“Coffee and cake don’t solve the world’s problems, Noelle.”

“No, but neither does going without them, so why not have them anyway?”

“Your reasoning is incredibly hard to argue with.”

“I know.” I smile. “Give me two minutes.”

I dig my keys from my purse and jump out. I jog back to the front door and make sure to disable the alarm. Damn thing really is a pain in the ass for situations like this. Then I stop in the middle of the kitchen.

Crap. Natalie was supposed to get her alarm set up today on an emergency call.

I guess she won’t be needing that.

Drake’s footsteps echo behind me, and I turn to remind him, but before I can, he frames my face with his hands and presses his lips to mine. It’s short and sweet and, oddly, completely welcome.

“Morning,” he mumbles quietly, his sunglasses presumably left in the car.

I smile. “I see you woke up.”

“Have you seen your ass in those shorts? They’d wake up the entire graveyard if you walked through.”

I laugh and move my attention to the coffee machine. I pull two takeout mugs from the cupboard, ’cause, you know, doesn’t everyone have those in their kitchen?

“You have reusable takeout cups in your kitchen?”

Apparently not. “Uh, yeah. I have to run out early a ton of times, especially if clients think their spouses are lying about where they’re going. I once had to go follow some guy in my pajamas at six a.m. because his wife thought he was lying about his earlier flight to New York for some business meeting.”

“Was he?”

“Yeah. He went and bonked his mistress before he went to the airport.”

“It’s a wonder you’ve never been arrested for invasion of privacy, you know that?”

I fill one mug and smile sweetly over my shoulder. Then I slide the cup along the counter to him. He picks it up and sniffs.

“Hey,” I say to him, “Normal coffee, no cream or sugar.”

His smile reflects in his eyes. “We already know how the other takes their coffee. Maybe there’s hope for us yet.”

I purse my lips, but he winks, exaggerating his smile, and I laugh at him. To be fair, Trent and Alison never really got it right until he finally learned how she takes her coffee on a morning before her shifts…and that took him eighteen months. So Drake does have a point there.

“What if one of us didn’t drink coffee? Then what?” I ask, fitting the lid on my cup.

“Let’s be honest here. You’d never be the one to not drink coffee, and if I didn’t drink coffee, I wouldn’t come near you before four in the afternoon. I wouldn’t be brave enough to face you until you were falling asleep.”

“I could so go without coffee,” I argue, grabbing a muffin and shoving it at him. “I’m not that much of a bitch without it.”

“Sweetheart, don’t take this the wrong way, but you can be that much of a bitch with coffee.”

I glance at the clock on my fireplace before I step outside. “Fifteen minutes into the day. I’m going to count myself as the bigger person here and not respond to that asinine comment.”

“Oooh, asinine. Big word for this early.”

I spin on the balls of my feet by his car. “Keep that sass up, Detective Nash…”

“And you’ll shoot me?” His eyes twinkle.

“No,” I say with a sassy half smile. “I can implicate a sex ban now. That’s way more threatening than shooting you.”

Drake snorts, getting back into the truck and putting his cup and muffin in the center console. “A sex ban? Yeah, all right, cupcake.”

“I’m dead serious.”

“Noelle, if you think your dumbass sex bans can stop me from touching you and turning you the fuck on whenever I want to, then clearly I need to fuck you again—and harder this time.” He lifts one eyebrow, almost running a red light.

“You need to pay attention to the road,” I scold him, but my mouth is dry.

Holy shit, and I thought I had no brain-to-mouth filter. Does Drake Nash spit out every sexy thought in that delightful little mind of his without a second thought?

Wait—delightful little mind? What kind of voodoo is this prick pulling on me?

Handsome, part Italian, a Catholic in theory, killer eyes, deadly kiss… Oh, that voodoo.

New Orleans, I need a cure, please and thank you.

“You’re mutterin’ to yourself, and you look like you have a headache. Are you thinkin’ too hard again?”

“One more word,” I warn. “One more word and I’m clamping your cock to your thigh.”

“If you can find a clamp big enough, I’m gonna say go ahead.”

“Cocky bastard.”

He slows before turning the corner toward Natalie’s street, and he looks at me with a grin that tells me that I walked straight into his trap. “I am, aren’t I?”

I exhale loudly, looking away. “Okay. We’re here to work. Let’s try to be professional.”

“Shouldn’ta worn those shorts.”

“I should be able to wear whatever I like to work and not be lusted over. Especially when I’m being dragged along on my day off.”

“You don’t get days off when people die, cupcake.”

“I don’t get them when they’re damn well living, either.” I jump out of the truck and slam the door shut. “It’d be real helpful if adulterers could schedule their trysts around my schedule.”

“I don’t think it works that way.” Drake gives me a half grin and inserts the key into the front door.

My skin prickles when he opens it. There’s a chill in the air, and if this were a horror movie, I’d say that Ms. Natalie Owens’s ghost was haunting this house to stop us from entering and potentially discovering a myriad of her secrets.

I don’t know whether Drake feels it or not, because he walks in as if he owns the place, while I’m still hovering on the threshold, a hand curled around the doorframe.

“What are you doing? Waiting for the spirits to cross from the other side and come answer your questions?”

I glare at him. “It feels…strange. Last time I was here, she was so scared and alive…and…alive,” I finish lamely before swallowing hard.

Two days.

Two days ago, I was here, and she was sick, which I now know wasn’t because of the breakdown. It was probably because of that sweet baby growing inside her.

A baby who’ll never know life because its momma was killed. A baby who didn’t deserve that ending.

Oh my God.

Oh my God.

“Noelle.” Drake cups my face the way he did earlier. “One step. Inside. This isn’t the time to be the sweet Noelle I like. Now is when your badass gene can kick the fuck in.”

I divert my gaze while I swallow down the lump in my throat. He’s right. I can’t be emotionally connected to this. I have to come in and look at this house with a critical eye, even if that means being a bitch to him.

“I’m okay,” I reassure him, forcing my arm to pull me inside the house. Then I briefly close my eyes, breathing in.

Work, Noelle. Forget everything else.

“What are we looking for?”

“Anything,” Drake answers, shutting the front door. “Anything that seems out of place. Diaries. Planners. Calendars. Anything that might relate to her pregnancy.”

I hold my hand out, and he passes me a pair of latex gloves. I wriggle my fingers into them because it’s really not the easy snap the TV makes it out to be. I practically have my pinkie finger make love to its empty finger space before it goes in. Jesus. If someone wants to make hand-friendly latex gloves, it’d be real appreciated.

I do, however, snap the latex against my wrist. Because. I won’t be doing it again though because it does kinda sting a little.

’Kay. A lot. Ouch.

“You take upstairs,” Drake says. “I’ll do downstairs.”

“Got it.” I put my foot on the bottom step and start slowly walking up. There are two bookcases on the U-turn of the stairs, each of them filled bottom to top with books. Some are fiction, popular romance and fantasy novels and the like, and others are nonfiction books.