Cold Midnight Read Online Free PDF

this she had no training for, no point of reference. And, frankly, all she wanted to do was run as fast as she could. Just forget Kendall Falls and her family and the tennis center and Chase Manning, and go back to that safe place in California where no one cared how she felt or what she thought or whether she worked the day after a vital piece of her past resurfaced. Safety in anonymity.
    Realizing that Jane hadn’t tossed out one of her insightful, snappy comebacks, Kylie glanced over and found her sister watching her like a therapist observing a patient trying to wriggle out of a straitjacket. She had a knowing smile on her porcelain-doll face.
    Putting aside the peanut butter-smeared knife, Kylie decided to ignore her. Not that that ever worked.
    Jane hummed a little as she cranked the flame higher under the tea kettle. “I find it . . . interesting who’s involved in solving the case.”
    “It’s not interesting. It’s his job.”
    “Technically, he shouldn’t be involved. It could be considered a conflict of interest because of your past together.”
    “Sort of like psychoanalyzing your sister?”
    Jane’s peach-tinted lips tightened. “All I’m trying to do is help you.”
    Jane meant well, but that didn’t change the fact that Kylie had the childish urge to push her face into the wall. Sisterly love at its best.
    Deliberately loosening the set of her jaw, Kylie started toward the hall, bagel clasped in one hand. “As much as I’m enjoying this session, I’m running late.”
    Jane called after her, “I’d say you’re running right on time.”

5
    QUINN MCKAY STARED DOWN AT THE SCHEDULES spread across his desk. Two of the personal trainers had already bitched that they should have been posted on the health club’s bulletin board yesterday. He’d promised he’d get them up right after lunch, which was right now, but he couldn’t focus, couldn’t think. All he could do was worry.
    He scrubbed his hands over his face. Christ, why did that fucking bat have to turn up now, after all this time? Damn it, he’d known when Kylie picked that particular parcel of land for the new tennis center that it was a terrible idea. He’d tried to tell her so.
    “Why not there?” she’d asked. “It’s perfect. It’s in our old neighborhood, which, in case you haven’t noticed, looks like hell these days. A new tennis center would give the kids a place where they can be safe.”
    He supposed, too, that she’d wanted to recapture some of her own unjaded happiness from those times.
    “I just think that something on the newer side of town would be more appropriate,” he’d said. “You’d get a better—richer—clientele, and in the winter, there’d be tourist traffic.”
    But again she’d shaken her head. “That’s not the point. The old neighborhood is falling apart. There were beer cans and cigarette butts all over the lot when I toured it. The Bat Cave isn’t what it used to be.”
    He’d chuckled at that. The Bat Cave referred to the abandoned house that had stood on the lot. With concrete walls on the outside and nothing but the wooden frames of walls inside, the house had been a stand-alone cave on two acres of Florida foliage. One of their friends had dubbed it the Bat Cave during a childhood game. Interesting how people’s memories were so different. Where Kylie fondly remembered fun and games at the Bat Cave, Quinn recalled hours of getting drunk, feeling sorry for himself and resenting the hell out of her.
    He’d tried again to dissuade her. “You probably won’t even be able to get the people who own it to sell. They’ve let it sit there for years.”
    “I’ve already had the title search done and contacted the owner. She told me the history of the place and, Quinn, it’s just heartbreaking. She and her husband were living in Chicago and building their dream house on that lot, but then her husband died in a car accident, and she abandoned the project. She didn’t want to finish it