Cold Dark Heart by Julie Kriss

Epilogue

Damon

One year later

The sun was starting to set when I pulled into the driveway. It was a beautiful spring evening in Colorado. When I got out of the car, I noticed that the front lawn needed mowing.

Yes, that was me, Damon Blake. Thinking about my fucking lawn.

Life had taken me to some strange places. And now I was here.

Not only did I have a lawn, I had a house—actually, Andie and I had a house. She’d sold the old one she’d lived in with Terry and we’d bought one that was all our own. It wasn’t huge, it wasn’t fancy, but it was ours.

I hefted my bag onto my shoulder, picked up my shopping bags, and walked over the lengthening grass. There was a chair with a little table next to it on the front porch—Andie’s. There was a pile of fragrant sneakers just inside the front door—those belonged to Miles and his friends.

In the front room, which was the living room, I glanced at the framed photo on the wall above the sofa. It was a large print of the jumbled houses of Positano, Italy, built on the sheer cliff face rising up from the sea. It was taken by Kat, my sister-in-law, on her wedding trip with Alex. Kat was a famous photographer now, and the print was probably worth money, though we would never sell it. It had been a housewarming gift when we bought our place. Alex and Kat had delivered it in person when they visited the month after we moved in. Andie, Miles, and I reciprocated with a visit to Texas during Miles’s spring break. I was the guy who made him mow the lawn, but Miles thought his Uncle Alex was very cool.

As for the rest of us adults? We not only got along, we had started to relax together and have fun. My brother was my brother again—more so, maybe, than he’d ever been. The past was finally the past.

The front room was empty and quiet. I knew Andie was home because her car was here, and Miles was here with his friends, but they were nowhere in sight. I dropped my bag, took off my own shoes, and walked into the kitchen with the shopping bags. As I put a couple cans of soda in the fridge, I listened carefully.

There were voices in the basement. So Miles and his friends were playing video games, then. There was a shout as someone probably got killed in the game, and then laughter. Then ribbing. Ah, to be fourteen again.

Or maybe not.

I took one of the grocery bags and opened the basement door. “Miles,” I called down.

In a second he appeared at the bottom of the stairs, smiling up at me. He had grown taller in the past year, started to fill out in the shoulders. He was a handsome kid, and thank God, he looked nothing like Terry. Those cheekbones were all Andie’s, though his hair was lighter, and he had it cut in the same style his friends all had. Someday he would be very embarrassed about that haircut. I didn’t tease him about it, but I took lots of pictures so I could torture him with them in ten years.

“Hey, man,” Miles said. “What’s up?”

We weren’t father and son, Miles and me, but to my surprise, we had gotten close really fast. Maybe it was the formative experience of me helping him puke when we first met. Maybe it was just our personalities. But as I slid into Andie’s life, I had also slid into Miles’s, and to both of our surprise, it had felt really good.

“You’re on lawn duty,” I told him.

He frowned. “Not now?”

“No, not now. Tomorrow morning.”

He grinned. “What do I get for it?”

I felt myself smiling back. “The pleasure of being useful.”

“And fifty bucks?”

“Fifty? Dream on, kid.”

“I’m willing to go as low as forty.”

He was already saving for his first car, so this was a delicate negotiation. “You get twenty-five if it’s done before noon. If it’s done after, you only get ten.”

“Ten bucks?” Miles pretended to be offended. “I can barely buy anything for ten bucks. You want me to starve?”

“You’re not going to starve.” I held up the grocery bag. “Catch.”

His face lit up. “Sweet!”

I reached into the grocery bag, took out a bag of chips, and tossed it down the stairs at him. He caught it and, in turn, tossed it to his friends. I heard a cheer go up from somewhere in the basement, probably the sofa in front of the TV.

I pulled out another bag of chips, and another. Apparently you feed a teenage boy by throwing chips at him and his friends. When I was finished, Miles thanked me and went back to his video game. I closed the basement door.

That took care of him for a while. Now for Andie.

She was probably upstairs. We had turned the extra bedroom into a small office. Sometimes Andie used it, and sometimes I did. I didn’t have a permanent office because I was on the road a lot during the day. Andie still had her office at the Wild, but the home office was handy when she wanted to do some work from home in off hours.

I opened the door to the office, and sure enough, there she was. Andie was sitting behind the desk in old yoga pants and a stretched-out tee, her dark curls tied up on top of her head. She had no makeup on. She had a pen in her hand and she was peering at something on the screen.

When she saw me, her lips parted in shock. The pen fell to the surface of the desk with a click.

“Holy hell, you’re wearing a suit,” she said.

“I know. I told you, I had to go to court today.”

Her eyes traveled up and down me, over and over. “Uh,” she said, lost for words for a second. I hadn’t been wearing the suit when I left this morning; I’d changed in the bathroom at the courthouse. That was how much I hated wearing a fucking suit.

“Earth to Andie,” I said.

“Uh huh.” She cleared her throat. “How was court?”

“It was court. They asked me questions, I answered. I left.”

I had gotten certified and started my own business as a private investigator. I liked it. Along with the fact that it was surprisingly lucrative, I was my own boss, I was rarely in an office, and I spent my days however the hell I wanted. Except for the days when a case I had worked on landed in court and I needed to testify. It was rare, but it happened from time to time.

Andie was still running the Wild, which was doing killer business. She was bringing in the younger crowd—not just the college kids but the people in their twenties and thirties. She was using the stage in the huge space to book really good live bands, and sometimes DJ’s so the crowd would get dancing. The Wild had gone from an old fashioned joke to a hotspot, and it was all because of Andie. She’d even hired a manager to help with the day-to-day operations so she didn’t have to do the hours she used to.

My girl, it turned out, was a brilliant businesswoman.

Maybe she liked how I looked in the suit, but I liked how she looked in the old yoga pants and tee. I liked Andie in anything. And in nothing. “What are you doing?” I asked her.

She licked her lip. “Something with numbers. I don’t really remember.”

“Okay then, stop what you’re doing and come with me.”

She was out of her chair and rounding her desk in an instant. “Where are we going?”

I gave her a meaningful look. “You said you liked the suit.”

“We can’t.” She lowered her voice to a whisper, a mother’s reflex. “You know Miles is home.”

“He’s in the basement playing video games with his friends. I threw chips at them. We have an hour at least.” The boys, eternally hungry, would emerge, probably seeking pizza. But not yet.

Her eyes widened, and I knew I had her. There was nothing that turned Andie on more than a forbidden thrill. “We’ll have to be fast,” she whispered. “And we have to lock the door.”

Our bedroom door had a lock on it, of course. You think I was going to go without one?

I took her hand and turned it so the palm was up. I kissed her wrist, feeling her quickening pulse beneath my lips.

She moaned a little. “Oh, my God. That suit.”

“You’re wasting time, Andie.”

She literally jumped me. She put her arms around my neck and wrapped her legs tightly around my waist as I caught her, gripping her ass through the old yoga pants. It was a good thing I kept myself in shape. Before I could carry her down the hall, she pulled me down and kissed me, long and deep.

“Have I told you that you make me happy today?” she asked against my mouth.

“No,” I said as I maneuvered her toward our bedroom.

“Well, you do.” She kissed my neck as I banged the door open.

“You make me happy, too,” I said, and I meant it. The only thing I wanted was to make this woman happy. Forever.

We’d start right now.

And I’d start by taking off the suit.