Killing Me Softly. Maggie Shayne

crept over her entire soul as the dinner conversation had unfolded. Nightcap Strangler. Serial killer. Copycat crime. A dead girlfriend. And all of it tied up with Bryan. What the hell?

      “Hey, Nick,” Bryan said, his expression lightening. “Dawn, come meet Nick.” Bryan got up, and she followed him out of the dining room, across the living room and into the foyer. Beth and Josh remained at the table, and Dawn could hear them speaking softly, probably trying to reassure each other that everything would be all right.

      Nick, who looked as if he’d been buff once but now had the proverbial muffin top spilling over his belt, pushed the screen door open and entered, still smiling. He had blue eyes that won you over with a single glance. His hair looked like onyx in a snowstorm. And when his warm smile landed on Dawn, it somehow managed to broaden.

      “You’ve gotta be Beth’s little girl, Dawnie. I’ve been hearing about you for years. It’s good to finally meet you. I’m Nick Di Marco, an old friend of Bryan’s.”

      Dawn couldn’t help but return the infectious smile. Somehow his demeanor made the tension she’d been feeling a few moments ago fade away.

      “Hello, Nick. I’ve been hearing about you for years, too. Bryan tells me you’re the man he trusts most in the world, after his dad, and that’s saying something.” She extended a hand, and Nick took it. His was big and very warm, but she felt the strength beneath the friendliness.

      “Sorry we’re meeting under such dire circumstances,” he said, and then he shifted his gaze to Bryan. “You didn’t tell me how closely she fit.”

      Bryan frowned hard, but nodded at his mentor. “I didn’t even think about it myself until she got here.”

      “She can’t set foot in Shadow Falls, Bryan. She might not even be safe here in Blackberry, even though it’s almost an hour away. You know that, right?”

      “I know,” Bryan agreed.

      “Whoa, wait a minute.” Dawn was shifting her curious blue eyes from one of them to the other. “Fit what?”

      “She’s got the look,” Nick said. But he said it quietly, as if he didn’t want Beth and Josh, who were still in the other room, to hear.

      Bryan ignored her question and said, “I know, Nick,” he said. “I was going to get to that.”

      “Get to what?” Dawn frowned at Bryan, puzzled and irritated at being ignored.

      He quickly covered her hand with his and gave it a squeeze that made her heart beat faster, despite the situation.

      “Nick, go on in and have something to eat. I’ll be back.” Then, finally, Bryan met Dawn’s probing stare. “Come for a walk with me?”

      She looked down at his hand still holding hers and felt such a rush of confused emotions that her eyes started to burn. She blinked against the feeling and nodded once, not quite trusting herself to speak, because her throat was so tight. Bryan was in more trouble than she had begun to imagine, and it seemed she cared a whole lot more than she had allowed herself to acknowledge.

      Bryan walked Nick to the dining room and waved him into a seat as Beth invited him to join them for the meal. “Dawn and I are going for a short walk. We’ll be back soon,” Bryan told them.

      “Don’t parade her all over the neighborhood, Bryan,” Nick said. “The more people who see her, the greater the risk.”

      Risk? Dawn shot Bryan a “what the hell is he talking about” look as he returned to her. But he just took her hand and gave it another squeeze, then walked with her to the door. The screen door creaked, and as they stepped outside and let it close behind them, she felt the warm kiss of a summer night and heard the crickets chirping in a way she hadn’t heard in five long years. God, she’d missed Vermont.

      They walked down the porch steps, and Bryan seemed to be avoiding looking at her, even though she was staring at him as she kept in step at his side.

      He released her hand as they walked, and hers felt cold without it, despite the warmth of the evening.

      “Why am I…at risk, Bryan?” she asked.

      He sighed, coming to a stop. They’d followed a walk-way that wound through a garden that hadn’t been there when she’d left. It took up the entire side lawn, and was dotted with statues and benches. The air was almost thick with perfume, and even though it was already dark, there were still bees bumbling from blossom to fragrant blossom.

      Bryan sank onto a bench, and she sat down beside him. “Dawn,” he said, “Bette looked…similar to you.”

      “She did?” She tipped her head to one side, and for some reason her mind went in the opposite direction from murders and death and serial killers. It went straight to him—to them. “You were dating someone who looked like me? What’s that mean, Bryan? Are you saying you never—”

      “It wasn’t like that with Bette and me. We were friends.”

      Dawn lifted her brows. “Some friends.”

      “I’m not telling you this to make you think I still—Dawn, that’s not what this is about. You’re blonde, slender, taller than average. You have blue eyes, and you’re between nineteen and twenty-five.”

      “That’s an odd way to put it. You know perfectly well I’m twenty-four.”

      “Bette was twenty-three.”

      She nodded. “So we were close in age. And we looked kind of alike. But it was just coincidence that you were dating her, right? It had nothing to do with her resemblance to me.”

      “Right.”

      “So why bring it up, then?”

      “Because…that description—the age range, the body type, the long straight hair, light brown to blond—it also fits all the original victims of the Nightcap Strangler.”

      An ice-cold finger slid down Dawn’s spine, and she sucked in a breath, suddenly very clear as to what he was getting at.

      “All of them? And how many would that be, Bryan?”

      “Seventeen original victims that we know of. Eighteen, if you add Bette. The thing is, whether this is a copycat or Nick arrested the wrong guy, you won’t be safe in Shadow Falls. And Nick’s right, you might not even be safe here in Blackberry, Dawn.”

      She nodded three times, slowly, firmly, while her mind raced. But even before her brain reached a practical conclusion, her lips were moving. Her emotions were doing the talking tonight, it seemed.

      “I’m not leaving,” she told him.

      “Dawn, look, I can’t let you risk your life—”

      “It sounded like you don’t think this guy will kill again.”

      “Nick thinks he will. And believe me, Dawn, Nick knows this case a whole lot better than I do.”

      “I can take precautions,” she said quickly. “I can color my hair. Slouch when I walk so I look shorter. Get some tinted contacts.”

      Bryan sighed, shaking his head and, she sensed, constructing logical arguments in his mind. But then she closed her hand around his, and he went very still. She’d been hoping her touch still had the same effect on him as his did on her. And it seemed that maybe it did.

      “I’m not leaving you, Bryan.”

      He stared into her eyes for a long moment. She tried not to start arguing with herself as to whether what she was feeling for him now was friendship or something more. It wasn’t the same emotion she’d felt for him before. She’d been a girl then. Barely out of school.

      What she felt now was different, and it was too soon to know exactly how. Besides, figuring that out wasn’t the most important thing right now. What was important now was getting through this. “I mean it,” she said, feeling the need to drive the point