His Brother's Bride

They looked under the bed, in the drawers, behind every piece of furniture.

Laurel crossed to the dresser, using a pencil to type on the laptop keyboard.

“This computer’s password-encrypted,” she told Scott.

He joined her by the dresser, looking over her shoulder at the darkened screen. “Must be something important in there...”

“Something that could, perhaps, put William in danger....”

“Except why would he have left it sitting here like this?”

“For that matter, why would he have left it out in the open like this at all...”

“...unless he didn’t plan to be away from it,” Scott concluded.

Laurel felt a rush of familiar warmth as her mind melded with Scott’s. The two of them had always thought more alike than she and Paul had.

Paul had teased them about it.

And she’d punished him with heated kisses...

“But then, writers are by nature a somewhat paranoid bunch,” she said, refusing to allow herself to be sidetracked. “It’s probably more likely that William is simply protecting his next bestseller.”

“What do you make of this?” With the back of his hand, Scott nudged the birth certificate until it was facing them and more clearly legible.

Laurel whistled softly. “The birth was thirty-five years ago. In Iowa. And...”

“No parents.”

“I wonder who Leslie Renwick is....”

“I’ve never heard of any Renwick family around here. Maureen and Clint hadn’t, either.”

“It’s got to be significant, though. People don’t just leave important documents like that lying around.”

Scott pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and dialed some numbers.

While he gave the specifics of the birth certificate to whoever was on the other end of the line, Laurel moved on to look at the copy of Byrd’s B and B guide on the nightstand.

“It’s open to a place in Vermont,” she said as soon as Scott hung up the phone. “I wonder if that means anything.”

Again, Scott came to stand closely beside her. Again, Laurel reacted strangely, feeling an odd combination of security and excitement. Scott was reminding her of Paul—reigniting the torch that had burned so brightly for her fiancé.

Was she ever going to be over her intense love for Paul? Had she set herself an impossible goal in believing she could move on?

“Might be someplace he was planning to visit. I’ll give them a call, see what I can find out,” Scott was saying as he jotted down the phone number and address. “What do you make of the picture?”

Laurel glanced at the old photograph, briefly. A young couple hugging was not what she needed to be focusing on right now. Turning from the nightstand, she noticed the negligee hanging on the bedpost.

“I wonder if the picture has any connection to that,” she said, pointing to the sexy nightgown.

“Perhaps,” Scott said, inspecting the gown as closely as he could without actually touching it. “I’m guessing that what it does mean is that a woman plays a significant part in whatever happened to Byrd yesterday.”

“Unless he was a cross-dresser...”

CHAPTER FOUR

AFTER PULLING A few strings to have Byrd’s possessions sent down to the lab in Pittsfield for fingerprinting, Scott invited Laurel to take a drive into Cooper’s Corner with him to do some questioning. Depending on what he turned up, Scott figured he just might be spending the better part of his vacation working on the case.