Smoke

By Leigh Macfarlane

After recognizing a killer at the law office where she is employed, Jen is on the run from Vancouver, British Columbia, to the Interior city of Kelowna. BC. There, she hopes to hide out and stay alive long enough to come up with a survival plan. Her friend, Constance, runs the local contemporary art gallery, and Constance is busy getting ready for the opening of environmental artist, Matt Collier's newest show. As if Collier's opening wasn't keeping her busy enough, Constance's boss saddles her with Chad Jones, a new gallery intern. Every time Constance is in proximity with the ruggedly attractive newcomer, it's not art that is on her mind. Even without the attraction she's struggling to control, Chad's arrival complicates an already stressful time for Constance, because Matt Collier's show is probably the most important moment of her career. Having Collier at the gallery is a coup, even if it means dealing with protestors on the doorstep and death threats on the phone, and Constance needs to keep her mind on the work at hand. When a local community patrol officer discovers the body of a badly beaten woman with ties to solar energy behind the gallery, local police worry there might be a connection to Collier's opening. When the resemblance between the dead woman and Constance are observed, authorities wonder if the death was a case of mistaken identity. Was Constance the killer's intended target? The Canadian art scene and pipeline debate collide in this novella, and lives are forever changed. Smoke keeps readerts glued to the page, desperate to know what happens next.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Leigh Macfarlane
• Release date: Apr 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9781999106201

Leigh Macfarlane

Leigh Macfarlane is a proud Canadian (eh!) author of both fiction and non-fiction books who is fortunate enough to live in California North -- the gorgeous Okanagan Valley of British Columbia. Since Leigh already lives in one of the most beautiful places in the world, many of her novels are set locally. In Leigh's books you will be transported to orchards, vineyards, ski hills, ranches, beaches, art galleries, athletic fields and waterfront cafes.Well, maybe not ski hills. Rumour has it Leigh is afraid to drive in the snow.Where heroes are concerned, I love me a cowboy, or a guy who can fix a car, a fearless protector type, or a studious professor with a sharp mind, the soft touch daddy, or a hard-body with a soft-heart. Sometimes I love me a bad boy, but I'm working on it. Just as long as he is good to his woman and cares about the world around him, I'm in.My heroines might be clutzy, or chubby, still figuring life out, or they might just have swollen bank accounts and be living the high life. Either way, my ladies are real women who appreciate life, laughter, beauty, family, puppies, chocolate, and especially the love of a strong man.When not writing, Leigh is mom to four wonderful, not so small, humans, one yap-monster dog, a gorgeous but aging cat and a fish whose quality of life appears to be declining. Once, Leigh fell off a horse, wrapped the back of her knee around a telephone pole, had horse liniment applied to her injury, and was proclaimed part horse by the race horse trainer who had fixed her up. To date, this claim has not been proven false.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is strictly coincidental.

Copyright © 2019 Leigh Macfarlane

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review.

First Edition April 2019

ISBN (ebook): 978-1-9991062-0-1

Published by LMCreative

British Columbia, Canada

Table of Contents

Copyright

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Coming Soon Excerpt

Follow the Author

About the Author

Where there’s smoke there’s fire.

Chapter One

Bastard.

Jen could hear him. He was still there. The crashing in the brush behind her was even louder than the sounds made by her own mad flight through the woods. She was two minutes away from civilization. This just couldn’t be happening, not here.

Stanley Park was one of the biggest city parks in Canada, but it sure sounded like the psycho chasing her was getting nearer. Any minute now, he was going to have her.

No chance.

She was moving again, sprinting down a path buried somewhere in the centre of the park. Jen had known precisely where she was when she’d first spotted him, but she’d lost track of her exact location a long time ago. Now, the wind that had been blowing against her while she was jogging the seawall was picking up, and the sky had made a couple of moves beyond dusk. At this point, Jen had no choice but to keep dashing through the darkening forest, hurdling the deadfall and hoping to recognize one of the landmarks soon.

On any ordinary day she would have been safer if she’d stayed on the seawall and out of the forest. With the storm warning, though, the park was deserted. No one was around to help her. And she couldn’t outrun him on the flat. Jen had dashed into the woods, knowing exactly where she was and how she was planning to elude him.

And then Tony had made that single shattering scream, and had dropped, a literal dead weight at the end of his nylon leash. There had been no sound of a shot, but the evidence lay at her feet. Tony lay prone, blood draining from his inert form. Someone had just shot and killed her three-year old Rottweiler.

Don’t cry. Don’t cry.

There was no time for tears. If the guy was good enough to get a clear shot of her dog, he could easily get a clear shot of her. With limited options, Jen veered off the trail and into the relative cover of the bush.

She ran until she couldn’t hear him anymore. But then, she couldn’t hear anything -- not even the sounds of her own lungs sucking air past the razor blades in her throat. Sound had ceased to exist other than the screaming wind that was whipping the tops of trees like toothpicks in a cyclone. Even inside the relative shelter of the forest, Jen had to bend almost double to brace against the force of the wind. She really couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of her. The forest had become a dense, disorienting, undulating mass of darkness, and she was staggering around like a drunk inside the bowels of night, trying not to let the freaky wind blow her off her feet.

Her dog – damn it! – was dead. She was seriously out of her element, and some lunatic hired gun was chasing her, and was, she was pretty sure, fully intent on killing her.

Not good. So not good.

The wind whipped at her hair, stung her eyes, and for just a moment, Jen stopped running. She bent over at the waist, wobbled, braced her hands against her quadriceps. Her gut cramped. Violently, Jen vomited into the ferns.

