Dead Giveaway

“A page-turner…A darn good read.”

—All About Romance

“Novak knows how to relate a suspenseful tale. [The heroine’s] almost palpable fear fuels this gripping tale.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A brave but very human heroine and a grieving hero obsessed with vengeance manage to find both healing and love as they deal with the past—and the violent present—in this fast-paced romantic thriller. Exceptionally vivid descriptions and realistic but not overwhelming details of the day-to-day aspects of raising a child with diabetes add depth to a story more complex than most.”

—Library Journal

“This story’s strong, edge-of-your-seat suspense starts on the first page and doesn’t let up until the end…Novak’s book is an extremely tense and emotional story with a satisfying conclusion.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews

“Brenda Novak’s gift lies in grabbing the reader mercilessly by the throat and not letting go until the very end…Fast-paced scenes filled with sparkling dialogue, romantic tension and a series of pulse-racing twists bring the story to a heart-stopping climax.An exciting, compelling, entertaining read.”

—Mayra Calvani, Midwest Book Reviews

“Strongly defined characters, sizzling sexual tension and a tautly constructed plot steeped in danger blend brilliantly together in Novak’s exceptionally intense, powerfully emotional novel.”

—Booklist

“Every Waking Moment is an absolute must-read.”

—Dawn Myers, Writers Unlimited

Dead Giveaway

Brenda Novak

www.mirabooks.co.uk

To Kendra DeSantolo, who supports me in everything I do. She reads my work and holds my feet to the fire until I get each story just right. She donates and shops at my annual online auction for diabetes research. She delivers food when I shut myself up in my house for days to finish a book (and my family is gone and I have nothing but a bag of almonds in my desk). She offers sage advice when I need input on various life subjects. She notifies me of any bake sales in the area (I love bake sales). And she listens when I need to complain.

I’m glad she’s part of my life. She’s a true friend.

Dear Reader,

Is it ever OK to do the wrong thing for the right reason? That’s one of the themes I wanted to explore when I wrote this story. Clay Montgomery has certainly walked on the wrong side of the law—is still walking on the wrong side of the law.Which makes it pretty tough to get together with a police officer. But faced with the same set of circumstances in which he found himself nineteen years ago, he’d do it all again.That’s what I love about him. He’s uncompromising in his determination to protect those he loves, regardless of the personal sacrifice. I don’t think I’ve ever created a character with such a strong sense of responsibility, or so much courage.

Please visit my website at www.brendanovak.com. to take a peek at some of the exciting and unique items that will be up for bid in my next online auction to benefit diabetes research. My youngest son has this disease, so my auctions are held on my website every May, in honour of Mother’s Day. Together with my donors and shoppers, I raised $34,982 in 2005, $62,706 in 2006 and $100,000 in 2007 and could definitely use your help.

I love to hear from readers. If you don’t have internet service, please feel free to write to me at PO Box 3781, Citrus Heights, CA 95611, USA.

Here’s hoping you enjoy your visit to Stillwater, Mississippi!

Brenda Novak

“Any coward can fight a battle when he’s sure of winning; but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he’s sure of losing.”

—George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)

English novelist, 1819—1880

Chapter 1

Any coward can fight a battle when he’s sure of winning; but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he’s sure of losing.

—George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) English novelist 1819-80

They hadn’t meant to kill him. That should’ve mattered. It probably would have—in a different time, a different place. But this was Stillwater, Mississippi, and the only thing smaller than the town itself was the minds of the people living in it. They never forgot and they never forgave. Nineteen years had passed since Reverend Barker disappeared, but they wanted someone to pay for the loss of their beloved preacher.

And they’d had their eye on Clay Montgomery from the beginning.

The only bit of luck that had gone his way was that, without a body, the police couldn’t prove Clay had done anything. But that didn’t stop them—and others—from constantly poking around his farm, asking questions, suggesting scenarios, attempting to piece together the past in hopes of solving the biggest mystery Stillwater had ever known.

“Do you think someday he’ll come back? Your stepdaddy, I mean?” Beth Ann Cole plumped her pillow and arranged one arm above her head.

