"Captain Tipton?"

He whirled around, looking very much like something out of a B horror movie, his eyes shaded by amber-toned plastic, his ear protectors bulging and gray, and red splotches dotting his shirt.

"Oh, God, you've cut yourself."

"Where? What?" Alarmed, Tipton checked to make sure all his fingers were in place as Kelsey dashed across the shed. "Oh, this." Grinning, he patted his chest. "Cranberry juice. The wife doesn't like me to work in good clothes."

Kelsey leaned weakly against the bench and swore.

"Scared you, huh?" Still chuckling, he pulled off his ear guards and pushed up his goggles. "Want to sit down?"

"No, I'm fine."

"I'm building some shelves." He picked up a wide, flat board, sighted down it for warping. "The wife and I have this little game. I build shelves and she fills them up with doodads. Keeps us both happy."

"That's nice. I wonder if you could spare a few minutes."

"I might be able to squeeze you in. Lemonade?" Without waiting for her assent, he hefted a big plastic jug and poured two paper cups. "You had some more trouble out your way, I hear."

"Yes. It's an odd coincidence, isn't it? That Reno should so completely mirror his father's life. And death."

"The world's full of odd coincidences, Ms. Byden." But he wasn't happy about this one. He'd completed his background check on Benny Morales, and had gathered all the details only hours before Reno's suicide. Another twenty-four hours, he thought, and events might have taken a different turn. "It solves one of your problems, though. You know who did your horse."

"Reno didn't mean to kill him. I'm certain of that." She sipped the lemonade, found it tart and swimming with pulp. His wife, she thought, must squeeze her own. "Someone used him, Captain. There's a lot of that in the world, too. People using people."

"Can't argue with you there."

"My mother was using Alec Bradley to make my father jealous, to prove her own independence, even to incite gossip. I wonder, though, how had Alec Bradley been using her?"

The girl had a nice, tidy mind, Tipton decided. He picked up a square of sandpaper and began to rub it over a curved slat of wood. "She's a beautiful woman."

"This isn't about sex, Captain. Rape isn't about sex."

He huffed out a breath. "Maybe not. We only ever had her word about the attempted rape."

"I believe her. So did you. Did you ever ask yourself why-if she was telling the truth-why Alec Bradley chose that particular night to attack her? They'd been seeing each other for weeks. She's not the kind of woman who could continue to see a man who abused her. Or who threatened to abuse her."

Tipton continued to sand the wood. It would be a rocking chair for his granddaughter on her birthday in September.

"If she was telling the truth, Ms. Byden. If. He'd been drinking. They'd had a public scene. She'd given him his walking papers and a faceful of French champagne. That kind of combination could push a certain kind of man in the wrong direction." He blew lightly at the wood dust. "But, like I said, there was no evidence to support it."

"Her nightgown was torn. She had bruises." Kelsey let out an impatient sound at his shrug. "All right, as easily self-inflicted as not. But if we say not, if we believe not, how do you prove it? You checked his background, certainly. If there was another woman, someone else he'd abused or attacked, that would weigh on Naomi's side, wouldn't it?"

"I never found one. A lot of rapes go unreported. Especially the kind you're talking about. The date-rape kind."

He didn't like that particular term. Date rape, acquaintance rape. It made the vicious act seem much too friendly.

"And back twenty years ago, people had a different attitude. Bradley had a reputation, but violence wasn't part of it. He had some heavy debts," Tipton continued, almost to himself. "About the time he started seeing your mother, he paid off some of them. About twenty thousand dollars' worth. But he needed at least that much again to pull himself out."

"So he needed money. My mother had money."

"He never asked her for more than a couple of grand." Tipton set the wood aside. "That's her own statement. He never asked her for big money. And that's one of the things I found odd. Because it was his pattern to sponge off women."

"He might have been biding his time. Or ... he might have been expecting it from another source."

"That was a thought." Tipton pulled a Baby Ruth bar from his back pocket, snapped it in half, and offered a share to Kelsey. "I never tracked it down, though. I always wondered where he got that twenty grand. Could've won it at the track. But the word there was that he lost as much as he won, and most of it was penny-ante. He talked big," Tipton added with a mouthful of chocolate. "Let a lot of people know he had a deal in the works. Just talk, as far I could find."

