Chapter Three

      The woman standing by the front window next to the pleasant-faced hulk with the unruly hair was cute.

      Beyond cute, Colin amended. There was something appealing about her that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. As best as he could analyze it, he sensed an intriguing combination of sadness mixed with an undercurrent of energy radiating from her.

      And, more startling and thus far more important, he realized that for the first time in months, he found himself both attracted and interested.

      There’d been a time when his older brother, Ryan, had called him a ladies’ man, a “babe magnet” and a number of less flattering but equally descriptive terms. And at the time, they had all been rather accurate.

      But all that had been before life had abruptly changed for him. Before his brother and sister-in-law, Jennifer, had been involved in that freak skiing accident that had resulted in their being swallowed up by an avalanche. Who could have predicted this outcome when Ryan and Jennifer had gone on a last-minute spur-of-the-moment vacation because a late-season unexpected snowfall had occurred and they were both avid skiers?

      Just like that, in the blink of an eye, he suddenly found himself the only family that their only daughter, Heather, had left.

      His personality, not to mention his priorities, had changed overnight. He hadn’t been on so much as a date since he’d had to fly to Aspen to identify Ryan and Jennifer’s bodies and to pick up his niece. Heather had been in bed asleep when it had all happened. Her parents had opted to sneak in a quick early-morning ski run before she woke up—not thinking that it would be the last thing that they would ever do.

      Stunned, Colin had never thought twice about assuming this new responsibility. He turned his entire life around, then and there, vowing that Heather would always come first.

      He couldn’t give up what he did for a living—he’d worked too hard to get to where he was. It came with its own set of dangers, and that couldn’t be helped. But he could definitely make sure that any time outside his job would go to being with Heather, to making sure that she wouldn’t be permanently scarred by the loss of her parents. He’d vowed that he would always be there when Heather needed him to make the night terrors go away.

      But just for a moment, this petite woman standing before him took Colin back to the man he had been before all of this had happened to change his life. It made him remember just how he’d felt when a really attractive woman crossed his path.

      “Detective?” Ellie prodded when he didn’t seem to have heard her, or at least wasn’t attempting to respond to her greeting.

      “Sorry,” Colin apologized, rousing himself out of the temporary mental revelry he’d fallen into. He flashed a smile at her that one of his former girlfriends had called “naturally sexy.” “I got distracted for a moment.”

      She was about to ask him if it was because he recalled who she was, but then she remembered that she had given him only her first name. Even if she’d told him her full name, that wouldn’t necessarily mean that the detective would remember her husband and that fatal night at the convenience store.

      Or even if he did recall every moment of that night, there was no reason to believe that he would make the connection between her and the man he couldn’t save. King was, after all, a common enough name. Most likely, Benteen probably hadn’t even gotten Brett’s name after everything had gone back to normal—or as normal as it could have gone back to, she silently corrected.

      No, if the detective was distracted on her account, he was probably trying to place where he’d seen her before.

      As if the presence of a cameraman wasn’t enough of a clue, she thought wryly.

      “No problem,” Ellie told the detective. In her opinion, that was a throwaway line that blanketed a lot of territory. She just wanted to do this story and move on. “Your CO told us we could take up a little of your time and ask you about the huge coup you just scored.”

      Colin looked at her puzzled, not quite following the sexy reporter. “Excuse me?”

      “The paintings,” Ellie prompted. “The stolen paintings that were in the storage unit you found.”

      Colin nodded in response but said nothing.

      “Well?” she asked, waiting for him to start speaking. Talk about having to pull words out of someone’s mouth. The detective was either exceptionally modest or exceedingly camera shy.

      “That about covers it,” he told her.

      She could see by the look that Jerry gave her that he had the same thought as she did. This wasn’t going to film well, not unless she could find a way to make this detective come around and start talking. She had a feeling that he would engage the audience once he got comfortable.

      “You’re being modest,” she said, her voice coaxing him to elaborate.

      He surprised her by saying, “Bragging rights aren’t a part of this job.”

      Okay, she thought. He did need to be coaxed. A lot. She had to admit that this wasn’t what she’d expected. Some people, once they got in front of a camera, wouldn’t stop talking. This one seemed reluctant to even start.

      “Still, I’m sure that it’s not every police detective who gets to take down an art thief who’s been plaguing the city.”

      “I really can’t take any kind of credit for what happened. It’s not as if this was the result of long hours of planning.” He shrugged. “This was all actually just a big accident,” Colin told her.

      The job had made her somewhat cynical. It wasn’t anything that she was particularly proud of, just a fact. But Ellie was beginning to believe that the detective was being serious. He was the genuine article. And because of this, she found herself trying to reach out to Benteen.

      “There’s that modesty again,” she said. “I tell you what—why don’t you walk me through exactly what happened and we’ll go from there?”

      She could see by the look on the detective’s face that he was about to dismiss the whole incident. It made him a rare find in her book. Most men couldn’t stop talking about themselves. But the station manager obviously was expecting a story and she wasn’t about to come back empty-handed. It wasn’t