Deadly Lies Read online

  Deadly Lies

  Kylie Hatfield Series: Book Two

  Mary Stone

  Bella Cross

  Copyright © 2019 by Mary Stone and Bella Cross

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Mary Stone

  To my husband.

  Thank you for taking care of our home and its many inhabitants while I follow this silly dream of mine.

  Bella Cross

  To my family. Thank you for your unending support, love, and patience while I navigate this exciting new world of publishing.

  Contents

  Description

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Kylie Hatfield Series

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Description

  Family is everything...unless they want you dead.

  Sweet little Emma Jennings is certain someone is robbing her vast estate, and she wants Kylie Hatfield on the case. Sure, an embezzlement case might be boring—boring and Kylie don’t mix—but Kylie feels for the octogenarian and pledges to right the wrong. She’s certain that she can. She’s just been promoted to Assistant PI of Starr Investigations, after all.

  When embezzlement turns to murder, Kylie is once again tossed into a situation she isn’t prepared for, and her personal life isn’t much better. Sexy Linc Coulter, her Newfoundland’s trainer and her friend with benefits, is facing demons of his own.

  As her search for answers to Emma Jennings’s case grows more dangerous, Kylie is beginning to suspect that she might indeed be a magnet for trouble—and killers. Even worse, she also suspects that she might be Linc Coulter’s greatest downfall.

  If you like your murder mysteries with a dose of romance, humor, and a few good dogs, Deadly Lies, the second book of the compelling Kylie Hatfield Series, will tug at your heartstrings even as you pull the covers over your head.

  1

  The colors weren’t right.

  Frustrated, Arnold Jennings tossed the pallet of paint onto the long table at his side. They hadn’t been right for days. Maybe he needed a rest.

  Sighing in frustration, he gingerly sat down on his favorite stool, remembering fondly all the times he and the love of his life, his wife of sixty-one years, had fooled around on that very stool. He felt quite certain that he and Emma had conceived one of their daughters on that very piece of furniture.

  The memory made him smile.

  He’d been a lucky man.

  Well, in the early days.

  He’d found the perfect girl, and she’d said yes when he asked for her hand. She’d supported his art. He smiled bigger, settling more comfortably on the worn seat beneath his tired behind. Oh, how Emma had supported him.

  “Naughty girl,” he’d call her when she’d seduce him from his work.

  It hadn’t taken much.

  It was a wonder that they hadn’t had a brood of children, birth control being so unreliable back in those early days.

  The smile slid from his face as memories of the miscarriages, one after the next, forced their way into the present. All boys, Arnold was told.

  Seven of them, all now lying under their little markers in a row at the Jennings family cemetery.

  Each loss made him paint harder. Each painting gave him an escape from the crushing blow.

  There’d been no escaping the pain for Emma, so no matter that he’d have preferred a small cabin in the woods, he commissioned this home to give her something to do with her time. To distract her. Allow her to give birth to something that didn’t give her sorrow.

  The house should have been overlooking some estate in France, grapes growing so near you could reach out the window and pluck them off the vines. Not in some small North Carolina town.

  He didn’t care.

  Emma loved the design, and what Emma wanted, Emma got.

  She flew all over the world selecting tapestries and carpeting and stone.

  Slowly, she began to smile again.

  And three days after they’d moved into their new home, he convinced her to allow him to paint her again. It had been years since she’d felt free enough to do so.

  Her body had changed. Four of the pregnancies had lasted up until the child was born, and stretch marks marred the once perfect flesh of her stomach. The breasts that had once sat on her chest so high had fallen from the weight of milk no child would be blessed enough to drink.

  She’d never been more beautiful to him.

  And he’d painted her with an exhilaration he hadn’t felt in so many years.

  She’d come to him then, just as she’d done in the earlier years of their marriage. They’d made love on this stool, and weeks later, they learned of another pregnancy.

  They dared not hope. They didn’t even select a nursery from the vast number of rooms in their stately home. They chose no name. Essentially, they didn’t speak of the pregnancy at all.

  Until Emma’s water broke in the middle of one winter night.

  A blizzard had been raging all that day, and their doctor had assured them that the chances of Emma going into labor were slim. They had been three weeks from delivery, after all.

  But go into labor, she did.

  With more than a foot of snow outside, there was no hope of getting to the hospital or of emergency personnel to get to them. It was good that they hadn’t allowed themselves to become excited about the impending birth because, as they spoke of their situation, gathered necessary implements to help them, neither expected a good outcome.

  Arnold just hoped he wouldn’t also lose his wife.

