When Night Falls by Jenna Mills Read Free Book Online Page A

known its owner less than twenty-four hours. “How did you get my number?”
    “That’s not important.”
    “It is to me.” She shot the words back. “I’m unlisted for a reason.”
    “I called the station, but you weren’t there. I wanted to know if you found Adam Braxton.”
    Earlier in the day she’d thought she and Armstrong had called a truce. Now she realized white flags were hardly his stock-in-trade. “I don’t give play-by-plays of my investigations.”
    Armstrong muttered something unintelligible under his breath. “You just turn in when you get tired, is that it?”
    “And you just attack.”
    “It’s a simple question, Detective. Can’t you give me a simple answer in return?”
    Jess reined in her illogical response to the man. He wasn’t talking to her as a woman, but as a cop. He wasn’t her friend or lover. He was a man whose daughter was missing. A man her father thought capable of murder.
    “I talked to several of Emily’s friends,” she told him, knowing it was only right to update him, even if he was deliberately trying to goad her. “But I didn’t find Braxton.”
    She carried the phone into her living room, but didn’t sit. That was too casual. Just talking to the man while wearing pajamas felt oddly intimate. Too easily she remembered the sight of him more nude than dressed. Those clingy gray shorts had cupped in all the wrong places, revealed a physique more impressive than she could have imagined.
    Jess had a vivid imagination.
    “I plan to follow up a few leads first thing in the morning,” she told him.
    “That’s what I thought.”
    The disappointment in his voice hit like a rock. “What?”
    “Nothing. Good night, Detective. Dream well.”
    Yeah, right. Long after she hung up the phone, the hollow words lingered. They crawled into bed with her, tossed and turned, accompanied her into a fitful sleep.
    Bone-tired, she fell into a trap she avoided while awake and alert. She did just as William Armstrong commanded. She dreamed.
    The images were hazy, the sensations acute. Heat and urgency, need, recklessness, bliss. A lover’s arms holding her against his chest, the steady strum of his heart. Sensual words of pleasure and fierce promises of forever. Strength and warmth, intensity. A touch that ignited a fire deep within her. A seductive tangle of fulfillment and hunger.
    She awoke abruptly to the cold. Alone.
    Jess pulled the covers closer. “Stop it,” she admonished the darkness. Around her, the familiar sounds of the night tried to work their magic. The rhythmic ticktock of her bedside clock, her neighbor’s two Australian shepherds who thought they’d been born to serenade the moon, the steady January wind blowing through the shivering branches of a red oak. But they weren’t enough to steady her choppy breathing.
    Resigned, she accepted the truth. Sleep would not return. She rolled out of bed, taking the covers with her, and moved to stand before the window. Despite the thick comforter, the bone-deep cold radiating from the glass pane cut right through her. The temperature had to be well into the teens. No wonder Thelma and Louise wouldn’t stop barking. The mutts had to be freezing. She understood.
    Demons crept out of the shadows to jeer at her. Strong Jessica Clark. Daddy’s fierce little warrior princess. Independent. Capable. Brave. Didn’t need anyone.
    The words had been intended to rally, and rally they had. But like many calls to arms, they also lingered. And wounded.
    What was it about the cover of night, she wondered, that left her raw and exposed, vulnerable to daggers she could avoid during the light of day?
    “Damn it,” she growled, then headed downstairs. She was adding cocoa to warm milk when the phone rang. “Detective Clark,” she answered.
    “Jessie, it’s Margo.”
    Her heart beat a little faster. A patrol cop didn’t call late at night, not unless something had gone down. Emily.
    “What’s happened?” she bit out.
    Margo