Deadly Inheritance: A Romantic Suspense Page 3

  His hand hovered over the manila folder on his desk. Two weeks wouldn’t make a difference to Clark. He scooped up the four grand, unlocked the drawer safe in his desk, and put it inside.

  Done. Decision made.

  Debunking a haunting was child’s play. But as Frank Leonard guessed, Gabe was more interested in the theory that a killer might be behind the haunting and trying to frighten five people out of their inheritance.

  That made him mad when he looked into Nora’s troubled eyes. She deserved better than an anonymous threatening note and two weeks in the company of a murderer.

  So maybe he could make sure no one tried to frighten her and speed up the police investigation.

  Failing that, he could at least keep her alive.

  Chapter Three

  Nora stood on her front porch with her duct tape-patched, blue roller bag at her feet and glanced at the time on her phone. Déjà vu. Once more, she was standing alone in the glare of the hot sun. Abandoned. Just like being in school again, watching the other kids get onto the buses and roll away while she waited at the curb for her mother.

  She really was too trusting. She should never have agreed to let Mr. O’Brien drive. She glanced uneasily up and down the road, listening. She felt exposed standing on the porch of her house, like she was displayed on a pedestal.

  Here I am—take a shot! That threatening letter hadn’t been mailed—it had just been left in her mailbox. Whoever sent it to her knew where she lived and had been at her house at least once. He could be watching her now, the crosshairs of his rifle sight lined up with her eyebrows.

  She strained to hear the sounds of a car coming closer. Nothing.

  Why had she thought Gabe O’Brien would be different and keep his word? Because he had twinkling blue eyes and a strong, square chin? He’d promised he’d pick her up at nine, and here it was, nine-fifteen and no sign of anyone, or anything, except a couple of lunatic squirrels who kept ramming each other because they couldn’t decide who was chasing whom across the lawn. The animals made her feel marginally better. They created the illusion that everything was okay. Normal.

  She stared down the street again. Did she give him a half-hour or go for a more convenient fifteen minutes and just drive herself?

  To heck with him.

  She’d just picked up her bag to go down her front steps when a monstrous vehicle roared into her driveway. The thing appeared to be some kind of hybrid pickup truck and sports utility vehicle. She stopped, appalled. She’d thought her car was well-used, but this thing looked like it had spent the last fifty years being abused in the baking heat and sand of North Africa. Whatever its original color had been, there was nothing left of it except dull gray metal, and even the vehicle’s manufacturer would have a hard time recognizing it. A wide metal grill protected the headlights and bumper and behind the passenger compartment was a gigantic metal box welded in place where a truck’s bed would be. The square container had a few small grill-covered windows that suggested there might even be seats back there.

  The battered driver’s door jerked open with a harsh squeal, and O’Brien leapt out. “Do you need help with your luggage?” He rubbed his hands on his thighs, leaving dark streaks behind.

  “No. I just have this one bag. Interesting vehicle.” She edged closer to the truck, wondering if she really should have met him at Autumn Hill, after all.

  “It’s been to interesting places.” He looked down at his hands. Dirt showed under his nails, and he rubbed them again on his jeans. “Had to change a tire.”

  “Oh.” She studied him as she edged closer. If he wasn’t going to apologize, she wasn’t going to say it was okay.

  Oblivious to her disapproval, he grabbed the handle of her bag and headed around the side of his vehicle. “I’ll put this in the back. The passenger door’s open.”

  The inside was as utilitarian as the outside. There were two black leather captain’s chairs that were surprisingly comfortable and well equipped with seat belts and knobs to adjust to any desired position, including completely prone, as she discovered to her dismay when she hit a lever that threw her back and left her staring up at the roof. The dashboard looked like the cockpit of a plane with more gauges, dials, buttons, levers, and monitors than she really wanted to think about.

  Well, it could have been worse. This could have been a super-charged sports car driven by a short, fat, balding man with cigar-breath and perspiration stains under his arms. By comparison, this car seemed positively useful, and Mr. O’Brien was…not short. Not at all.

