Heartwishes (Edilean 5)

He kissed her palm again. “Thanks, but I may have reached my limit. I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry.”

“For me or for food?”

“Food!” he said as he got off the bed and pulled on his trousers.

As she watched him walk out, his back muscles playing under his skin, she said loudly, “Looks like the honeymoon is over.”

He looked around the doorjamb. “Feed me, then I’ll show you that it’s only just begun.”

Gemma grabbed Colin’s T-shirt off the floor and put it on a

s she ran past him to the living room.

Colin had taken only two bites when his cell buzzed and he pulled it out of his pocket. “It’s Roy,” he said as he looked at the text message. “I have to go. There’s been a robbery in Edilean.”

Gemma was up in an instant. “Need this?” she asked, indicating his T-shirt, which she was wearing.

“Yeah,” he said as he put on his shoes and socks. When he looked up, Gemma had removed his shirt and was standing before him naked. When he’d seen her wearing her skimpy street clothes, she’d had a beautiful body, and he’d loved touching it in bed. But now, seeing her naked, she looked like a Vargas pinup.

Colin stood there looking at her, his eyes wide, then he staggered back a step until he hit the wall. “Ooooooh,” was all he could say.

Gemma, a bit embarrassed but extremely pleased by his reaction, said, “You have to go.”

“I can’t,” Colin said. “My legs are numb. My brain has died.”

“I’ll—” Gemma took a step.

“Freeze!” he said. “You move and make a single thing bounce and I’ll fall down dead right here.”

Gemma was trying not to grin, but she couldn’t help it. “All right, I’ll stay still, but you have to go and save Edilean. Think it was someone stealing a pie off a windowsill?”

“I don’t know,” he said as he went to her, bent, and kissed her sweetly on the mouth. As he stepped away, he ran his hands down her sides. “Roy better have a damned good reason for calling me away,” he said, looking as though he were about to cry. He left.

17

THE ROBBERY HAD taken place in one of the newer houses in Edilean. In Colin’s opinion, too many houses had been jammed together on twenty acres that had once been farmland. The long-term residents had tried to stop the building when it began five years before, but they hadn’t been successful. City people, charmed by the idea of living in “the quaint little town of Edilean, Virginia, a place untouched by time,” as the ads said, had snatched up the houses before they were finished. Since then, a lot of people had moved out. Edilean, for all its proximity to larger cities, was too rural for them.

Colin knew more about the “newcomers” as they were called—and would be no matter how many years they stayed there—than the other original residents did, and he was somewhat familiar with this family. The wife was a stay-at-home mom with a young daughter and a three-year-old son. The husband worked in Portsmouth, something to do with the military. Colin’s impression had always been that they seemed like a nice family.

“What happened to you?” Roy asked as soon as he got inside the house and she saw his messed hair and sleepy-eyed look. She’d already put yellow tape across the bedroom door and taken many photos throughout the house.

Colin gave her a look to be quiet.

“Oh, right,” Roy said, “Jean.” She was smirking at his general air of having just tumbled out of bed.

“We broke up,” Colin said under his breath, and the way he said it told her he wasn’t saying any more. “Tell me what happened here.”

Roy filled him in on the details of a diamond ring that had been stolen. The owner had kept it inside a hidden compartment of her bedpost. Unfortunately, there were no photos of the ring. “From the way the bedroom was tossed about, it looks like the thief had a difficult time finding it. My guess is it was some local kids,” Roy added. “Maybe on a dare. I think it was just dumb luck that they found the ring.”

Colin stepped under the tape across the doorway and began to look around. While it was true that the room was in disarray, with pillows knocked off the beds, a corner of the rug rolled back, and a chair overturned, there was something about it all that didn’t seem right. For one thing, putting the room back together would take only minutes. In a way, it looked as though the thief had moved things about as an afterthought.

He looked at the bedpost. The end had been screwed off, exposing a small hollowed-out area inside. Not much could have been hidden there, but a ring would fit easily. His first thought was of Mrs. Ellis at the furniture store. Only someone who knew furniture would know there was a hiding place there—or a customer who owned the same set.

He told Roy to find out who in the area had bought an identical bed and she made a note of it.

After Roy left the room, Colin walked about, looking at all of it. On top of the dresser were the usual perfume bottles and cosmetics, a few framed photos of the family. He didn’t see anything in the closet that looked as though it hadn’t been touched, nor did the bathroom seem to have been disturbed.

When Roy returned, she told him the bed had belonged to the woman’s parents and that her father had made it. “It’s one of a kind.”