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  An eRedSage Publishing Publication

  This book is a work of complete fiction. Any names, places, incidents, characters are products of the author’s imagination and creativity or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is fully coincidental.

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  Deceiver

  An eRed Sage Publication All Rights Reserved Copyright © 2018

  eRedSage is a registered trademark of Red Sage Publishing, Inc.

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  ISBN: 9781603100755; 160310075X Deceiver eBook version

  Published by arrangement with the authors and copyright holders of the individual works as follows:

  Deceiver © 2018 by D. Morrissey

  Cover © 2018 by Lacey

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  ebook layout and conversion by jimandzetta.com

  Deceiver

  ***

  By D. Morrissey

  TO MY READERS:

  The Southern Ladies’ Glee Club is meant to entertain and amuse. The sassy, saucy ladies from Arkansas deliver charm and wit. But, they are far from graceful, as their exploits turn into catastrophic comedies. I hope you enjoy reading about the ladies as much as I enjoyed writing about them.

  READER ALERT!:

  The Southern Ladies’ Glee Club is a five-book series. “Liar” is Book One and “Deceiver” is Book Two. Book Three, “Cozener”, will be available by the end of 2017.

  Chapter One

  “I’m coming!”

  The insistent ring of the doorbell allows me to only wrap myself in a big, fluffy bath towel and run down the hall toward the front door, picking up Josh’s dirty clothes along the way. How in the hell could I have raised such a slob? It rings again just as I reach it.

  “Yes?” Irritation is heavy in my tone as I swing the door open wide, expecting to see Mrs. Gilmore from next door.

  “Uh… Mrs. Putnam?”

  Oh, shit. What I did not expect to see is this tall, dark, broad-shouldered piece of hotness who’s standing on my front porch. I reposition the armful of dirty clothes in front of me, trying to hide Josh’s unclean briefs that are tucked beneath my chin.

  “Oh. Um…Yes. How can I help you?” I’m only half-listening, absorbed instead in his tall, muscular physique, broad square shoulders and penetrating blue eyes. Beautiful.

  “I’m Detective Cole. I was hoping to speak to you for a moment.”

  He reaches into his coat pocket and produces a wallet, which he casually allows to fall open so I can see the nice, shiny badge inside.

  I try to swallow the hard knot that’s formed in my throat. I’ve been expecting him. Well, obviously, not him, specifically. Someone like him. I’m just surprised that it’s taken him this long to find me.

  “Oh, I see. Alright.” I glance around nervously, only somewhat relieved that he’s not in a marked police car. That would give Mrs. Gilmore something to talk about for weeks. “Okay. Come on in, I guess?”

  I push open the screen door, trying to work out exactly how an innocent person might act in this scenario.

  “Thanks.” He smiles at me as he enters, his gaze nearly setting me on fire as his eyes study the damp towel that’s wrapped around me.

  “Uh… Have a seat.” My hustling moves herd him into the living room, and then I take a step back toward the hall. “If you’ll give me just one minute to go get dressed… I’m afraid you caught me just getting out of the shower.”

  His eyes slide down to the pile of dirty laundry in my arms.

  “Oh, and picking up my son’s dirty clothes. I’ll just put these away and change real quick.”

  “Take your time. I’ll wait right here,” he says, his bright blue eyes continuing their assessment of my wardrobe, or lack of it, I suppose.

  I smile and nod while continuing to back down the hall, hugging Josh’s laundry tightly. “Okay. I’ll… uh… be right back, then.”

  I turn around, keenly aware of his eyes boring into my back as I scurry to my room out of sight.

  Closing the bedroom door, I toss the dirty clothes into my laundry basket and stand there for a second silently freaking out. Oh my God. How did he find me? Has he found anyone else? What do I say?

  I rush to my phone and dial Billie’s number. While the phone rings, I strip off my towel and toss it on the chair. Then, I paw frantically through my drawers looking for, well, drawers, when I suddenly remember leaving all my favorite ones folded neatly in the laundry room. Come on. Pick up, Billie! I finally find two old pairs and hold them up side by side, unsure about panty fashion for today’s prison runway models. I need some pokey panties.

