Page 18 of The Case of the Missing Love Stone

She turns the first card over. An emotion crosses her face but disappears before I can read it. She flips the second card, and her posture tightens. Her pulse jumps at the base of her throat, and her scent sharpens with surprise.

Wes leans slightly forward before checking himself, narrowing his attention on her face. “What?” he asks.

“Nothing.” She gathers the cards faster than the reading warrants, stacking them with the concentrated attention of a person putting information away before it says too much.

Wes watches her hands. “What did you see?”

“The cards are impressionistic.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the honest one.”

I study her while she straightens the deck. She won’t meet Wes’s eyes with the directness she used at the bakery, and her body is tense. Whatever the cards showed her, she wasn’t prepared for it.

Before either of us can press further, footsteps strike the porch hard enough to rattle the wind chimes, and a truck engine cuts outside.

Scarlet closes her eyes. She takes one breath. Then another. When she opens them, the warmth from the card reading has closed behind a practiced, tired expression.

A knock hits the screen door.

“Scarlet. It’s Sheriff Tom Bentley.” His voice carries through the house like he is accustomed to walls obeying him. “Open up.”

Wes is already on his feet.

Scarlet stands slowly, smoothing her hands along the front of her sweater before looking directly at Wes. Her face is open yet controlled. She wants him to understand before she opens the door. “They’re going to search the house,” she says rigidly, her voice devoid of emotion. “And they’re going to think I did it regardless of what they find.”

The words carry the weight of a fact she has lived with long enough to stop sounding angry about it.

Wes’s expression hardens. His alpha presses against the restraint he keeps it behind, before the change registers across his expression. The investigator in him recedes, as older and less professional instincts move forward. I give his forearm a brief squeeze, and Wes reins it in, though his alpha presses into the room.

Scarlet watches us like she’s searching for an answer to a question. I hope what she sees proves that Wes and I hold each other steady.

Her body leans a fraction toward us before she catches herself. Then she crosses to the screen door, pushes it open, and faces whatever is waiting on the other side.

I stay where I am for a moment, looking at the tarot cards she gathered too quickly, the half-finished coffee gone cold, and the quilts visible from every angle of the room.

She saw something in those cards and put it away.

I think I know what it was.

Chapter 5

Scarlet Sage

Sheriff Tom Bentley enters my house like he already owns the verdict.

Two deputies follow him, their heavy boots thudding across the old hardwood while the screen door bangs shut hard enough to rattle the drying chives near the kitchen window. Humid air laced with swamp water and engine fumes drifts in with them.

Tom removes his sunglasses slowly. “Scarlet.”

I fold my arms beneath my oversized sweater. “Tom.”

He studies me looking for confirmation of a conclusion he’d reached before the conversation began.

The worst part is that he used to smile at me normally, before enough people started connecting my name to bad things happening in Sweetheart Haven. Now he looks at me the way people look at weather damage during festival season: unfortunate, poorly timed, and a problem to be managed.

Behind me, Wes has gone tense in a deeply alpha way that changes the pressure inside a room without anyone speaking.