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waves.

    ―I think I‘m drunk,‖ Coby responded, to which he laughed and reached out for her hands, rubbing them between his as he felt how cold they were. She looked up at him, seeing a little double. ―Where‘s Rhiannon?‖

    ―Oh, you know.‖ He inclined his head in the general direction from where they‘d come. And then he pulled her forward and kissed her on the lips. She felt the heat on her mouth when the rest of her skin was cold, and the whole thing was cool and sweet, and kinda felt like a dream.

    Pulling away reluctantly, she said, ―You‘re a bad boyfriend.‖

    ―I like you,‖ he said, and kissed her again.

    Vaguely she remembered somebody breaking them apart. Jarrod, maybe? Although it seemed more like Paul Lessington. And then in one of those snapshots that stood out later, a sharp memory surfacing from the drunken haze, she recalled seeing Lucas kissing Genevieve sometime later during the night.

    She‘d been right: He was a bad boyfriend. A bad, bad boyfriend.

    But she didn‘t tell Detective Clausen any of that. She told him about the guys and the alcohol but revealed as little as she could about Lucas himself. It just seemed wrong and unimportant. He‘d fallen. It was sad and horrifying and a total loss, but he‘d simply fallen.

    Twelve years . . .

    Twelve years since then.

    Now Coby flexed her hands on the steering wheel of her Sentra and drew a deep breath. The road to the coast was dark, wet, slippery, and lonely, and she was driving with careful control, slowing to almost a crawl around the blind corners and snaking curves. She was in a hurry, but hurrying could get you killed on this stretch of two-lane highway, even without a bent axle.

    A lot of things could get you killed.

    Twelve years.

    She seemed destined to dwell in the past tonight, and why not? It wasn‘t just that she was going to the beach. For the first time in years she was going to be seeing many of the players from that fateful night: guys, girls, even dads. This was not a reunion she was looking forward to, and if there were any way she could have gotten out of it, she would have.

    But she was stuck. Almost as powerless as she‘d been all those years ago when they‘d foolishly played Pass the Candle and the guys had invaded their secret meeting and the next morning Lucas Moore‘s body had been discovered floating in the surf, his long hair tangled with seaweed, his surfer-boy good looks reduced to chilling purplish skin and cobalt blue lips.

    Now, cautiously lifting a hand from the wheel, she ran it pensively through her auburn shoulder-length hair, brushing out leftover rain that had found its way beneath her hat. She‘d spent these twelve years trying desperately to forget about Lucas Moore and Pass the Candle and a whole lot of other things. She hadn‘t learned her lesson with Lucas, either. A few years after graduation she‘d run into Danner Lockwood, her other secret fantasy, and had gone out of her way to get him to notice her. He had, too; in that she‘d succeeded. But what she‘d hoped was a fabulous romance had been a fling. She‘d been infatuated, even more so with Danner than with fickle Lucas. And for a time Danner had been sort of interested in her, too, but then the relationship had died beneath them.

    And later, another tragedy: Rhiannon Gallworth, Lucas‘s supposed girlfriend, fell from a hiking trail to her death shortly after graduating from college.

    Slam! The car suddenly jerked sideways again and Coby quickly grabbed the wheel hard with both hands as the Nissan shuddered and shimmied toward the side ditch, its back wheel having squarely hit the pothole she‘d tried to miss. Carefully she guided it back onto the road, hoping she hadn‘t screwed the damn thing up even further.

    ―Good God,‖ she murmured, her heart still racing. Six o‘clock at the end of November. It had been dark since four thirty and the rain was a black, unrelenting curtain. At this rate she would be