back, trying to soothe her the way he would a distraught crime victim, which in a way Annie was. Her mother’s murder had affected her, too. It didn’t matter how much this woman looked like Nadine, to Annie she was still a stranger. How could he turn the child over to her? “Ms. Michaelson—”
“Did I—should I have let her think…” Her voice cracked, and she shivered.
“Come on, let’s get out of the wind,” he said, leading her away from the dock. When his deputy moved to follow, he turned back toward him. “Tommy, I’ve got it from here. You can take the ferry back to Whiskey Bay. I need you to help Bruce at the office.”
“But, Sheriff Blakeslee…”
The kid wanted to be where the excitement was. The biggest thing to have ever happened in the far-reaching area that was Reed’s jurisdiction was Nadine’s murder. But it was so much more to Reed, so much more personal. Maybe he’d thought he’d been acting as her friend by not digging into her past, but she might be alive if he had. And now, because she was dead, he had to dig. “I need you there.”
“Yes…yes, sir,” the young man stammered. While he didn’t immediately head back to the ferry, he didn’t follow when Reed started walking again.
Sasha Michaelson glanced back toward the deputy, probably wishing she could take the next ferry away from Sunset Island, too. “There are no cars?”
“Nope. We could take a horse-drawn carriage, but my house isn’t far from here.”
“House?”
“I don’t have an office on the island. Nothing’s ever really happened here.” Until now. “A drunken brawl or two at one of the bars. And then I take them to the jail and office on the mainland.”
“By ferry?”
“There’s a sheriff’s boat.” He could have sent it for her, but he’d wanted it close…in case of emergency.
From the dock a cobblestone lane headed into the little town where the shops, restaurants and inns were. Reed led her the opposite direction, down a gravel path toward the houses. His cottage wasn’t much closer than the Scott Mansion, but he wasn’t ready to take her, or Annie, to the big house where Nadine had been savagely murdered, where her blood still stained the foyer.
Annie hadn’t been home when her mother was killed. The nanny had taken her for a walk, so she hadn’t seen anything. For that, but not much else, Reed could be grateful.
The problem was no one else had seen anything, either. No witnesses and no body made Nadine’s murder tough to solve. But he would. He owed both Nadine and her daughter justice. He would find the killer, whether he’d left the island or still lived among them.
He touched Sasha Michaelson’s back, turning her down the path toward his small, fieldstone cottage. She wasn’t very tall, her head barely as high as his shoulder. And despite the bulky jacket and heavy pants, he could tell her frame was delicate. Like Nadine’s.
He’d felt protective of Nadine and Annie. And it tore him apart that he hadn’t been able to protect Nadine from death or Annie from the loss of her mother.
But he didn’t feel protective of Sasha Michaelson. It was something else that flared inside him, something he hadn’t felt in so long that he barely recognized it as the hot sting of desire.
“Nice,” she murmured as she passed through the door he held open for her.
His ex-wife had hated the place for being too cramped, too primitive. A fire still burned in the grate, casting a warm glow over the hardwood floor. Sasha walked toward it, her hands out. “I forgot gloves,” she said. “I thought I’d thought of everything, but I forgot gloves.”
Reed caught the rising note of hysteria in her voice. Maybe she wasn’t cold and unemotional. Maybe she was just scared. He glanced down at Annie’s face. The child had fallen asleep in his arms, not a surprise after her restless night. He shouldered open the door to the spare bedroom and laid her on the mattress on the floor. Because of the chill in the room, he didn’t bother removing her coat and just pulled the comforter over her legs.
When he rose to his feet, he found Sasha in the doorway, watching him and her niece. “She’s so little,” she said in a hushed whisper. “Just a baby, isn’t she?”
“She’d argue that if she was awake,” he said with a short chuckle. The little girl knew many words other than Mommy, had even gotten good at stringing some into basic sentences. She was at the age of wonder and development, and her mother would miss it all. If only Nadine had trusted him enough to tell him what had been troubling her…
“She talks?”
“She’s very smart,” he said, not bothering to disguise his pride in the child.
Sasha must have caught it because her eyes narrowed. Then she shivered again. He brushed past her, resisting the urge to slide an arm around her, as he walked back into the living room, his boots clunking against the floor. He didn’t worry about Annie waking, Nadine had always said she was a sound sleeper. He worried about his reaction to Annie’s aunt, about his urge to touch her.
Sasha stood in the doorway another minute, staring at her sleeping niece before she turned to him. “Does she know her mother’s dead?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“You haven’t told her?”
“It’s not my place.” Nadine had had a legal document drawn up stating that fact, but in Reed’s heart, he knew it was very much his place…as Annie’s was with him.
“I have to tell her?”
“That’s up to you, Miss Michaelson.” And he did try to curb his bitterness. She didn’t deserve it.
She lifted her hands, then let them drop back to her sides. “I don’t know what to do….”
“You’re in shock.” He saw that now, as well as the fear that widened her crystal-blue eyes. More guilt plagued him for his lack of sensitivity.
Pride lifted her chin as she made a visible effort to pull herself together. “I’m just worried about her, about Annie. Losing her mother…”
“Yeah.” He couldn’t say any more, emotion choked his voice. A small kitchen was hidden behind the fireplace. He ducked around to splash coffee into two mugs. “Here, this’ll warm up your hands.”
And maybe Annie would warm her heart. She kept glancing toward the bedroom, alert to any murmur the child uttered in her sleep. She accepted the mug, barely distracted from her vigilance over her niece.
Still looking toward the bedroom, she asked, “How did my sister die?”
He didn’t want to tell her, didn’t want to reveal the gory details. “In her home,” he said instead. Nadine should have been safe there, should have been safe on Sunset Island. But since her murder, Reed couldn’t see the island as a sanctuary. Until Nadine’s killer was caught, an aura of danger would engulf the island like the fog that wrapped around it every night.
She glanced toward him, irritation flashing in her blue eyes. “I didn’t