  Before she could do more than adjust her seat to an upright position and lean over to try to identify at least the speedometer, Mr. O’Brien climbed into the driver’s seat, and once more she grew aware of the force of his presence.

  “By the way, you might as well call me Gabe.”

  “Great. I’m Nora.” She felt a little churlish after his abrupt, no-nonsense attitude. In fact, she was seriously starting to regret her previous disdain for the feckless Irish charm so rife within her family. “The next time you get to Ireland, you might consider kissing the Blarney Stone a half-dozen times or so.” She flicked a glance at him as he backed out of her driveway at a speed that left her clutching the armrests. “Just a thought.”

  Then, out of nowhere, a horrifying thought gripped her. What if he was the one who had sent that letter?

  No, why would he? She let out a long breath. Her godfather would never send her to a maniac. Gabe was just a man who drove like one.

  “If you want a lot of flowery excuses, you’ve got the wrong guy.” His mouth tightened. “I’m here, aren’t I? I gave you my word that I’d help you, and I will. Anything else is just crap.”

  “Hey, I didn’t let the air out of your tires.”

  “I don’t like being late.”

  “And…?”

  When he glanced at her, she caught just a brief glimpse of laughter in the blue depths of his eyes. His lips twisted into a grin as a dimple appeared in this right cheek. “And?” he repeated.

  “And you’re sorry?” she prompted him like a teacher encouraging a shy, slightly slow student.

  “Sure.”

  “Ah, brevity. The soul of wit. Your charm overwhelms me.” She transferred her gaze to the window.

  North Carolina countryside rolled by in stretches of plowed fields left fallow for the winter, pine plantations, and the occasional house set cozily in the center of a pleasant, mostly green lawn. At least people had given up the old practice of maintaining a yard of sand so that they could rake it at night and in the morning see if there were any snakes around. A cold chill rippled over her shoulders. If only it was that easy to locate human snakes.

  The view was uninspiring, and after flicking several glances at his profile, Nora’s curiosity got the better of her. “So what happened to your tire?”

  Intriguingly, his already hard jaw grew even more granite-like and his foot depressed the accelerator. The wind whistled by the window as he drove in silence.

  Nora settled back to wait. If he thought she would let him slide out of answering questions that easily, he was much mistaken.

  “It was flat. I already told you that,” he said finally.

  “Interesting. That means someone slashed it. Did they also leave you a threatening note? ‘If you help Nora James, you’ll suffer the same fate.’ Something like that?”

  “So now you’re a detective?” His hands tightened on the wheel. They went a little faster. “Don’t jump to conclusions.”

  “But I’m so good at jumping to conclusions. And let’s face it, there are only a couple of reasons why you wouldn’t want to tell me. Either you’re embarrassed because you forgot to check your tires, or something bad happened and you’re afraid of scaring me. You don’t seem incompetent, and you don’t look embarrassed, so it has to be the latter. Particularly since you’re in such a bad mood. In some males, anger is a displacement mechanism for anxiety. Or even fear.”

  The vehicle’s tires sc
reamed around a corner. The force made her seatbelt tighten across her chest.

  She smiled serenely. “You forget that I make my living diagnosing the problems of patients who won’t talk and hide all signs of illness or injury because showing a weakness makes them today’s special on a predator’s menu. So why not just tell me? I promise I won’t go into hysterics.”

  The vehicle slowed slightly.

  “I’m not afraid.” Despite the almost-amused twitch of his lips, she could tell that he’d fixated on the “anxiety or even fear” part of her speech, and it annoyed him. “I just didn’t want to worry you.”

  “I’m not worried. I leave that part up to you. And I’d still like to know what really happened. Incompetence or deliberate sabotage?”

  “I wouldn’t call it sabotage. But yes, one of my tires was slashed.”

  “A note?”

  “I got a letter. Yesterday. Nothing you need to be concerned about.”

  “We’ve already established that I’m not the one showing signs of distinctly neurotic and secretive behavior. So what did your little note say?”