  Emma’s pain had been terrible, and it had been the first time Arnold had been witness to any of the births. He thought she would surely die of it. He wanted to run, to drink himself into a stupor.

  But he was all she had.

  The Christmas holidays had just passed, and all the servants had been given leave to visit with their families. They were well and truly on their own.

  And to their amazement, a baby girl had slithered out into Arnold’s hands. To their further amazement, the child opened her eyes and then gave a hearty wail.

  He hadn’t known what to do, but some primal instinct kicked in, and he cleared the baby’s mouth and nose before putting the child on her mother’s chest. She soon began to suckle. The beauty of the memory played in Arnold’s mind in vivid detail. He remembered the color of the first rays of sunlight peeking through the drapes. But most of all, he remembered Emma’s smile.

  “Noel,” Emma said. “Can we name her that?”

  Emma c
ould have named her anything. “Yes, my love. Noel Joy.”

  It had only been a suggestion, but even as it left his mouth, it felt right. Emma beamed at him.

  “Yes, Noel Joy.”

  Three years later, Noel became a big sister, to another girl child who was born in a proper hospital with much less drama, but no less love.

  Summer Hope came out screaming and lived life just as loud.

  “I’m going to be the first female president when I get older,” Summer had declared on her tenth birthday.

  At the time, Arnold hadn’t doubted it for a second.

  His younger daughter had had a plan. Law school. Run for first political office. White House. Exactly in that order and at that speed. When she found a “suitable partner” and got married, it had surprised them all.

  His eldest, on the other hand, had one goal…to become a mother.

  Her journey to that goal had been as rocky as her own mother’s had been. Miscarriages. Stillbirths. Then Nathaniel Gabriel Jennings-Jennings came into their world.

  Noel had married a Jennings. No relation, if you please. Her younger sister had insisted she keep her maiden name, as repetitive as it was. Women’s independence and all that.

  Over the years, Nathaniel became Nate and his surname trimmed down to a single Jennings.

  Life had been good.

  Until it hadn’t.

  Until the morning they awoke to a policeman at their door, giving them the terrible news that their daughters were dead, burned alive in a chalet in Maine, where they’d gone on a joint vacation.

  Nate had survived, which had been the only glimmer of light left in their world.

  But Nate had changed.

  No longer the well-loved smiling teenager, this new Nate never smiled and only came out of his room when forced. When he learned that he wouldn’t be getting all of his inheritance in one lump sum, he’d been so angry. Scary angry. He’d broken priceless artifacts in their home, ramming his fist through dozens of Arnold’s paintings.

  Both Emma and Arnold had feared for their very lives.

  Sloane, their butler, had called for help, and Nate had been taken away, hospitalized for months.

  He’d come home even more different. Not so angry, exactly, just withdrawn.

  They hired tutors in which to homeschool him, as he refused to go to school.

  They tried therapist after therapist, prescription after prescription.

  Eventually, Nate found his own type of drug, and by the time Arnold and Emma learned of what he was doing to his body, it was too late.

  They’d lost it all. The babies. The daughters. Now, the beloved grandson was lost in a different, even more brutal fashion.

  But they had each other.

  “That will be enough,” Arnold told Emma one chilly spring morning.

  It was just one of the lies they’d told each other.

  They had become almost like robots for a while, but slowly…oh so slowly…their steps had grown lighter, their smiles more apt to appear, and Arnold thought that, maybe, just maybe, they would be okay.

  Another lie.

  Over time, Arnold threw himself back into his painting again, and Emma threw herself into her charitable work. She even hired an assistant to help her, which had pleased Arnold to no end.

  Soon after that, Nate reappeared in their lives.

  He was clean and sober, he promised. He wanted to be a good grandson again.

  And he was. For a while.

  A knock on the door startled Arnold from his ruminations, and he pushed to his feet, his knees cracking and popping as his weight left the stool.

  “Come in,” he called.

  The door opened and Arnold smiled as a tray brandishing a pot of tea appeared, along with his favorite cookies. “Thank you, Sloane.”

  The butler inclined his head. “Anything else, sir?”

  Grabbing a cookie, Arnold waved the manservant off. “That will be all.”

  Arnold was adding milk to his tea, a habit he’d picked up when he and Emma had visited London nearly five decades ago, when a voice startled him.

  His heart pounded in his chest. He raised a hand to rub at the spot as he turned and faced his new visitor. “What do you want?”

  He hadn’t meant to sound so snappish, but he deplored when people went sneaking about. And he deplored how scared he’d been for those few seconds.

  Arnold rubbed at his chest again, willing his heart to quiet its frantic movement.

  “I need a loan.”

