“He should be. He—”
“Wait!” Terri pushed on his shoulders. “What about the note? Who wrote it?”
“Someone who knew Leslie’s handwriting and could imitate it.”
His hands were running down her body. She still had on some clothes and Nate was deftly removing them.
Terri wanted to ask more questions, but at the moment she could think of nothing but his hands and his lips on her skin.
Besides, something Dr. Jamie had said yesterday was coming to her. “There is always a good side,” he’d said. “You just have to find it.” He’d made her realize that the cloud that had hung over her since she could remember—that her mother had abandoned her and her father—was no longer there. Her mother had wanted them. She didn’t discard them and run away with someone else. She wasn’t—as Terri feared—now living somewhere else with another family. She wasn’t helping another daughter buy a new dress. She wasn’t taking her other children to swimming lessons. Wasn’t laughing with them and never thinking about the two people she’d left behind.
“Nate,” Terri whispered. “We can—”
“Yeah,” he answered as he rolled on top of her. “We can do anything. Do it all.”
As he entered her, she felt the freest she’d felt in her lifetime. With Nate’s slow, long, deep strokes, she felt something else rise in her: hope. It was not an emotion she was familiar with. Her life had always seemed to be preordained. She had to always be good to atone for her mother’s sins. She’d had to...
She bent her leg and pushed on Nate so he rolled onto his back, taking her with him.
When he looked up at her face and saw the beginning of a smile, he understood. For all the tragedy of the situation, it meant he and Terri could be together. With the infidelity of the past removed from Terri’s life, all that was wrong was a broken engagement. Not a reenactment of the past, just a normal thing.
They knew that the future belonged to them. They were conjoined beings who no longer had to face the world separately.
They made love for an hour, until exhaustion and hunger made them stop. Nate would have to go back to the crime scene, but he needed a shower. Terri joined him. “You know I can’t resist water,” she said.
By the time they got out, it was midmorning and Nate finally checked his phone. He had thirty-two messages—none of which he read. “I have to go,” he muttered.
“Oh?” Terri dropped the towel to the floor. “Sure?”
Nate stepped back to look at her nude body, rosy pink from the hot water. He remembered her long, long legs around him, her ankles on his shoulder. “I’m the sheriff now so I have to—”
“You’re what?”
“Jamie gave Frank a tranq and put him in the hospital, so Frank temporarily gave me his badge. I need to—”
Terri threw open a closet door, pulled out a blue robe, put it on and headed for the kitchen. “I’ll make you a sandwich and you can eat it in the car. What’s Rowan doing to find out who...who did it?”
Nate hastily pulled on his jeans and T-shirt. He picked up his shoes and socks and followed her to the kitchen. “Why the change of heart?”
“I thought you were just a bystander, getting in the way of the FBI, but as sheriff they’ll have to let you in on this. You’re clever. You can figure out things.”
Nate took a handful of corn chips. “When you thought I was a civilian, you wanted to spend the day in bed with me. But now you want me gone?”
“That’s right.”
“Jamie will probably release Frank today and I’ll give his badge back.”
Terri stopped putting mayonnaise on bread and stared at him. “I retract the clever part. If you think Frank Cannon will ever take that badge back, you are dreaming. And as for getting out of the hospital, I’ll bet you twenty grand—which I don’t have—that he’s on his way to his fishing cabin—and no one, not even Dad, knows where that is. Since I won’t lose, I’ll add five to the bet that he left his phone behind so no one can reach him.”
Nate was staring at her.
She piled the bread high with cold cuts, tomatoes, pickles and lettuce. “You have the badge with you?”
Silently, Nate pulled it out of his pocket and pinned it to his shirt.
“Looks good, and you’d better get used to it.”
“Terri,” Nate said with great patience, “I am not into law enforcement.”