Deadly Obsession (A Brown and de Luca Novel Book 4) Read Online Free

inside to rescue Rouse’s children, ages three and eight. Detective Brown has been in the news before, most notably for solving our city’s first-ever serial killings last year and, more recently, for arresting his own mentally ill sister-in-law for another spate of bizarre murders. The hero cop is listed in satisfactory condition at Saint Joseph’s Hospital. Police aren’t commenting on the arson investigation, though newly minted Police Chief Vanessa Cantone will hold a press conference tomorrow afternoon.”
    Gretchen hit the rewind button, then paused the TV on the shot of that hero cop. He was the kind of man she deserved. The kind of man who would know exactly how to love a woman like her. How to make her feel important. Special. Treasured.
    Peter Rouse wasn’t worth her time after all, was he?
    She looked at her bag of tools on the kitchen counter, where she’d dropped it after coming home from her night’s work. The bag, a little black leather satchel like an old-school doctor might carry, had been her gift to herself way back when she’d graduated and received her pin.
    She wouldn’t part with the bag. But she
could
afford to get rid of a few of the tools it held. Since they knew it was arson, they were going to need an arsonist. Peter Rouse’s punishment wasn’t quite complete. Yet.

2
    “T wo freaking weeks,” Mason said. It was his routine now. The first thing he said every morning when I walked into his hospital room was an exaggeration of how long he’d been imprisoned there. I showed up at my usual time. Eight o’clock with a Box O’ Joe, a pair of breakfast sandwiches and a couple of doughnuts.
    “Ten days,” I corrected. “You’ll survive, I promise.” I pulled the bedside tray around and adjusted the height, cleared it of books, magazines and an empty plastic Jell-O container from the night before, and set the feast for him. I even poured his coffee. I was spoiling the man rotten. And I still hadn’t told him I loved him, because there were bigger things going on. Okay, and because I was a fucking chicken. I’d managed to decide that I’d say it back if he said it to me again. I’d do it immediately. So all he had to do was say it again and make it easy on me.
    What if he’d changed his mind?
    “Earth to Rachel,” he said,
    I blinked out of my own head and said, “I brought you a great big present today.”
    “My discharge papers?”
    “Better.” I slid my bag off my shoulder, took out my laptop and set it on the nearby easy chair, my new workstation. I worked on my book-in-progress right here in his hospital room, every day until noon. Then I headed home for a few hours of quality time with my dog, and then I came back with the boys in tow as soon as school let out for the day. I didn’t mind it a bit. The four of us usually had dinner together, cafeteria food or takeout, depending on what I had time to grab, and then I took the kids back to my place for the night.
    Amy, my personal assistant, was handling everything else. Copy edits, Facebook and Twitter posts, newsletter mailings, and fan letter replies. I needed to come up with a new title for Amy, because personal assistant didn’t begin to cover it. Maybe something like “She Whose Quitting Would Result in My Complete and Utter Annihilation.” Yeah, that would do it. Goth chick had made herself indispensable to me. Probably all part of her evil plan for the ultimate in job security. As long as I stayed flush, she’d stay flush. And I was staying flush.
    I pulled a manila envelope out of my bag and slapped it onto the tray in front of “my detective.” I’d been calling him that inside my head ever since the night of the fire, when I’d screamed it at the Binghamton FD.
    Mason was in mid-coffee-sip, but he stopped when he looked at the file. “What’s this?”
    “The full case file. Everything to do with it, from the arson investigator’s report to Rebecca Rouse’s autopsy report. It also has Rosie’s notes