Nothing To Lose

She also didn’t look much like the other college students who had attending his reading, in their jeans and T-shirts and slouchy backpacks. Taylor Bradshaw wore tailored slacks and a russet blazer over a crisp white shirt. She carried a leather briefcase and exuded an air of professional competence. Her auburn hair was cut shorter than he remembered it and her face was harder, somehow. Determined.

She looked…driven. He couldn’t come up with another word to describe her. He knew she had been in her last year of medical school during the trial and he wondered now if she had returned to finish up. He sincerely hoped for her sake that she had. Just because her brother was living on borrowed time didn’t mean she had to shove her own life into the deep freeze.

“I’m surprised to see you here,” he admitted.

Her gaze was as cool as the October night outside the bookstore. “I’m sure you are.”

Though both of them had attended the monthlong trial every day, they had spoken only once. It hadn’t been a friendly conversation, Wyatt remembered with an internal grimace. During a recess in the trial, he had slipped to the coffee shop across the street from the courthouse and discovered Taylor sitting alone in a quiet corner booth.

He remembered she had some kind of thick medical textbook propped up in front of her, but over the top of it he had just been able to see her eyes. The utter lack of hope in them still haunted him.

That despair had changed to bitter anger when he approached her booth, driven by some insane desire to try to comfort her.

“Looking for a scoop, Mr. McKinnon?” she had asked, her tone biting.

“No. Just a lunch companion. I hate eating alone.” But even his friendliest smile didn’t thaw the chill in her eyes by a single degree.

She snapped shut her textbook and slid out of the booth. “Too bad. I’m done here.”

The full plate of food in front of her gave the lie to her words and made him annoyed at his own foolishness. She didn’t want his comfort. What had he expected, that she would be thrilled to have his company?

“Come on, don’t run away. You have to eat. I won’t bother you, I promise.”

“I’ve suddenly lost my appetite. Something about yellow journalism does that to me.”

The denunciation had stung, he had to admit. He took pride in his work, in presenting the blunt truth, no matter how unpalatable it might be. Through his career he had received thanks not only from the families of the victims he wrote about but also the families of their killers for helping them understand what had gone so horribly wrong.

Before he could respond to Taylor Bradshaw’s derisive comments, she had stalked out of the diner, and she had studiously avoided him for the remaining days of the trial.

Apparently the intervening eighteen months hadn’t softened her attitude toward him at all. She still looked at him like she thought he was approximately as appealing as a cow with the slobbers.

“Hunter told me you’ve been going to the Point of the Mountain to see him.”

“A few times, yes.”

“He told me he’s cooperating with you from prison on the book you’re writing about his case.”

“We’ve had a few conversations, mostly about his relationship with Dru Ferrin. How they met, how long they dated, that sort of thing.”

“I don’t want you going out there again.”

Wyatt studied the muscle flexing along her jawline and the hot color climbing her cheekbones. He wasn’t the kind of man to go looking for fights but he wouldn’t back down when one found him, either. “Your brother is a grown man, Ms. Bradshaw,” he murmured. “If he wants to talk to me, I don’t see how you can do anything about it.”

Anger snapped to life in her eyes. “I can ask you to have a little human decency, if you even know what that is. My brother is living in hell. The last thing he needs is for you to write one of your salacious books about the case and go stirring everybody up all over again.”

In the court of public opinion, Hunter Bradshaw had been guilty of the Ferrin murders before he ever walked into that courtroom. In conservative Utah, where Dru Ferrin had been a pretty, popular television personality, and with the case involving the violent deaths of pregnant women or their terminally ill mothers, the man hadn’t stood a chance of being acquitted.

“I’m not trying to stir everybody up again,” he said, deciding to ignore that whole “salacious” bit. “All I want to do is explore a little more deeply why it happened.”

“To know why Dru and her mother were killed, don’t you think you have to know who really did it first? It certainly wasn’t my brother.”

“A jury of his peers said he did.”

“That jury was wrong! And if you write a book saying he killed anyone, all you will be doing is furthering their injustice.”

“Your faith in your brother is admirable, Ms. Bradshaw.”

“Admirable but misplaced. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”

That was exactly what he’d been thinking but he didn’t have the heart to voice his opinion. “He was convicted,” Wyatt pointed out gently. “Hunter is on death row. In the eyes of the courts and the world, he’s guilty of killing both women and Dru’s unborn child.”

“I don’t care what the world says. I know he didn’t do it! My brother is facing death for something he didn’t do. What could be worse?”

Despite his own knowledge of the case and the overwhelming avalanche of evidence against Bradshaw, Wyatt couldn’t help being stirred by the force of her convictions.

Taylor went on. “You’ve met him. Can you honestly tell me you think he’s capable of this crime?”

That was one of the things that bothered him most about this case, Wyatt had to admit. Bradshaw was a tough man to peg. He had a reputation for being a smart, dedicated cop. Stubborn enough to earn his share of enemies on the force, but passionate about the job and not at all the sort who would fly into a rage and kill two women.

During their three prison interviews, he had seen none of that passion the prosecution had alleged. Bradshaw had been courteous but cool, showing no emotion whatsoever.

Wyatt wasn’t being arrogant to acknowledge that one of the reasons his books had been so well-received was his ability to climb inside the minds of the killers he wrote about. As uncomfortable as he found such places, the perspective always gave a rich depth to his writing, a gritty verity he worked hard to attain. But Hunter Bradshaw wasn’t letting him anywhere near his mind. The man he met was as remote and cool as the Yukon.

“Who knows what any of us is capable of with the right provocation?” he responded.

Taylor Bradshaw’s midnight-blue eyes flashed fire. “I don’t know you. I don’t know what you’re capable of. But I do know my brother and I know he would never lift a finger to hurt any woman, especially not the woman he thought was carrying his child.”

Wyatt thought again of Dru Ferrin, the girl he’d known in grade school, pretty and sassy and smart-mouthed. He’d been lost and terribly lonely when he returned to Utah with his mother after the divorce. Missing his dad and Gage like crazy, mourning Charlotte, traumatized by the purgatory they had all been through.

The other children hadn’t known how to talk to him—what did a nine-year-old say to a kid who was the only witness to his little sister’s kidnapping?—but Dru had always been kind to him.

For that alone, he wanted to write her story, so he could remember that girl willing to sit by him on the school bus when everybody else treated him like he had head lice.

“Leave Hunter alone.” A pleading note crept into Taylor’s voice and her hand tightened on her attaché. “He’s fighting for his life. He should be pouring all his energies into his appeal, not wasting his time talking to you.”

“I’m sorry you’re not happy about it. But your brother seems to want to tell his side of the story. As long as he wants to talk to me, I’ll continue going down to the Point of the Mountain.”

“And nothing I say will change your mind?”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

She gazed at him for a long moment, that sweetly curved mouth tight and angry, then she turned and stalked away, leaving him with his head pounding and unwilling guilt gnawing at his insides.

Taylor was greeted by two things a half hour later when she let herself into her little house in the Avenues—the rich smell of something Italian and spicy wafting from the kitchen, and a huge furry shape that rushed her the moment she walked inside.

Belle’s eager welcome went a long way to helping Taylor shake the anger and frustration that lingered from her encounter with Wyatt McKinnon.

She dropped her case and gave the dog the obligatory attention, ignoring the hair Belle eagerly deposited. “Yeah, I’m happy to see you too, you crazy dog, even if my jacket will never be the same. How was your day, sweetheart? Anything exciting happen?”