  He chuckled, the sound rumbling low in his throat. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you wrote it, because you pretty much nailed it.” He flicked her another, much more speculative glance, his blue eyes gleaming. “You didn’t do that, did you? Just to make sure I didn’t back out?”

  “No.” Nora laughed. “Honestly, it was just a guess. But I mean, what else would it say? If you’ve read one threat, you’ve read them all.”

  Gabe grunted and fixed his attention on the road, leaving Nora to stare out the window again at the passing pastures and woods. The road between New Bern and Beaufort didn’t have a lot to commend it, and although Nora tried to believe they had lapsed into a comfortable silence, it didn’t seem all that comfortable. She was too aware of him and the small shifts of his large body, his muscles tightening and then relaxing as he maneuvered the truck on the almost deserted roads.

  They were so close that the passenger cab felt almost too small.

  Her gaze lingered on his strong forearms and hands, the broad backs with tracings of deep blue veins and his long, tapering fingers that looked so capable. A few white scars outlined the knuckles of the right hand, suggesting a fight long-ago.

  Can you fall in love with someone’s hands? She almost laughed it was so ridiculous. But still, she stared at his hands. They looked so competent, so dependable. Honest. The hands of a man who could fix a leak in the bathroom or build a sunroom. A man you could trust to stay with you.

  “What do you want me to call you when we get there?” he asked abruptly. “Ms. James?”

  “Nora will do.”

  “And what are we pretending to be? Boyfriend, girlfriend? Domestic partners? Married?”

  “Friends.” She grinned at his profile, surprised again at the force of his attractiveness and how it stole the breath from her throat. If he took her advice and kissed the Blarney Stone, no one would be able to resist him. Assuming one liked handsome Irishmen. “No one said we couldn’t bring a friend with us for a two-week vacation. So I brought you, my friend, because you’re interested in the paranormal. I don’t see any reason to get all twisted up in a bunch of lies.”

  “Fair enough.” He nodded. “Nora.”

  “Try it again, this time with more of a happy, upward lilt, and less like you’re cursing me and my children unto the seventh generation.”

  This time he laughed outright, his dimple firmly creasing his right cheek. “Alright, Nora.” The beautiful, lilting note in his voice created a tickle under her heart that made her want to sigh with pleasure.

  Her reaction almost made her regret her impulsive suggestion. She fixed her gaze firmly on an old dilapidated farmhouse coming into view on the right. It looked abandoned, with several windows broken out and the roof sagging over the wide, wrap-around porch. According to the GPS on her phone, the empty house was their closest neighbor. They were almost at Autumn Hill.

  “What kind of vehicle is this?” she asked when the silence grew a little too intense.

  He laughed again. “It’s an O’Brien original.”

  When she glanced at him, he grinned and laughed even harder.

  “A while back, I took a welding class and wanted to do a project. Practice.” He shrugged. “So I started visiting junkyards and collecting things, a chassis here, an engine there, and this thing just grew.” Pleasure and a kind of half-ashamed pride lit up his face, and he couldn’t seem to stop grinning. His dimples creased his cheek deeply and Nora felt her spirits soar as he continued. “I’ve gone off-road—way off-road. There’s not much it can’t handle. It’s a tank.”

  “Well, it’s certainly, uh, different.”

  “Yeah.” He completely missed the sarcasm in her voice and was still smiling as wildly as a kid on a roller coaster. “A battlewagon.”

  “So. Welding?”

  “Just a useful skill.” His grin grew crooked, self-deprecating, and the expression did something strange to Nora’s heart. She stared at the road ahead in an effort to stay detached. “My dad used to say I collected skills the way other kids collected baseball cards. But if you want to understand the difference between a trick and reality, a wide range of talents can be invaluable.”

  His sudden companionability surprised her. Maybe she’d been right, and he’d been terse because he was worried and hadn’t wanted her to know. Her stomach twisted when she thought about his slashed tire and the note. Making light of it was one thing, but now she’d dragged another person into danger with her. She was responsible if he got hurt.

