Breathe by Kristen Ashley, now you can read online.
Chapter One
Never to Be His
“Talk to me.”
Chace Keaton was whispering to no one, sitting alone in the very early morning February cold of Harker’s Wood.
The place where his wife was shot to death.
Harker’s Wood was an unusual spread of trees in the Colorado Mountains. Unusual because it wasn’t simply conifer and aspen. For some reason that was likely akin to the reasons Old Man Harker did all the crazy shit he did, he had cleared that space seventy years ago and planted hundreds of shoots of twenty different varieties of trees. Trees that shouldn’t take root in the Colorado Mountains. Trees that, by some miracle, not only took root but grew tall and remained strong.
It was late night. The snow was thick and deep. It was freezing cold. There were a few clouds but the full moon shone bright through the trees, gilding them silver.
Chace didn’t see the trees or the moon. He didn’t feel the cold seeping through his jeans that were resting on the snow covered log which his ass was on.
He saw nothing.
He heard nothing.
He waited for the wood to talk.
It wasn’t talking.
He’d been up there countless times since Misty was shot there. Her death was purposefully not investigated by strict, detailed police protocol.
Not by the Carnal Police Department.
Not then.
Not when it was infested.
Now it was no longer infested.
But that didn’t mean Chace didn’t come up there alone, without a tail and instigate his own detailed examination of the area.
He found nothing.
And the wood never talked to him. Not back then. Not now.
Misty’s blood had long since washed away or mingled with the dirt. Now that dirt was covered in snow.
But Chace saw in his mind’s eye the footprints.
And, Christ, the knee prints.
Two sets. A man’s, a woman’s. Both of them walking up the well-tended trail to the wood. Only the man’s walking back.
Misty was wearing high heels. She always wore high heels. Chace liked women in heels. That said, the ones his wife wore made her look like a whore.
He’d noted several times in the footprints that marked her enforced walk, after being beaten badly, probably at gunpoint, definitely scared out of her mind, where she’d stumbled. Other times where she’d fallen.
But he’d done her on her knees.
Chace closed his eyes.
Very few people knew that they’d found se**n on her chin and in her stomach. He knew because he was a cop in that town and her husband.
And he knew that before she was shot to death, she’d been forced to her knees in order to give her killer a blowjob.