Run Wild, page 13
Trent glanced at her screen and nodded, then leaned back, stretching his legs so they were on top of her feet under the coffee table. He made no attempt to adjust his position, nor did he seem overly interested in her ability to learn who owned what property in his county. Natasha flipped to another page, determined to prove her usefulness and keep her mind off the long, muscular body threatening to distract her until all she would be able to think about was how soon, and where, they would have sex.
“When was she Ethel Piney?”
“Her maiden name was Piney. Ethel was married to one of the Popes, a ranch hand on a ranch south of here. She hooked up with him shortly after high school,” he said in a slow, lazy drawl, sounding as if explaining all this to her didn’t bother him. But he didn’t sound as if any of it mattered, either.
Natasha frowned, trying to follow what he’d said. “So Ethel was a Piney. She married and her last name became Pope. But she left that guy. Now she’s a Burrows and lives on Trinity Ranch and apparently owns it along with Jim Burrows.”
“That’s right.”
“So she wouldn’t have any connection to that land we were on today.”
“It’s not her land. The deed isn’t clear which Piney owns it and they’re a fairly reclusive family. I don’t know any Pineys around here but I’m going to look into it.”
“Oh.” Maybe there was a connection between the items in the cabin and Carl Williams’ murder. At the moment Natasha didn’t have a clue what, or how any of this tied in with her father. “We need to find out what this key is. My aunt and uncle have a safe-deposit box at their bank. I’ve accessed it before. Their key looks like this. But I guess if it’s as old as everything else here, it could be for something else.”
Trent leaned forward on the couch. He took the bag she’d lifted with the key in it and placed it back on the coffee table. “Give it a rest for now,” he said, his voice turning soothing.
Natasha didn’t want soothing. She wanted answers. If Trent turned gentle on her, she quite possibly would melt in his arms. And God, she wanted to feel his muscular arms wrapped around her. She wanted to know what his naked body would feel like pressed against hers. She wanted him buried so deep inside her the pressure that wouldn’t quit swelling, and throbbing, would finally go away.
Fucking Trent would be pointless. As soon as she figured out how to get her father out of this mess she would be returning to her life in L.A. Trent would continue his life here. They would never see each other again. As much as hot, mind-blowing sex with Trent sounded wonderful, he wasn’t the one-night-stand type. Or maybe she couldn’t be with him.
“No. I can’t,” she snapped, snatching the bag up again.
“We’ll think better if we take a break.”
“I’m here for one reason, and one reason only,” she informed Trent, moving so she faced him, and put distance between them. “I’m going to prove my father’s innocence. Even if that was him at that cabin, he’s probably hiding only because you think he committed murder.”
“Natasha.”
“No,” she yelled, letting the one word slice through the air between them. She jumped off the couch, putting her laptop on the coffee table, then moving around it, needing away from that virile body so she could think.
Trent moved just as fast, coming around the coffee table from the other side and cutting her off in the middle of his living room. When he gripped her arms, his touch created a heat too strong to ignore. She damn near sagged against him from the affect of it.
“Your father’s fingerprints were found all over Carl Williams’ body.”
She couldn’t have heard him right. Natasha lifted her gaze and stared into eyes so beautiful, at features so perfectly chiseled, at black hair that bordered his manly features, and wished they could go back in time just a few moments, to just before he’d uttered those words and ruined the perfect man for her.
“All over Carl Williams’ body?” Her voice didn’t sound right, as if her vocal cords had constricted too tight in her throat. Tears she wouldn’t ever allow to fall for her father again had receded and left her eyes dry. Her eyes burned.
Trent nodded, sucking in a breath. His thumbs rubbed against her bare arms. Moments ago his touch made her sizzle with need. Now she felt empty, unable to feel a thing.
“Williams was found spread-eagled, bound—”
“I saw the pictures.” She wouldn’t cringe against the image of the dead young man when he appeared in her mind. Her father wasn’t capable of such a horrendous act. He wasn’t.
“King,” Trent began, and the pained look on his face, as if it hurt him as much as it did her to lay the facts out before her, made his expression darker, almost vulnerable looking. “Your father,” he amended. “His fingerprints were around the man’s wrist, on his torso, his neck.” Trent shook his head. “I know how to do my job, darling,” he said, lowering his voice until his words were a rough whisper, brutally honest and at the same time brushing over her like pin pricks against her skin. “The positioning of fingerprints, where the pressure points are, show how a person grabs something, which direction his hand is coming from. I’ll show you.”
Before Natasha opened her mouth to tell Trent she knew how to read fingerprints, he’d left the room. His solid footsteps seemed to match the heavy beating of her heart. He was next to her again in a moment, holding a file. Suddenly he was willing to tell her everything.
What had changed? Natasha wouldn’t let her thoughts go there. Not now. Not when it didn’t matter if anything had changed between them or not. This man standing next to her was definitely the sexiest, most perfect man she’d ever met—yes, she’d admit it. Why the hell not?—and was also as wrong as a man could be for her. She wanted him more than she’d ever wanted another man in her entire life. Yet he was telling her that her father had committed a heinous crime. Worse yet, he would be the man who would arrest her father and make sure he was sent to prison, or worse.