  Arnold scoffed. “Another one? Didn’t I just give you a loan last month?”

  “It wasn’t enough.”

  Shaking his head, Arnold went to pick up his tea again, giving himself time to think.

  How had it come to this?

  Guilt? Sorrow?

  “Please…”

  The pleading in the tone had the opposite effect than he was sure was intended. It pissed him off.

  “No.”

  He felt movement behind him more than saw it. He tried not to flinch but wasn’t quite successful. “You hateful old man.”

  Sweat bloomed on his brow, trickled down his back. His chest began to throb, air refusing to fill his lungs.

  “Call the doctor,” he said, clutching at his chest.

  A laugh was his only response.

  More panicked now, Arnold knew he had to get downstairs. He had to get to Emma. A phone.

  Pushing past his visitor, he stumbled through the door and into the hallway.

  Pain seized him, almost taking him to his knees, but he refused to go down so easily.

  Making it to the bannister, he flinched as a hand came down on his shoulder. “Give me the loan, and I’ll help you.”

  With as much strength as Arnold could muster, he pulled away, and began his descent down the stairs.

  A foot appeared.

  He saw it because he’d been watching his own feet as he held on to the railing.

  Arnold gasped, and he supposed that he really shouldn’t have been that surprised.

  While all the world thought how blessed the Jennings were, Arnold knew that was yet another lie.

  The Jennings were indeed cursed.

  Arnold wanted to warn Emma, tell her that he’d been wrong all along. Tell her to be careful. To be watchful. Their home had been invaded and there was no one they could trust.

  But he was falling even as the thoughts crossed over his mind.

  It seemed to take a long time to get to the bottom. His paintings flashed across his vision, the colors blurring together.

  And as he lay at the bottom, his eyes fastened on Emma. He’d painted that one before their children’s deaths. She looked so beautiful. So free. Gazing at her brought him solace.

  The pain was incredible but mercifully short as darkness stripped him of even that small comfort.

  2

  Five years later…

  Hunt, peck. Hunt, peck.

  Life with one working hand, for lack of a more appropriate word, sucked.

  Alone in the office of Starr Investigations, downtown Asheville’s premiere full-service private investigations establishment, Kylie pushed back from the typewriter and stretched her aching back. She had a pile of background check chicken-scratch notes she’d taken over the phone that she’d been trying to transfer to some semblance of an orderly report, but her little injury was kind of getting in the way.

  Little injury. Ha.

  She had a gunshot wound in her shoulder. Thirty-eight caliber passed clear through the muscle.

  Yeah, she was badass. That’s how she rolled.

  Except now. Now that Greg Starr, her boss, had resigned her to office work. Now, in her little cardigan, ponytail, and comfy shoes, she looked about as badass as Big Bird.

  Hopefully, that was just temporary.

  Not that she wanted to field bullets on a daily basis, but she definitely didn’t want to be chained to this desk either, with Greg’s easy-listening Muzak piping through his boom box t
o keep her company. She probably looked like the world’s youngest senior citizen now, jamming out to Enya.

  Greg had said the exclusive desk work was “until her injury healed,” but she worried that he was trying to keep her out of trouble. She frowned. He even made her turn down the robbery case for a sweet little lady who’d called the other day.

  That still made her mad.

  Weeks ago, Greg promised that he’d train her to be more of a private investigator like him, instead of just his lousy assistant, but one really couldn’t be a PI while sitting behind a desk. The fingers of her lame hand itched with the desire to blow this joint and get back into doing some meatier things.

  Like, bringing down serial killers. Oh, yeah. That was another badass thing she’d done.

  This woman, the Spotlight Killer, had terrorized the entire country, wreaking havoc from Texas to North Carolina, until Kylie Hatfield, badass extraordinaire, stepped in and ended her reign of terror. Or something like that.

  Kylie’d actually heard that on an episode of Nightline. They’d made her seem so fearless, but…the truth involved a lot more of her cowering and shaking and nearly peeing her pants.

  She looked down at Vader, her goofy Newfoundland, and ruffled his fur. She couldn’t have done it without him. Him and Lincoln Coulter, her real badass of a…

  Whatever he was.

  She wasn’t really sure. He was more than her dog’s trainer, that was for sure, since they were…intimate. Boyfriend sounded so sixth grade. They hadn’t really defined it. Fuckbuddy? It definitely seemed like more than that. The last night she’d spent with him, she was pretty sure the “L” word was about to slip out of his mouth. She’d put a stop to that, real fast. Because…love. No thank you. She knew what happened when love and commitment came along. A big ole bunch of nothing.