On Pins and Needles. Victoria Pade

he considered her a flake nor the fact that she might be involved in some way with a murder, kept him from wishing the state patrolmen, Burt Connors’s crew, and the forensics team would hurry up and clear out of there.

      Because the sooner they did, the sooner he could get back to Megan Bailey.

      And be alone with her again….

      Megan sat in her kitchen, trying to sort through what had happened today.

      There was no denying that returning to Elk Creek had been fraught with complications. The house had been in such disrepair. Worse than room after room of cobwebs, four broken windows, and a need for new paint inside and out, there had been problems with the electrical wiring, old appliances that had refused to come out of retirement, and the need for a whole new septic system.

      Not only had she and Nissa had to do all the home repairs they could possibly do them selves, they’d also had to set up their office on top of it—complete with more cleaning and painting and furniture moving—because they hadn’t been able to afford to hire help.

      Certainly clients hadn’t been clamoring to their door and they hadn’t been met with a warm reception.

      And now this.

      Someone was buried in the backyard? Megan didn’t know what to make of that. Especially when Josh Brimley turned officious and contrary on her. As if she’d had some thing to do with it.

      Did he think she and her sister had brought the skeleton with them and planted it behind the house for fun? Or maybe he thought it was part of some hocus-pocus or voodoo ritual since that’s what he considered the practice of acupuncture.

      Well, fine. It was good to know from the start what kind of man he was. That he was not the kind of man she would ever allow to get close to her again. The next man she let into her life was going to be accepting and tolerant and receptive. He was going to be open-minded, liberal, enlightened and unbiased.

      In short, he wasn’t going to be anything like Noel.

      And so far, Josh Brimley seemed a whole lot more like Noel than not.

      Hocus-pocus and voodoo, Megan thought, taking offense now to what she hadn’t taken offense to when he’d said it earlier. And that facetious, if you can’t take it…

      As if she should stay standing out in the chilly night air as punishment. As if, under the circumstances, she didn’t deserve to come in out of the cold.

      He might be incredible to look at, but now she knew what was under the surface—he wasn’t just a skeptic who could be won over to the idea that there were viable alternatives in the world, to the fact that not everyone had to be a carbon copy of everyone else. He wasn’t a person who could learn to appreciate diversity. He was judgmental, close-minded, and suspicious. Suspicious of her, of all things.

      Megan had worked up quite a head of steam by the time the knock came on the back door just then.

      “Yes,” she called in a clipped tone that lacked all welcome.

      And when Josh Brimley opened the door and stepped inside, she didn’t stand to greet him and she absolutely refused to offer him some thing to drink to warm up—like a cup of the spice tea she’d fixed herself.

      But what she did do—much to her own dismay—was become instantly aware all over again that he was jaw-droppingly handsome and brought with him a heady, primitively sensual masculinity that alerted everything female inside her.

      Not that she was going to let that make any difference to her. Now that she knew what he was made up of.

      “I need a few questions answered,” he informed her bluntly as he closed the door behind him.

      “So you said,” Megan answered in the same stern voice he was still using on her.

      “Mind if I sit down?” he asked, pointing with a nod of his head to the chair around the corner from her at the square oak table her father had made by hand.

      “Suit yourself,” was Megan’s curt reply.

      But for some reason, her response seemed to amuse him. He was fighting it, but a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth just the same.

      “Are we getting defensive here?” he asked then.

      “Since you seem to want to treat me like some kind of criminal, I guess we are, yes.”

      He shot a glance at the wrist of the hand she was using to grasp her teacup and said, “I don’t see any hand cuffs and I haven’t hauled you into the station. How am I treating you like a criminal?”

      “Your attitude.”

      “My attitude. My attitude is that I’ve just found a body buried in your backyard and I have some questions about it. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.”

      “I haven’t lived here since I was twelve years old. What do you expect me to know about it?”

      “Twelve years old, huh? My brother Scott is thirty and he was in your class in elementary school. That’d mean you and your family moved away eighteen years ago, right?”

      “Has the interrogation begun?”

      That made him chuckle. Clearly at some point he’d begun to enjoy himself.

      “I don’t think this could be considered an interrogation. But that is one of my questions, yeah.”

      “Eighteen years ago—yes, that’s when my family left Elk Creek,” she supplied what was no secret. “What month?”

      “June. Right after school let out for the summer.”

      “What do you remember about that time?”

      Megan rolled her eyes. “This is just silly.”

      “Humor me,” he suggested, his tone cajoling now.

      She took a deep breath and decided it wasn’t going to do anyone any good to go on being hostile. Besides, Josh Brimley was getting too much pleasure out of it and she didn’t want to contribute to that.

      So, after a sigh, she said in a calmer tone, “What I remember about June, eighteen years ago, is that I didn’t want to leave. That my parents had turned an old school bus into a mobile home so we could live on the road going from one cause to another because they’d decided that being here was basically living with their heads in the sand and they couldn’t go on doing that when there were so many social and environmental in justices that needed to be ad dressed. They wanted to be active, not passive, and that meant not staying in Elk Creek.”

      “How about the exact month you left? Do you remember anyone being around besides your mother and father?”

      “My sister.”

      “Anyone besides your mother, father and sister?” he amended.

      “No.”

      “Think about it.”

      “I don’t have to think about it. I don’t remember anything except not wanting to go.”

      Josh Brimley’s navy-blue eyes stayed on her, as if he knew better and would stay in a stare-down with her until she told him the truth. But that was the truth—she didn’t recall anything but being miserable at the thought of leaving her home to live in a bus and be taught by her mother rather than staying in one place and going to school like everyone else.

      Maybe her continuing silence finally convinced Josh that she didn’t have any more to say on the matter because after a few moments he seemed to decide to make an attempt at sparking her memory rather than merely waiting her out.

      “What about friends your parents might have had or maybe an uncle or a cousin? Do you remember anyone like that being around?”

      “Neither of my parents have a brother and even if they did, both their families steer clear of them because they think my folks are lunatics. And as for friends, what I do remember