CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Joanna and her mother had gone to the hospital in an ambulance. Donnie’s body went in another ambulance to the morgue. Two sorts of backup had shown up: two cops, one the promised female, and Constantine.

  “Gideon called me,” the rocker said with a twisted grin. “Thought I might be needed.”

  The police chief, now Gideon’s fervent supporter, wandered through the scene, rehearsing his statement to the press. Ophelia mothered Zelda until Violet arrived, and then walked quietly away to inspect the maple trees Gideon had planted. His car still stood next to the chipper. She looked at the car and the trees again and wondered, but when Gretchen bounded over to snuffle eagerly at the trunk of the Mercedes, she knew for sure.

  Ophelia gave a short statement to the female cop, and Zelda, holding a tissue to her mouth, gave an even shorter one. “This is it, Gideon?” a member of the crime-scene crew quipped. “No more bodies for a couple of days?”

  Zelda flexed her jaw and surreptitiously fingered her fangs. She huddled on Ophelia’s steps beside her mother, whose white lace top was streaked, liked Ophelia’s, with Zelda’s blood.

  “They’re not supposed to rip out of your gums like that,” Violet said over and over again. “Poor sweetie. My poor, poor baby.”

  “There was no choice,” Ophelia said. “It was a case of sprout her fangs or die.”

  Violet shuddered but said, “Stop playing with your fangs, Zelda, or the cuts will never heal. Your saliva will handle only so much.”

  “Be thankful she didn’t have to use them,” Ophelia said.

  “I’m thankful neither of you had to. Ripping people apart is simply ghastly. Not that I’ve ever done it, but I can imagine—”

  Actually, you can’t. Ophelia and Constantine exchanged glances, and Constantine winked. And then laughed.

  Finally, Gideon beckoned to Ophelia. She walked away with him, guiding him a lot farther from the others than he deemed necessary. He had a lot to learn about living with vamps.

  “Everyone can go home now,” he said. “We’ll get signed statements later. Our guys found a couple of trash bags of photo-shop stuff at the Taylor Road dump, right next to a roll of carpet cushion and some computer equipment. I’ll make sure no one’s secrets get out. Art’s job is safe, and Andrea and her kids can come home.”

  Ophelia breathed him in, his scent and his strength, and waited for whatever came next.

  He held out the keys to his car, to his house, to his entire future, and spoke very low. “Unless you have something urgent to do here, why not take my car—by yourself—and go dig up my mother’s rose garden?” Apparently he mistook the reason for her hesitation, for he added diffidently, “Unless…You have other resources to take care of things, if you’d prefer.”

  Ophelia glanced at Constantine, lounging darkly in one of the plastic chairs, a little smile hovering on his lips. She turned away, feeling Constantine’s smile grow. “You don’t have to do this,” she told Gideon, not meaning it at all.

  “Just don’t plant daisies,” Gideon said.

  In the light of the full moon, they lowered Johnny’s bones into the hole Ophelia had dug in Gideon’s garden. “I couldn’t leave him to Constantine,” Ophelia said. “Maybe I would have, if he’d been in town when it first happened. But now…” She tossed in a shovelful of dirt and stopped to lean on her shovel. “Constantine might have dumped him in a swamp. I couldn’t do that.”

  “Most people don’t end up under a beautiful garden,” Gideon said. “Johnny is being cared for far beyond his deserts, and eventually Marissa will be able to declare him dead and move on with her life.” He threw one shovelful after another into the grave. “Constantine already played a highly useful role.”

  “He’s always been a good friend to me, but I didn’t want this”—she gestured with her shovel—“to be Constantine’s problem. Only mine.” Ophelia sighed. “And now it’s yours.”

  “Ours,” Gideon said.

  When the grave was full, Ophelia led the way back toward the house. “I still don’t understand. You’re a cop. You have to take homicide seriously. You’re not supposed to cover it up, even if you think it was self-defense. I appreciate it, but…”

  “Do you have a better solution?” Gideon asked.

  Ophelia propped her shovel against the deck. She shook her head.

  “Even if I didn’t take into consideration my own skin and yours, how would justice be served if you went to jail?” Gideon asked. “Even if you survived that, even if Lep didn’t kill me and possibly my boss, you’d spend endless time, and money you don’t have, trying to prove it was self-defense, and even then you’d probably end up serving time. As it is, the only person I can’t help out is Marissa Parkerson, and frankly, weighing things in the balance, I just don’t care. I do my best to work things out fairly for as many people as possible. No way I’ll follow rules and procedure if they make matters worse.”

  Ophelia raised her eyes to Gideon. It had to be said: “I’m not a trusting sort of person.”

  “You mean I still haven’t earned your trust?” He didn’t sound upset. He chuckled as he set his shovel next to hers and went to free the dogs from their pen. “Even if I weren’t such a trustworthy guy, you’ve got me by the balls now in too many ways to count.”

  “It’s not right.” Ophelia rinsed her hands long and carefully under the outdoor tap. “But I still want the garden. And I want you.”

  “And my finger. Mustn’t forget that.” Gideon followed her up the steps to the deck and pulled her onto his lap on a bench by the wall. She leaned uneasily against him. The night breezes sighed and the milling dogs subsided one by one onto the deck.

  “It’s not going to be easy,” Ophelia said. “It’s never going to be safe.”

  “Works for me,” Gideon said. “Tell you what. You don’t have to trust me, but I get to glare at you suspiciously anytime I like.”

  “It’s a deal,” Ophelia said, smiling a little now, twining her fingers into his and relaxing into his embrace.

  For a long time they stayed there, in love in a twisted garden, and at last the sun rose on a brighter day.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to my husband and daughters for everything from relentless support to flawlessly aimed criticism.

  Thanks to Scott Simmons for cluing me in about landscaping in south Louisiana, and to Nancie Hays for answering my questions about guns. Needless to say, all errors are mine.

  Thanks to the Internet acquaintances who pointed me toward sources about the kinky side of life. Again, misunderstandings and errors are mine.

  Thanks to Chris Keeslar for being a delight to work with and for giving me the word “toothsome,” which I will use somehow, somewhere.

  Thanks to my daughters and sisters for brainstorming, reading and commenting; to Sheila Connolly and Jennifer Stevenson for their comments on the full manuscript in draft; to the many friends, relatives, critique partners and contest judges who read this story in bits and pieces, in part or the whole dang thing, just once or over and over again; to the members of Georgia Romance Writers and the Cherries for friendship and support. I couldn’t have done it without you all.

  Copyright

  LOVE SPELL®

  April 2010

  Published by

  Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

  200 Madison Avenue

  New York, NY 10016

  Copyright © 2010 by Barbara Monajem

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

  E-ISBN: 978-1-4285-0836-1

  The name “Love Spell” and its logo are trademarks of Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

  Visit us online at www.dorchesterpub.com.

 

 

  Barbara Monajem, Sunrise in a Garden of Love and Evil

 

 

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