The Girl in the Mist (Misted Pines 1)

They wanted to meet these Celeste, Jesse and Jason people I kept talking about.

And, of course, Cade.

And yes, you could take that for what it was.

My dastardly daughters—plotting.

Incidentally, I had not shared with my girls that there recently was the very dramatic death that I was marginally embroiled in of a pretty eight-year-old child.

I told myself they’d worried enough about Welsh; they didn’t need me to add to that with Alice.

And although that was true, I had concerns that neither of my girls was going to be very accepting of that truth.

Onward from that forthcoming debacle…

We were hitting critical mass with how desperately I needed to have sex with Cade Hunter Bohannan (yes, I’d learned his middle name, I’d learned a lot about Bohannan, except how good he was in bed).

Living with a man you were preposterously attracted to but sleeping in a different room from him, with some hard kisses, your neck having been made fair game along the way and lots of cuddling the only things you got, was—believe me—torture.

So there was also that.

Celeste and I still had GPS panic buttons we carried with us and had been given several Taser sessions, which were equal doses of scary and fun. But I felt (somewhat) like I could handle myself with one.

As a Bohannan, Celeste was a natural.

She didn’t carry one to school, as that would not be cool, but she carried one everywhere else.

So did I.

The boys had put more cameras up and sensors out.

Hawk’s man, Billy, had flown back to Denver.

Nothing had led to anything regarding Alice’s killer, to the point Bohannan had sent both boys out on two different jobs—Jace gone for three days first, Jess for four days after—because someone had to make money.

(Don’t ask me what these “jobs” were, none of them would tell me, so I let it lie.)

Bohannan himself spent a lot of time in his office (the only room in the house that Grace had decorated with a thoroughly masculine hand—think leather and wood but fortunately no antlers—then again, I’d learned Bohannan and both his boys weren’t only non-hunters, they were anti-hunting, regardless of their lustfully meat-eating ways, “Because in a civilized world, I see no reason why I, or anyone, personally needs to kill a living thing.”—Bohannan’s firm words on that subject).

He was in that office going over files he was sent, which he was consulting on, from not only police departments across the United States, but also ones from different countries, including ones that had to be translated.

So…yeah.

He was that big of a deal.

I had not moved home, because David decided to take this time I was away to renovate my master bath, and that was noisy, messy, dusty work that not only put me out of my bedroom, but made it impossible for me to work there.

My kitchen was done (and it proved a little updating—like a new herringbone backsplash and quartz countertops—could work wonders for a space).

My bath would be finished in another week, just in time to have the house together for my girls to be there.

Though, I was also not back home, sleeping in one of the two other bedrooms, because Bohannan wanted me to stay.

I was writing again, and on the weekends would go to my place for several hours to work in my office. But when David was working, I set up in the sitting room in Bohannan’s bedroom (or the living room, or in the local library doing research, or wherever, as laptops do travel).

This was the only interesting twist of the last three and a half weeks, seeing as I was writing a Mullally, and Bohannan had asked to read it as I wrote it.

I let Alicia read my writing as I wrote, and that was it.

But I found when he asked, I had zero qualms with saying yes.

So I let him.

And it was my favorite part of the day when Bohannan would surface from his iPad, look at me and say, “You’re crushing it.”

Life had formed into a rhythm, and as with these things, the horror of Alice’s loss diminished with time—for us and in town.

Make no mistake, the gloom had not lifted. Alice and her loss would be remembered for decades to come, but people were getting on with their lives.

Bohannan and the boys had not forgotten about it, but you can’t investigate a case with zero leads.

Fortunately, everyone was blaming Leland Dern for this, exulting Harry Moran for his patience and continued tenacity (because he wasn’t giving up) and exonerating Bohannan for stepping back.

He had been doing it free of charge, for one, and everyone understood people had to get paid.

And you couldn’t make up psychological factors to build a profile, and the murderer was giving them nothing.

So all was good in my world even if all was not good.