“Take a look at the fingerprints found on Williams’ body.” Trent opened the file and positioned a couple printouts but then slapped the file shut and pressed one hand in the middle of her back. “It will be easier to see here.”
“I know what you’re talking about.” There wasn’t a lot of protest in her voice and her legs were wobbly when he walked with her into his kitchen.
“I want you to understand why I’m taking the angle I am on this case.”
Natasha looked at him as he focused on the contents of the file, spreading them out on the table and positioning them where he wanted them. There was strength in his profile, in the way his jaw was set with determination, in his incredibly focused nature. She imagined Trent to be the type of investigator who when he took on a case lived, breathed, and slept it until he had the thing cracked wide open and solved. Uncle Greg was the same way. God, was that why Trent seemed so perfect to her? He was just like Uncle Greg, like the man who’d raised her. She was falling for this man because he was just like the man who raised her.
The thought was so incredibly warped she almost laughed, which was insane. She should be crying. Yet she couldn’t cry.
“Here are prints on Carl’s wrists,” Trent told her, and angled his hand on top of the photograph to show how the aggressor’s hand would have been positioned. “Those prints were made before Carl was spread-eagled and bound to the poles.”
“How do you know they weren’t after?” Natasha studied the gruesome pictures. They weren’t as gory as the full-body shots had been. These pictures had been altered to show the fingerprints on Carl’s skin. “It looks like he was gripping Carl’s wrist, which he couldn’t have been doing if Carl was hanging. In order to hold his wrist the way this picture implies, the person would have had to have been standing on one hell of a ladder. You showed me the other pictures. He was up in the air. Maybe my father was trying to get him down.”
“Natasha,” Trent began, and faced her. His hands were on her arms, caressing them before he started speaking. “Carl was hanging, his wrists and ankles bound to those two poles when I showed up at the scene. He remained in that position until the medical examiner arrived at the ranch; then we cut him down. Once he was down, he was in the ambulance and removed from the property. I promise you, no one touched him once he was cut down without wearing gloves. The ladder used was cast to the side of the barn by the house. There was blood on it but no prints. The only way those prints could have been put on Carl’s body was before he was hung on the posts, or as he was being hung on those posts.”
She stared at Trent, managed to nod, then lowered her attention to his chest, unwilling to lose herself in his compelling gaze. His palms ran up and down the outside of her arms, brushing over her skin, consoling and arousing but, worse yet, distracting.
Her world was crashing in around her. The constants she knew in life were dissipating before her eyes, with the simple validation of where fingerprints were found, in what position, pressing down from what angle. She could see the forms on the table Trent hadn’t bothered pointing out to her. Natasha had printed off fingerprint analysis before many times. The printouts at the edge of the table were the damning evidence that the person who’d grabbed Carl Williams while he’d still been bleeding, held on to his wrist firmly, and pulled upward, as if lifting the blood-drenched hand up into the air to that post, had been her father.
“Natasha, it’s all there.”
She backed away from him and he let her go. Natasha didn’t shake from anger, pain, or regret. All the emotions that should be bombarding her simply weren’t there.
Turning, she returned to the living room, picked up her shoes and socks she’d taken off earlier, once the fire had warmed her, then sat stiffly at the edge of the couch and put them back on. Her luggage was in the corner and her laptop on the coffee table. All she had to do was gather her few belongings and head out the front door. This wasn’t her world. Trent Oakley would never be her man. She didn’t belong here.
My father isn’t a murderer!
The small voice screaming at the back of her head was easily ignored. Natasha wouldn’t endure any more pain because of her father. All her life she’d adored the man who helped give her life. Her mother had given up on the both of them when Natasha was four. Natasha had told herself, and her aunt and uncle told her the same thing most of her growing-up life, that her father adored her, loved her with all his heart, but wanted her growing up in a family environment. She grew up with her cousins, in their home, with Uncle Greg and Aunt Haley as parents because Natasha’s father couldn’t be both mom and dad at the same time.
Other parents raised their children by themselves.
The little voice in the back of her head usually annoyed the crap out of her. It screamed the brutal truth, demanded she see the reality of being a child not cared about and not loved by the two people who brought her into the world. Yet once again it failed to pull off its mission. Natasha wouldn’t let her father hurt her again. That would require feelings. There was no lust for Trent, worry for her father, pride over her computer and detective skills. Nothing had room to creep back in around the numbness consuming her.
“I don’t blame you for thinking him guilty.” She looked at Trent as he stood in his living room watching her.
Natasha walked over to her laptop, and shut it down.
“I want you to understand why I’m investigating this murder the way I am.”
She smiled when she looked at him, but there wasn’t any happiness inside. The void filling her left her dull, almost lifeless, with an emptiness that would hurt like hell if it weren’t for the fact that her emotions couldn’t get around the black hole taking over her insides.
“Of course.”
“Natasha,” Trent spit out, lunging at her and yanking her laptop from her hands. “Did you think I was such an inept sheriff I would go after a man for a crime simply because he wasn’t from here? You didn’t come up here simply because I demanded it. You believed in your heart, before knowing anything about why he was in trouble, that your father was an innocent man.”
