The Girl in the Mist (Misted Pines 1)

He was making love to me because he was falling in love with me too.

This was great.

This was marvelous.

This gave him my June Cleaver act for at least until they caught this killer, and then we’d be figuring out if Bohannan could cook too.

And it would have remained great and marvelous if my phone hadn’t started ringing.

No one got through but a select few, and none of those select few had any reason to phone me at that hour.

Unless it was important.

Or an emergency.

Shit.

Bohannan knew this, so he reached for my phone and took it from the charge pad I’d set up on what was now my nightstand.

“Fenn,” he muttered.

I wasn’t going to talk to my daughter with my man inside me, and he knew that.

So he slid out, rolled to his back, tucked me to his side, and I took the call.

“Hey, lovely, everything okay?” I greeted.

“Okay, Mom,” she said cautiously. “I’m gonna send you a link but I wanted to phone you before instead of springing it on you in a text.”

My eyes found Bohannan’s.

His brows knitted ominously.

“What?” I asked.

“Well, your secret is out about your new home among the pines. And the killings are no longer a local story. And your relationship with the famous profiler handling them isn’t either. And…uh…” a loaded beat, “did you know Cade is married?”

Well.

Shit.

Forty-Five

Heart to Hearts

We both put our pajamas back on before I opened my texts to grab the link Fenn sent.

And I sent it to Bohannan so he could read it with me.

I was two paragraphs in when he bit off, “Fucking Dern.”

And yes.

The article had Dern written all over it.

Evidence of that was that it alluded to the fact I’d picked Misted Pines to escape my stalker because I’d found it safe, due to his reputation as a stalwart law enforcement officer who ran a tight ship.

Sadly, a miracle had not happened, and Bob Welsh’s activities didn’t fly under media radar. Those activities were far too shocking and involved far too many famous people for that ever to happen.

Therefore, it wasn’t lost on me Bob Welsh had garnered no small amount of media fascination because of what he did and why he did it.

But for the most part, Alicia and Russ weathered that storm not only because they came home and were accessible, but because both of them were far more famous than me. Though they did it by making no comment (Michael used it to get himself a few television interviews).

I was in Misted Pines, and no one knew I was there (until now), not to mention I had other things going on. Although I kept my finger on the pulse, stayed in touch with Alicia and Russ, Agent Palmer kept me informed if I needed to be, and Welsh’s two victims frequently came to mind, I hoped they were doing all right and was poised to help if asked, it didn’t really faze me.

And as with everything like that, once the bloom went off the rose of that story, it disappeared and would probably not reappear (because he’d pleaded guilty and would not stand trial) until (or if) one of the women came forward to tell their story or when someone got hold of it to do a documentary and/or movie for Netflix.

So even though, for all involved, one way or another, that would never be done, for all intents and purposes (for now), it was.

To be honest, the fact I was in Misted Pines wasn’t very interesting.

The fact, after over a decade of being single and meticulously guarding my privacy, I’d hooked up with a lauded ex-FBI profiler who was helping with the local case of the deaths of two girls…

And that profiler looked like Bohannan.

That was going to be an issue.

But Bob Welsh wasn’t the first time I’d learned the lesson that the twenty-four-hour news cycle was perhaps one of the top (if not the top) detrimental things to happen in society in the last few decades.

There was just not that much news.

Since there wasn’t, you had to make that much news.

And when you couldn’t make it, you had to have someone talking about it. Which spawned more interview shows than there were people who were interesting enough to be interviewed (so you had to make them interesting), and talking head news commentary shows, both of which existed mostly to tell people what to think.

When people should think for themselves.

Or alternately pay more attention to living their own lives.

So in the end, I knew Leland Dern’s desperate ploy to save face and attempt to convince the few supporters he had left that he was who he wanted them to believe he was would be an annoyance for Bohannan and me.

But it would be brief.

Bohannan tossed his phone on his nightstand before I got to the end (so he was also a speed reader) and he had his palms to his forehead when I was done.