  She should have gone alone. Why had she let Mr. Leonard convince her to hire Gabe? Because the lawyer had scared her and made her believe she would be irresponsible if she didn’t do as he suggested. So now, she was responsible for herself and Gabe.

  “Put the cost of repairing that tire, or getting a new one, on your bill.” Nora shifted uncomfortably in the deeply padded seat. The leather protested with a low squeal, making her blush. Thankfully, Gabe didn’t seem to notice either the sound or her warm face.

  “Done.” He glanced around and made a sharp, sudden turn off the main road onto a narrow, rutted lane.

  Huge, nearly horizontal limbs of Quercus virginiana, Southern live oaks, hung over the road. Gray swags of Spanish moss turned the sunny autumn day into dappled shade. In the humid heat of summer, the shadowy coolness might have been welcomed, but now, it reminded her that winter was near with a bone-penetrating chill that even the crystalline sunshine couldn’t banish. Shivering, Nora zipped up her fleece jacket, grateful when Gabe flipped on the heater and a burst of warm air, smelling of hot metal and oil, caressed her cheeks.

  It had been easy at home to brush off the threat in the letter she’d received. However, as the road wound between the ancient, twisted oak trees, a more insistent, insidious anxiety trailed icy fingers down the back of her neck.

  Was the money really worth it?

  Yes. She only had to stay at Autumn Hill for two weeks, fifteen hours out of every twenty-four. And there would be others there. She wasn’t going to be alone. She cast an uneasy glance at Gabe’s calm profile. The ghost of a smile still compressed the corners of his mouth.

  Just two weeks. Then she might have enough to get the no-kill shelter off the ground. They could finally move the cats and dogs out of their current cramped quarters and into a spacious shelter. They’d have room to thrive.

  That is, if she survived.

  No. There was no reason to think she might die. A slashed tire and a few notes didn’t mean a homicidal maniac had targeted her. She could handle this.

  Even as she tried to convince herself, Gabe turned down an even narrower gravel road. Low-hanging branches and tangled, thorny bushes scraped the sides of their vehicle with shrill squeals, as if screaming at them to turn back. Before she could do more than lean forward to stare out the windshield, a huge, rambling brick structure rose up in front of them.

  T
he façade looked like a standard, three-story colonial house, except that someone had tacked on a pair of two-story wings on either side of the main house. The lower additions made the main building appear to tower over the driveway like an anvil about to fall on them. As she stared at the central portion, the house leaned toward her with a malignant, hypnotic effect, threatening to crush her under its terrible weight. Brick upon brick—the dusty smell of the crumbling mortar choked her. Nora gripped the armrests and pressed herself back into the seat.

  No—how can we live here? No one can live here. She wanted to run, to hide from the looming house. The place reeked of fear and death.

  She took a deep breath. Calm down. It’s just a house. Her heart thudded within the narrow confines of her ribcage. Her fingers ached until she forced herself to release the armrests. Suddenly, she was glad, very glad, that Gabe was with her. She couldn’t have gone in there alone and walked through that front door, felt it shut behind her and lock.

  Never.

  When she forced herself to examine it calmly, rationally, she noticed two, huge chains. The gray links came out a few feet above the wide, double door and stretched down to twin cement posts sunk into the ground several yards away.

  A drawbridge. The two chains were fastened to a drawbridge that had been let down over a deep, murky pit. A wide moat encircled the entire house, disappearing from view around the wings. While the water might have leant a romantic air to the sprawling house, to Nora, it looked like a too-tight girdle squeezing the air out of the house and keeping everyone locked inside.

  “You ready?” Gabe asked cheerfully as he turned off the engine and opened his door. “This is quite the castle. Have you been here before?”

  “No. Never,” she croaked through a dry throat. She hated the place on sight.

  There was no way they’d be able to use this place in any way, shape, or form for an extension to the animal shelter. No animal—or human—would want to stay here. It was impossible.