If You Know Her: A Novel of Romantic Suspense

write from there.
    But he was too fucking stubborn to do that. Too stubborn, too determined.
    And he knew the demons would still be there anyway.
    The demons lived in his memories, not in the house, not in the earth. He couldn’t eradicate them from his memory, so he’d just have to deal with them, live with them.
    Those memories weren’t going to win, damn it. They weren’t.
    Joe was dead, Hope was safe, and she was happier than she’d ever been in her life. It was over. Completely over.
    He’d just started up the steps when the phone rang.
    His muscles turned to lead as he turned to stare. It was late. There had been a time when late calls wouldn’t faze him, but after the past year, it was hard to ignore the dread creeping through him. Hard to ignore the worry, the fear.
    Not too many people would be calling him. Not too many people had his number. Hope and Remy. Lena and Ezra. His agent. A few friends. That was about it—and none of them would call him this late unless it was an emergency.
    Scowling, he moved to the phone, stared at the caller ID.
    Virginia. Did he know anybody in Virginia?
    The machine picked up and he stood there, dumbly, as a voice rolled out. Low and smooth, soft and sexy as black velvet draped over a woman’s nude body.
    “Hello. I’m … looking for Law Reilly. My name is Nia Hollister. I … ah, we met a few months ago …”
    Yeah. He hadn’t forgotten. They’d met the day she accused him of killing her cousin. The day she’d punched him, drawn a gun on him—not exactly the sort of woman a guy was going to forget.
    Without realizing what he was doing, he reached for the phone.
    “Hello.”
    “Ahh … Mr. Reilly?”
    He just waited.
    “Ah … hello. This … okay, this is awkward. My name is Nia Hollister. We met a few months ago—”
    “I remember.” Short, silken, dark hair. Big gold eyes. A mouth that he would have given his right arm to taste. Long legs. Attitude. Grief. And a gun … mustn’t forget that gun, or the fact that she’d come onto his property ready to kill him, and Hope, if she’d decided they had something to do with her cousin’s death.
    Stupid, he knew, being that hung up on a woman with that kind of reckless disregard. But he couldn’t help himself, couldn’t stop thinking about her, even months later.
    Even now he found himself wondering what that mouth of hers would feel like pressed against his. Howshe would taste. How she would feel if he pressed her up against a wall, then pressed himself against her …
    “Yeah. For some reason, that doesn’t surprise me,” Nia muttered, her voice low and soft. Then she cleared her throat. “Look, I’m sorry to be calling so late. I just wanted to … well …”
    Her voice trailed off.
    Law cocked a brow and leaned back against the wall. “You wanted to what?” he asked when her silence stretched from a few seconds into nearly a minute.
    “I … shit. Has anything else, um, weird happened in Ash since, well, you know, that shithead died?”
    “Weird.” Law ran his tongue along his teeth and tried to get his brain to think about something
beyond
the physical images. But he wasn’t having much luck. “Define weird.”
    She muttered under her breath and then abruptly said, “You know what? Forget it.”
    And just like that, she hung up.

CHAPTER
FOUR
     
    D EFINE WEIRD
, he tells her.
    Nia was still trying to decide if Law Reilly had been trying to piss her off or if he’d been serious.
    Weird was
weird
. What was there to define? But screw it. She’d just check things out herself. And that was what she was doing, why she’d spent the past eleven-something hours on her bike, driving from home to Ash, the small town almost an hour outside of Lexington.
    She wanted answers—she’d get them. Wasn’t like she had anything better to do, not really. She couldn’t focus, couldn’t concentrate, and it was finally starting to show in her work, as evidenced by the fact that the last job she’d tried to get, they’d given it to somebody with half her experience, half her talent. But more heart, that much Nia could admit. She had no heart left, not for this at least.
    She’d spent so many years building her career in photojournalism, but lately, all she was doing was flushing it down the drain. She didn’t give a damn, either.
    She had to find closure, find some way to make herself accept this, or her life, as she knew it at least, was just going to stay in limbo. So she