Cole Dempsey's Back In Town. Suzanne Mcminn

was right about the past or not.

      And how could he be right? Why would anyone else have killed Aimee? Nothing about his claims made sense. Wade Dempsey had been the one with the grudge against the Louvels. The one making threats. The one who’d charged back to Bellefleur drunk, looking for revenge. The one who’d been found with Aimee.

      How dare Cole expect her to help him now? She wanted to charge right back down the stairs, shake him, strike him, do something, anything.

      Then he did something. He closed the space between them in two heartbeats.

      “We weren’t finished with our conversation,” he said quietly. The bright candescence of the chandelier played unforgivingly on his features. God, he was good-looking. Always had been. But now his face was etched with experience, and yet within those austere lines she could still see the boy she’d loved.

      His tormented bayou eyes had her aching with a raw need. They’d both given in to that need once and had found something in each other that had seemed too strong to break. But the horror their families had faced had broken it. She’d stood by her family and he’d stood by his. Their youthful trust and love had been shattered irreparably. They’d tried to talk, but they’d both been too hurt and too immature to overcome what stood between them, and eventually it had turned into a bitter chasm. And she wasn’t feeling any more capable of overcoming it now. So why did she suddenly wish things could be different?

      “Maybe you weren’t.” She forced her weak knees to move. “But I am.”

      She left him at the foot of the stairs, but her room was no escape. The pull of him reached her even there. She clicked the lock on the inside of her doorknob and sank onto the night-gloam of her bed.

      Sleep was a million miles away, but somehow she found her way into its dark, anguished arms. And the nightmares of Aimee’s murder pounded through the wispy night of ghosts and fears.

      It was sometime after midnight when a shadow lunged through her bedroom window.