  “Hi there. Congratulations! You’ve reached my voicemail, which means that I’m either busy right now or I just don’t want to talk to you. Either way, leave a message and I’ll call you back… maybe.”

  Dammit. I hang up the phone and toss it on the bed as I step into some panties that I don’t recall ever even seeing before. How does that happen? Then, I bounce around my room like a pinball trying to hook my bra and find some clothes to put on, running through all the possible scenarios in my head as I search.

  He could have found out that I stole the blood from the hospital. But, how? It’d been almost three weeks since the girls and I had taken matters into our own hands and visited some sweet, old-fashioned justice on a malicious, murdering swine of a local cop. We’d planned everything perfectly, and I’d been careful not to take the blood from storage where it might be missed. Instead, I had taken it directly from a patient, one who is long gone now.

  I grab a T-shirt off my dresser and tug it over my head.

  Maybe he found some kind of DNA evidence at the crime scene? What could I have possibly left there?

  I wiggle into my jeans.

  Am I taking too long? Does that make me look even guiltier? I stand by the door for a second, debating, and then yell through a small crack, “Almost done! Be right there!”

  Socks! I need some socks. I’m sure the floor of my impending cell is probably cold and I’ll appreciate some warm ones. Tearing through my sock drawer now, I pluck out a pair without holes, which is usually a crap shoot for me. Scraping them on, I wonder whether I should try to call Billie again. Or, maybe I should call Sami instead? She’s pretty level-headed in an emergency, and she might even be able to tell me what to say.

  “Nice place you have here,” the detective yells from the hallway.

  All my movements freeze at the sound of his husky voice, my eyes suddenly wide as baseballs.

  Surely, he wouldn’t come back here? Okay, there’s no time to call anyone else. Quick check in the mirror—I haven’t had time to put on any makeup or even brush my hair after my shower. They’ll have to do with me raking my fingers through the damp, blond ringlets, and pinching a bit of color to my cheeks.

  A thirty-four-year-old mother is staring back at me from the mirror. She looks flushed. She looks like a criminal. She looks nervous as hell. I’m not sure what has me more anxious—the fact that he’s a cop and I could be facing life in prison? Or that he looked at me the same way Josh looks at the last piece of pizza.

  I give myself a mental slap. He’s not here to date you! He’s here to investigate me, a murderer. Face it. You deserve whatever you get. I shake my head at the mirror and walk out, prepared to face the music.

  “Sorry about that.” Every sense in me takes in the tall, dark-haired Adonis standing in the middle of my living room and staring out th
e big, bay window. Lean, with an athletic build and a rugged handsomeness, he makes my thoughts migrate to all kinds of kinky, sinful notions. Is it possible he got even better looking while I was in the bedroom? “So, how can I help you, Detective …?”

  “Cole.” He smiles at me, and I’m afraid I may need to go change my panties again. “But you can call me Dan, if you like.”

  Ooh. Yes. I do like. “Dan.”

  Murderer or not, it’s been almost a year since I’ve had the pleasure of a man, any man, much less one that looks like him.

  “I hate to bother you on your day off, but I missed you at the hospital yesterday. I’m investigating a murder.”

  Oh, no. Here it comes. I steel myself. At least I’ll be handcuffed and arrested by an attractive man who wants me to call him by his first name. I wonder how he feels about dating someone on Death Row? “A murder, you say?”

  “Yes. Tell me, have you ever seen this man?” He reaches into his pocket and fishes out a photo.

  I am a hair’s breath away from just confessing everything. He seems like he might be understanding.

  You can’t! Think of the other girls!

  “Um, I don’t have my glasses on,” I stall. “In fact, I might have left them at work.”

  I step forward nervously. Should I say I’ve never seen him before? Maybe I should say I’m not sure? I’m still going through possible responses when he presses the photo into my hand.

