“Preacher and Paige are getting dinner ready.”

“Are we alone?”

“Yeah.” He shoved his hat back, took his feet off the rail and put them on the wood planks of the porch, turning toward her. He rested his elbows on his knees and leaned forward. “What’s the matter? You don’t look too happy.”

“Let me ask you something. Just how much of a cop do you intend to be around here? What if I suspected a possible problem? Could you look into it? Maybe investigate?”

“Well, I have detective experience, but I’m used to having a crime lab to back me up.” He grinned. “I used to belong to the biggest gang in L.A.”

“Gang?”

“LAPD. Lotta backup there. Want to lay it on me?”

She took a breath. “Understand, I can’t give you names or evidence—just a real strong intuitive hunch. And I’ve been doing this awhile.”

“Shoot.”

She looked into his coal-black eyes. “I’m worried that we have a date raper. A kid, I think. I’ve had two girls who were clearly forced—neither willing or able to admit it. The scenarios were different, but there were some alarming similarities.”

“Go on,” he said, encouraging her to continue.

“The first came to me for emergency birth control. She said that she and her boyfriend of a whole two weeks had decided to have sex and at the last minute she lost her nerve, but he couldn’t stop. She was bruised. Held down. Her vagina was ragged and torn. She was visibly upset. But she absolutely insists she was not forced.

“The second one went to a kegger somewhere around town—her first drinking party, though she admits to having a beer or two before. She passed out and didn’t remember having sex, but missed two periods and took a home pregnancy test and told her mother what had happened. The kids at the party were all drunk, she said, and no one remembered anything….”

“Yeah, right,” he said.

“I explained that to her—that in order to have successful intercourse, it was very likely one of them wasn’t too drunk.”

“Very likely? I thought that was a law of nature,” Mike said.

“I thought it was, too,” she said. “It was obviously too late to detect damage or bruising—but she said she’d been very sore all over, especially on her chest.” She laid her hand on her own sternum. “As if hit in the chest with a basketball.”

“Possibly held down as she struggled,” he supplied. “What about bruising on the inside of her thighs?”

“She didn’t recall anything like that, but she was distracted by the fact she was real hung over and sick. The first one, however, had unmistakable finger and thumb prints on the inside of her thighs. Both tested positive for chlamydia. The pregnant one miscarried and, understandably, wants to forget the whole thing. If she can. Neither of them would give me a name or even an age of the boy or boys.”

He winced visibly, inhaled deeply and rolled his eyes briefly skyward. “Jesus,” he said.

“I can’t go anywhere with this. I don’t even have grounds to report it without at least one of them relenting and saying it could have been rape. In the second case, the girl didn’t remember drinking much—I’m wondering if there was a drug involved.”

“Roofies?” he asked. “GHB? That could have made her really sick.”

“She woke up covered in vomit.”

“She’s lucky she woke up. A side effect of GHB is a suppressed gag reflex. She could have aspirated and died,” he pointed out.

“This really eats at me, Mike. There’s nothing I can do. Well, I did do one thing—I got a vaginal swab from number one, but intercourse was a couple of days old and I’m sure she bathed a couple of times before coming in. Even if it turns out there’s DNA present, we might never get that far.”

“But still, good thinking. Any chance you got pictures of the bruising?”

“No. I have nothing. She was nearly hysterical and insisted she wasn’t raped. If she had relented, even once, and said that she’d been held down and forced, I would have reported it. As it stands, all I have is this big ache in my gut that tells me there’s a teenage boy out there who’s out of control.”

“Sounds like it’s time for me to get to know the youth of Virgin River.”

“Whew. I hoped I could dump this on you. I feel a little lighter already.”

“You tell anyone else?”

“Yeah—I did. I called June Hudson in Grace Valley—she and her partner, John Stone, will be watching their patients for similar symptoms. And the family planning clinic in Eureka is aware of my concerns. But Mike—what sickens me most is that my second girl said this happened in Virgin River.”

“Either a teenager whose testosterone popped or a new kid in town. Worth looking at.”

“Thank you.”

“Obviously, if any more girls come into the clinic—”

“Of course. I’ll be sure to let you know.”

“I’ll start looking around, talking to people.”

“Thanks,” she said, leaning back in her chair, relieved.

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something else, Mel. I’m ready to discontinue the antidepressant you prescribed after the shooting, during my recovery.”

She smiled at him. “Feeling pretty good?” she asked.

“Stronger, yes. I agree, it was a good idea at the time. But—”

“Sure, sure. We said a few months, right? Sounds good,” she said. “Let’s take you down slowly. I’ll write up a dosage schedule for you. We’ll have you off in a couple of weeks. How’s that?”

“Perfect.”

John—Preacher to his friends—was thirty-three years old and knew a lot about war and about cooking, about hunting and fishing. He’d served in the Marine Corps for twelve years and followed Jack to Virgin River, where he’d turned himself into one of the best cooks in the region, if little known. But his knowledge of women was recent.

