Page 76 of Lead Me On
“I’ll do whatever I want, Jane. I just thought you deserved fair warning.”
“Then you need to leave. Just go!”
“I’m your ride, darlin’. And right now your brother is more important than your fear of genuine emotion.”
Her jaw dropped. “Mywhat?”
Chase rolled his eyes. “Get in the truck, Jane. We’ll talk about this after we find Jessie.”
She choked on her outrage a little, still staring at him as if he’d just grown a third eye. But finally she bit out, “Fine,” and climbed into the truck.
Finewas never a good thing from a woman, and it would likely be an uncomfortable ride, but Chase was glad he’d said it. A pressure was gone from his chest, as if those words had weighed a ton. But he made a sincere effort to hide his smile as they pulled onto the road and headed toward Carbondale. Jane wouldn’t appreciate it at all.
* * *
HIS CELL PHONE RANGlike an alarm, startling Jane’s heart into a stampede. She was getting a stiff neck from holding her head perfectly straight, but when Chase answered his phone, she allowed herself to look in his direction.
He was falling for her.
Just that was a frightening complication, but the way her heart had responded to those words was even more disturbing. It hadstrainedin her chest, as if it wanted her to jump up and down or throw her arms around him and squeal.
Her second response had been abject terror. Butnotbecause she was afraid of genuine emotion. It wasn’t that at all.
Jane glared at him in remembered anger. Then she registered the deep lines of worry in his forehead as he listened to whoever was on the line.
“Who is it?” she whispered.
He held up a hand. “And that’s all he would say?” When he pressed his fingers to his forehead, Jane began to worry. “Shit,” he muttered. “All right, Dad. Thanks. I’ll talk to you later.”
Chase snapped his phone shut and wrapped both hands around the steering wheel. “We’ve got a big problem.”
“What?”
“They found another girl.”
Panic blasted through her body like lightning. “A girl? A murdered girl?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, God. Oh, God. This is…”
“Her body was found in her house tonight. Cause of death was unnatural.”
“She was strangled?”
“My dad’s contact didn’t know any more. He did say the time of death hasn’t been determined, so my dad suspects it wasn’t within the last hour or two.”
“Who was it?”
Chase shook his head, the bones of his knuckles showing white through his skin. “I don’t know. It was in Aspen, though, not Carbondale or Garfield County.”
The panic twisted through her, squeezing her stomach too tight. “Mom should never have bailed him out.”
Chase shot her a hard glance. “You think he did it?”
“I think if he was still in jail, we’d have proof he hadn’t done it.”
By the time they drove into Carbondale and turned onto Grandma Olive’s street, Jane’s body burned with tension.