Annoyance ripped through Clay despite the beautiful eyes that regarded him from beneath thick golden lashes. Beth Ann hardly ever pressed him about his missing stepfather. She knew he’d show her the door. But he’d let her come over too much lately and she was beginning to overrate her value to him.

Without answering, he kicked off the blankets and began to get out of bed, only to have her grab hold of his arm. “Wait, that’s it? Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am? You’re not usually so selfish.”

“You didn’t have any complaints a minute ago,” he drawled, glancing pointedly over his shoulder at the claw marks she’d left on his back.

Her bottom lip jutted out. “I want more.”

“You always want more. Of everything. More than I’m willing to give.” He stared at the delicate white fingers clutching his darker forearm. Normally, she would’ve recognized the warning in his expression and let him go. Tonight, however, she went straight into her “how can you use me like this” mode, an act she put on whenever her impatience overcame her good sense.

The cloying sound of Beth Ann’s voice bothered Clay more than usual. Probably because he’d so recently had bad news. The police chief’s daughter, Allie McCormick—a police officer herself—had returned to town. And she was asking questions.

Swallowing a curse, he rubbed his temples, trying to alleviate the beginnings of a headache.

The pounding only grew worse when Beth Ann’s voice rose. “Clay, are we ever gonna move beyond a physical relationship? Is sex all you’re interested in from me?”

Beth Ann had a gorgeous body and occasionally used it to get what she wanted—and he knew what she wanted right now was him. She often wheedled or pouted, trying to coax him into a marriage proposal. But he didn’t love her, and she understood that, even if she liked to pretend otherwise. He rarely made the first move, hardly ever asked her out, never made any promises. He paid her way if they went anywhere, but that was a matter of courtesy, not a declaration of undying devotion. She initiated most of their contact.

He remembered the first time she’d come to his door. From the day she’d moved to town nearly two years ago, she’d flirted with him whenever possible. She worked in the bakery of the local supermarket and did her damnedest to corner him the moment he crossed the threshold. But when he didn’t immediately fall and worship at her feet, like all the other single men in Stillwater, she’d decided he was a challenge worthy of her best efforts. One night, after a brief encounter at the store, during which she’d made some innuendo he’d purposely ignored, she’d appeared on his doorstep wearing a trench coat—and not a stitch of clothing underneath.

She knew he couldn’t ignore that. And he hadn’t. But at least he didn’t feel guilty about his involvement in her life. Maybe she liked to act as though he was the sex fiend and she the benevolent provider, but after experiencing her voracious appetite over the past several months he had his own opinions about who’d become the provider.

“Let go of my arm,” he said.

Obviously uncertain, she blinked at the edge in his voice and released him. “I thought you were starting to care about me.”

Presenting his back to her, he pulled on his jeans. Sex relaxed him, helped him sleep. Which was why he’d let his relationship with Beth Ann continue for so long. But they’d just made love twice, and he felt more wound up than ever. He couldn’t stop thinking about Officer Allie McCormick. His sister Grace had told him she’d been a cold case detective in Chicago—a damn good one. Would she finally bring an end to it all?

“Clay?”

Beth Ann was getting on his last nerve. “I think maybe it’s time we quit seeing each other,” he said as he yanked on a clean T-shirt.

When she didn’t answer, he turned to see her gaping at him.

“How can you say that?” she cried. “I asked one question. One!” She laughed in a manner meant to suggest that he’d completely overreacted. “You’re so jumpy.”

“My stepfather is not a subject I’m prepared to discuss.”

She opened her mouth, then seemed to reconsider what she was about to say. “Okay, I get it. I was tired and didn’t realize how much the subject would upset you. I’m sorry.”

She should’ve told him to go to hell and walked out.

He scowled. Although he’d tried to make it clear that he was the most emotionally unavailable man she’d probably ever meet, she was becoming attached. He didn’t understand how, but there it was, written all over her face.

He had to make a change. He wasn’t even willing to admit he had a heart, let alone open it to anyone. “Get dressed, okay?” he said.

