TAMING KNOX (Gray Wolf Security, Texas Book 3)

by Glenna Sinclair

  I stood behind a tree, listening closely to her footsteps, trying to figure out her exact location. I couldn’t run any more. My chest burned, my heart pounding. And the wounds in my arm were pumping so much blood, I was safer standing still. I was leaving too big a trail.

  “Jack Kyle killed Joshua,” I wheezed.

  She came closer. I could hear her footsteps before I heard her voice. So close. Why didn’t I have my gun?

  I needed my fucking gun!

  “But Jack wouldn’t have been so angry if it weren’t for her. If he hadn’t insulted her and Joshua hadn’t spit on him.”

  “How is that Kate’s fault?” I called to her, jumping to another tree, trying to keep space between us.

  Not enough. I could hear her tracking my voice, could hear her come closer.

  “How isn’t it? If she wasn’t giving it to every boy in town…”

  “Shows how little you knew Kate back then. Not as well as Joshua. He knew she hadn’t done anything wrong.”

  “He didn’t know anything like that. He just knew she was his sister and it was his job to protect her.”

  “He was a good guy, but he wouldn’t have stood up for her if he’d thought it was true.”

  “What do you know about it?”

  She was growing agitated. Not listening to me as closely as she should be. Maybe I had a chance.

  “I knew Joshua since we were both seven, Amanda. I think I knew him pretty well.”

  “Just because you knew him longer—”

  “I know that he loved his sister. But I’ve seen him back out of a fight because he knew Kate was in the wrong.”

  “She’s the reason—”

  “He knew it was me, didn’t he?”

  The reality of it sunk in the moment I said it aloud. I’d kept the truth from myself all these years, but I suddenly realized how clear it really was.

  Joshua had known all along. He knew Kate and I were in love. He knew that it wasn’t just some passing crush. And he knew we’d get around to telling him someday.

  He defended her that night not because she was his sister and they had a relationship like no other siblings, but because he was defending us both.

  In a way, it was my fault he was attacked that night. Joshua saw the writing on the wall, knew Jack Kyle was out to get anybody, and he was willing to take the heat on himself. Because he knew.

  Because he was my friend.

  He practically told me. Days before that night, he told me.

  “It was just a prank,” I said. “One last hurrah before graduation.”

  “Yeah, but to pin it on Jack Kyle and the others? Not smart,” Joshua said. “I heard that he was arrested last month for stealing a car. Not the kind of guy you should be getting tangled up with.”

  “He’s harmless. Just a wimp trying to pretend he’s a tough guy. I can deal with him.”

  “Yeah, well, I hope so. Otherwise you might have just put into motion something we’ll all regret.”

  Joshua glanced toward the door, aware Kate was standing just on the other side. Then he moved closer to me.

  “You’ve got more important things to worry about now,” he said softly. “A future. Don’t let one last hurrah ruin that, my friend. This, this future, is too important.”

  He knew. It was so clear now.

  “How could any of us have known that he would lose control that night?” I asked, trying to keep her distracted. Trying to find the advantage. “I don’t think even he knew it was coming. And I think he’d be the first to take it back if he could.”

  “She took away the only thing that mattered to me,” Amanda said, her voice moving closer and closer. “We were going away to school together. We were going to have a life together.”

  “We were all supposed to have a different life, Amanda. But, sometimes, things don’t work out the way you think they will.”

  “No,” she said, more to herself than to me. “No, no, no.”

  I could hear the exhaustion in her voice, the crazy starting to leak out. I remembered something else Joshua once told me. Amanda saw a psychiatrist when we were in high school. She was on medication, but he didn’t know what it was for. He said she acted strangely every time he asked, so he stopped asking.

  I slipped around the trunk of the tree and peeked behind me. She wasn’t there. Then I moved again, going a quarter turn each time. I spotted her almost immediately, walking slowly toward my tree, just at the wrong angle.

  I waited, held my breath lest she hear me and turn around. Then I sprang on her when the moment was right.

  The gun discharged, but she was going down. I landed hard, the wind once again torn from my lungs. She struggled, screaming so loudly there was a ringing in my ears when she stopped.

  Secure the gun.

  I reached under her body, but I couldn’t find it. Maybe she’d tossed it aside. Maybe it fell when she fell. Maybe…I searched the debris near her hand. She wasn’t moving. I thought maybe I’d knocked her out. But the blood. There was blood. Everywhere.

  I found the gun. It was caught between our bodies, her arm twisted from the break in her humerus. The pain must have knocked her out.

  So why was I feeling lightheaded all of a sudden?

  Then the pain came.

  Oh…that’s it…

  Donovan was badly wounded in the attack, but he recovered and married Kate not long afterward. They had a little girl now.

  It was heartwarming and sickening all at the same time for Kipling. He liked Donovan. They’d served together in Afghanistan. But happiness was as revolting as bile to him. His happiness had been murdered. He hated seeing it in other people despite his attempts to be respectful of their right to find it.

  Elliot answered their knock at the front door, a cup of coffee in hand. He stepped back without a word, allowing them inside.

  “Everyone’s still asleep. It was a long night.”

