had given up his chance to leave for college. He’d given up everything, because his brothers needed him.
Niall understood something else, too. In making the decision not to abandon them, this big brother of his had changed. The frighteningly intense focus that had made Duncan valedictorian of his class and star athlete all while holding jobs and saving money for the future that had meant everything to him, that focus would now be turned on Conall and Niall. He would demand of them what he’d always demanded of himself. Perfection.
I can’t do it.
Duncan’s eyes had acquired a film of ice, like a winter pond. There was no love in them, only resignation and resolution so cold Niall had to repress a shiver.
He thought, I’m going to hate him, and then, with agony and shock, This is love. Hard as bedrock. The real deal.
The kind neither of their parents had ever given them.
CHAPTER ONE
MAYBE IF I WENT BACK to bed and started over.
Detective Niall MacLachlan looked down at the dead body sprawled on the kitchen floor and knew that no do-over was possible.
The body was not a murder victim. It was the corporeal shell of his landlady.
He attempted no resuscitation. He knew dead when he saw dead. Rigor mortis had set in. The old lady must have gotten up during the night. Niall knew she hadn’t been sleeping well. Heartburn, she’d told him, but she kept nitroglycerin at hand.
This wasn’t what you’d call a tragedy. Enid Cooper had turned eighty-eight in April. She’d lost two inches in height from crumbling bones and had confessed to Niall that she hurt all the time. Her worst fear had been ending up in a nursing home.
Maybe, he thought, her last emotion had been relief. He’d like to think so.
She had family who would mourn, he guessed. He didn’t know them, had been careful to avoid any introductions, but he’d seen a young woman with two little kids come and go. She’d mowed the lawn this spring and summer. Niall had kept his distance, but had paused a couple of times to admire her. She was a small, curvy package with fabulous legs. She was also, however, a mother and likely a wife. He suspected she would be Enid’s heir, too.
Which made Enid’s decision to kick the bucket very bad news for him. He was a selfish son of a bitch to be thinking about himself right now, but he had time to kill while he waited for the appropriate authority to take over. Beyond tugging down the hem of Enid’s nightgown so that her birdlike, liver-spotted legs were decently covered, there wasn’t anything he could do for her.
He’d signed a new one-year lease not six weeks ago. This would be his second year living in the tiny cottage tucked on the back of the large lot, behind Enid’s 1940s-era bungalow. Living here had worked out fine for him. Enid ignored him and didn’t mind that he ignored her. She was deaf as a post and didn’t like to be bothered with her hearing aid, which she said whined. Niall played the bagpipe. Your average landlord or landlady did not consider him an ideal tenant. Enid and he were a match made in heaven. He didn’t like to think what was going to happen now.
A uniformed officer arrived and Niall explained that he’d come to check on Enid because the kitchen light wasn’t on. This time of the morning, she would have long since had breakfast and tea. Enid tended to linger over her tea. He’d knocked on the back door, gotten no response and felt enough alarm he’d gone back to his cottage to get the key she had given him in case of emergency.
“I’d hate to die and not be found for so long I shrivelled up like a mummy,” she’d told him. “I don’t much like that idea. So if you don’t see me around, feel free to check.”
He could do that. She’d asked little enough of him. Rental payment once a month—which he deposited directly into her bank account as getting out was hard for her—and the understanding that he’d keep an eye on her from a distance.
Enid had been dead for a few hours, but the mortician would get his hands on her before she began serious decomposition. Niall hadn’t told her that in the incessantly damp climate of the Pacific Northwest, corpses didn’t dry up leatherlike. He didn’t tell her that what did happen to them was a whole lot more unpleasant than mummification.
He hoped that if she was opposed to being embalmed she’d have discussed it with her family.
It was with relief that he escaped after a silent goodbye.
As luck would have it, the first person he saw when he arrived at the public safety building that housed the police department was his brother Duncan. Captain Duncan MacLachlan, only one rung below the police chief who was currently under fire for publicly making a racist remark and who was at risk for being fired. Even though Duncan was a hard-ass, he backed his officers and was known for being fair, smart and the soul of integrity. The general hope was that the city council would give the job to him, rather than hiring from outside the department.
Niall had very mixed feelings for his brother.
They were a hell of a lot closer than they’d been even a year ago, though. Duncan had mellowed when he’d fallen in love. Niall had watched the process with bemusement.
Duncan had pushed through the doors on his way out, and the two of them stepped aside so they weren’t in the way of traffic. Although barely midmorning, it had to be eighty degrees already. A humid eighty degrees.
“You just getting here?”
“I found my landlady dead.”
Duncan nodded without apparent surprise. “What’ll that do to your lease?”
Niall grinned. Trust his big brother to hold no sentimental feelings whatsoever. Except where Jane was concerned, of course. Niall shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I’ll find out.”
Rather than offering another brisk nod and continuing on his way, Duncan kept standing there. He was wearing one of the suits that made him appear more like a politician than a cop, and he had to be looking forward to the air-conditioning in that big SUV he drove. But instead of heading for it, he shifted his weight, hemmed and hawed.
“I was going to call you today,” he finally said.
Niall was entertained by the unexpected and unnatural sight of Captain MacLachlan looking irresolute.
“Yeah?”
“Jane wants you to come to dinner. Tonight or tomorrow?”
“Is there an occasion?”
Expression strangely vulnerable, Duncan met his eyes. “Jane’s pregnant.”
Niall found himself momentarily speechless. “This a surprise?” he asked at last.
Duncan shook his head. “No. I’m thirty-seven, Jane’s thirty-two. We didn’t want to wait too long.”
“My brother, a daddy.” Niall smiled broadly. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks.”
“How far along is she?”