  “Take your time. If you want to look around for your glasses, I can wait.”

  I nod, resigned, and then look down at the photo. I’m prepared to see Derek, the piece of shit cop who started this whole mess. I’m not prepared for what I actually do see.

  What the hell? It can’t be. I stare at the photo, trying to reconcile my eyes and my brain.

  “That’s Mr. Stratford,” I murmur, both shocked and relieved, not to mention more than a little confused.

  Dan studies my reaction closely. “So, you know him?”

  “Yeah. Well, I mean, sort of. He’s a patient.” I try to recall the last time I saw him. He came into the emergency room just last month, I think. Was it a laceration?

  “Do you think we could sit down for a minute?”

  “Oh, sure. Sorry. I don’t know where my head is today.”

  I walk with him over to the sofa, and we sit down, a little too close for comfort if he wants me to actually concentrate on answering any questions. His knee falls to rest innocently against my leg, and suddenly, that’s the only thing I can think of.

  “Is Mr. … uh…” Hot knee on my leg. “…Stratford. Yes… Mr. Stratford…” Stop staring at his crotch. “…him… Is he okay?”

  Dan smiles as if he deals with babbling idiots all the time. They should bottle this guy’s pheromones and use it to take down female criminals. Wait…maybe that’s what’s happening right now?

  I shift nervously.

  “I mean, he seemed like such a nice man. I hope no one’s hurt him.” I sound like a total dweeb. So, I try to reclaim what’s left of my tattered pride by donning my professional persona. “Can I get you something to drink, Detective?”

  “No. Thank you, though.” He smiles at me, and a tingling sensation starts deep down in my belly. “And Mr. Stratford’s actually fine. Though he’s currently the subject of an ongoing investigation.”

  My eyebrows leap up my forehead. “Really? How so?”

  He sighs. “Jessie Stratford, that nice man you met at work, is a key suspect in a missing person’s case that I’m working on. Personally, I believe that he abducted a twelve-year-old girl named Jessica Henderson last month in South Bryant.”

  “Oh my gosh. I heard about that on the news.” My thoughts return to the sweet, middle-aged man who came to see me at the hospital. It is unfathomable that he could have harmed a fly. “And, he…” I grimace. “…has he hurt her?”

  “We still haven’t found her yet. But, given that we’ve not seen or heard anything in almost a month, we’re not very hopeful. In fact, we’re now treating this as a murder investigation.”

  Suddenly, I’m sick at my stomach. “How can I help?”

  “I understand you treated him when he came into the ER last month?”

  I nod, feeling deflated. I’m not going to be able to help him. “Detective… Dan, I mean. You know I can’t talk about anything that might violate—”

  “I knew you were going to say that,” he interrupts, frisking his other pocket. “Here’s the subpoena for the release of records.”

  He hands me the papers, and I examine them, still unsure whether I should be speaking to him without the hospital’s counsel present. I really need to check with my boss.

  “Oh, and here’s an authorization from your boss.”

  Hm…and he read minds, too! He fishes another piece of paper from his pants’ pocket, and I wonder if he’s ever going to run out of pockets.

  “Well, it looks to me like you have everything covered.” I examine the release from my boss, Nurse Ratchet, whom we lovingly refer to as Nurse Hatchet because she’s such a cranky, old battle-axe. “Okay. Let me see. What can I tell you?”

  I pinch my lip as I think, rolling it lightly between my thumb and my finger.

  His gaze dips to my mouth, his eyes narrowing as he parts his lips. I hear him draw a sharp breath.

  I freeze, my fingers halting in mid lip-roll, and clench my thighs together tightly. Jesus. That was sexy.

  “Ahem…” He covers his mouth with a fist and clears his throat. “Um… Why don’t you start by telling me about his injury? I read the medical notes, but I’d rather hear from you.”

  I nod. “Okay. Sure. I don’t normally work in the ER, you know, but they were really busy that day. My boss asked me to go and help them out.”

  “So, you were volunteered.” Dan smiles.