“Clay, you don’t really want me to leave, do you?”

He used to send her home as soon as they were finished, so there could be no confusion about the nature of their relationship. But the past few times they’d been together, she’d faked sleep and he’d let her stay the night.

Softening his stance had been a mistake. “I’ve got work to do, Beth Ann.”

“At one in the morning?”

“Always.”

“Come on, Clay. Stop being a grump. Get back into bed, and I’ll give you a massage. I owe you for that dress you bought me.”

She grinned enticingly but with enough desperation to make his neck prickle. He should’ve said goodbye a month ago. “You don’t owe me anything. Forget me and be happy.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “If you want me to be happy, that means I matter to you.”

Determined to be completely honest—or at least retain his hard-ass image—he shook his head. “No one matters to me.”

As tears slipped down her cheeks, he silently cursed himself for not seeing this coming. Perhaps he’d relied too heavily on the fact that BethAnn wasn’t a particularly deep person. Anyway, she’d get over him as soon as some other man strolled through the Piggly Wiggly.

“What about your sisters? You love them,” she said. “You’d take a bullet for Grace or Molly, even Madeline.”

What he’d done for his sisters was a case of too little, too late. But BethAnn wouldn’t understand that. She didn’t know what had happened that long-ago night. No one did, besides him, his mother and his two natural sisters. Even his stepsister Madeline, Reverend Barker’s only natural child, had no clue. She’d been living with them at the time, but as fate would have it, she’d spent that night at a girlfriend’s.

“That’s different,” he said.

Silence. Hurt. Then, “You’re an asshole, you know that?”

“Better than you do, I’m sure.”

When he wouldn’t give her a target, she drew herself up onto her knees. “You’ve been using me all along, haven’t you!”

“No more than you’ve been using me,” he replied calmly, and pulled on his boots.

“I haven’t been using you! I want to marry you!”

“You only want what you can’t have.”

“That’s not true!”

“You knew what you were getting into from the start. I warned you before you ever peeled off that trench coat.”

She glanced wildly around the room as though stunned to recognize he was really through with her. “But I thought…I thought that for me you might—”

“Stop it,” he said.

“No. Clay.” Climbing out of bed, she came toward him as if she’d wrap her arms around his neck and cling for dear life.

He put up a hand to stop her before she could reach him. Not even the sight of her full breasts, swinging above her flat stomach and toned legs, could change his mind. Part of him wanted to live and love like any other man. To have a family. But he felt empty inside. Dead. As dead as the man buried in his cellar. “I’m sorry,” he said.

When she saw how little her pleading affected him, her top lip curled and her eyes hardened into shiny emeralds. “You son of a bitch! You…you’re not going to get away with this. I…I’m going to…” She gave a desperate sob and lunged toward the nightstand, grabbing for the phone.

Because Beth Ann was so prone to histrionics, Clay guessed she was playing some kind of dramatic game, possibly hoping to get one of her many male admirers to drive over and pick her up, even though she had a car parked outside. He watched dispassionately. He didn’t care if she used the phone, as long as she left right afterward. This was a blow to her pride, not her heart, and it couldn’t have come as a surprise.

But she pressed only three buttons and, in the next second, screamed into the receiver: “Help! Police! Clay Montgomery’s trying to k-kill me! I know what he did to the rev—”

Crossing the room in three long strides, Clay wrenched the phone from her and slammed down the receiver. “Have you lost your mind?” he growled.

She was breathing hard. With her gleaming, frantic eyes and curly blond hair falling in tangles about her shoulders, she looked like an evil witch. No longer pretty.

“I hope they put you in prison,” she said, her voice a low, hateful murmur. “I hope they put you away for life!”

Scooping her clothes off the floor, she hurried into the hall, leaving Clay shaking his head. Evidently she didn’t grasp that she already had her wish. Maybe he wasn’t in a physical prison, but he was paying the price for what had happened nineteen years ago—and would be for the rest of his life.

