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  Deadly Noel

  Number V of Strong Women, Extraordinary Situations

  Margaret Daley

  (2015)

  * * *

  Tags: Romance

  Romancettt

  District attorney, Kira Davis, convicted the wrong man—Gabriel Michaels, a single dad with a young daughter. When new evidence was brought forth, his conviction was overturned, and Gabriel returned home to his ranch to put his life back together. Although Gabriel is free, the murderer of his wife is still out there and resumes killing women. In a desperate alliance, Kira and Gabriel join forces to find the true identity of the person terrorizing their town. Will they be able to forgive the past and find the killer before it's too late?

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Strong Women, Extraordinary Situations Series

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Dear Reader

  About the Author

  DEADLY HUNT Excerpt

  DEADLY INTENT Excerpt

  DEADLY HOLIDAY Excerpt

  DEADLY COUNTDOWN Excerpt

  DEADLY DOSE Excerpt

  RODEO KNIGHTS Series

  DEADLY NOEL

  Strong Women, Extraordinary Situations

  Book Five

  by Margaret Daley

  Deadly Noel

  Copyright © 2015 by Margaret Daley

  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 permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  All texts contained within this document are a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons (living or dead), is entirely coincidental.

  Strong Women, Extraordinary Situations Series

  Deadly Hunt, Book 1

  Deadly Intent, Book 2

  Deadly Holiday, Book 3

  Deadly Countdown, Book 4

  Deadly Noel, Book 5

  Deadly Dose, Book 6 (Spring 2016)

  Chapter One

  Someone was watching her. She could feel it.

  Kira Davis lifted her gaze to scan the grocery aisles in front of her. Nothing. She slowly turned. Her heartbeat accelerated, her palms damp with perspiration.

  That was when she saw him. He leaned back against the counter, his jean clad legs crossed at the ankles, his arms folded over his chest. His silver-tarnished gaze drilled into her. Beneath his black Stetson, his expression was hard, unrelenting—dangerous. Three words that applicably described Gabriel Michaels, a man she’d sent to prison.

  Help! He’s after me.

  Gabriel is…

  Marcie screamed. The line went dead.

  Her best friend’s slurred plea, left on Kira’s voicemail the day Marcie died, echoed through her mind, throwing her back to the day the nightmare began, the town still locked in its grip.

  Gabriel pushed away from the counter and sauntered toward her. She hadn’t thought it possible for her heart to increase its rapid beat, but it did. Dizzy, she gripped her shopping cart, determined to stand her ground. Fear tangled with an emotion she couldn’t quite define as the man approached her.

  His frosty gaze pierced through her as though she didn’t exist.

  Her mouth went dry.

  She stiffened and swallowed several times, her chin tilted at a defiant angle while she returned his intense look. Her determination not to be intimidated solidified in the pit of her stomach.

  She would never forget how he had looked at her the day the judge had pronounced his sentence. Gabriel had swung around, his gray eyes locking with hers across the short distance in the courtroom. Nothing, no one else mattered. She was alone in the world, stripped of all civilization, only the essence of life at its primeval core important. That was the moment she’d begun to doubt the verdict, although she was the county assistant district attorney in Pinecrest, Oklahoma.

  Gabriel said nothing as he passed her and headed for the checkout.

  Her throat burning, Kira stared at his broad back, his narrow waist, his long legs that went well with his six-and-a-half foot frame. The black T-shirt he wore even though it was December revealed his muscular arms and build. In the years she’d known him, he’d never been bothered by the cold whereas she hated winter and its bleakness. He seemed to thrive in it.

  Her legs buckled. Her grip on the cart tightened while she sucked in deep breaths to calm the thundering beat of her heart.

  “Why, Gabriel, it’s good to see you’re back,” the woman at the checkout counter said while ringing up his three items.

  “Thanks, Mary Lou. That’s the friendliest welcome I’ve gotten since I returned a few days ago.”

  “Well, you know how some people in this town can be.”

  Gabriel pocketed his change. “So true.”

  “I knew you could never have done those awful things they accused you of.” Mary Lou hunched her shoulders as though a blast of cold swept into the grocery store. “But to think the person responsible is still out there.” She waved her hand toward the street.” I never used to lock my doors at night, but I bought deadbolts for all my doors when those three bodies were found. And I still don’t feel safe.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be caught soon. We have such a good police force in Pinecrest.” He slid his sharp, accusing look toward Kira.

  She still stood a few feet from the checkout aisle, not having moved a foot since she’d seen him. He let his gaze travel down her length inch by slow inch before it came back to rest on her face, trapping her as if he had the ability to paralyze her. She tried to muster her anger at his intimidating techniques, but she couldn’t. She was responsible for putting him falsely in prison for eight months.

  “Don’t be a stranger.” Mary Lou smiled, two dimples appearing.

  Gabriel took the plastic bag from Mary Lou. “I’m not going anywhere. Pinecrest is my home.”

  Kira shivered. The words sounded like a threat directed at her.

