It wasn’t her, of course.

More than five years had passed since Cindy died of cancer as he sat beside her hospital bed. The pain of her loss had retreated to a distant ache in a corner of his soul. Even so, there were moments like this when he saw a stranger and something about her brought it all back. It didn’t take much, just the look in her eyes or the way she carried herself, to stir his memory.

This woman was looking back at him, too. She was small but a couple of inches taller than Cindy, who had barely crossed five feet four on tiptoes. Her blond hair fell breezily around her shoulders, and her sunglasses were now tented on top of her head. Her earrings were sapphire studs. She wore a blue-flowered summer skirt that hung to her knees, baby blue heels, a white blouse, and a lightweight tan leather jacket with a braided fringe. She balanced one hand on a narrow hip as she watched him. The ties of her jacket dangled between her legs.

He knew her from somewhere.

“Your five seconds are up,” Serena Dial told him.

Stride broke away. “What?”

Serena sipped her lemonade and eyed the woman in the leather jacket as she was shown to a table on the patio. A gust of wind blew off the lake and rustled her own silky dark hair. “You get a free pass to look at any woman for up to five seconds. After that, it officially becomes flirting.”

“She reminded me of someone,” Stride said.

“Sure she did.”

Serena was an ex-cop and now a private investigator. She and Stride had shared a bed for almost two years.

Stride turned to his partner in the Detective Bureau, Maggie Bei, as if consulting an Olympic judge for a ruling. “Is this five-second thing commonly known?” he asked.

“Absolutely,” Maggie said, with a wink at Serena.

Stride knew when he was on the losing end of an argument. “Okay, I was flirting,” he admitted.

Serena stretched out her arm lazily and used the back of her hand to caress Stride’s cheek, which was rough with black-and-gray stubble. She sidled her long fingers through his wavy hair and leaned forward to plant a slow kiss on his lips. She tasted like citrus and sugar.

“Most animals mark their territory by urinating,” Maggie remarked, with her mouth full of a large bite of her steak sandwich. She batted her almond-shaped eyes innocently at Serena and grinned.

Stride laughed. “Can we get back to work?”

“Go ahead,” Serena told him. She swiped a French fry from Maggie’s plate and bit into it while baring her teeth.

“What’s the latest on the peeper?” Stride asked Maggie. He stole a sideways glance across the restaurant at the other woman and noticed that she was doing the same thing to him from over her menu.

“He struck again on Friday night,” Maggie replied. “A sixteen-year-old girl in Fond du Lac noticed a guy in the trees outside her bedroom when she was getting undressed. She screamed, and he took off.”