The skies took that as a sign to open up. Jen straightened, pressed her back into the trunk of a spruce tree, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Then she pushed off again, running against a freezing November rain that dumped heavily enough to penetrate the thickets of the woods in slashing streams.

It was full dark now, and Jen was all but blind. Still, she heard the horrific crack and the crash as a young pine tree toppled, hitting the ground with a thud so near that it jarred her all the way up her spine. Instinctively, she jumped left.

The toe of her Nike trainers connected hard with something solid. Jen staggered sideways, and her foot landed halfway across a rut on the path. Her heel sank down into a bed of wet slime, and her ankle simply collapsed into itself. Pain shot up her leg.

Disoriented, Jen took a step into the dark. Her foot slid in mud churned up by the rain. Jen hissed in pain as she pitched forward, the sound lost in a racket of storm. She never saw the tree before she hit. With a thick, heavy thwack, her forehead connected. Flight ended.

Jen crumpled heavily – lights out. Unconscious and still, she lay defenseless, nothing more than a small, slight pile on the floor of a heaving forest.

Chapter Two

Sam’s loafers squeaked slightly as he walked down the gallery hallway. Constance didn’t look up. She wouldn’t give him that satisfaction even though it was the third time he’d travelled that route today. Each time he had paused, peered into the gallery space, and scanned the interior office where she sat at her desk working. Each time, she had kept her head studiously down, avoiding eye contact. The sound his shoes made wasn’t loud enough to disturb her. His silent, distant stare was.

When the squeaking started up again, she lifted her head, allowed herself the luxury of staring at his back as his navy suit jacket disappeared down the corridor. She sighed internally, wished just for a moment that things had gone better on last night’s date. Maybe then she wouldn’t find herself in this predicament.

Clearly, Sam was feeling it, too, the awkwardness of the morning after. It just figured, Constance thought, that the one time she broke her own rule and got involved with someone from work, it would turn out to be the most tepid sexual encounter of her life. With all she and Sam had in common, their lack of chemistry was a bit of a shocker.

Of course, it was true that ever since she’d gotten Lauren’s email, she’d been off. Which meant, maybe she should stop avoiding Sam and give the man a second chance. Staring off into space, Constance considered the idea, then jumped when the knock sounded outside her office door.

Ms. DuBois?

Yes? Constance said, May I help you?

I’m Chad Jones.

The man standing outside her office door was over six feet of solid muscle, with waves of brown hair curling over one eyebrow. His eyes were the colour of melted chocolate, his jawline covered in stubble. And one look was all it took for Constance to know that here was a man who’d never had a bad sexual night in his life.

You’re Chad Jones? she said, You’re my new intern?

Yes ma’am.

She stared at him a moment longer. He wore stonewashed denim jeans, belted, and a long-sleeved black t-shirt that hugged his body. The shirt stretched snugly across his broad shoulders in a way that made a little bit of drool pool in the back of Constance’s throat. Hoping her pale skin wasn’t giving her reaction to him away, she stood from behind the desk and held out her hand. His, when they shook, was calloused and strong, and seemed to dwarf her own.

Good to meet you, Chad, she said, proud that her voice, at least, sounded even and composed. When she smiled, the dimple in her left cheek winked out at him, but even then, the little worry line in her forehead didn’t completely fade away.

I get the feeling I wasn’t what you were expecting.

Oh. No. She shrugged his words off, denial in her tone. Jerking her head in a way that bobbed the honey-coloured bun which was her hair’s morning-after-the-night-before look, she said, I’m glad you’re here. Dr. Ranney just led me to believe you wouldn’t be here until later this afternoon.

I can come back if that would be better.

No, of course not. Come on in.

She bit her lower lip, a bad habit, and hoped she hadn’t sounded as formal and stilted as she suspected she had. Dr. Ranney had told her he’d hired his nephew, Chad, to intern with the gallery. But nothing James had said could have prepared her for the man standing in front of her.

Ms. DuBois?

Mmm?

You’re staring.

Oh. She felt the blush flame across her neck and cheeks and knew she wouldn’t get away with it this time. Sorry. I was just… I don’t see much family resemblance between James and yourself.

I’ve been told I take after my father’s side of the family.

Ah. Well.

Still flustered, Constance left the thought hanging, and wondered if she could blame this embarrassing lack of sophistication on her largely sleepless and utterly disappointing evening with Sam. Meeting the boss’ nephew and making a fool of oneself seemed to qualify as just one more reason to avoid office romance -- and boring sex.

As if on que, Constance heard the squeaking start up in the hallway. This time, though, Sam didn’t merely stand at the doorway and wait. He entered, walking up to Chad. Rather, he walked past Chad and sidled up to Constance then, standing beside her as if to convey that they were some kind of unit, he turned and offered the taller, fitter, hotter man his hand.

Sam Wallace, he said as their hands clasped. His tone was mild, and yet somehow Constance felt like he’d just slapped a big, fat No Trespassing sign across her chest. His words might have said, Hello, can I help you, but his tone said, Back off, I’ve seen her naked, and you’re not going to.

Chad Jones, her new assistant said, shaking hands with Sam in an entirely neutral fashion. But his eyes cut from Sam to Constance and a corner of his lip quirked up slightly as if to say, You? With him?

Her cheeks were burning again. Constance knew they’d be streaked with a flame of red. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been the subject of this much non-verbal communication. Fighting the urge to side-step until there was extra distance between herself and Sam, Constance breathed deeply, and straightened her spine.

Which may have been a mistake, given the way both sets of male eyes drifted to her chest before rebounding to her face.

Constance mentally rolled her eyes. Yes, her breasts were ample. She did her best to dress them down because there was nothing like hauling around a set of double D’s in a professional environment to skew the world’s