Love Is The Bond: A Rowan Gant Investigation Read Online Free Page A

and I witnessed
her going through the same things over Kimberly Forest, I gained a
healthy respect for her feelings. I guess I couldn’t blame her. She
was only doing exactly what I would do.
    Still, I was just as stubborn as she, and
when it came to being the protector, I felt it my place to assume
that role. It was the very meaning behind the name Rowan, after
all.
    I plunged the tip of a shovel down into the
soft earth and used my foot to shove it deeper still. Pulling back
on the wooden handle, I levered a sizeable chunk of dirt upward and
plopped it off to the side then repeated the process as I continued
mulling over the events of the morning thus far.
    We had reached an impasse. Felicity had it in
her head that she was going to add herself to the list of freelance
crime scene photographers used by the local police departments. As
a matter of fact, at this very moment she was literally on her way
to fill out the necessary paperwork.
    The plain truth was that I was most likely
worrying myself over nothing. Ben had told us that the local
departments rarely used the freelancers. They were primarily there
for the specialized photos just as Felicity had said. The only
reason she’d had to go through the crime scene technician
certification courses was to meet the requirements set forth by the
city police department. What it really came down to was that the
freelance program was really nothing more than a contingency plan
born of an anal retentive bureaucracy.
    So, as it stood, the likelihood of needing
them was minimal, much less Felicity having her name drawn from the
pool. Still, anyone can tell you that Murphy’s law will invoke
itself without warning, and I just had a bad feeling that if her
name was on the list, she was going to end up in the middle of
something. What’s more, I feared that since she had been fully
across the veil once, it would only take a single, highly charged
experience to drag her under in an ethereal riptide. That was how
it happened with me, so I had to figure it could happen with
her—unless of course, I had any say in the matter.
    And, that was the very reason why I was
standing in our back yard on a chilly November morning, digging a
hole in the rock garden.
    It was cold enough to cause my breath to
condense in rapidly dissipating clouds of steam yet still far
enough above the freezing mark that the somewhat soggy ground was
soft and easy to penetrate. My most laborious task so far had been
moving the small boulder from the spot where I wanted to dig.
    I had waited until I was certain Felicity was
well on her way so that I would have ample time to complete my
project. It was a task that was a long time coming. Something I’d
started better than two years ago and now felt compelled to finish
without delay.
    I struck the point of the shovel into the
hole with a repeated chopping motion, widening the small excavation
to suit my purpose. I only stopped for a brief moment when my heart
skipped a beat upon hearing our English setter and Australian
cattle dog yelping at the gate. But, I immediately breathed a sigh
of relief when I caught a glimpse of someone walking past the house
on the sidewalk out front. For a frightening instant, I feared
Felicity had returned too soon.
    I finished squaring up the hole, which now
looked to be better than a foot deep, then set the shovel aside.
Kneeling next to it, I opened a small, metal toolbox I had set off
to the side before starting the manual labor portion of this job.
Inside the shallow container, pristine as when I had placed it
there, was what would at first glance be considered a toy. It was a
fashion doll to be exact, complete with long red hair and a smooth,
ivory-tinted complexion. If ever there was a perfect representation
of my ethnically stereotypical wife, this was it. The doll was
wrapped securely in clear cellophane and trussed with a
criss-crossed purple ribbon. It was a piece of SpellCraft commonly
known as a binding. A powerful act of