What We May Be: An MMF Romantic Mystery Read online

  What We May Be

  Layla Reyne

  What We May Be

  Copyright © 2021 by Layla Reyne

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the copyright owner, and where permitted by law. Reviewers may quote brief passages in a review.

  Cover Design: Cate Ashwood Designs

  Cover Photography: Wander Aguiar Photography

  Developmental Editing: Edits by Kristi

  Line & Copy Editing: Susie Selva

  Proofreading: Lori Parks

  First Edition

  August, 2021

  E-Book ISBN: 978-1-7373524-0-2

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-7373524-1-9

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All person(s) depicted on the cover are model(s) used for illustrative purposes only.

  Contents

  Stay in Touch with Layla

  About this Book

  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

  Fog City Series

  An Excerpt from Prince of Killers

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Layla Reyne

  About the Author

  Stay in Touch with Layla

  Join Layla’s Lushes

  Like Layla on Facebook

  Follow Layla on Instagram

  Never Miss a New Release or Sale:

  Newsletter, BookBub, Amazon

  Binge a Layla Series:

  Fog City

  Agents Irish and Whiskey

  Trouble Brewing

  Changing Lanes

  Reading Order on Layla’s Website:

  www.laylareyne.com

  About this Book

  What we were…

  Sean found love once, with his college roommate, Trevor, and Trevor’s best friend, Charlotte.

  The missing piece, Sean made it possible for Trevor and Charlotte to find love too.

  But then Sean left and took the love with him.

  What we are…

  Now an FBI agent, Sean is back in town, ten years later, to investigate a murder.

  A case that pits him against his ex-lovers—Charlotte, a local detective, and Trevor, a literature professor sucked into the Shakespearean mystery.

  Everyone guards their hearts, but before long, desire sparks anew the feelings that burned hot a decade ago. That still burn true.

  What we may be…

  Love is within their grasp again, but as the killer escalates, it’s more than just their hearts and futures on the line.

  Sean, Charlotte, and Trevor will need to work together to solve the case.

  If they can’t, lives will be lost and pieces of their love gone for good.

  For my grandmothers,

  one a Southern storyteller, the other an English professor… the perfect storm.

  Chapter One

  Standing at the edge of the crowd in Hanover’s centuries-old cemetery, his dress shoes dusted with sand and pollen, Sean watched as two flag-covered caskets received a three-volley salute. He didn’t flinch at the gunfire—police and Bureau academy had trained that out of him—but when the Stars and Stripes were lifted and folded with snapped precision, when the long, polished caskets were lowered into the ground, his insides clenched, a flinch worse than muscles and bones could betray.

  They were gone and Sean had missed his opportunity to say goodbye, to explain, to apologize.

  To find out if the cruelest betrayal was worth the broken heart that had never healed.

  “You a friend of the family?”

  Law enforcement academies had also trained Sean to not betray his surprise at the voice immediately to his right. Never mind the training to always remain aware of his surroundings, a skill that had apparently deserted him in his grief. The uniformed officer who’d approached was white, late twenties or so with a summer sunburn that had caused the rosy skin of his too-thin nose to peel, an errant flake caught in the lashes of his light blue eyes.

  Sean smiled politely. “I went to school with Charlie and Cal.”

  The officer—Sylvan according to his badge—swiped at his eye, flicking away the bothersome flake. “HU?”

  Probably not a local, then. At a minimum, not an HU sports fan. If he’d spent much time at all in the memorabilia-filled halls of Hanover University’s baseball complex, he would have seen the pictures of Sean. Sure, ten years had given him a few more wrinkles, shorter hair, and thicker facial scruff, but he was still #10.

  “I did,” Sean answered. “But I haven’t visited in some time.”

  “You live out of town?”

  The questions were annoying—nosy digging cloaked in polite conversation, a Southern specialty that had taken Sean half his time in Hanover to get used to. Never really had, which made the irony of his career detour even more ironic. That said, Sylvan’s nosiness was warranted. To him, Sean was a stranger in the crowd. The officer was just doing his duty at the funeral of his fallen colleagues. As a fellow LEO, at least until the end of the summer, Sean respected Officer Sylvan’s commitment. As a fellow LEO, Sean also knew how to keep his answers equally polite—and vague.

  “Washington.” Not technically—yet—but that’s where he’d be living once he retired from the FBI and moved back across the ocean.

  “Nice of you to come down,” the officer said.

  “Least I could do.”

  Two days ago, his phone had rung and the voice on the other end of the line had delivered a punch to the gut so severe Sean had had to grab the closest chair to hold himself up. He’d been struggling to regain his balance ever since. He shoved his hands into his pockets and glanced back across the cemetery, through the crowd of mourners to the Henby family gravesites. “What happened?”

