Beckett's Convenient Bride. Dixie Browning

was looking for his pistol. He had to be wearing one, because why else would he be wearing a leather coat on a day like this? As long as you stayed out of the wind, it felt almost summer.

      Had he had it in his hand when she’d hit him? If so, it could be anywhere, even in the ditch—although she hadn’t heard a splash.

      The murder weapon. Oh, my blessed mercy!

      She had to find it before he came to and hold it on him until she could get help. Yell for one of the men on the wharf to call the sheriff.

      Being able to hand over his gun as evidence would make up for not giving her name when she called, but first she had to find it. One side of his coat was caught underneath his body, and so she started, carefully patting him down. His body was hot. Hot, hard and…

      Squatting beside him, she leaned over and slipped her fingers under the other side of his coat. Right-handed men wore their guns on the left side, didn’t they? And vice versa?

      She had no way of knowing which handed he was. Some men shoved their guns into the back of their belt, but he was lying on his back and he was too heavy for her to roll over.

      And then her fingers touched something that felt like leather. Too flat to be a gun or a holster…

      Frowning, she managed to ease it out of an inside pocket. “A badge?”

      “Satisfied?” His voice sounded like iron grating on concrete.

      She gasped and dropped the badge, scrambling backward and trying to look as if she hadn’t been caught with her hands in places they had no business being. “Look, whoever you are, we’re going to have to move you, else you’ll slide into the ditch and drown, but don’t try any funny business, because we’re being watched.” She had no idea whether or not the men working on the waterfront a few thousand feet away were paying any attention, much less whether they could actually see what was going on. “So don’t think you can get away with anything.”

      “Wouldn’t think of it,” he rasped. His eyes were still closed. She didn’t know whether to trust him or not.

      “Can you move?” She leaned forward on her knees again and studied his face, which was hardly reassuring, but then at this point it would take the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to reassure her.

      “Can you open your eyes?”

      No way, lady. As long as he didn’t open his eyes, Carson told himself, he could pretend this was all a bad dream. All of it…the purple banshee, the smell of cinnamon and apples, the babbling testimony—those cool hands pawing over his body.

      Don’t try any funny business? What was she, a comic book character? There was nothing even faintly funny about any of the past forty-eight hours.

      He groaned, and the woman caught her breath.

      Man, I don’t need this complication, Carson thought tiredly. She clutched his hand and gave a few experimental tugs. If he had a lick of sense he’d have crawled on his knees, climbed back in his car and hightailed it out of here the minute he realized she was criminally insane.

      If I had a grain of sense, Kit thought, I’d have left him where he fell and got hold of the sheriff, and let him send for an ambulance. And while she was at it, she could have mentioned that they might want to bring along handcuffs, because the man sprawled out beside the road was probably a murderer, never mind that he had a badge inside his jacket.

      Or she could call nine-one-one again, report a man down at the intersection of Landing and Waterlily Roads and then drive up to Chesapeake. Her grandparents might not approve of her, but they wouldn’t want anything awful to happen to her.

      Oh, it would make the papers, all right. The churchyard murderer hit by a car driven by the only witness to the crime.

      On the other hand, if she left him here, he might lose consciousness and slide down the ditch bank and drown.

      “What am I going to do about you?” she whispered. “I’m tempted to—”

      He opened his eyes then, and Kit found herself staring down into the bluest eyes she had ever seen. More cobalt than cerulean, she thought fleetingly, but darker now with what could be pain.

      “Are you…all right?” she asked hesitantly. Merciful saints, the man was on a mission to shut her up permanently, and she was worried about his health?

      She studied him carefully. His eyes were closed again. He was breathing heavily, as if he were in pain. She didn’t know if he’d lost consciousness or not, but she needed another look at that badge, and this might be her last chance. The thing could have come from a toy store, for all she knew. Probably had.

      But not his gun. There was nothing wrong with her ears; toy guns didn’t make the same sound as what she’d heard in the churchyard.

      Her hand moved toward his jacket. He opened his eyes, focusing on her face, not the hand that hovered over the flap of his coat.

      “It’s real,” he said as if he’d read her mind. With a smile that looked as if it hurt and disappeared almost instantly, he said, “I’m a few miles out of my territory, but—” He covered his mouth, sneezed, and then groaned.

      “Bless you,” Kit murmured automatically. “What are you—that is, are you looking for someone in particular?” Like me, for instance? She added silently.

      If he was from the sheriff’s department, he’d probably traced her through one of those gizmos people hooked onto their phones. Nine-one-one probably had it for people like her; people who didn’t want to get involved.

      Well, crud. No matter how tempting it was, she couldn’t leave the man lying there. Any minute now a car could come peeling in off Waterlily and crash into his car or run over his legs. Probably cream Ladybug in the process. There wasn’t much room for maneuvering.

      “Look, I’ll help you get up and into your car, but I really don’t know anything more than what I told you over the phone. Told your dispatcher, at least. I heard voices— I couldn’t even tell what they were arguing about. Then I heard a shot, only I thought it was a backfire, and then—”

      There was barely room, but she managed to position herself behind him. Reaching down, she hooked her arms under his. Lordy, what a waste, she thought before she could stop herself. He was a big man. A big, beautifully constructed man, she couldn’t help but notice. With uncombed black hair that was overdue for a trim, a lean, pale face that hadn’t recently seen a razor, he wore western boots, jeans that were worn in all the right places, a black shirt and a buckskin jacket that looked as if it had been through a few battles.

      Get your mind on what you’re doing, you ditz!

      “I’m going to sit you up,” she said, bracing to use herself as a counterweight. “Help me out here, you weigh a ton.”

      “Give me a minute, okay? I’m just winded.”

      “More than that, if you ask me. Well, you didn’t, but I’ll get you back inside your car, anyway. The rest is up to you. If you’re a real policeman, you can call one of your deputies or something. If you’re not—well, like I said, I didn’t see anything. Honestly.”

      By the time they managed to get him on his feet again, Kit had touched him in places she hadn’t touched any man in years. Her palms tingled from the heat of his body. If it turned out he really was a sheriff or a policeman, she would simply repeat what she’d said over the phone—which wasn’t all that much, come to think of it. But this time she would answer any questions he asked to the best of her ability. Then, if he insisted on taking her in to make a statement, she could do that, too, because no crook was going to come near her as long as she was under police protection.

      At least, that was the way it worked in suspense novels.

      Except when the cop turned out to be the villain.

      Well, she wouldn’t think about that. Besides, this one looked