First order of business, to dress. The jeans and T-shirt she’d thrown on after her shower were perfect for cleaning and packing kitchenware, but they were utterly inadequate for facing Liam Knightly.

Moxie sprawled, purring, on a growing heap of rejects on the futon couch as Nancy yanked item after item out of her closet.

She finally settled on snug black pants and a white cotton blouse, nipped in at the waist, primly buttoned up. Just the last button left open, so that the beautiful sapphire N at her throat showed, a tiny glint of color. Crisp, no-nonsense, yet subtly feminine. She fixed her hair twelve different ways. In a paroxysm of disgust, she fell back on her old standby: slicked back with styling gel into a gleaming braid. She spritzed on hairspray to underscore the no-nonsense message of the tough hair. Some cover-up under her eyes, brown mascara, a dab of sandalwood oil to infuse the look with an air of sensual mystery.

She stared into the mirror wishing she could make the anxious crinkle between her brows disappear. What was she trying to accomplish, anyway? A come-on, or a back-off?

Hell with it. It was 8:20 already, and she was wasting the guy’s time with her stupid, crushed-out primping. She perched her glasses on her nose and gave herself a hard smile. Ta-da.

She picked up Moxie and buried her nose in the cat’s soft fur again. “Time for me to scram,” she whispered. “Sorry. I’ll make it up to you.”

Her cell phone buzzed. She almost ignored it, late as she was, but ingrained professionalism prevailed. Or maybe obsessive paranoia. It depended on one’s point of view. She hit “talk.” “Hello?”

“Nancy? This is Liam Knightly.”

Moxie fell to the ground with a squawk as Nancy’s arm went boneless. “Ah. Um, hi,” she stammered. “Are you already at the house?”

“Yes, and I—”

“Oh, God. We must have crossed wires about the meeting time. I’m so sorry. I’m running a little late, because of some—”

“Nancy.” He cut her off, his voice grim. “There’s a problem.”

“A problem?” A weird, creeping, cold began to spread its tendrils out to her belly and her limbs. “What do you mean, a problem?”

“There’s been another break-in.”

Another break-in? “That’s not possible,” she whispered.

“I was driving by on my way to breakfast, to see if your car was there,” he said. “I wanted to pass a broom through the place before you saw it, since Eoin and I tracked in mud yesterday. I saw the door was open, so I thought maybe you drove a different car up. Then I looked inside.”

His eloquent pause chilled her blood. She was starting to shake. “And?”

“It’s bad,” he said shortly.

She was crumpling. On her knees, her hands holding the floor away from herself like it was trying to rise up and hit her in the face. Her cell lay next to Moxie’s bowl of kitty crunchies. Fish-shaped pellets were scattered on the black-and-white tiles. The floor was cold against her hands. Liam Knightly’s urgent, tinny voice came through the phone, from where it lay on the floor. She let her hip drop to the floor so that she could support herself on one hand, and picked up the phone.

“Here I am,” she gasped out. “Sorry. Dropped the phone.”

“Jesus! You scared me! Are you okay?”

“I’m good,” she croaked. “Did you, um, call the—”

“The cops? Yeah. They’re on their way. You were my second call.”

Unreasonable panic seized her, ballooning inside her into something monstrous. She saw Lucia’s body lying on the ground, her wide-open eyes, her livid face. “Don’t go in! Get away from there,” she told him wildly. “Right now! What if whoever did it is still inside?”

“I’ll be okay,” he soothed. “I won’t go in. I’ll leave that for the cops.”

“It’s just a goddamn house.” The words made no sense, she realized, as they flew out of her mouth, and oh shit, her face had dissolved again. “It’s just a goddamn house. That’s all. That’s all!”

“Yes. That’s true,” he said. “Hey, Nancy? Answer me!”

She tried, but her throat was vibrating too much. She made a wordless sound, just so he would know she was still conscious.

“Nancy, give me one of your sisters’ phone numbers, okay? You shouldn’t be alone. I’ll call one of them for you. Give me the number.”

He thought she was going batshit on him. Embarrassment stiffened her spine. “No. They’re busy. I’ll be out there as soon as I can.”

“No!” He sounded appalled. “You’re upset! You should not drive!”

“I will be fine. I’ll see you in an hour and ten, barring traffic.”

“Hey! Wait! Nancy—”

She hung up on him and lurched over to the kitchen counter. The little espresso pot had a mouthful of powerful coffee in the bottom. She poured it into a cup, cold though it was, and dosed it with sugar.

Her cell began to tinkle. She checked. It was him. No freaking way was she answering now. Ten rings. A pause. Ten more. Take that, buddy. Then, the chime of a text message. She opened it. It said,

At least take a goddamn taxi pls

She snorted. Like she had a hundred and twenty bucks to burn. She tossed on her jacket, legs wobbling. This news had taken all the starch out of her, but it gave her a feeling of unfurling warmth in her chest that he worried about her. She cherished the feeling.

Silly though it was. Bossy though he’d been. Sweet of him.

She spent the drive up to Hempton trying to figure out why she’d flipped out like that. It was just a deserted house. A break-in was upsetting, expensive, a rotten inconvenience—and that was it.

Lucia was no longer in that house. The very worst that could possibly happen had already happened.

So why did she still feel so scared?

Liam lurked in his truck and watched cops and forensics techs trooping in and out of the D’Onofrio house. Finding the house trashed had been a shock. Weird, for lightning to strike the same place twice, just a week after Lucia’s death. He felt strange, queasy, like he was missing something important. Something that kept flitting out of sight before he could focus on it.

Maybe that was a result of not having slept. Around two-thirty a.m. he’d given up and headed to his furniture workshop. The detailed work of joining without glue or nails was one of his favorite activities. It put him in a mellow, focused place that he liked. The next best thing to sleep. Currently, he was working on a dining room table big enough to feed a dynasty. Sometimes he fantasized, in a vague, hopeful way, about his future wife while he worked on it, imagined how it would feel to see his wife and children gathered around it.

The fantasy usually gave him a connected feeling. Hope for the future. He’d figured that working on that table would be just the thing to chill him out. Hook him back into reality. His real, bedrock values.

He’d bombed out, big-time. He hadn’t been able to picture his future wife. She was a fog of bland possibilities, whereas Nancy D’Onofrio stood out, brilliantly sharp and clear. Every vivid detail of her, burned onto his retina. Those soft, cool fingers. At a certain point, his unruly mind had gone wild with erotic fantasies involving Nancy and the dining room table. Her, perched on the edge, graceful legs spread wide. Him, on his knees, with his face in her muff and his tongue as deep inside her as it would reach, licking up her lube. Her hands wound into his hair. Writhing and whimpering.

He was still twitching from the aftereffects. Whew. Working on that dining room table was never going to be the same again.

He’d gotten out of the house before Eoin was up. The first thing he’d done was to drive by the D’Onofrio house. And the bitch of it was, she wasn’t even in the damn house. Oh, no, it was enough for him that she’d been in it the day before. That she’d be in it again today.

Jesus. How sick was that. How stupid.

Well, he’d paid for his sophomoric bullshit. He got to be the dumb-ass who bore the bad tidings. That was what happened when a guy started nosing around in a woman’s messy, complicated life.