forgot to lock your door. I came by hoping to catch your building manager so he could let me in again—”
“Fiona, stop lying. I talked to him after the last time. He didn’t let you in.” The big cowboy held out his hand. “Give it to me.”
She pretended not to know what he was talking about, blinking her big green eyes at him in the best innocent look she could muster. She couldn’t lose this man. She wouldn’t. She did the only thing she could. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the key. “I can explain.”
“No need,” he said as he took the key.
She felt real tears of remorse fill her eyes. But she saw that he was no longer affected by her tears. She stepped to him to put her arms around his neck and pulled him down for a kiss. Maybe if she could draw him toward the bed...
“Fiona, stop.” He grabbed her wrists and pulled them from around his neck. “Stop!”
She stared at him, feeling the happy life she’d planned crumbling under her feet.
He groaned and shook his head. “You need to leave.”
“Sure,” she said and, trying to get control of her emotions, started to step past him. “Just let me look in one more place for my lipstick. I know I had it—”
“No,” he said, blocking her way. “Your lipstick isn’t here and we both know it. Just like your phone wasn’t here the last time you stopped by. This has to stop. I don’t want to see you again.”
“You don’t mean that.” Her voice broke. “Is this about the letter from that bitch who dumped you?”
His gaze shot to the bureau again. She watched his expression change from frustrated to furious. “You’ve been going through my things?”
“I told you, I was looking for my lipstick. I’m sorry I found the letter. You hadn’t called, and I thought maybe it was because of the letter.”
He sighed, and when he spoke it was as if he was talking to a small unruly child. “Fiona, I told you from the first night we met that I wasn’t ready for another relationship. You caught me at a weak moment, otherwise nothing would have happened between the two of us. I’d had too much to drink, and my boss’s wife insisted that I let you drive me back to my apartment.” He groaned. “I’m not trying to make excuses for what happened. We are both adults. But I was honest with you.” He looked pained, his blue eyes dark. “I’m sorry if you thought that that night was more than it was. But now you have to leave and not come back.”
“We can’t be over! You have to give me another chance.” She’d heard the words before from other men, more times than she wanted to remember. “I’m sorry. I was wrong to come here when you weren’t home. I won’t do anything like this again. I promise.”
“Stop!” he snapped. “You’re not listening. Look,” he said, lowering his voice. “You might as well know that I’m leaving at the end of the week. My job here is over.”
“Leaving?” This couldn’t be happening. “Where are you going?” she cried, and felt her eyes widen in alarm. “You’re going back to Montana. Back to her. Mary Cardwell Savage.” She spit out the words as if they were stones that had been lodged in her throat.
He shook his head. “I told you the night we met that there was no chance of me falling for another woman because I was still in love with someone else.”
She sneered at him. “She broke your heart. She’ll do it again. Don’t let her. She’s nobody.” She took a step toward him. “I can make you happy if you’ll just give me a chance.”
“Fiona, please go before either of us says something we’ll regret,” Chase said in a tone she’d never heard from him before. He was shutting her out. For good.
If he would only let her kiss him... She reached for him, thinking she could make him remember what they had together, but he pushed her back.
“Don’t.” He was shaking his head, looking at her as if horrified by her. There was anguish in his gaze. But there was also pity and disgust. That too she’d seen before. She felt a dark shell close around her heart.
“You’ll be sorry,” she said, feeling crushed but at the same time infused with a cold, murderous fury.
“I should have never have let this happen,” Chase was saying. “This is all my fault. I’m so sorry.”
Oh, he didn’t know sorry, but he would soon enough. He would rue this day. And if he thought he’d seen the last of her, he was in for a surprise. That Montana hayseed would have Chase over her dead body.
“I feel terrible that I didn’t warn you about Fiona,” his boss said on Chase’s last day of work. Rick had insisted on buying him a beer after quitting time.
Now in the cool dark of the bar, Chase looked at the man and said, “So she’s done this before?”
Rick sighed. “She gets attached if a man pays any attention to her in the least and can’t let go, but don’t worry, she’ll meet some other guy and get crazy over him. It’s a pattern with her. She and my wife went to high school together. Patty feels sorry for her and keeps hoping she’ll meet someone and settle down.”
Chase shook his head, remembering his first impression of the woman. Fiona had seemed so together, so...normal. She sold real estate, dressed like a polished professional and acted like one. She’d come up to him at a barbecue at Rick’s house. Chase hadn’t wanted to go, but his boss had insisted, saying it would do him good to get out more.
He’d just lost his mother. His mother, Muriel, had been sick for some time. It was one of the reasons he’d come to Arizona in the first place. The other was that he knew he could find work here as a carpenter. Muriel had made him promise that when she died, he would take her ashes back to Montana. He’d been with her at the end, hoping that she would finally tell him the one thing she’d kept from him all these years. But she hadn’t. She’d taken her secret to the grave and left him with more questions than answers—and an urn full of her ashes.
“You need to get out occasionally,” Rick had said when Chase left work to go pick up the urn from the mortuary. It was in a velvet bag. He’d stuffed it behind the seat of his pickup on the way to the barbecue.
“All you do is work, then hide out in your apartment not to be seen again until you do the same thing the next day,” Rick had argued. “You might just have fun and I cook damned good barbecue. Come on, it’s just a few friends.”
He’d gone, planning not to stay longer than it took to drink a couple of beers and have some barbecued ribs. He’d been on his second beer when he’d seen her. Fiona stood out among the working-class men and women at the party because she’d come straight from her job at a local real estate company.
She wore high heels that made her long legs look even longer. Her curvaceous body was molded into a dark suit with a white blouse and gold jewelry. Her long blond hair was pulled up, accentuating her tanned throat against the white of her blouse.
He’d
