in Colombia several months earlier.
Megan had known Elliot for years. Though only five or six years older, somehow he had always seemed ancient to her, even when she was a girl—as if he belonged to some earlier generation. He seemed so serious all the time, like some sort of stuffy uncle who couldn’t be bothered with youthful shenanigans.
Hey, you kids. Get off my lawn.
He had probably never actually said those words, but she could clearly imagine them coming out of that incongruously sexy mouth.
He did love his family. She couldn’t argue that. He watched out for his sisters and was close to his brother Marshall, the sheriff of Lake Haven County. He cherished his mother and made the long trip from Denver to Haven Point for every important Bailey event, several times a year.
Which also begged the question: Why had he chosen to rent a cottage on the inn property instead of staying with one of his family members?
His mother and stepfather lived not far away and so did Marshall, Wynona and Katrina with their respective spouses. While Marshall’s house was filled to the brim with kids, Cade and Wyn had plenty of room and Bowie and Katrina had a vast house at Serenity Harbor that would fit the entire Haven Point High School football team, with room left over for the coaching staff and a few cheerleaders.
Instead, Elliot had chosen to book this small, solitary rental unit at the inn for three entire weeks.
Did his reasons have anything to do with that sling he was sporting? How had he been hurt? Did it have anything to do with his work for the FBI?
The answers to those questions were none of her business, Megan reminded herself. He was a guest at her inn, which meant she had an obligation to respect his privacy.
Elliot came back to the vehicle for one more bag, something that looked the size of a laptop, which gave her something else to consider. He had booked the cottage for three weeks. Maybe he had taken a leave of absence from his job at the FBI to work on another book.
She pulled Cyrus onto her lap and rubbed behind his ears as she considered the cottage next door and the enigmatic man currently inhabiting it. That was another component to the mystery of Elliot Bailey. Whoever would have guessed that the stiff, humorless, focused FBI agent could pen gripping true-crime books in his spare time? She would never admit it to Elliot, but she found it utterly fascinating how his writing managed to convey pathos and drama and even some lighter moments.
True crime was definitely not her groove at all but she had read his last bestseller in five hours, without so much as stopping to take a bathroom break—and had slept with her closet light on for weeks.
That still didn’t mean she wanted him living next door. At this point, she couldn’t do anything to change that. The only thing she could do was treat him with the same courtesy and respect she would any other guest at the inn.
No matter how difficult that might prove.
* * *
WHAT THE HELL was he doing here?
Elliot dragged his duffel to the larger of the cottage’s two bedrooms, where a folding wood-framed luggage stand had been set out, ready for guests.
The cottage was tastefully decorated in what he termed Western chic—bold mission furniture, wood plank ceiling, colorful rugs on the floor. A river rock fireplace dominated the living room, probably perfect for those chilly evenings along the lakeshore.
Cedarwood Cottage seemed comfortable and welcoming, a good place for him to huddle over his laptop and pound out the last few chapters of the book that was overdue to his editor.
Even so, he could already tell this was a mistake.
Why the hell hadn’t he simply told his mother and Katrina he wouldn’t be able to make it to the reception? He had flown to Cartagena for the wedding three months earlier, after all. Surely that showed enough personal commitment on his part to his baby sister’s nuptials.
They would have protested a bit but would have understood—and in the end, it wouldn’t have much mattered whether he made it home for the event or not. The reception wasn’t about him; it was about Bowie and Katrina and the life they were building with Bowie’s younger brother Milo and Kat’s adopted daughter, Gabriella.
For his part, Elliot was quite sure he would have been better off if he had stayed holed up in his condo in Denver to finish the book, no matter how awkward things had become for him there. If he closed the blinds, ignored the doorbell and just hunkered down, he could have typed one-handed or even dictated the changes he needed to make. The whole thing would have been done in a week.
The manuscript wasn’t the problem.
Elliot frowned, his head pounding in rhythm to each throbbing ache of his shoulder.
He was the problem—and he couldn’t escape the mess he had created, no matter how far away from Denver he drove.
He struggled to unzip the duffel one-handed, then finally gave up and stuck his right arm out of the sling to help. His shoulder ached even more in response, not happy with being subjected to eight hours of driving only days post-surgery.
How was he going to explain the shoulder injury to his mother? He couldn’t tell her he was recovering from a gunshot wound, not given his family’s history.
Charlene had lost a son and husband in the line of duty and had seen both a daughter and her other son injured on the job.
Nor could he tell his brother Marshall or his brother-in-law Cade about all the trouble he found himself in. He was the model FBI agent, with the unblemished record.
Until now.
Moving into the cottage was an easy job that took him all of five minutes, transferring the packing cubes from his duffel into drawers, setting his toiletries in the bathroom, hanging the few dress shirts he had brought along. When he was done, he wandered back into the combined living room/kitchen.
The front wall was made almost entirely of windows, perfect for looking out and enjoying the spectacular view of Lake Haven during one of its most beautiful seasons, late spring, before the tourist horde descended.
On impulse, Elliot opened the door and walked out onto the wide front porch. The night was chilly but the mingled scents of pine and cedar and lake intoxicated him. He drew fresh mountain air deep into his lungs.
This.
If he needed to look for a reason why he had been compelled to come home during his suspension and the investigation into his actions, he only had to think about what this view would look like in the morning, with the sun creeping over the mountains.
Lake Haven called to him like nowhere else on earth—not only the stunning blue waters or the mountains that jutted out of them in jagged peaks, but the calm, rhythmic lapping of the water against the shore, the ever-changing sky, the cry of wood ducks pedaling in for a landing.
He had spent his entire professional life digging into the worst aspects of the human condition, investigating cruelty and injustice and people with no moral conscience whatsoever. No matter what sort of muck he waded through, he had figured out early in his career at the FBI that he could keep that ugliness from touching the core of him with thoughts of Haven Point and the people
