Winter at the Door Read Online Free Page B

his lips moved subtly in a small, utterly outrageous imitation of a kiss.
    Damn, damn,
damn
, she thought.
    It was Dylan Hudson.
    Her new place was a rented house on a dead-end street on the easternmost edge of Bearkill, a tiny ranch-style structure with a mildewed porch awning, a small plate-glass picture window, and a concrete birdbath lying on its side in the unkempt front yard.
    Half an hour after showing up in the diner, Dylan eyed her appreciatively as she strode up the front walk and let herself in with her new key.
    “Looking good, Lizzie,” he said.
    The landlord, with whom she’d only spoken once on the phone, had left the key for her in the mailbox mounted on a post at the end of the front walk; yet another astonishing difference from the way things were done back in Boston, she thought.
    “Oh, shut up,” she snapped crossly at Dylan, pushing the front door open. The air inside smelled stale but otherwise okay.
    “What the hell are you doing here, anyway?”
    She looked around, meanwhile thinking that in a moment she’d be alone in here with him, and that she’d rented the place fully furnished.And that last time she’d checked, the word
furnished
implied a bed …
    Behind her, Dylan waltzed in without being invited. But then she didn’t have to invite him, did she? He knew perfectly well that he’d been invited wherever she was, pretty much from the first moment she’d laid eyes on him.
    “Answer my question, please,” she told him as he bent to plump one of the cushions on the upholstered sofa: brown plaid tweed with big shiny wooden armrest knobs, truly ghastly looking.
    Cheap pottery lamps, wood-laminate end tables … the place had been decorated out of Walmart, it looked like. But it was better than nothing, and anyway, furniture shopping wasn’t on her agenda.
    Finding Nicki was. Dylan stood innocently a few feet away. “I mean what, did you think I need babysitting or something?” she went on.
    He turned, the look in his dark eyes mischievous. The faint scent of his cologne, some very subtle champagne-y thing that was emphatically not Old Spice, floated in the still air; he’d been wearing it when they first …
    No. No, don’t go there
, she instructed herself firmly.
    Dylan grinned wickedly. “Babysitting, huh? That could be fun.” But then his expression changed. “Come on, Lizzie. I just wanted to help you get settled in, you know me.”
    After she’d said goodbye to the veterinarian Trey Washburn and turned down his invitation, she and Chevrier had driven back to Bearkill, with Dylan following in his own car.
    Chevrier and Hudson knew each other pretty well, somewhat to her surprise; Maine State Police detectives like Dylan worked often with the rural sheriffs here, it seemed, unlike back in the big city, where in her experience the relationship was more often competitive, to put it mildly.
    “Yeah, I know you,” she answered Dylan now, a pain she’d thought healed suddenly sharp in her chest. “You’re the guy who swore to me that your wife was already getting a divorce.”
    She crossed the small knotty-pine-paneled living room and drew the flimsy-feeling dark red curtains back from the picture window.Weak autumn light filtered in, the sun at a long, low angle already even this early in the afternoon.
    Dylan came up behind her, gazing out at a tiny lawn thickly carpeted with fallen leaves. The other houses on the street were just like this one, small ranches set well back in postage-stamp yards.
    “Hey,” he said softly. “Come on, I thought we’d settled all that.”
    Silence from Lizzie. She’d thought so, too.
    Sort of. He went on. “Anyway, it’s not so bad here. Maine’s a fine place. You’ll enjoy it when you get used to it.”
    “Sure,” she replied scathingly. Right now back in Boston, the afternoon light would be on the river, turning the rowers whose shells skated like water bugs over the golden surface to slender silhouettes, their joints