  He tipped his black cowboy hat at Mary Lou then turned his full attention on Kira. “Afternoon, Miss Davis.” He nodded toward her, sending her a long look as hot and edgy as a western Oklahoma summer.

  He walked from the grocery store and climbed into his black pickup, his stride belying the leashed power beneath the surface.

  He had a right to hate her. She’d gone after him with a vengeance at the murder trial of her best friend, Marcie. At the time, she’d thought it justified vengeance.

  Kira finally steered her cart to the checkout aisle and began placing her groceries on the conveyor belt. She’d only been doing her job, prosecuting Gabriel Michaels for second-degree murder. But seeing him, knowing he had just been released from prison, brought all the guilt she’d felt to the foreground. Two more women who’d gone missing during Gabriel’s incarceration were found buried in separate graves alongside Marcie with the accompanying note: Stop me.

  “Paper or plastic?”

  Kira blinked. “What?”

  “Do you want paper or plastic for your groceries?”

  “I guess—paper, please.” Kira tried to ignore the tightness in Mary Lou’s voice, but it was hard to overlook the narrowed eyes, the tense mouth set in a frown.

  “I don’t know how you sleep at night, Kira Davis. First, you convict the wrong man. You take him away from his daughter. And now, a maniac is running ar
ound murdering women and taunting you. It’s not right! You should have prosecuted the right person last spring for Marcie’s murder. Shirley and Rebecca would be alive today.”

  In the background, Christmas music played over the PA system, making a mockery of the exchange. There was nothing peaceful and uplifting about being hated by certain people in town while a madman continued to terrorize it.

  A dull ache behind Kira’s eyes throbbed. The muscles in her neck grew taut and hard. “The police are doing their best.”

  Mary Lou snorted. “Well, that ain’t good enough. Thankfully, at least Gabriel was in prison when the other murders occurred, or I’m sure you would have arrested him for those deaths, too.” The cashier sacked the groceries with no regard to how she placed them in the paper bag.

  Kira closed her eyes, hoping that would quiet the pounding against her skull. It didn’t. Pinecrest, the county seat, was a nice, peaceful town of twenty thousand. Murder and rape weren’t supposed to happen here. But they had—three times in the past eleven months.

  “That’ll be fifty-two dollars and twenty-three cents.”

  Wanting to escape Mary Lou’s wrath, Kira quickly swiped her credit card and signed in the little black box. As she walked away, Kira realized it would be hard to escape something she felt each waking moment since the nightmare began almost a year ago with Marcie’s disappearance. Remembering the sight of what had to be the murder scene nauseated her then and now. Blood everywhere. Although there wasn’t a body, the blood was her best friend’s and the medical examiner ruled there was no way she could have survived.

  Until a few weeks ago, uncertainty plagued her when she remembered how Gabriel looked at her in the courtroom. Now there was no doubt. He’d been innocent in spite of the phone call from Marcie about Gabriel coming after her. Then there was Marcie’s blood on his shirt and in the sink as though he tried to clean up before taking Marcie from her house.

  When Kira left the grocery store, she surveyed the main street that ran through Pinecrest, studying the people around her as if that would help discern who was really responsible for murdering three women. She and the police had already made one mistake and sent the wrong man to prison. She couldn’t afford to make that kind of mistake again. It cost two additional women their lives since Marcie’s disappearance/murder. Their deaths were on her conscience, and no amount of reasoning on her part could change the fact she felt responsible for the present situation.

  She placed the three grocery bags on the front seat of her Chevy then rounded the hood and slipped behind the steering wheel. The tension produced with Gabriel’s return dug deep. She’d heard three days earlier he was back. She’d hoped to avoid him because she didn’t know what to say. She usually never ran from a difficult situation, but what could she say to the innocent man she’d sent to prison?

  Is I’m sorry enough?

  Kira pulled into the steady stream of five o’clock traffic and headed home. All she wanted to do was soak in a hot bath and try washing away her worries. Of course, nothing she did would alter what was happening in Pinecrest now. That was the worst part, the hopelessness she felt in the face of this madman who lived to taunt her and the police with their mistakes.

  When she turned down her street, her grandmother’s old Cadillac sat at the curb. She groaned, knowing the hot bath would have to wait. After a frustrating day in court, she wasn’t sure she could handle a frustrating conversation with Grams, whose one goal in life was to see her granddaughter married and pregnant.

  Kira was lifting the groceries from her front seat when Grams approached, taking one sack from her. By the determined look in her grandmother’s eyes, she knew this would be a long evening.

  “My dear, I hadn’t heard from you in a couple of days, and I got worried.”

  “There’s no need to worry, Grams.”

  “Worry! Child, there’s a killer running around Pinecrest, murdering beautiful girls. You fall into that category. I wish you would move in with me until this—this lunatic is caught.”

  “We’d cramp each other’s style.”

  “In other words, you like your freedom. No ties. No commitments.”

