suppose,” Neil said, “that you’ll be staying the night.”
“I’m not going to leave her and Benjy unprotected.”
“Fine. I’d stay myself but I’m in the midst of some very important meetings.”
What could be more important than the safety of his bride and her son? Shane kept that opinion to himself.
“Tomorrow, we’ll get them moved,” Neil said. “I have plenty of room at my house. You’re welcome to stay there until the wedding.”
Considering what had happened tonight, it was generous for him to offer. “I appreciate your hospitality.”
“It’s no trouble. My housekeeper hired people to help out until after the wedding, and I have other houseguests. I believe you know one of them—Dr. Edgar Prentice from Aspen.”
“We’ve met.”
“He’s a fertility specialist and an ob-gyn. Your cousin Tom sought my uncle out when he decided that he and Angela should go through the process of creating frozen embryos.”
“I know.”
“In a way, Uncle Edgar was Angela’s midwife, even though he didn’t deliver Benjy. Ironic. Now, I’ll be Benjy’s father.”
“Stepfather,” Shane corrected. Nobody but Tom should be recognized as the father of Angela’s child.
“I’ll see to Angela now.”
As he watched Neil stride toward Angela’s bedroom, Shane wanted to stop him. Neil wasn’t the right man for her. He was cold and arrogant and sure as hell didn’t put Angela first. None of my business. Shane didn’t have the right to tell her who to marry or what to do with her life.
He sat at the kitchen table, took the last macadamia nut cookie from the plate and bit into it.
When Angela lashed out against law enforcement, he hadn’t been surprised. Shane had listened to hours of her complaints about how the Park County Sheriff’s Department had failed to bring her husband’s murderer to justice. She’d gotten to the point where she refused to even talk to them.
That had been his job.
The investigators had compiled quite a bit of evidence. The flat tire was caused by three nails that could have been picked up from any number of construction sites in the mountains. The indentations in Tom’s SUV indicated that he’d been hit by a truck, and the crime scene investigators found bits of black paint. From the tire tracks, they could tell that after Tom was hit, the truck backed up and hit him again.
The police theory was that the driver of the truck was drunk or otherwise incapacitated. After he hit Tom, he backed up to see if he could help and accidentally ran into Tom a second time. The driver had gotten out of his car and had left a fingerprint in Tom’s blood on the Toyota.
The print matched nothing in the database, and the cops had other factors working against them: It had taken over two hours to locate Tom’s body. There were no witnesses. They’d never been able to locate the black truck.
The final conclusion from the Park County Sheriff’s Department was vehicular homicide. The driver of the black truck was never found.
Shane understood Angela’s pain and frustration, but he knew the investigators had done their best to solve the case. A hit-and-run accident was cold-blooded—the kind of case that would haunt the investigative team almost as much as it troubled Shane.
His instincts told him that Tom’s death wasn’t an accident. He was targeted, mowed down on purpose. Shane believed that Tom’s death was premeditated murder.
THE NEXT MORNING, Angela felt like a new woman. Her usual schedule meant jumping out of bed at four in the morning and dashing like mad to have Waffles ready for business at six-thirty. Not this week. While planning the last details of the wedding, she had enough on her plate, so to speak. Though she might stop by the restaurant and help out, they weren’t expecting her.
With no need to rush, she took a long, luxurious shower. When she meandered into kitchen after eight o’clock, Shane had already made coffee and fed Benjy. He greeted her with a grin and a joke about sleeping late. What an amazing friend! He made her laugh, always made her feel comfortable.
And he wasn’t bad to look at in his jeans and cowboy boots. His black hair was in need of a trim before the wedding. Not that any of the women in attendance would notice. They’d be too busy swooning over his sky-blue eyes and rugged masculine features. It was hard to believe Shane was still single. There had been a couple of live-in girl-friends over the years, but he’d never once walked down the aisle.
After they dropped off Benjy at the babysitter, she slipped behind the steering wheel of her van and turned to Shane. “Before I stop by Waffles, I have to pop into the dress shop for a final fitting on the wedding gown. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Bring on the ruffles and lace,” he said. “I told you I’d do anything to help, and I meant it.”
“Oh, good.” The very idea of super-macho Shane in a dress shop amused her. “After the gown, we can go to the florist, then stop by the lingerie store.”
He groaned. “As long as I don’t have to have my toenails painted pink. Isn’t the maid of honor supposed to do this stuff?”
“Yvonne’s busy running Waffles. But don’t worry. I’m sure I can come up with some manly, testosterone-driven tasks for you, too.”
“Like moving you and Benjy to Neil’s house?”
She hadn’t planned on making that move until she and Neil got back from their two-week honeymoon in Baja. Even then, it would be difficult. His house was far from her work, her favorite market and everything she was familiar with. “It’s so inconvenient.”
“But safe,” he said.
It hadn’t escaped her notice that he was wearing his holster under a lightweight summer blazer. Shane definitely took her intruder seriously.
Not like Neil. She didn’t like the way he’d reacted last night. In his opinion, she was having panic attacks, and he wasn’t going to change his mind. Though she admired her fiancé for his decisiveness, she wished that he’d listen to her side of the story.
“After you’re married,” he said, “how are you planning to run Waffles? You’re at the south end of the metro area in Littleton and Neil’s almost in Boulder.”
“Neil wants me to quit.”
“But you don’t want to.”
“I don’t know.” She’d given the issue so much thought that her head ached. “It’s a bridge I’ll cross when I come to it.”
She turned off the main road into the four-block area known as Old South Clarkson Street. With several boutiques and restaurants, it was a pleasant, neighborhood place for specialty shopping. On weekends, traffic closed down in the morning for a farmers’ market.
She drove past Waffles, pleased to see that the tables they set up on the sidewalk for summer were all filled.
