Deadline (Sandra Brown)

you, either.” The admission surprised her, and it must have shown. Leaning back, he rested his elbows on the step on which she sat and stretched his long legs out in front of him. “I resented this story being thrust on me.”
    “Was it thrust?”
    “Yes. In the sense that I couldn’t say no.”
    “Why?”
    He closed one eye in a grimace. “That’s complicated.” He didn’t divulge why.
    Absently she rubbed her sore knee. “From a layman’s standpoint, Jeremy’s story has a lot of intriguing elements. Why weren’t you interested?”
    He stared at a spot in the distance for a long time, and when he answered, it was in a soft voice. “I saw guys blown to bits. Saw men risking their lives to save a wounded buddy whose odds of making it were nonexistent. Watched men and women putting themselves in harm’s way to save a stranger. A hostile, even.
    “Having witnessed incredible acts of bravery, I was disgusted by a decorated Marine who came home after surviving all that and then let his life—a damn good life, it seemed to me—go into the sewer. I didn’t know Jeremy Wesson, but I didn’t like him. Still don’t.” He looked at her then. “But I can relate to him. And that’s what really disgusts me.”
    “The post-traumatic stress?”
    He raised his shoulders in a small shrug.
    Since that was the first time he had acknowledged that he suffered it to any degree, suspicion crept in, and she angled away from him. “Is this an I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours?”
    “Your what and my what?”
    “Vulnerability. You’ve revealed yours. Now you expect me to reveal mine?”
    “Your vulnerability being your father.” When she didn’t answer, he asked, “Do you really think I’m that manipulative?”
    “If not, why did you refer to his death as a suicide? The coroner ruled it an unintentional overdose of medication.”
    “I’m aware of that. But there were rumors and speculation.”
    “Which I squelched under threat of suing for libel if they were printed or broadcast. They were never made public, not even by the most jaundiced media. So how did you—” She stopped. “Oh. Glenda again.”
    “She has a ferret in her gene pool.”
    “So now I’m trapped into talking to you about it.”
    “No you’re not.”
    “Sure I am. How can I dispel your misconceptions about my father’s death without talking about it?”
    “You can leave me with my misconceptions.”
    That wasn’t a desirable option, and he knew it. “Do I at least have your word that anything I say is off the record?”
    “Yes.”
    Perhaps she was swayed by the intimacy of the situation, or his masculine appeal, or the sincerity in his eyes. But, for whatever reason, in that moment she accepted him as trustworthy. “I’ll never believe Daddy did it on purpose, especially knowing that I—the boys and I—would be the ones to find him.”
    “Christ.”
    “We were expected at his house at three o’clock, after I had picked them up from preschool. His time of death was placed at somewhere around two. He wouldn’t have done that to me. I know it. The boys rushing in, seeing him slumped at his desk?” She shook her head adamantly.
    “Never in a million years would he have deliberately left us with that memory. And that’s assuming that he had a reason to take his life, when there was no evidence of any. He embraced life and lived it to the fullest.”
    “Incurable cancer? Financial troubles? Woman problems? A political scandal about to come to light?”
    “Nothing. I swear to you, Dawson. I would know.”
    “Would you?”
    “Yes.”
    “Fathers don’t tell their daughters everything, especially ugly things.”
    “I would have known if something were terribly wrong.”
    “Okay.”
    “You say okay, but I feel your skepticism.” She continued trying to convince him. “It was his housekeeper’s afternoon off. Which explains how he could have overdosed. She’d been with us for years, even long before Mother died. She adored him, as everyone did.
    “She nagged him about diet, exercise, and taking his various medications. She knew which were to be taken with or without food. She kept track of all that. So it’s conceivable to me that he simply made a mistake, and she wasn’t there to prevent it.”
    He frowned doubtfully. “It was a lot of pills to swallow by mistake.”
    “Says one who takes a lot.”
    “Exactly,” he said with matching curtness. “And I know better than to eat a whole damn bottle