  After the call, he’d scoured the web for information. He’d found a few articles, then culled more detailed reports from various law enforcement channels. But an account from someone local—someone in the department—was likely to be more colorful and possibly more accurate. That’s what Sean had told himself, the rationalization he’d used to justify hopping on an eight-hour flight from Amsterdam to DC and driving six hours to Hanover, despite the razor-sharp claws of self-recrimination and regret tearing apart his insides.

  “Bust on a local drug dealer,” Sylvan said. “Charlie’s been building the case against him for years. We finally got the go-ahead to move in as part of a joint takedown with the county sheriff’s department.” He swallowed hard and dug his toe into the sandy dirt. “Someone tipped off the bad guy, though. We still got him, but one of his soldiers also got Cal and the chief.”

  The reason they were gather
ed there today. “Two fallen heroes, two decorated officers of the law, two native sons of Hanover,” the minister had said at the beginning of the service. Detective Callum Henby—Sean’s former friend and teammate and Charlie’s twin brother—and Hanover Chief of Police, Mitch Henby—the man who a decade ago had affectionately called Sean “son” and carved out a place for him in his family.

  “We’re lucky we didn’t lose Charlie too,” Sylvan added.

  Sean doubted Charlie saw it that way. He peered at Charlotte Henby through the crowd of mourners and the abundance of graveside flowers. She was seated in the front row of folding chairs, dressed in her own police blues, her dark hair pulled into a bun at the base of her neck beneath the lip of her cap, her gloved hands folded in her lap, resting atop two bouquets of red roses. She had remained stoic during the service, likewise not a flinch at the gun salute or when the uniformed officers had handed one of the folded flags to her.

  The minister concluded the service, and the family rose. Sean tore his gaze from Charlie and shifted a couple steps behind a group of officers. “The tipster?” he asked Sylvan.

  “A mole in the sheriff’s office. Behind bars too.” A faint glimmer of pride belied the officer’s sad smile. “Don’t think Charlie or Abel slept a wink until they nailed him. None of us did. We owed it to Cal and Mitch.”

  Sean chanced another glance at the gravesites. Abel Champion, Mitch’s brother-in-law, now the acting chief, was as massive and imposing as Sean remembered. He had his big hand on the shoulder of Charlie’s sister, Annie, who, folded flag clutched to her chest, sobbed in the arms of a uniformed Black man about Sylvan’s age. Abel’s worried gaze, though, was on Charlie, who knelt between the graves and tossed a bouquet of roses into each. He shot a concerned look over her head, toward the final member of the gathered family.

  Trevor Caldwell, his dirty-blond locks in a knot, his broad shoulders straining the seams of his jacket, gave Abel a sharp shake of his head. Abel let whatever he wanted to say to Charlie go, knowing as well as Sean did that Trevor read her best. They’d been thick as thieves since childhood, the too-smart kid from the wrong side of the tracks and the police chief’s daughter. Trevor had always understood what Charlie needed better than anyone.

  “I didn’t catch your name?” Sylvan said, snapping Sean’s mind out of the past and back to the present.

  “Shane,” he replied, the alias easily rolling off his tongue. He held out a hand. “And yours, Officer Sylvan?”

  “Wallace.” The young man smiled wider as he returned the handshake. “There’s a reception back at the station. You should swing by. I’m sure Charlie would love to see you.” Sean doubted that too, but he smiled and nodded anyway. “You remember where it is?”

  How could he forget? “I do. Thanks.”

  Sylvan wished him a good day, then snaked through the rows of graves to pay his respects. Sean tracked his every step, wishing he could do the same. He owed the Henby family so much more.

  Caught in a web of grief and wishful thinking, Sean’s training faltered once more, and he missed the shift of the parting crowd. Missed moving out of view of a pair of hazel eyes that stared across the distance at him. Sean held the piercing gaze, not bothering to hide the regret and guilt that threatened to gut him. Trevor had always been able to read him too, better than anyone.

  Sean sat in his parked rental, staring out the windshield at the For Sale sign in the front yard of the place he used to call home. His chest ached, quite a feat after the beating his heart had taken on his drive through town after leaving the cemetery. Hanover, North Carolina, had changed over the past ten years. The red-brick station house and the cluster of matching government buildings remained intact, but they’d been expanded with multiple annexes. Crowds still lingered outside the downtown barbecue joint and the dive bar by the pier, but so many of the other local places he used to frequent were gone, their storefronts either empty or replaced by national retailers. None of those heartbreaks, however, compared to the parking deck on campus where his beloved baseball diamond used to stand. A shiny new ballpark had been built in the shiny new sports complex across campus. Maybe there weren’t any vestiges of #10 left for Officer Sylvan to find. Once the gray-and-white clapboard house was sold, would there be any evidence left of the best five years of Sean’s life?