Officer Allie McCormick couldn’t believe what came through her police radio. Pulling onto the shoulder of the empty country road she’d been patrolling since midnight, she put her cruiser in Park. “What did you say?”

The county dispatcher finally swallowed whatever she had in her mouth. “I said I just got a call from 10682 Old Barn Road.”

Allie recognized the address. She’d seen it all over the case files she’d been studying since she and her six-year-old daughter had moved back to Stillwater and in with her parents several weeks ago. “That’s the Montgomery farm.”

“There’s a possible 10—31 C in progress.”

“A homicide?”

“That’s what the caller said.”

Allie thought there might have been one murder committed on that property years ago—if the Reverend Barker hadn’t disappeared of his own volition. But there’d never been any proof.

This was probably a prank. Kids screwing around because of all the rumors that had circulated about Clay and his missing stepfather.

“Was it a man or woman you spoke to?”

“A woman. And she seemed damn convincing. She was so panicked I could barely understand her. Then the call was disconnected.”

Shit. Skeptical or not, Allie figured that couldn’t be good. “I’m not far. I can be there in less than five minutes.” Peeling out, she raced down the road.

“You want me to rouse Hendricks for backup?” the dispatcher asked, still on the line.

The other officer on graveyard wasn’t the best Allie had ever worked with, but if there was trouble, he’d be better than nothing. “Might as well try. I’ll bet he’s sleeping at the station again, though. I caught him with his chin on his chest an hour ago, and once he’s out, an earthquake won’t raise him.”

“I could call your dad at home.”

“No. Don’t bother him. If you can’t get Hendricks, I’ll handle this on my own.” Hanging up, she flipped on her strobe lights to warn any vehicles she might encounter that she was in a hurry, but didn’t bother with the siren. Once she got near the farmhouse, she’d turn it on to let the panicking victim know that help had arrived. Until then, the noise would only rattle her nerves. She wasn’t completely comfortable being a street cop again. She was too rusty at the job. As a detective in Chicago, she’d spent the last seven years working mostly in an office, the past five in the cold case unit. But her divorce, and coming home so that she and her daughter would be closer to family, meant she’d had to make some sacrifices. Hitting the streets was one of them.

Rain began to plink against her windshield as she drove down Pine Road and hung a skidding left at the highway. It had been a wet spring, but she preferred it to the terrible humidity they were facing as June approached.

Staring intently at the shiny pavement ahead of her, she ignored the rapid swish, swish, swish of her windshield wipers, which were on high but beating only half as fast as her heart. “What’re you up to, Mr. Montgomery?” she muttered. She couldn’t imagine he was really trying to kill anyone. Other than an occasional fistfight in the bar, Stillwater had next to no violent crime. And Clay was a real loner. But, like everyone else in Stillwater, she felt a little nervous around him. The Reverend Barker’s disappearance—an incident she clearly remembered—was highly suspicious. She didn’t believe such a well-respected man, the community’s spiritual leader, would drive off without saying a word to anyone and without packing or withdrawing any money from his bank account. No one would do that without good reason. And what reason, good or otherwise, could Barker have had to abandon his farm?

If he was alive, someone would’ve heard from him by now. He still had plenty of family in town: a wife, a daughter, two stepdaughters, a stepson, a sister, a brother-in-law and two nephews.

His daughter Madeline—who, like Clay, was thirty-four, a year older than she was—was certain he’d met with foul play. But Madeline was equally certain that her stepmother, stepsisters and stepbrother had nothing to do with it.

It made for an interesting mystery. One Allie was determined to solve. For her own peace of mind. For Madeline, whom she’d known her whole life. For Barker’s nephew, Joe, who was pressing her to solve the case almost as hard as Madeline was. For the whole town.

Gravel spun as she arrived at the farm and whipped into the long driveway. She realized that the property looked far better than it had when Reverend Barker lived there. The junk he’d stacked all around—the rusty old appliances, flat tires, bits of scrap metal and other odds and ends—was gone. The house and buildings seemed to be in good repair. But she didn’t have time to look the place over very carefully. She was too busy flipping her siren on and off before coming to a halt.

