I’m letting go of it now, Samantha. No grudges, no obsessive remembering, no self-pity.

Good luck to you. Be well.

Danny

When he was done and mostly satisfied, he created a new, free email account and sent his email to her email address. He waited a little while to see if the email bounced back as undeliverable and was not surprised when it didn’t. She was keeping things the same in case he ever succumbed to the urge to reach out to her. He didn’t give it much time—an hour or so. When it didn’t bounce back, he closed and canceled that email account.

Done.

The very next morning, it began. He was not prepared, though he should’ve been. The pretrial jury selection started a rush of press about the crime he’d witnessed and speculation about the trial.

Conner spent a lot of time reading the news online before he went to work. He was working with Dan Brady on a kitchen renovation. He kept his ears sharp all day, but the news of a murder trial in Sacramento didn’t seem to spark any interest in Virgin River. He even stopped by the bar before heading over to Leslie’s house just to see if anyone was talking about it.

He had to give the press some credit—there was speculation about witnesses and even some curiosity about whether the prosecution’s witness might have any connection to the hardware store where the crime was committed, the hardware store that had burned to the ground. But unless there were articles he was unaware of, they were not putting names to their speculation. He didn’t see his name in any press, yet they would have known it was him—his name had appeared as probable cause on the search warrant that was used to search Mathis’s car and home and arrest him.

A name he did see quite a bit of was Dickie Randolph, the victim. Randolph had been pretty well-known for dabbling in the underworld of drugs and prostitution.

Yet there was more—Randolph had invested in some of Mathis’s condo properties, and it was speculated that Mathis could be a silent partner in some of Randolph’s businesses. And of course a sleazeball like Dickie Randolph had a lot of ancillary characters involved in his businesses, as well.

Motive? The press hadn’t uncovered one yet, unless there had been some sort of bad blood between the two that had gone unnoticed thus far. In fact, if Conner hadn’t seen Mathis do the shooting, there would have been many other individuals who would have been suspect.

As the police had told Conner a long time ago—everyone in this case was dirty. But as far as what they could prove in a court of law, only Regis Mathis had committed murder.

Conner was a little uncertain how to handle the flood of news where Leslie was concerned. In the end he told her to get out her laptop and log on so they could look at some of it together, while he was still in town to help her understand the details and what he knew about the stories. They sat at her kitchen table, and he ran the search, bringing up pictures and articles from the Sacramento newspaper.

Most of the pictures that would be used as evidence, such as the blood splatters in the car that were illuminated by the luminol the police used, were not available to the press, but there were photos they couldn’t control. The Dumpster where the body had been dumped, for example, with the long streak of blood running down the side and the yellow crime-scene tape stretching across the area. The covered body on the gurney that was being loaded in to the ambulance.

“Where were you?” Leslie asked.

“I had just walked out the back door of the store,” he said. “I heard the car door, noticed a man walking around the front of the car to the passenger side. He was pulling a gun out of his pocket at the same time he opened the passenger door and he shot him in the head. I ducked behind the Dumpster. It was fast and brutal. Over, body dumped and car backing out of the alley, in a couple of minutes or less. I looked in the Dumpster first—the man’s hands and feet were bound with duct tape, a strip across his mouth.”

“And you called the police right away?”

“My cell phone was on my belt,” he said. “The dispatcher asked me if I could check for a pulse. He was very dead.”

And of course there was a picture of the skeletal remains of a once large and prosperous hardware store.

“Do they know it’s you? That you’re the witness?”

He shrugged. “Of course they know—my name appears on the warrant. Before this is over, my picture will be in the paper. If there’s a leak in the D.A.’s office, they might know where I am. Either way, the burned building is a message sent to anyone who might be considering testifying against Regis Mathis. I had a more direct message, left on my voice mail at home. Just in case I wondered if they knew where I lived.”

“And if you didn’t testify? Would you be forgotten?”

“There are way too many unknowns,” Conner said. “I called the police within minutes of the murder,” Conner said. “If no other witness appeared, would they consider their warning had scared me off? Or would they try to ensure I remained scared off? Because what I saw, Les, was horrible. If that happened to a member of my family, I’d hope to God someone had the balls to step up.”

“Of course you have to,” she said.

“And the hard part for you, Les, you have to act like you didn’t even notice any of this has been happening. At least until the trial is over.”

She laughed softly. “Do you think I’d have trouble doing that if it means keeping you and your family safe?”

“If you get overwhelmed or freaked out, you can talk to Brie.”

“But I’ll talk to you, too. Won’t I?”

“Sure we will.” He put down the laptop screen, blocking the stories and images, and gently traced the line of her jaw. “Yes, we’ll talk. Probably every day.” He leaned toward her to give her a light kiss. “Let’s be done with this for now. Let’s sit on the back porch and talk about regular things. Let’s pretend life is normal.”