"But if he did, if it had something to do with my mother." Kelsey began to pace the shop as she worked it out. "She was through with him, told him it was over. So he panicked, tried to force her. If she cut him loose, the deal was dead. He needed money. A lot of people knew he needed money. But who would have used him to get to my mother?"

As the answer swam into her mind, she stopped. The hand holding the paper cup tightened, crushing it into a damp blob.

"That's the trouble when you turn over rocks," Tipton said kindly. "You hardly ever like what you find under them. I never linked your father to Alec Bradley. And I tried. I subpoenaed your father's bank records, went over them with a fine-tooth comb looking for that twenty-thousand-dollar payment. He was clean. Phone records, too. No calls came from or to Alec Bradley's number from the house in Potomac or his office at the university."

"He would never have done such a thing." But Kelsey's lips were stiff and cold. "My father would never have done such a thing."

"The way it looks, you're right. Of course that puts the heat back on your mother."

"There's another answer." Kelsey whirled back. "I know there's another answer."

"You want another answer," Tipton said gently. "Maybe you'll find it. Maybe you won't like it. " He sighed and reached out to take the squashed cup from her hand. "I only had one thing linking Philip Byden with what happened that night at Three Willows. That was Charles Rooney."

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

IT WAS OBVIOUS SOMETHING WAS WRONG. SHE'D COME TO HIM AFTER dark, saying only that she wanted to be with him. Gabe wanted to believe it was as simple as that. As true as that.

But her eyes were distant, her smile too bright, with strain at the edges. Her needs, always a delight to him, were frenzied. She'd torn into sex with a wild abandon that couldn't quite mask the desperation.

As if she'd been purging herself, he thought now that she lay quiet beside him. His body had responded, and in that most elemental link they had met, clashed, and joined. But, he thought now, as the silence stretched out between them, neither of them had been satisfied.

"Are you ready now?" he asked her.

She turned her head, looking for a cooler place to rest her cheek on the warm sheets. "Ready?"

"To tell me what's eating you."

"What should be eating me?" Her voice was dull, tired. "A man I knew and liked killed himself a few days ago."

"This isn't about Reno. It's about you."

She turned on her back, staring up at the dark skylight. No moon tonight, she thought. The clouds masked it like smoke. It really took very little to hide so much.

"He loved his father," she began. "He didn't even know him, but he loved him. Believed in him.

Everything Reno did circled back to that love and belief. Blind, unquestioning love and belief." She sighed once. "And when he realized it had been misplaced, at least the belief had been misplaced, he couldn't live with it."

She shifted restlessly, the sound of her skin against the sheets a whisper in the darkness.

"It would have been better if he'd turned away from it, wouldn't it? Better for him, better for everyone, if he'd left what happened all those years ago alone. What's to be proved, Gabe, what's to be solved by insisting on looking back?"

"It depends on how badly you need to look. And what you find." He touched her hair, let it sift through his fingers. "This is about you, isn't it, Kelsey? About you and Naomi."

"She considers it over. Why can't I? There's no turning back the clock, giving her back those years we lost. That we both lost. She killed Alec Bradley. I should accept that. I shouldn't let it matter so much why."

Kelsey moved again, pushing herself up, drawing in her knees, circling them with her arms in a move of such poignant defense it tore at his heart.

"Then let it go."

"Let it go," she repeated. "It's the sensible thing. After all, whatever wrong she did, whatever mistakes she made, she's paid for. I didn't know her then, or don't remember knowing her. What makes me think I can go back and sort it out? Or that I should? She's happy. My father's happy. Neither of them would thank me for digging into it. I've no right to scrape open old wounds just to satisfy my own ridiculous need for truth, for justice."

Squeezing her eyes tight, she pressed her face to her knees. "They're not always the same, are they?

Truth and justice?"

"They should be. One of the most admirable things about you is that you want them to be." He brushed a hand over her shoulder, felt the knots of tension, and began to massage them out. "What stirred this up, Kelsey?"

She took a long, steadying breath and told him about her visit to Tipton. He didn't interrupt, and tried to deal with his own knee-jerk anger that she had gone without him.

"And now you're worried that your father was somehow involved."

"He couldn't have been." Her head shot up. In the dark her eyes shone with defiance and a plea for understanding. "He couldn't have been, Gabe. You don't know him."

"No, I don't." Annoyed with himself, Gabe drew away and reached for a cigar on the night table.