  “I understand,” David said.

  “Go wake Knox,” Kipling demanded.

  Elliot glanced at David, only acting when David nodded. That irritated Kipling a little. He didn’t like his orders being second-guessed. But he also wasn’t used to being the second-in-command.

  “Are you sure this is the direction you want to go in?” David asked as soon as Elliot disappeared around a corner.

  “I’m sure. Have her meet me out back.”

  Kipling walked away, slipping out the back doors that led to a lovely deck that overlooked the wooded property behind the house. Ash knew his real estate. Looking at this, Kipling’s annoyance with everyone’s happiness was tempered a little. He knew that Ash bought this property as a getaway for him and his first fiancée, Alexi. She was CIA—like Knox—but she broke Ash’s heart when she decided to disappear on her own, leaving him behind to wonder what had happened to her. Kipling had heard that Ash eventually tracked her down only to discover she was living a quiet life with a new husband and child.

  Kipling wondered what it would be like to discover Jesse was alive, living as someone else’s wife. It made him sick to his stomach at the thought. He couldn’t imagine what the reality had been like for Ash.

  Knox stepped outside, fully dressed. Leave it to a Marine to be ready for battle at a moment’s notice.

  “Let’s walk,” he said, stepping down the deck steps to the woods behind it.

  Knox fell into step beside him, as obedient as a good soldier. Kipling wouldn’t have expected any less.

  “David’s concerned about your feelings for Dunlap. He thinks you can’t be objective.”

  “That’s why he won’t let me run this case.”

  “Yes, well, I think you’re the perfect person to have in control.”

  Knox’s eyes widened as she missed a step beside him. “You do?”

  “You know him better than any of us. You know what he might be hiding, what he might have simply forgotten to mention, or what he thought was unimportant, but was actually very important. You know the people around him. You
know all the potential suspects.”

  Knox inclined her head thoughtfully, as though those things hadn’t crossed her mind.

  “That’s why I’m putting you back on this case.”

  “Okay,” she said immediately. “What’s the plan?”

  Kipling smiled. He liked her enthusiasm.

  “You and Dunlap go back to the house. Act as if he was staying with you last night and the girls were with a friend or something. You didn’t know about the explosion until now.”

  “Okay.”

  “Dunlap calls in his construction crew to check out the damage and assess what should happen next. You proceed like you just found out what happened, like you think it’s an accident. You proceed like it wasn’t an attempt on his life.”

  “You’re trying to draw out the person behind all this.”

  “Exactly. Alexander, Elliot, and I will be in a house across the street, watching. When someone shows their hand, we’ll be there.”

  She nodded. “And the girls?”

  “They’ll stay at the compound with Ricki and Ingram’s wife.”

  She dragged her fingers through her hair, lifting it off her neck and tying it with an elastic so that it flowed into one, thick ponytail. She was preparing herself for battle. Kipling could see it in the determination on her face.

  “I don’t think it’s Julep Montgomery,” she said, catching Kipling off guard.

  “Who do you think it is?”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t think Julep would put the children in danger in the way that the house exploded last night. She might appear indifferent, but she’s a southern woman. That’s the way her generation is. But she loves those girls.”

  Kipling nodded. “Then we’ll broaden our expectations. But we will continue to watch her in light of what you found out about the nanny last night.”

  “Great.”

  She turned and started toward the house. Kipling grabbed her arm.

  “Be safe, Knox. Don’t get dead.”

  She smiled. “That comes from you, doesn’t it? I always wondered.”

  “It’s something my commanding officer said to us on my first tour.”

  “Yeah. My commander had his own little sayings, too.”

  She turned again, walking toward the deck. “Make sure you keep your eyes where they belong.”

  “Will do.”

  Kipling watched her, thinking he might have liked to get to know her a little better if he’d met her before Dunlap. That was always his luck, a day late and a dollar short.

  Chapter 18

  Dunlap

  I thought Knox was out of her mind when she told me that we were going back to the house. I knew she was tough and that she could handle herself. But were we really going back into a house that someone had rigged to blow up while I was there with my two children? With the nanny and Knox and Elliot? Were we supposed to wait around until someone blew up the rest of the house?

  But I trusted her.

  “We should move in together,” I said as we drove through the city.

  I hadn’t meant to just blurt it out that way, but it just sort of came out. I watched her, waiting for her reaction, but there wasn’t one at first. And then she glanced at me.

  “Okay.”

  Just like that.

  I wanted to get up and dance; I wanted to hug her and kiss her all over her beautiful face. Instead, I looked out the window and hid the huge smile that took over my face.

  The fire investigator was waiting for us when we pulled up to the house.

  “It looks like a gas leak,” he said, just as Knox had said he would. “We’ve had the city come out and check their lines to make sure it’s been cut off properly. You’ll also need a licensed plumber to check the gas lines in the rest of the house and, if you should rebuild, the new lines in the kitchen.”

  “Thank you,” I said, even though he’d just essentially told me I’d have to shell out thousands just to make my house safe to live in again.