He pulled her to her feet and walked her outside. They sat side by side in chairs as the sun sank and the sky above the trees grew lavender. He asked her about high school and her friends when she was younger. She told him about a best girlfriend who moved away when they were both sixteen, and it had been so traumatic, she had cried for days. And there were the sorority sisters in college—they stayed in touch, got together every year or so. She’d had a close friend during her marriage, but they’d grown apart as her girlfriend had children and Leslie didn’t. And, Leslie admitted, it was her own longing for a family that kept her away.

He wanted to know about boyfriends, and she told him there had been a couple of pretty unexciting ones. And then he wanted to know who the first one had been, the one who had captured her long enough to lay claim to her virginity. “That would be Pete,” she said. “And I suspect I was his first, too, because neither one of us was very good at it. And it happened at my house when my parents were out for the evening. On the couch. I was unimpressed.”

And he pulled her onto his lap. He kissed her in that teasing way he had. “What does it take to impress you now?” he whispered against her mouth.

“Now?” she asked with a laugh. “Now it takes the perfect man.”

“Don’t know any of those,” he said, running his hands up her sides. “Sometimes it pays to be imperfect. I’m willing to try harder.”

She wiggled into his lap. “Take me to bed, Conner. The whole world goes away when you take me to bed.”

Conner didn’t know how many women he’d been intimate with in his life. It didn’t seem like that many. There had only been a couple who had stood any kind of test of time—one when he was in the army, away from home, young and lonely. One was later, when he was working all the time and felt the stress of trying to operate a business he was too inexperienced to run. Both of those had probably been six-month relationships. He was grateful for them—they were nice women and the relationships hadn’t ended badly. There had been others here and there before his wife, very brief liaisons.

Nothing in his life had prepared him for this woman, for Leslie. The way she came to him was magic; she unfolded for him, drew him in as if absorbing him and surrounding him with her love. Words of love had not been spoken, but he felt it to the marrow of his bones. He liked to lay her gently on the bed and slowly undress her. Every time she grew impatient when he got to the snap on her jeans, and every time she would go after his belt buckle, even more eager for him than he was for her.

“Wait,” he said. “Tonight you’re going to wait.”

She groaned and said, “I hate to wait. I love to wait.”

He drew down her jeans very slowly and revealed red lace panties that were barely panties at all. “These are new,” he said.

“Mail order,” she whispered. “It’s nice to buy for someone who appreciates it so much.”

“Oh, I do, sweetheart.” He ran a finger around the elastic below the waist and at the legs. “I’m going to eat these. I’ll buy you more....”

That brought a deep moan from her and a low laugh from him. He bent his head to her red panties.

“No!” she said, pushing him back. “Not until you take off the jeans! You have to play fair!”

He didn’t even hesitate. He shucked those jeans so fast, it was like sleight of hand. Then he started over, from her lips to her chin to her br**sts to her belly and then lower. They hadn’t been a couple long, but he knew what she liked, knew what her favorite adventures were, and one of them included his tongue teasing around the edge of her panties until he couldn’t stand it any longer and had to go in for the kill.

Tonight, he decided, he wasn’t taking the red lace off. He was going to move it around. Until Leslie, he’d had no idea how much he enjoyed a little lace that barely covered her. He gently spread her, licked her thighs, pulled the panties to the side and enjoyed the most private part of Leslie. Enjoyed her deeply. Wanted her wildly. And she made those beautiful sounds for him, lifted herself against his mouth, begging. When her moans came in breathless gasps, closer and harder, he pulled away from her and rose to her lips. “Not yet,” he said. “Not yet.”

“I think you have a mean streak,” she rasped out.

“You like this. This is your favorite. Deny it.”

“I can’t deny it.”

He kissed her in a way that said he owned her, and she wrapped herself around him, trying to hurry him, but he couldn’t be hurried. This was going to be like the first time. Then if he had the energy, he might take her through all the times....

He changed his mind and got rid of the red lace, leaving her beautifully bare.

“Please,” she whispered against his mouth.

“Not yet.” And then he entered her slowly, so slowly. He held very still because when he was inside her like this he wanted time to stop. This felt natural and right to him, to be cocooned with the one woman in his life he loved with all his heart and mind. Loved.

He dipped his head and gave her nipple a lick, then a tug. And he moved, very slowly and deeply. And she said exactly what he expected her to say. “More. Come on, harder.”

He chuckled. “Not yet. I want you to let it build. Slow and easy. Try to lie still and let me get you there, from the inside, let it build.”

And she groaned. She couldn’t do it. She tried moving her h*ps against him, but he wasn’t allowing it. He held her still and took his time, pumping, kissing, sucking.

It wasn’t long before she began to lose control and pant, squirm, dig her heels into the mattress and lift against him, slam against him.

“Okay, baby,” he said. “I guess it’s time....” He covered her mouth, accepted her tongue into his, grabbed her hips, fixed the friction just right and pounded into her, fast and rhythmic, hard and even, deep and perfect. And she rose, cried out against his mouth, wrapped her legs around him to hold him and erupted into a liquid heat that sent him out of his mind, clenching in the most delicious spasms. He tried to wait her out, let her finish before he gave it up, but he could only do so much, and he went off like a rocket, a beautiful rocket.