Chapter One
It was the nightmare. But Deputy Livvy Walsh wasn’t dreaming. She was wide awake, on the job.
And the nightmare was right here, right in front of her.
Livvy gasped, staggering back a step. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t take her eyes off the blond-haired woman lying in the rust-streaked claw-foot tub. She was dead—no doubts about that. There wasn’t a drop of color on her skin. But there was plenty of color on the sides of the tub and floor.
Blood.
Lots of it.
It pooled around the tub, the only item left in what had once been a bathroom in the abandoned house. Now the wood floor was warped and splintered, and the walls bore the holes from where other fixtures and such had been ripped out over the more than two decades since the place had been abandoned.
Definitely not a spot where someone would have settled in to take a long soak in the bath.
The back of the woman’s neck was resting against the curved rim of the tub, but her head was turned toward the door. Toward Livvy. Her left arm was dangling over the side of the tub, her hand nearly touching the floor. A bead of blood had dried on the tip of her index finger, and judging from the pool beneath it, this had been her position when she had bled out.
Livvy swallowed hard and tried to tamp down her heart rate, her breathing. She was nearly five months pregnant, and she had to calm down for the sake of her baby.
She had managed to steady herself some, but she got another hit of adrenaline when she heard the footsteps behind her. Livvy automatically drew her gun and whirled around, expecting some part of the nightmare she’d never been able to see. A part that terrified her even more than the dream itself.
“Whoa,” the man said when he saw her defensive stance.
Not the nightmare but rather her fellow deputy, Ethan Oakley. Of course, Ethan was more than that.
Way more.
He’d been a friend since childhood during their days at the Horseshoe Foster Ranch. He was also her partner at the Renegade Canyon Sheriff’s Office.
And he was the father of her unborn child.
But other than the one time Ethan and she had beentogether, he wasn’t her lover. She definitely wasn’t the love of his life either. Not even close. That distinction belonged to his late wife, and Livvy was certain no other woman, including herself, would ever usurp that place of honor in his heart.
Still there were times, in those unguarded moments, that Ethan looked at her with heat sizzling in his gray eyes. Usually just as fast, he could shut it right down. But there was no heat now. Just a huge amount of concern.
“Whoa,” he repeated, touching her hand to lower her gun. “The rest of the house is empty, but I’m guessing…” Ethan’s words trailed off as his gaze slid from her to the tub. And he cursed.
In a blink, he seemed to take in the entire room, including the dead woman.Especiallythe dead woman. Then his attention snapped back to her.
“It’s your nightmare,” he muttered.
Of course he knew about that. Best friends and all. And being a best friend and having a room just up the hall from hers at the Horseshoe Foster Ranch, Ethan had ended up rushing intoher bedroom more than once to try to soothe her when the night terrors came.
Terrors filled with images of a dead blonde woman in a tub.
Blood everywhere. So much blood. And the woman’s lifeless blue eyes fixed on Livvy.
The dream had been with Livvy as long as she could remember. Since she’d been six years old and had been found wandering around the small ranching town of Renegade Canyon, Texas. There’d been blood on her hands and clothes. But Livvy had had no idea how it’d gotten there. In fact, she’d had no idea of anything. The first six years of her life were simply a blank.
They still were.
“Come with me,” Ethan insisted, slipping his arm around her waist, pulling her to him so that her face was buried against his chest. No doubt to shield her from seeing the body again.
He rarely touched her. Not since five months ago when they’d landed in bed and she’d gotten pregnant. And that told her just how awful she must’ve looked for him to have risked that kind of close contact. They’d learned the hard way that touching led to…other things. Things that she knew caused Ethan so much grief. It was the reason that Livvy usually refrained from touching him as well.
Clearly, though, this was an exception.
Livvy wasn’t even sure she could move on her own, and she very much wanted to step out of this nightmare. Ethan helped with that. He led her back into the living room, such that it was. It was as dilapidated as the rest of the house, but at least there was no blood here. No dead woman.
