Beckett's Convenient Bride Read Online Free PDF Page B

a crazy woman feeling him up…
    Get your hands off my body, lady, that’s private property you’re invading.
    Her hair hung down and tickled his face. She was muttering under her breath, something about a gun. What the devil was she talking about? She didn’t even know he was a cop—they’d never got that far in the introductions.
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    Kit was looking for his pistol. He had to be wearing one, because why else would he be wearing a leather coat on a day like this? As long as you stayed out of the wind, it felt almost summer.
    Had he had it in his hand when she’d hit him? If so, itcould be anywhere, even in the ditch—although she hadn’t heard a splash.
    The murder weapon. Oh, my blessed mercy!
    She had to find it before he came to and hold it on him until she could get help. Yell for one of the men on the wharf to call the sheriff.
    Being able to hand over his gun as evidence would make up for not giving her name when she called, but first she had to find it. One side of his coat was caught underneath his body, and so she started, carefully patting him down. His body was hot. Hot, hard and…
    Squatting beside him, she leaned over and slipped her fingers under the other side of his coat. Right-handed men wore their guns on the left side, didn’t they? And vice versa?
    She had no way of knowing which handed he was. Some men shoved their guns into the back of their belt, but he was lying on his back and he was too heavy for her to roll over.
    And then her fingers touched something that felt like leather. Too flat to be a gun or a holster…
    Frowning, she managed to ease it out of an inside pocket. “A badge?”
    â€œSatisfied?” His voice sounded like iron grating on concrete.
    She gasped and dropped the badge, scrambling backward and trying to look as if she hadn’t been caught with her hands in places they had no business being. “Look, whoever you are, we’re going to have to move you, else you’ll slide into the ditch and drown, but don’t try any funny business, because we’re being watched.” She had no idea whether or not the men working on the waterfront a few thousand feet away were paying any attention, muchless whether they could actually see what was going on. “So don’t think you can get away with anything.”
    â€œWouldn’t think of it,” he rasped. His eyes were still closed. She didn’t know whether to trust him or not.
    â€œCan you move?” She leaned forward on her knees again and studied his face, which was hardly reassuring, but then at this point it would take the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to reassure her.
    â€œCan you open your eyes?”
    No way, lady. As long as he didn’t open his eyes, Carson told himself, he could pretend this was all a bad dream. All of it…the purple banshee, the smell of cinnamon and apples, the babbling testimony—those cool hands pawing over his body.
    Don’t try any funny business? What was she, a comic book character? There was nothing even faintly funny about any of the past forty-eight hours.
    He groaned, and the woman caught her breath.
    Man, I don’t need this complication, Carson thought tiredly. She clutched his hand and gave a few experimental tugs. If he had a lick of sense he’d have crawled on his knees, climbed back in his car and hightailed it out of here the minute he realized she was criminally insane.
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    If I had a grain of sense, Kit thought, I’d have left him where he fell and got hold of the sheriff, and let him send for an ambulance. And while she was at it, she could have mentioned that they might want to bring along handcuffs, because the man sprawled out beside the road was probably a murderer, never mind that he had a badge inside his jacket.
    Or she could call nine-one-one again, report a man down at the intersection of Landing and Waterlily Roadsand then