  Every conversation in the past couple of years with her grandmother had always come around to the subject of marriage. Kira sighed and shifted the bags so she could open the front door. “One disastrous marriage was enough for me. I don’t hate men, Grams. I just don’t want to get tied down to one again.” Kira set the two bags on the kitchen counter and started putting her groceries away. “Can’t you just accept that and move on?”

  “No, child. I’m not giving up on you even if you have on yourself. Somewhere there’s a man who’s perfect for you.” She patted her chest over her heart. “I know it in here.”

  “My soul mate?” Kira couldn’t contain her laugh. Ever since she could remember, her grandmother had filled her head with notions that there was one man in this world who was Kira’s other half. Grams had found such a man, and she thought everyone else could, too. It didn’t put her grandmother off that her own daughter had been married three times and was working on her fourth.

  “Don’t be so cynical. Jonathan wasn’t that man. I told you that when you married him.”

  “Yeah, after the wedding. That was a little late.” But even if her grandmother had said anything before the wedding, that wouldn’t have stopped her from marrying Jonathan Bennett. She had thought herself deeply in love until he’d hit her.

  “I couldn’t say anything because y’all eloped, and I didn’t really know the young man until later.” Her grandmother opened the refrigerator door and slipped in the quart of milk. “At least one good thing came out of your split-up.”

  Kira stiffened, memories of the ugly divorce, the trauma she had endured, sweeping through her mind like a sandstorm. She couldn’t imagine anything good coming from her failed marriage.

  “Child, don’t look at me as if I’ve grown two heads. You finally came home. I call that a good thing even if you don’t.”

  “Home is good,” Kira murmured then remembered the women’s mutilated bodies the police found several weeks ago.

  “You left Pinecrest so fast after you graduated from high school that I think my head actually spun.”

  The visual image of her grandmother’s head spinning brought a short laugh to Kira. “Nothing rattles you, Grams.”

  “You’re a pretty tough cookie yourself.”

  “Not as tough as I would like.”

  “What’s bothering you? The murders?”

  Kira finished placing the canned goods in the cabinet and closed the door. She faced her grandmother. “Yes—no.”

  “Which is it?”

  “The it is a man. Gabriel Michaels to be exact. I saw him today.”

  “Oh my, child, that might rattle even me. What did he say to you?”

  “‘Afternoon, Miss Davis.’”

  “That’s all?”

  “He didn’t have to say anything else. He said it all with his eyes.” The most compelling gray eyes. Kira recalled how he had looked so intently, heatedly at her in the grocery store. Just the remembrance brought a tightening in her stomach.

  “If my memory serves me right, he’s one handsome fella.”

  “Your memory is as sharp as ever. Nothing much gets by you.”

  “Have you told the man you’re sorry?”

  “I was doing my job.” Her legs suddenly giving out on her, Kira sat at the kitchen table. The day had been too long and tension-filled.

  Her grandmother took the chair opposite Kira. “True. But maybe that boy needs to hear from you. I imagine that whole affair nearly destroyed his life.”

  “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  “How about with I’m sorry? Nothing fancy. Keep it simple.”

  “Grams, life isn’t simple.”

  “Sure it is. You’re born. You live. You die. Nothing’s simpler than that. He may need to hear the words from you, but more importantly, I think you need to say t
hose words to him. Ever since the bodies were found, you’ve been beating yourself up over this whole affair. Go to him. Tell him you’re sorry.”

  The thought of facing Gabriel Michaels made Kira’s heart slow to a painful throb. Beads of sweat popped out on her forehead. She swiped them away with a shaky hand. She’d never been a coward—until now. “I guess I could go see him at his ranch tomorrow.”

  * * *

  Gabriel sat at his office desk at his ranch, staring out the window at the landscape some would say was almost barren, bleak. But he felt a kinship with this semi-arid land, an appreciation for its raw beauty. He was home and didn’t ever intend to leave again.

  Thank You, Lord, for freeing me from prison.

  He closed his eyes and tried to focus on the present. Christmas would be in three weeks. He’d be here to enjoy it with his eight-year-old daughter, Abbey, and his sister, Jessie, not in…Memories of the past months threatened what little peace he had achieved since coming home. He’d been doing fine until he saw Kira Davis yesterday at the grocery store.

  They had known each other for years, especially after he married her best friend. But when it came to believing him about his wife’s disappearance, she couldn’t. Yes, he had Marcie’s blood on his shirt because she came at him with a knife. He finally managed to wrestle it away but not before he was cut in several places in the struggle. They had been in the kitchen. He quickly washed his hands and wrapped one in a towel.

  When Marcie turned toward him, she was on her cell. He’d intended to leave until she settled down, but then he saw her bleeding palm, blood dripping from it. He wanted to check it because she’d been drinking, but she screamed and attacked him again, her long fingernails gouging his upper arm, ripping his T-shirt. He hurried from the place with her yelling obscenities. She was very much alive when he pulled away from the house she’d lived in since their separation. And he didn’t come back a couple of hours later, as the police thought, and kill his wife then get rid of her body.