  “No, actually. I was voluntold.” I giggle at my own joke, a nasty habit of mine when I’m nervous. “Anyway, Mr. Stratford was the first patient they gave me, and he had a laceration to his arm. It was a small cut, but it was deep. I remember that part clearly.”

  “Like a knife wound?” Dan pulls out a notepad and starts scribbling in it.

  “Knife wound?” That wouldn’t have been my first thought.

  “We have reason to believe she might have stabbed him. We found the small pocket knife that she carried around with her.”

  “Oh. Well, yeah. Possibly, I guess. He said he did it on a fence. Or, maybe it was a gate?” I’d probably seen hundreds of patients since that day, making me struggle to recall all the details of our discussion. “If I had the file, I could probably remember better.”

  “I have it, if you think that might help.” He reaches into his coat pocket again, scrounging around for something.

  If he pulls out a Manila folder full of medical records, I swear I’m calling the Guinness World Record people.

  No folder. Instead, he produces his cell phone and begins tapping and sliding his fingers around on the screen. “Here’s a copy of the records from that visit.”

  I take his phone and thumb through all my scribbled notes nodding and remembering. “Okay. Yeah. So, basically, he had a cut on his arm that was deep. It went almost all the way through. I remember thinking how lucky he was that it missed a major artery. I asked him what happened, and he said he was mending the gate to his cattle pasture. Actually, I believe he said he got his ankle caught in the cattle guard and he fell into a piece of sharp sheet metal.”

  “Did you find anything suspicious about his story?”

  “No. Not really, except maybe that sheet metal is usually long and thin. It seems like it would have sliced him wide open. Instead, his wound looked more like something gouged him. Although I could see maybe a sharp, twisted piece of sheet metal sticking out from somewhere. I mean, really, you’d be surprised at some of the things we see and hear in the ER.”

  He chuckles. “Yeah. I’ve seen a few things myself.”

  I roll my eyes at my own stupidity. “I’m s
orry. I keep forgetting that you’re probably as familiar with all these crazies as I am, if not more.”

  “Maybe we should get together and swap war stories some time?” He grins, his cerulean eyes glistening dangerously.

  I swallow hard and blink at him, unsure if that was an actual invitation or just a flippant, off-hand remark. Surely, it’s just chit-chat?

  “So, nothing about his wound seemed to set off alarms or anything,” he says, breaking the brief, uncomfortable silence.

  “Right. It didn’t strike me as especially strange. He did look like the farmer type who could have been working outside or mending a fence or something.” I shake my head, recalling nothing that might be beneficial for him. “Like I said, the only weird thing was that the cut was so clean. A lot of times, when someone comes in with a home-related injury like that, especially on a farm, the injuries are more…brutal, I guess you could say, like gashes, or rips, or tears. His was a neat, little two-inch laceration that came within centimeters of going through the other side of his arm. He was lucky. I was able to stitch it up so clean, he probably won’t even have a scar. So, yes. In retrospect, I suppose it could have been a knife wound.”

  “What about his demeanor? Did he seem unusually nervous or anxious?”

  I shake my head. “No. Not that I recall. Nothing that would have made me question his behavior or his account of the injury. In fact, he was really pleasant.”

  “So, you guys spoke for a while, then? Had a conversation?”

  “Yeah. We had a bus full of kids come in to the ER that day after an MVA. Uh… I mean, a Motor Vehicle Accident.”

  He smiles and nods. What am I saying? Of course, he knows what an MVA is.

  “Anyway, all the on-call doctors were busy with the kids, so I sutured him myself. We talked the whole time I was stitching him up.”

  “Do you remember what you spoke about?”

  A sigh escapes me as I try to think back on that day. “Yeah. Nothing really special. I was raised on a farm myself. So we talked about his crops, his livestock, how hard it is to get good field-hands nowadays, how much I hate picking okra. Uh… Oh, yeah. He told me that he was a veteran and really into the local chapter of the VFW. I can’t think of anything that might interest you. Just a bunch of nothing, really.”