“He’s on the run. There are places my father could go for help. His family has never turned him away, no matter how many years passed without seeing him. He saw me earlier today. I know that was my father. Yet he shot at me. His message was clear. He doesn’t want my help.” Natasha listened to herself talk and managed to register the meaning behind the words she spoke rather mechanically. “If he hasn’t gone to Uncle Greg but has sent me a rather harsh message, I need to face up to the obvious.”
“What’s that?” Trent reached for a single strand of hair bordering her face and brushed it behind her shoulders.
Less than an hour ago, possibly just minutes ago if he’d touched her like that Natasha would have melted; the pressure that continued building the more she was around Trent quite possibly would have erupted. Yet now all she felt were his calloused fingertips that were neither too warm nor too cold. She didn’t blink when he ran his fingers down the side of her face, nor did she look away.
“My father killed that young man. If he hadn’t, he would have let me help him.”
Chapter Eight
The next morning Natasha walked briskly into the shop, with its familiar smells of oil and gasoline. “I’m here to pick up my Avalanche,” she told the man standing behind the counter.
A thin woman with gray, bristly hair sat with her back to the counter, facing a computer. She looked over her shoulder, giving Natasha an appraising look over the rim of her glasses.
“The Avalanche is a charge,” she announced.
Natasha wasn’t in the mood for people to explain or discuss anything. She just wanted the truck and to drive. Drive until the void inside her dissipated, go far enough away from this picturesque town lost in time that the terrible things that had happened here wouldn’t affect her. She wanted to keep going until her father wasn’t on her mind any longer.
“It was,” she explained, even though she just wanted to snap at the woman that she was a bad businesswoman to insist on getting paid next month when she could have the bill settled today. “The sheriff believed he was doing me a favor when he found me stranded at the side of the road.”
The woman turned around farther. “He was doing you a favor, honey. Sheriff Oakley is a good man.” She stood, tugged on the oversized T-shirt she wore that advertised the Powell gas station they were standing in, and moved in next to the man who still stood at the counter. “If he takes care of you it’s because he believes you’re good people.”
“I am good people,” Natasha insisted, and realized the urge to knock the woman down a few notches for getting snappy wasn’t there. After a sleepless night on Trent’s couch, she was even more numb. “Which is why I would rather pay cash for your work and quick service in repairing my truck. I don’t want to be in debt to your good sheriff.”
The door opened behind Natasha and a rush of cold hair hit hard enough she hugged herself against its brutal lashing. The woman behind the counter humphed. Then she lifted her hand and slapped an invoice in front of the man at the counter. He’d been looking incredibly busy with paperwork in front of him, more than likely used to the woman giving customers tongue-lashings and wanting no part of it. Natasha didn’t blame him.
“Mary, are you giving Natasha grief?” Trent asked as he entered the shop, and leaned against the end of the counter. Trent had an amused grin on his face as if he knew the moment Natasha had leapt out of the Suburban, anxious to clear the bill before Trent could inform the shop owners he had it covered and she could pay him later, what she’d be in store for once she walked into the shop.
“She wants to pay cash.” Mary shrugged and returned to her computer, turning her back on all of them.
The man took the invoice and looked it over. “Can’t say I ever had a truck, or any vehicle, come in here with all four tires lashed up like yours were, miss.”
“It’s Miss Natasha King,” the woman informed him, looking over her shoulder. She shot Natasha a look that could only be described as hateful. “You got any family in town, Miss King?” Each time she said Natasha’s name there was emphasis on her last name, as if “King” was a derogatory word in the woman’s mind.
“I did,” Natasha answered truthfully, her tone flat.
Mary humphed again and shot Trent a look as if demanding to know what he would do about Natasha’s presence in town. “Carl never did a soul wrong,” she muttered under her breath. “And her daddy killed him.”
“Mary,” the man at the counter snapped.
“What?” she hurled at him. “What did I say? You know damn good and well who she is. She’s that demented murderer’s kin.”
“That’s enough,” the man warned Mary.
“I can’t believe you put such good tires on that truck. She’ll probably use it to get her daddy across the state line.” Mary pointed a finger at the sheriff. “Don’t let her looks fool you. If she’s in town and she’s his blood, it’s as plain as the nose on my face what she’s doing here.”
“God damn it, Mary!” the man bellowed.
“It’s okay.” Natasha reached over the counter and took the invoice from the man’s hands. Seventeen hundred dollars. She blinked. Then swallowing, she looked at Mary, who was standing behind the man with her arms crossed against her skinny frame and glaring at Natasha. “For the most part, Mary, you’re right.”
Her confession didn’t cause Mary’s features to relax. Trent quit leaning against the counter. He was by Natasha’s side before she continued speaking. Fortunately, he didn’t touch her. She wasn’t sure she could handle his hands on her right now. She’d never had to defend her family name before, but the words came out anyway.
“I heard my father was in trouble and drove up here. I can’t find him. And although it’s not in his nature to do something so incredibly horrendous as what happened to Carl Williams, I’m sure your sheriff will sort through the evidence and find the killer.”
