silence?” Liz said, angry now. “What choice did you give me but silence?”
He shook his head again.
“You didn’t give me a chance to explain.”
“Explain what? How mad you were? How mad we both were? You and I were prime suspects. Everyone at the house that night heard you threaten your uncle, heard you tell him you’d had enough, that you weren’t going to take it anymore.”
“I meant I was going to quit my job and stop subjecting myself to his manipulations.”
“Dozens of bystanders only heard a threat. You were pregnant. You’d had a miscarriage a few months before and I couldn’t let anything happen to you.”
“So you told them you did it.”
“For once, my family history came in handy. Nobody ever really expected a Chase man to stay out of trouble for long. I don’t think it strained anyone’s imagination to picture me as a killer. Logic said it had to be one of us.”
“But, Alex, it wasn’t one of us.”
He stared at her. “No, it wasn’t.”
Liz felt her heart thump wildly. Alex reached out and took her hand, kissed her palm, and folded her hand in his. His fingers flicked over her bare finger, absent of her thick gold wedding band. “No,” he repeated, “it wasn’t.”
“You’re innocent.”
“So are you.” His relief was palpable and for the first time she understood the depth of the burden he’d been carrying. He’d thought she’d killed her uncle, he knew he hadn’t. He’d given up his freedom and his chance to know his child—all for her. He’d thought she’d been willing to repay this sacrifice by leaving him to suffer the consequences alone. And then she’d asked him for a divorce.
She felt herself lean toward him, she felt him leaning toward her. What came now, a kiss, reconciliation, everything back to the way it was? She pulled away.
His eyes demanded an explanation but she didn’t have one to offer. What he’d done was protect her and she felt humbled. But he hadn’t trusted her. She’d thought they were a team, but Alex hadn’t included her in a decision that would forever change the course of both of their lives—and that of their unborn child. Quite the opposite, he’d gone out of his way to exclude her.
His distrust of the sheriff was old news. It reminded her that Alex had learned, within the boundaries of his highly dysfunctional family, to go it alone. A stint in the army and the years at the fire station had tempered his fierce independent streak so that he’d become comfortable working as part of a team with men he respected. She’d assumed that quality would extend into their marriage, but he’d jumped to a terrible and wrong conclusion this time and he hadn’t trusted her when it counted.
That hurt.
More to the heart of the matter, he’d also implicated himself so thoroughly that it might never be made right because Alex was correct—the whole community had reacted to his arrest with a knowing shake of their collective head.
Another Chase man gone wrong.
Only this one hadn’t.
Alex stood, and extending a hand, helped Liz to her feet. “Are you okay now?” he asked softly. “Is the baby all right?”
“We’re both fine.”
“You must know I love you—”
This time she held up a hand to silence him. Her feelings were like tumbleweeds, roaming here and there and everywhere, rootless and brittle. “I can’t talk anymore tonight,” she mumbled.
“You’re exhausted,” he said, his voice filled with concern. Taking her hand, he looked at her with eyes so deep and midnight blue she yearned to get lost in them the way she had in the past, lost and found at the same time. He whispered, “You go to bed.”
“What about you?”
He glanced around the room then back at her. “I need to think.”
She felt a consuming shudder rack her body from the inside out and knew she needed time alone to absorb all this startling new information. For six months she’d thought him a murderer. And worse in some ways, she’d thought he had stopped loving her, stopped needing her. These feelings had never seemed, well, right, but for six months, she’d told herself that her feelings, especially when it came to Alex, were unreliable. All that didn’t change in an instant.
She picked up Sinbad who immediately started purring. Lowering her gaze, avoiding Alex’s eyes, she said, “When you do get tired, I think it would be best if you slept in the guest room.”
She could feel him staring at her pregnancy as though he was wondering if she just wanted the bed to herself for comfort’s sake or because she didn’t want him that close. She added, “There’s a sleeping bag in the closet. All your clothes are packed away in the attic.”
“Don’t worry about me.”
There was so much she wanted to say to him. She didn’t know where to start.
He moved to her side, cupped her chin and kissed her. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the moist warmth of his lips, on the undercurrent of desire she could feel pulse between them. It was all she could do to keep from asking him to join her, to hold her, to make love to her, to take away some of the pain they had unwittingly caused each other.
But she didn’t. The world had exploded tonight—again. Alex was afraid a new investigation would lead the law to her. She was more afraid that he would once again try to protect her by offering himself up like a sacrificial goat. She didn’t want him spending the rest of his life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.
After all, it was just his word that he was innocent, just her word that she was, too. As far as she knew, the only pieces of undiscovered evidence both led back to her: the silk scarf and her late-night visit, the one she’d thought no one knew about.
Most likely, other than the true killer, she was the last one to see Uncle Devon alive.
And that wasn’t exactly a comforting thought, either.
LIZ WAS INNOCENT. He should have known. She was innocent. Not self-defense, not an accident—innocent.
Of course, the flip side of that was that there was a murderer on the loose. Even worse, there was a murderer on the loose who must have thought they were all but home free. What would happen when that person learned about the hung jury and the new investigation?
Liz’s green scarf worried him. How had her uncle ended up with that piece of sand-washed silk wrapped around his fingers? Alex realized he should have asked Liz more about it and he stopped pacing long enough to glance down the hall and consider going to her room right now.
The thought of her snuggled in the bed they’d shared so many times stopped him. There was no way in the world he would be able to leave her side once he was there. Pregnant or not, she was the most sensual woman he’d ever known and he ached for her in his mind, in his body, in his soul.
He
