what was under the surface—he wasn’t just a skeptic who could be won over to the idea that there were viable alternatives in the world, to the fact that not everyone had to be a carbon copy of everyone else. He wasn’t a person who could learn to appreciate diversity. He was judgmental, close-minded, and suspicious. Suspicious of her, of all things.
Megan had worked up quite a head of steam by the time the knock came on the back door just then.
“Yes,” she called in a clipped tone that lacked all welcome.
And when Josh Brimley opened the door and stepped inside, she didn’t stand to greet him and she absolutely refused to offer him some thing to drink to warm up—like a cup of the spice tea she’d fixed herself.
But what she did do—much to her own dismay—was become instantly aware all over again that he was jaw-droppingly handsome and brought with him a heady, primitively sensual masculinity that alerted everything female inside her.
Not that she was going to let that make any difference to her. Now that she knew what he was made up of.
“I need a few questions answered,” he informed her bluntly as he closed the door behind him.
“So you said,” Megan answered in the same stern voice he was still using on her.
“Mind if I sit down?” he asked, pointing with a nod of his head to the chair around the corner from her at the square oak table her father had made by hand.
“Suit
