Before any of them could say more, a voice called out from the other room, “Aggie, I'm going to get going, I've interrupted enough …”
He placed the voice instantly.
When its owner entered the room and saw him, he knew she recognized him too.
It was the woman he’d bumped into on the street earlier as he’d been walking around trying to garner enough courage to face his brother.
In the light, she looked even more beautiful, and her voice was sweeter when it wasn't stuttering. She had trembled under his hands when he’d grabbed hold of her shoulders so she didn’t topple over. She’d been afraid of him. Why, he had no idea, but when he’d opened his mouth to ask her out, she had run. Luke had never had a woman run from him before.
“It’s you.” The woman was staring at him in shock.
“Do you two know each other?” Nick was looking suspiciously back and forth from him to the woman like he suspected Luke had been lying when he’d said he wasn't currently dating anyone.
“No,” he replied, although he’d certainly love to change that. The woman was pretty, and if she was even half as sweet as his sister-in-law appeared to be, she was exactly the kind of woman he was attracted to. “We bumped into each other earlier tonight, literally.”
“Oh, what are the chances.” Aggie giggled.
The woman did not look amused.
“This is Aggie’s friend, Summer, and this is my brother, Luke,” Nick made the introductions.
“Nice to meet you, Summer.” He walked to the woman and held out his hand.
Summer stared at it, clearly not wanting to touch him. With a glance at Aggie and Nick, she reluctantly shook his hand. Luke felt the connection immediately. From the startled look she shot him and the way she quickly snatched her hand back he knew she felt it too.
He’d never felt anything like it before.
Luke had been in love many times, at least he’d thought he’d been in love. It was only after things had already fallen apart that he realized that what he’d felt wasn't love, it was a mixture of like, lust, and desperation.
He didn’t want another disastrous failure under his belt.
He wanted the real thing.
Could Summer be the one?
February 15th
7:53 A.M.
“I could quite happily have gone my whole life without seeing that.” Detective Allina Bennett scrunched up her nose at the sight before her. She had never seen anything like it, and in her forty-three years, more than half of them as a cop, she had seen a lot. But this … this was bad. Horrible. Awful. Unbelievable. And yet she had to believe it because she was standing here looking at it.
“Me too,” Jonathon Dawson agreed. Her partner was looking grim this morning, and since his son had been born five months ago, he had pretty much perpetually been sporting a huge, goofy grin. This crime scene was enough to wipe the smile off anyone’s face.
“What’s cause of death, Tracey?” Allina asked.
The medical examiner’s gaze didn’t leave the body lying in front of her. “I won’t know until I do the autopsy.”
Jonathon’s light brown eyes grew wide. “Is there a chance she was alive when …?”
“When he boiled her?” Tracey finished for him. “Yes.”
Allina’s shudder had nothing to do with the icy cold morning. Her family had experienced true evil up close. Her sister-in-law had been abducted five years ago and there had been no trace of Grace since.
Every day since they had lived with the fear that they would get a call telling them her body had been found, thrown away somewhere like trash.
Like this woman, whose body had been dumped at the side of a road.
This woman was someone’s daughter, maybe a sister, a girlfriend, a wife, a mother. There were people who would be wondering every day what had happened to her.