Dangerous Read Online Free PDF Page A

with a piece of tape. Señorita Rosa Carrera y Sinclair.” He whistled. “This was our great-grandmother, when she was first married! I should have known, but the portrait of her upstairs was painted when she was older.”
    Winnie looked at it, took it from his hands and studied the lovely face. “She was very beautiful.” She laughed. “And she fought bulls with a mantilla! She must have been brave.”
    “If what I remember hearing from Dad about our great-grandfather is accurate, she had to be brave.”
    “Truly.” She put the brooch down and looked at the other treasures. “So many rubies,” she mused. “She must have loved them.”
    “You should pick out some of those to wear,” he suggested.
    She laughed. “And where would I wear expensive jewelry like this?” she chided. “I work for Jacobs County dispatch. Wouldn’t the girls have a hoot seeing me decked out in these? Shirley would fall out of her chair laughing.”
    “You should get out more,” he said somberly.
    She gave him a long, sad look. “I’ll never get out, now. Kilraven is leaving after Christmas,” she said. Her face fell. “I gave him the raven painting at the party. He glared at me as if I’d committed murder under his nose and stormed out without even speaking to me.” She flushed. “Nothing that ever happened to me hurt so much.”
    “I thought the presents were anonymous.”
    “They were. I don’t know how he knew it was me. I’ve never told him that I paint.”
    “He’s a strange bird,” Boone commented. “He has feelings. Sort of like you do,” he added with a grin. “Sending backup when you thought he was going to a routine domestic fight with no weapons involved.”
    She nodded. “He was furious about that, too. But it saved his life.”
    “You really ought to see Cash Grier’s wife, Tippy. She has those intuitions, too.”
    “She knows things,” Winnie replied. “Whatever sort of mental gift this is, I don’t have her accuracy. I just feel uncomfortable before something bad pops up. Like today,” she said quietly. “I felt sick all day. Now I know why.”
    “You do look like her.” He was going to add that their mother used to have odd feelings about things that later happened, but he didn’t.
    “Yes,” she said curtly. She looked at the jewelry. “I shouldn’t have been so mean. She did a good thing. But it will never make up for leaving us.”
    “She knows that. She said she didn’t come for forgiveness.”
    She frowned. “Why did she come?”
    “She’s meeting someone.”
    “A boyfriend here in Jacobs County?” she asked curtly.
    “No, she said it was business.” He frowned, too. “You know, she seems to know a lot about that recent murder here.”
    “Why would she?”
    Boone grimaced. “I wasn’t going to tell you, but it seems our uncle may have had ties to the case.”
    She let out a breath. “Oh, that’s great. Now he’s not just the man who stole our mother, he’s a murderer!”
    “No, not that sort of involvement,” he replied. “I think he might have had some connection to the people involved. From what she said, he was a heavy drug user.”
    “Not surprising. I never liked him,” she confessed. “He was always picking on Dad, trying to compete with him in everything. It was sort of sad to me at the time because anybody could see he wasn’t the equal of our father at business or ranching or anything else.”
    “Our father had some good qualities. Hitting you like that wasn’t one of them,” he added coldly, “and if I’d known about it, I’d have knocked him through a wall!”
    “I know that. It was only the one time,” she said quietly, “and he’d been drinking. It was just after he and our mother met that time, when he thought she wanted to come back. It wasn’t long after she’d gone away with our uncle. He came back home all quiet and furious, and he drank like a fish for about two months. That was when he hit me. He was sorry afterward, and he