"We've skipped that little amenity."

She passed a weary hand through her hair. Somehow she'd managed to hurt him. "This has all happened so fast, everything between you and me has happened at double time. And the situation, my family situation, is on very rocky ground. It isn't that I've kept you from him."

"Forget it." He snapped on his lighter and scowled into the flame. "Forget it," he said again, more quietly. "It's hardly the point. And it's not what's annoying me. I would have gone with you today. I should have been with you."

"It was an impulse." That was the truth, she thought, but only half the truth. "Maybe I wanted to go alone. Maybe I needed to. I don't want to be protected, Gabe. All my life I've been protected without even knowing it. I can't live the rest of it that way."

"There's a difference between being protected and being supported. I need you to lean on me, Kelsey.

Just like I need to know I can lean on you."

After a moment she took his hand. "Do you have to be right?"

"I prefer it that way." He lifted her fingers to his lips. "What do you want to do?"

"What I want is to forget it. To let it all alone and go from here. But I can't. I have to know. And when I do I have to live with whatever I find out." She measured her palm against his, then laced fingers. "I'm going to go see Rooney tomorrow afternoon. Will you come with me?"

More lies, Kelsey thought. Of the little white variety.

"You're going to love the dress." Naomi held out the pale lavender business card. "The clerk's name's on the back. Ilsa. They do alterations right there."

"That's great."

"If it doesn't suit you, I'm sure you'll find something else. It's a wonderful shop. Oh, and I spoke to the caterer at the club. I know you want to keep the wedding simple, but you have to have food. He's going to work up a couple of menus for you to choose from. And ..." She snatched up another list. "I know Gabe has a wonderful garden, and he's got an innate touch with flowers, but you'll want some patio plants and cut arrangements to fill things out. Once you decide on your colors, we can order what you like."

"That's fine."

"Listen to me." Laughing at herself, Naomi set the lists back on her desk. "I've fallen headfirst into the mother-of-the-bride trap. I'm annoying myself."

Kelsey forced her lips to curve, tried to make the smile reflect in her eyes. "No, I appreciate it, really.

Even with a small, informal wedding at home, there are dozens of details."

"That you're perfectly capable of handling yourself," Naomi finished. "I know you've had the big splashy wedding, Kelsey, and that you want this to be different."

"I do, yes." Kelsey turned the business card over in her hand, then stuck it guiltily in her pocket.

"Candace orchestrated that. I barely had to do more than show up." Hearing herself, she hissed out a breath. "That sounds ungrateful. I'm not. She was wonderful."

"But you'd like to handle this one yourself."

"Let's just say I'd like more of a hand in it. But I don't mind delegating."

"I never thought I'd have this chance. Planning my daughter's wedding." Determined, she pushed all her lists into a pile, topped them with a brass paperweight. "Just yank me back when I threaten to go overboard. And ..." She eased a hip onto the corner of the desk. "About the dress. I promise I won't say a word if you don't love it. But you will. Now, you'd better go before I nag you into letting me go along with you instead of Gabe."

"We'll shop for your dress together," Kelsey said as guilt piled over guilt. "Maybe over the weekend."

"I'd like that." Breezily, Naomi linked her arm through Kelsey's as she walked Kelsey to the door. "It'll give me a chance to harass you about photographers. Now, go enjoy yourself."

Kelsey mumbled something and walked outside just as Gabe pulled up in the drive.

"We have to make a stop first," Kelsey told him, pulling out the business card after she'd settled into the passenger seat.

He lifted a brow. "Shopping?"

"Soothing my conscience."

It didn't work. Even when it turned out that Naomi had been completely right about the dress. Or, perhaps, because of it.

Under any other circumstances the dress would have lifted her spirits. The pale rose color of the silk, the elegant tea length, the simple lines enhanced by raindrops of seed pearls. It was a wish of a dress that Ilsa assured her might have been made with Kelsey in mind. And didn't they have the sweetest hat to go with it? the clerk expounded. A little whimsy with a flirty fingertip veil so perfect for an intimate outdoor wedding.

Shoes, of course. Classic satin pumps that could be dyed to match. What flowers was she going to carry? She didn't know? White roses would be lovely, she was assured. A bride was entitled to white.

Now, did she want to take the dress and hat along with her, or have them sent?