Uncovered by Linda Winfree

want the one who lived underneath that front. That one was a mess, and she didn’t make anyone a good friend.
    That one didn’t make a good anything for anyone.
    “Mad.”
    The diminutive hit her, hard. She stepped farther backward. “Don’t call me that, please.”
    “Okay.” His hands were up now, his voice quiet, his eyes watchful. The posture was familiar. She’d seen it on dozens of cops over the years, had even used it herself. That was the dealing-with-the-crazy-unpredictable-person stance. “Can you calm down and tell me what’s up?”
    “I am calm.” She was, icily so, a shiver moving over her cold skin. “And I need to get out of here. I have to get ready for work.”
    “All right.” He nodded, a slow, even movement. “So how about dinner tonight and we’ll talk then?”
    Dinner tonight and she’d fuck him again, he meant. She’d let enough men use her over the years to not get that implication. She threw back her shoulders. “I don’t think so.”
    “Madeline—”
    “I said no. You’ve had your one free ride, Hardison.”
    His face went white, eyes burning at the insult. His mouth tightened, and she could literally feel the way he was biting back words. She narrowed her eyes, willing him to spit them out, to give her a reason to leave in anger and not look back.
    She was good at that.
    “Okay.” His curt tone didn’t quite cover the sizzling anger underneath. “Call me if you change your mind.”
    “Yeah.” She snagged her purse and moved toward the door. “Goodbye, Hardison.”

    The woman was crazy.
    From the back of his truck, Ash tossed another bag of fertilizer on the stack in the barn. Absolutely-fucking-insane. Awful close to ex-wife nuts, except he’d never met anyone who really approached Suzanne’s level of sheer malevolent lunacy.
    He paused and pushed his cap back, rubbed his wrist over his forehead. As wild as Madeline’s behavior and mood swings were, he couldn’t call her crazy, not really.
    Hurting and desperate, maybe.
    Hell, he knew what that felt like, when everything, including his actions and emotions, had been scarily out of control. Thank God for Stanton, who’d been steady and on-hand, pulling him back from the edge of self-destruction.
    Who was going to pull Madeline back?
    “Not you.” He spoke aloud. His hand pulsed with needles of pain, and he shook it lightly. “You’re not in the fixing-people business, remember?”
    The barn cat looked up from her lazy self-bathing and eyed him like he’d gone over the deep end. He jumped down from the truck bed and pulled the last bag, hefted it to his shoulder, carried it to the neat stack. Along the way, he addressed the cat again.
    “That’s right. I’m not getting involved, or I’ll be crazy too.”
    The cat yawned and held up one paw for a good lick.
    “Exactly. Like the lady said, she doesn’t want a man in her life right now. Not even as a friend.”
    Which was probably what she needed more than anything. Hadn’t he sensed the loneliness that hung around her?
    The cat extended in a drowsy motion and curled around to groom her back.
    “I’m done.” Ash tucked his gloves in his pocket and propped his hands on his hips. The cat ignored him. “She doesn’t want to tell me what’s going on, that’s fine. I don’t need to know anyway, right? Because there’s nothing between us.”
    Rising into an arched stretch, the car meowed once and slinked off into the shadows.
    “Right.” Ash sighed, defeat heavy in him. He reached for the cell phone clipped to his belt. Maybe Tick was free for lunch.

    Madeline gnawed the inside of her bottom lip until it hurt. Nearly twenty years later, she could still navigate the back roads to Moultrie with her eyes closed. The thirty-minute drive to the crime lab gave her too much time to think and she really wished Tick would pick a fight, so she’d have an excuse not to reflect. Instead, he sat silent in the passenger seat, reading through a fat file of ancient