Leaving her lights flashing, she jumped out of the car and hurried toward the front door, only to be intercepted by a woman wearing a pair of slacks unbuttoned at the waist and holding a shirt and purse to her bare chest. “There you are,” she cried, stumbling toward Allie from the direction of the carport.

The woman appeared to be alone, so Allie relaxed the hand she’d put on her gun and reached out to steady her. It was BethAnn Cole, who worked in the bakery at the Piggly Wiggly. Allie had seen her several times. Beth Ann wasn’t someone she—or anyone else—was likely to forget. Mostly because she had the kind of face and body people admired. Tall, elegant and model pretty, she had healthy, glowing skin, long blond hair and slanted, cat-green eyes.

“Tell me what’s going on,” she said.

Suddenly, the other woman was crying so hard she couldn’t speak.

“Try to get hold of yourself, okay?” Allie used her “cop” voice, hoping to cut through Beth Ann’s near hysteria, and it seemed to work.

“I—I’m cold,” she managed to say, glancing toward the house as if she was afraid Clay might come charging out after her. “C-can we sit in your car?”

“Of course.” Allie didn’t hear or see anything that made her feel threatened, but until she knew exactly what had happened, she didn’t want to approach Clay. She’d never met a more difficult man to read. She’d gone to junior high and high school with him and had certainly noticed his swarthy good looks. But she’d never gotten close to him. No one had. Even back then, he’d made it abundantly clear that he wasn’t interested in making friends.

If she waited, maybe her backup would arrive.

She helped Beth Ann to the passenger side. Then, once again checking to make sure Clay wasn’t about to spring out of the azalea bushes near the house, she slid behind the wheel.

After locking the doors and turning off her flashers, she twisted in her seat and studied the other woman as well as she could in the dark. A floodlight attached to the barn had come on when she pulled in, revealing BethAnn’s smudged mascara. But it had been activated by a motion sensor and chose that moment to go off, and Allie didn’t want to turn on the car’s interior light until Beth Ann was fully dressed.

“Take a deep breath,” she said.

BethAnn sniffed and dashed a hand across her face, but more tears followed, so Allie started with a simple question, trying to relax her. “How’d you get out here?”

“I drove.” She pointed to a green Toyota Avalon not far from where Allie had parked. “That’s my car right there.”

“Do you have the keys?”

She nodded and sniffed again. “In my purse.”

Despite her desperation to escape, she’d been able to grab her purse? “What time was it when you got here?”

“About ten.”

“Are you the one who called in the complaint?”

“Yes, he’s an…animal,” Beth Ann responded. She broke into sobs again but spoke disjointedly through them. “He—he killed that reverend…guy everyone’s always talking about. The man…who’s been missing for…for so long.”

The hair rose on the back of Allie’s arms. Beth Ann had stated it so matter-of-factly, as though she had no doubt. And her words definitely supported the majority opinion. “How do you know?”

She rocked back and forth, still covering herself with her shirt but making no attempt to put it on. “He told me. He s-said if I d-didn’t shut up, he’d b-beat me to a bloody pulp, like he did his s-stepfather.”

Physically at least, Clay was capable of beating just about anyone. Nearly six-four, he had a well-defined body with shoulders broader than any Allie had ever seen. The long grueling hours he worked maintaining a farm that should have taken two or more people to run kept him in shape.

But he hadn’t been very big at sixteen. He’d been a tall, lanky kid with a shock of shiny black hair and cobalt-blue eyes. When he wasn’t aware of being watched, he occasionally looked lost, even weary, yet he consistently resisted any and all kindness. He hadn’t filled out until after she’d gone to college—presumably in his early twenties.

“Did he explain how he killed his stepfather?” she asked.

“I told you. He—he beat him.” Much to Allie’s relief, Beth Ann finally put on her shirt. Allie had seen a lot in her days working for the law—more dead bodies than she cared to count—but having the very busty Beth Ann sitting next to her half-naked, and knowing she’d probably just left Clay’s bed, was a little too up-close and personal. There was no cushion of anonymity in Stillwater.