Scarlet Nights (Edilean 3)

“I can take it.”

“Sure?”

“Haven’t you learned yet that I’m very strong?”

Mike put his hand on his lower back. “This morning in the shower I thought you were going to break me.”

Sara didn’t smile. “I want you to pretend I’m some woman who works in your office and tell me what you’ve found out. I’ll type it and I promise not to have palpitations.”

“Not even for kisses on the back of the neck?”

“That is altogether different. Can you treat me as though I’m just a regular person?”

“No,” he answered quickly.

“Good!” Sara said just as fast.

When they stopped at an office supply store to buy a printer, Mike asked why she wasn’t still typing Luke’s books.

“My mother. I was only fifteen when he wrote his first novel, and I spent an entire summer with a computer on my lap. When he finished it, Luke had half a dozen ideas for more books. I was going to help him, but my mother gave him a copy of Mavis Beacon—the typing software—and told him to let her daughter have a life.”

“Think you’ll someday be just like your mother?”

“I pray nightly not to be.”

Once they were back at the apartment, Sara turned on Mike’s laptop. After he told her to quit trying to access his personal files, he began to dictate.

He told of making contact with the “victim” and taking up residence with her. Mike glanced at Sara to see how she was taking this admission, but her face was stoic. She was concentrating on recording what he said.

It wasn’t until he got to the part about Merlin’s Farm that she interrupted. “I think you should mention your grandmother’s attachment to the farm.”

“That has nothing to do with this case. Now, as I was saying—”

“I think there is a connection. Your grandmother wanted the place and so does Greg … Stefan.”

“My grandmother left Edilean in 1941. What’s going on now has nothing to do with then.”

“I’m sure you know better than I do,” she said in a way that let him know he was wrong. She put her hands back on the keyboard.

Mike turned away. The truth was, he agreed with her. Even though he couldn’t see how the two events were related, he planned to work on it. But he wasn’t going to worry Sara with that now. He went on with his story, and she didn’t interrupt again until he got to his conversation with Ariel.

“Ariel knew Greg was fornicating with other women but she didn’t tell me?”

“I thought you were going to disassociate yourself from this.”

“I’m not angry at Greg. He’s the snake that doesn’t change character no matter how nice you are to him, but Ariel … What in the world can she imagine that I’ve done to her that she’d let me marry a man she knew was that bad?”

“If she’d told you about him, would you have believed her?”

“Not a word of it.”

Mike looked at her in astonishment. “Maybe she knew that and that’s why she didn’t tell you. Would you have told her if she was marrying a philanderer?”

“Oh, yes!” Sara said with a smile. “I would have run so fast my feet wouldn’t have touched the ground.”

Mike shook his head at her.

“And Colin!” Sara said. “I can’t believe he didn’t tell me about Greg. Colin and I have always been friends! When we get home I’m going to have a talk with the Fraziers.”