When he met and married his wife, that was when his education began. He’d been a man who knew few women up to that point, and he’d never considered himself much of a lover. In fact, he’d been scared to death of Paige—she was so petite and feminine and he was six-four, muscled, with huge, strong hands and shoulders so broad he had to turn sideways to pass through some doorways. He had been terrified that he’d hurt her, leave a bruise on her.

But she had worked him through it, confident that he was the gentlest man she’d ever known. In her arms he had been transformed. Now he not only understood the female body, but worshipped it. Things he hadn’t known existed were now second nature to him, and his wife was his treasure, the most awesome gift he could ever have received. To make her feel wonderful was one of his greatest obsessions. He knew every erogenous spot to touch, to kiss, and the better he could make her feel, the more he enjoyed his own experience.

She was his partner by day in the bar, working beside him in the cooking and management, and his angel by night in his arms. Between them they parented her son, Christopher, now four years old, and Preacher had the kind of happiness he’d thought existed only for other men. There was one small problem—he and Paige wanted to have a baby together, and while they’d been married only a few months, she’d stopped taking her pills over six months ago and nothing had happened.

He might be disappointed, but she was beyond disappointment. She’d been pregnant when she stumbled into the bar a year ago, and, as a result of a horrific beating from her then husband, had miscarried. Paige was afraid that there might be some kind of damage to her reproductive organs that would prevent her from having a baby with John—and sometimes it caused her deep sadness.

At the end of every day he would clean his kitchen at the bar, turn off the Open sign and lock the door, read to Christopher after he’d had his bath, then retire to the little apartment he shared with his wife, and love her. Born again in her arms, night after night.

He found her in the bathroom, wearing one of his huge T-shirts, and he caught her softly crying. It had been a very long time since he’d seen her tears, and it knocked the wind out of him. He couldn’t bear it. “Here, here,” he said, pulling her into his strong embrace. “You’re crying.”

She wiped the tears off her cheeks and looked up at him. “It’s nothing,” she said. “I got my period again. I didn’t want it to come. I wanted to be pregnant.”

“You weren’t even late,” he said, for he knew everything about her, about her body. You could set a watch by her.

“Not even an hour late,” she said, and a big tear spilled over.

“Is it a hard one?” he asked tenderly.

“No, it’s nothing at all. Except, I thought maybe finally…”

“Okay, it’s time,” he said, wiping away the tear. “You should talk to Mel. Maybe to John Stone. See if we should check something out.”

“I get the impression that could be expensive.”

“Don’t you worry about that,” he said. “Never mind money—this is about us being happy. We want a baby. We should do what we have to do. Right?”

“John, I’m sorry—”

“Why are you sorry? You’re not in this alone. Everything is both of us. Right?”

“Month after month…”

“Well, now we’re going to face it and ask for advice. We’ll get some help. No more crying.”

But she dropped her head against his chest and wept anyway, and it tore his heart out. He couldn’t stand Paige to be in any kind of pain. He lived for her happiness; she was his world. His life.

“Are you crying because you’re PMS-y?” he asked.

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Cramps? Want me to rub your back?”

“No,” she said. “I feel fine. Really.”

He lifted her chin and kissed her deeply. Lovingly. Lustfully. “Want me to make you feel a little better? I know how.”

“That’s okay, John. There’s no need.”

“You don’t have to be shy with me. There’s no part of your life, your body, that puts me off. I love every bit of you.”

She sighed deeply. “I should just take a shower and crawl into bed. I’m feeling sorry for myself.”

He reached behind her and started the water. Then he ran his hand up the back of her thigh, over her bum and under the large T-shirt she wore, caressing her back, pulling her close to kiss her some more. When he released her lips, he slowly pulled the T-shirt over her head. He loved the way she stood so erect and comfortable when she was naked in front of him, when he filled his eyes with her. He lowered his lips to her naked breast and drew gently on a nipple, causing her to let her head drop back and sigh deeply. If there was anything about his life with her that was past magnificent, it was the fact that she was as easily turned on by him as he was by her. Their love life gave her a constant glow. And he knew exactly how to make the tears go away.

He pulled the shower curtain wider for her to step inside, but then he quickly shed his clothes and got in with her. He pulled her into his arms again, his mouth on hers, his hands on her body.

“You don’t have to do this,” she whispered against his lips.

“I never do anything I don’t want to do,” he said. “I’m going to give you something happy to think about.” He kissed her forehead. “Baby, I love you so much.”

Mel and Jack had just finished having dinner together at the bar when Paige approached their table. “Mel, do you have a minute? I wanted to ask you something. Something medical.”

“Sure,” she said. “We can kill two birds with one stone—I have to nurse the wild one. Maybe we can go to your place.”