Page 21 of The Case of the Missing Love Stone

Regret moves briefly across his face, genuine enough to be painful. Then duty closes over it, and he nods toward the investigators, his voice sharpening when he looks at them. “You two be careful who you trust around here.”

The screen door bangs shut behind him. Truck doors slam outside, engines turn over, and tires grind across the dirt until the swamp swallows the noise.

I look at the tarot deck sitting at the edge of the kitchen table and focus on breathing.

My instincts scream at me to close the bedroom door, keep every window latched, and to scrub the strangers’ scents from the rooms they entered. I crave the security of a familiar body blocking the rest of the world from reaching me. My knees protest and the panic swells, but I refuse to give in to the collapse. Keeping my face neutral requires more effort than usual with two men in my kitchen who can apparently read distress signals I didn’t know I was sending.

The cards had shown a binding path. Three lives caught in the same current, oriented toward the same fixed point, and pushed toward a choice with consequences. I put both cards away before either man could see the reading clearly, and I’m not going to think about the implications of the three of us right now.

Roman moves first, but he doesn’t come closer. Instead, he lowers himself onto the edge of a chair and turns one hand palm up between us. “Can I?”

His question catches me unprepared. No one has asked permission to comfort me. They avoid me, advise me, or tell me I should be used to the way things are by now. I stare at his palm. He has long fingers, faint graphite marks near the side of his hand, and a shallow scar crossing one knuckle.

My instincts move before the rest of me agrees.

Roman closes his fingers around mine carefully, firm enough to feel real. My breath leaves in a rush. Warm cardamom and cinnamon settles around me, grounded by the cedar scent moving closer from the other side of the room. My omega latches onto both, orienting toward the stable rhythm between them with an embarrassing eagerness. Roman’s thumb strokes once over the place on my wrist where I had been pressing. The tenderness of it nearly undoes me.

“I’ve had worse afternoons,” I say.

His hazel eyes stay on mine. “That doesn’t make this one acceptable.”

Warmth spreads through my chest. It’s care, barely deep enough to qualify, but it’s more than I’m accustomed to receiving from people.

Wes crosses to the hallway without saying anything. He closes the bedroom door the deputy left open before moving through the living room, restoring a few displaced objects with careful hands. The carved owl goes back into the window. My grandmother’s quilt is folded over the chair again. The research stack is straightened without a single page being shuffled out of order.

I register the whole sequence as reclamation.

When Wes returns, he pulls off his jacket and holds it out to me.

I look from the dark canvas to his face. “What am I supposed to do with that?”

“Whatever helps.”

“That is dangerously vague.”

“Then wear it.” His tone is gruff enough to sound like an order, but he doesn’t step closer or try to put it on me.

I release Roman’s hand long enough to take the jacket.

The fabric is warm from Wes’s body. Cedar and clean soap rise around me as I slide my arms into sleeves long enough to cover my hands. The weight settles over my shoulders, and my body responds with an easing so intense that heat burns across my cheeks.

Wes has the decency not to look satisfied.

Roman keeps one hand offered near mine. I take it again.

For a few breaths, the house feels like it did this morning.

Wes returns to the doorway. The sharp certainty he carried in has developed visible cracks since Tom left, and I watch him recalculate in real time. His gaze moves between me, the storage box of dried flowers, the rooms the deputies searched, and back to me again. He is methodical even in doubt.

Finally, he looks directly at me. “You reacted in the bakery when Roman mentioned the plant compounds.”

“I noticed something before that.”

His focus sharpens. “At the fountain?”

I nod.

Roman’s thumb rests warm against my hand. “You told us the lilies didn’t belong there. You never told us why.”