Breathe by Kristen Ashley
Dedication
To Carly Phillips, Thank you for remembering what it’s like and doing your bit to pave my way.
You. Are. Awesome.
Acknowledgements
When I needed to understand how a small town library works, I did what I usually do. I phoned a friend. Or, in this instance, I emailed the fabulous Dixie Malone at Denver Public Library. Dixie has provided a lifeline often throughout the years of our friendship and she didn’t disappoint. She laid it all out for me and gave me little bits and pieces to make Faye’s experience as a small town librarian richer for my readers.
So, Miss Dix, you know I adore you. Now I adore you even more. I thought this was an impossible task but there it is.
And, as always and ever, thank you , Chas, for taking my back.
Author’s Note
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I encourage you to find the music I mention in this book and either listen to it while you read or later. Emma Mae Bowen’s “Holding Out for A Hero”, Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away” and all the rest will put you in the mood and place you right in the action. And I hope that’s a good place to be.
Thank you to KT for sending me the link to Emma Mae’s awesome, freaking song. And bonus, Angela Gray, my Pinklady reader/friend, turned out to be Emma Mae’s auntie. Now seriously, how is that for the sisterhood binding tighter?
Rock on!
*
Chapter One
Never to Be His
“Talk to me.”
Chace Keaton was whispering to no one, sitting alone in the very early morning February cold of Harker’s Wood.
The place where his wife was shot to death.
Harker’s Wood was an unusual spread of trees in the Colorado Mountains. Unusual because it wasn’t simply conifer and aspen. For some reason that was likely akin to the reasons Old Man Harker did all the crazy shit he did, he had cleared that space seventy years ago and planted hundreds of shoots of twenty different varieties of trees. Trees that shouldn’t take root in the Colorado Mountains. Trees that, by some miracle, not only took root but grew tall and remained strong.
It was late night. The snow was thick and deep. It was freezing cold. There were a few clouds but the full moon shone bright through the trees, gilding them silver.
Chace didn’t see the trees or the moon. He didn’t feel the cold seeping through his jeans that were resting on the snow covered log which his ass was on.
He saw nothing.
He heard nothing.
He waited for the wood to talk.
It wasn’t talking.
He’d been up there countless times since Misty was shot there. Her death was purposefully not investigated by strict, detailed police protocol.
Not by the Carnal Police Department.
Not then.
Not when it was infested.
Now it was no longer infested.
But that didn’t mean Chace didn’t come up there alone, without a tail and instigate his own detailed examination of the area.
He found nothing.
And the wood never talked to him. Not back then. Not now.
Misty’s blood had long since washed away or mingled with the dirt. Now that dirt was covered in snow.
But Chace saw in his mind’s eye the footprints.
And, Christ, the knee prints.
Two sets. A man’s, a woman’s. Both of them walking up the well-tended trail to the wood. Only the man’s walking back.
Misty was wearing high heels. She always wore high heels. Chace liked women in heels. That said, the ones his wife wore made her look like a whore.
He’d noted several times in the footprints that marked her enforced walk, after being beaten badly, probably at gunpoint, definitely scared out of her mind, where she’d stumbled. Other times where she’d fallen.
But he’d done her on her knees.
Chace closed his eyes.
Very few people knew that they’d found semen on her chin and in her stomach. He knew because he was a cop in that town and her husband.
And he knew that before she was shot to death, she’d been forced to her knees in order to give her killer a blowjob.
The bile rushed up his throat and in the months since his wife had been beaten, violated and murdered that had happened countless times too.
Kiss me, Chace.
Her voice came at him in a memory, brutalizing his brain as it had every day, so many fucking times a day, he couldn’t count.
Her last words to him.
She’d been begging.
Kiss me, Chace.
He hadn’t kissed her. They’d been married for years and except the kiss he had to give her at their wedding, he hadn’t kissed her once.
Not once.
Instead, he’d felt his lip curl, something he didn’t hide from her, and he’d walked away.
As he swallowed the bile down, his eyes flew open when he heard someone approaching.