  Charlie and Cal had inherited the beach house when their mother, Alice, had died in a car accident their senior year of high school. Mitch, then deputy chief, had moved into town to be closer to the station and to Annie’s middle school. But Charlie hadn’t wanted to part with her childhood home. The summer after their sophomore year at HU, Charlie had moved back in, bringing Trevor and Sean with her and making the house their home. Three years later, Sean had abandoned that home—and their future.

  He worried what it said now that Charlie was selling the house. Their history aside, she had cherished the house because it kept Alice close, even after her passing. Had Charlie learned the truth about the night her mother died? The truth Sean had stayed away to help keep buried? Knowing it, were the memories—the lies—too painful for Charlie to bear? Or was she simply moving on, leaving the last vestige of their lost future behind?

  Sean wondered if Trevor had made a pitch to keep the house or if he was ready to move on too. Trevor had already tried to move on once and failed—a marriage to and recent divorce from a nurse in town. Maybe Trevor, like Charlie, needed to cut all the ties to their past in order to have any chance at a different future. Or maybe Trevor and Charlie were finally moving on together. That’s what Sean had hoped. It had devastated him to learn his hope had been for naught. Or God help them all, were Charlie and Trevor, lifelong best friends, also going their separate ways? Sean didn’t think that was possible, not for two people so in sync and not after what he’d seen at the cemetery that afternoon, but he hadn’t thought Charlie would ever sell the beach house either.

  He swallowed down the upset the swirling worst-case scenarios caused and focused instead on the vintage Mustang parked next to an F-350 truck under the house between the stilts. The former was familiar, Charlie’s cherry-red ride all through college. In a way, so was the latter, a mega-sized version of the beat-up truck Trevor used to drive. After a day like today, Charlie and Trevor were as helpless as he was to resist the call of this place.

  Shoving open the car door, Sean angled his long legs out of the too-small rental and planted his feet on the sand and gravel driveway. He kicked the door shut behind him and leaned back against it, rolling up his shirtsleeves, closing his eyes, and inhaling the heavy, summer sea breeze. Working at The Hague, living in an apartment near the North Sea, he’d frequently catch whiffs of salt-tinged air, but it was never as strong as it was here on the North Carolina coast. He’d found it oppressive at first, but over time he’d come to appreciate the enveloping nature of it, the warmth and comfort it offered. In a way, it represented everything good about his life in Hanover before he’d deserted it.

  “Mr. Anderson.”

  Sean smiled at the use of his rarely spoken first name. He shied away from it—the memories of his namesake painful—but Trevor teasing him with it in a faux-Matrix voice had always made him laugh, had eased the pain.

  “Saw you at the cemetery,” Trevor continued, speaking normally. “Thought you were a figment of my imagination.”

  Sean savored the richness of Trevor’s accent. Another clue that Officer Sylvan from the cemetery wasn’t local. He lacked the low country accent that was a unique blend of Southern drawl and Elizabethan-era English, totally unlike anything Sean had ever heard outside the coastal counties.

  He opened his eyes and looked up at the house, drinking in the sight of the teammate and roommate he’d fallen for all those years ago. Trevor stood with a muscled shoulder propped against a porch pillar. In the hours since the funeral, he’d traded his dark suit for cargo shorts and a faded HU tee that hugged his broad chest and cut upper arms, and he’d untied his hair, the long strands tangling with
each breeze that lifted it around his angular face, made more so by the sharp lines of his beard.

  His hazel eyes were hard, though, as was his expression. “You shouldn’t be here.” He looked like one of the Smiths, ready to vault over the rail, miraculously land the jump, and beat the shit out of him. He’d only ever seen Trevor throw that look at opposing teams, never at him. Trevor had always been the romantic of their trio, the English lit nerd who spent his days studying sonnets, poems, and plays. Trevor had also been Charlie’s fiercest ally. The protector was pummeling the romantic today.

  Sean couldn’t blame him one bit. “I just wanted to pay my respects.”

  “You should’ve sent flowers. Anonymously.”

  “Trev—”

  “No!” The splintering crack of that one word was like a well-hit line drive off Trevor’s bat. Sean didn’t doubt that if he were in reach, Trevor’s fist would have connected with his face, same as his ball often had the bat. “She’s hurting enough.”

  “Damage is done,” Charlie interjected. She appeared at Trevor’s side and leaned a hip against the wraparound deck’s railing. She was similarly dressed down in a pair of cut-off denim shorts and a black lacy tank top. Her hair was down too, the same shoulder length she’d always worn it, the same dark brown that was nearly as black as her eyes, as far as possible from Trevor’s every-color hazel. They were a perfect complement, the two of them impossibly more beautiful at thirty-three than they had been at twenty-three.