Trinity Harbor 3 - Along Came Trouble Read Free

thoughts scrambling. She’d waited for a while on the porch, but eventual y exhaustion and fear had taken their tol . She had gone inside the unlocked house—a testament to Tucker’s faith in his own law-enforcement skil s—in search of a much-needed shower to cleanse away al signs of the night’s events.
    Then she’d found one of his T-shirts tossed over the back of a chair, slipped it on and, like a child seeking the safety of a familiar place, had crawled into Tucker’s bed to wait for him, uncertain what shift he was working or even whether he would be home at al . For al she knew, he could be spending his nights in another woman’s arms.
    Now, judging from the soft gray light spil ing in the windows, she’d slept through the night. Alone, which was as it should be.
    Some sixth sense told her that she might be alone in Tucker’s bed, but she was not by herself. She rol ed over and looked straight into eyes that were as familiar to her as her husband’s. More familiar, in some ways.
    Tucker regarded her with a cool, penetrating gaze that seemed to see straight into her soul. She wondered if he could see the turmoil, if he could read just how terrified she was…how relieved that he was final y there, even if his expression was far from friendly.
    “Welcome back seems a little inappropriate,” Tucker said with the wry humor that Liz had once decried because it kept her at a distance.
    She studied his face, noted the new lines fanning away from the corners of his crystal-blue eyes, the furrow in his forehead that meant he’d spent most of the night thinking hard about how to cope with her unexpected presence. She wanted to touch him, wanted to smooth away that furrow and tel him not to worry, but that was out of the question. He had every reason to worry. She was about to draw him into a quagmire.
    Not only was she—the woman who had once dumped him—suddenly back in his bed, but she was in more trouble than even Tucker Spencer with his keen intel igence, sterling moral streak and investigative skil s was likely to be able to fix. But, God help her, she needed him to try…for both their sakes.
    “Why are you here?” he asked, when she said nothing.
    Liz wished she had the kind of simple answer he seemed to expect. “It’s complicated,” she began final y.
    “Not good enough,” Tucker said flatly.
    His inscrutable gaze never once left her face, not even to stray to the ample amount of bare skin revealed by his twisted, hiked-up T-shirt. She shivered at the sudden chil in the air and drew the sheet tightly around her, embarrassed by her indecent exposure. Once it wouldn’t have mattered, but now it did. Things between them had changed. Much as she might hate it, it was an undeniable fact.
    She had to fight to blink back the tears that threatened. She wouldn’t—she couldn’t—cry. If she started, she might never stop. She had made such a mess of things—of her relationship with Tucker, of her marriage, of her life. Right now, though, she had to concentrate on one thing…finding out what had happened last night and who was responsible.
    “Stil have that rigid self-control, I see,” she said, covering her nerves with sarcasm, even at the risk of alienating the only friend she was likely to have in Trinity Harbor, where people might have voted for her husband but had been slow to forgive her for the choice she’d made between Tucker and an outsider.
    “It’s gotten me through the rough spots,” he replied evenly.
    “Meaning what I did to you,” she said, regretting that they hadn’t had this particular conversation years ago and gotten it out of the way. But Tucker, stoic and disdainful, had refused to let her explain anything back then. He’d said it was enough that she was turning her back on everything they’d shared.
    He hadn’t wanted to know the details, hadn’t wanted to understand her reasons for choosing Larry over him. Maybe he’d been right. Maybe none of them were good