  Knox and I walked through the rubble, picking up little things here and there. One of Mattie’s baby bottles. A sippy cup. A piece of china from the plates my mother had hand painted and given to Colby on our wedding day. A shard of the coffee cup Stevie had given to me on Father’s Day last year.

  It was gone. Part of the life I’d known the last ten years was gone. But, again, it felt like it’d been gone for ten months, ever since I found Colby in the hot tub. Maybe this was just a nudge in the direction I should have been going all along.

  “I think we’ll sell when we rebuild.”

  “Yeah?”

  I looked around, my eyes moving up the stairs that were now visible in the gaping hole on the side of the house.

  “I love this place. It was the first place I designed and watched come into reality. But I…I think we should have moved out a long time ago.”

  “Then why rebuild? Why not just demolish the whole thing and move on now?”

  I loved her practical mind. “That’s an option.”

  I walked over to her and wrapped my arms around her waist. She leaned back into me, leaning back to smile up at me. We were standing like that when a car pulled into the drive. I looked over, a different smile slipping across my expression as I watched Janis climb out of her car.

  Janis was…she’d always just sort of been there. She was a few years older than me, petite, but so confident, so in charge all the time, that she seemed ten feet tall. She had blond hair that she kept slicked back from her face in a severe ponytail. I often wondered what it would look like down around her face. And she had a nice face…a little upturned nose and slightly upraised, green eyes. She might have been pretty if she wasn’t so…what did they call it these days? A bitch-resting face? That’s what it was. She had this perpetual look that suggested unpleasantness even though she was one of the kindest people I’d ever met.

  I still couldn’t believe that Stevie thought Janis had feelings for me. It seemed absolutely absurd.

  “Morning,” she called brightly.

  “More like afternoon,” Knox corrected, pulling away from me.

  “Yes, afternoon.” Janis walked carefully through the debris to where we were standing. “I’m glad to see you’re safe. The girls? They’re safe, too?”

  “Fine. They’re with friends.”

  She nodded, her eyes shifting to Knox for a second. Knox smiled at her, then turned and walked away, sifting through debris some yards from us to give us a few minutes alone.

  “I’ve called the foremen and Anderson volunteered to bring his crew over here and check this mess out. They should be here soon.”

  “Thank you.”

  She touched my arm lightly. “Take all the time you need, Dunlap. Things are fine at the office.”

  “Good. But I want to be kept abreast on that Parkway job, okay?”

  She smiled, her eyes moving to Knox. “So, the two of you…?”

  “We’re moving in together.”

  Her eyebrows rose. “That’s pretty quick, isn’t it? You’ve only known each other a month, right?”

  “A little more than that, but yeah, I suppose it might seem quick. But when it’s right, you just kind of know it.”

  Janis nodded, this sort of sadness briefly touching her face.

  “Okay. I’m going back to the office. I’ll call you later.”

  I watched her go, wondering what the sadness was about. She must have had a lover at some point, someone who broke her heart. I felt for her. I knew that sort of loss.

  “Hey,” Knox said, coming back over to me. “I guess we stay at my place tonight.”

  I laughed, tugging her close. “And you have to cook.”

  ***

  The crew arrived a while later, every one of them jumping right in and gathering the trash. Knox and I sat in the living room, discussing the pros and cons of rebuilding. I happened to look up and see him coming toward us. He was, again, the last person on earth I wanted to see. I jumped to my feet and headed him off.


  “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  He seemed a little contrite. But I wasn’t buying it.

  “I’m sorry, Dunlap. I know I promised I wouldn’t come back, but there aren’t that many jobs back East. Not like this one.”

  “You signed papers.”

  “I know. I didn’t come back for the baby, I swear. I have a wife now, a kid of my own on the way.”

  He was sincere, but that didn’t soothe my fears any.

  “Then why are you here? Why are you on my crew?”

  He looked away, just for a second, but it was long enough to convince me there was something nefarious going on here. I shoved him hard against the chest. He stumbled back a few feet, causing Knox to get up and move between us.

  “What’s going on?”

  “This is Mattie’s biological father.”

  She spun around, her eyes moving over this man—this cheater who took advantage of my wife and created a child when she wouldn’t let me touch her—a mixture of concern and curiosity in her eyes.

  “Why are you here?”

  “I needed work,” he said.

  “Bullshit!”

  I almost laughed as the profanity slipped out of Knox’s pretty little mouth. But it hit its mark. He focused on her for a long second, shifting in his heavy work boots like a child standing uncomfortably in front of an angry parent.

  “Julep Montgomery called me. She wanted me to come sue for custody of my daughter. I told her I gave up my parental rights, but she told me her lawyer would find a loophole. She paid off all my debts and offered to pay for my wife’s maternity care. I couldn’t…”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said, resting a hand on Knox’s shoulder. “But why go to work for my crew?”

  “Because I was hoping to run into you and warn you what she was up to.”

  It seemed dubious, but again, I got the impression that he was sincere.

  “When’s the last time you heard from Julep?” Knox wanted to know.

  “A week ago. She said she’d served you with custody papers and she’d probably need me in court in a few weeks.”

  “Anything since?”

  “No.”

  Knox gestured toward the kitchen. “You do that? You know anything about it?”