South Dakota Showdown (Badlands Cops Series Book 1)

by Nicole Helm

  A small rustic-looking cabin sat in the middle of a small clearing in a thicket of a variety of trees. Leaves were lumped in random piles, likely dropped off by the wind. The windows were dark with grime where they weren’t shattered by unknown forces. It looked deserted, old and not well kept.

  But looks could be deceiving.

  It wasn’t her father’s place that Gigi had described, and if it was held by the Sons, no doubt she and Jamison would already be dead or threatened.

  She followed Jamison, gun in hand, watching the woods and the black windows as they moved around the clearing in a broad circle, then a smaller one.

  She wasn’t the best shot, especially when she was nervous, but she knew how to work a gun, and hopefully that amounted to something. Well, hopefully she didn’t have to shoot at all.

  The outside looked deserted—for a rather long time. There weren’t footprints or signs anything had been disturbed. There was no sight or sound of anyone. When they completed another, even smaller circle, Jamison nodded at the door. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  Liza nodded. They moved, close enough to be one. Jamison reached out and turned the knob. It squeaked and groaned, but it turned and the door pushed open.

  Jamison led with the gun, slowly pushing the door more and more open until sunlight spilled into the dim, dusty interior.

  She followed Jamison close all the way through the cabin, searching the meager cabinets and closets and nooks and crannies. Some furniture that looked abandoned, but mostly just dust and grime, and a few signs of animal life.

  “Someone’s been here recently, but they didn’t want anyone to know it,” Jamison said, slowly lowering his gun.

  Liza did the same with her gun, but frowned at the surroundings. It didn’t look like anyone had been here in decades to her. “How can you tell?”

  “The windows aren’t as dusty as the counters. Someone’s opened them and then brushed off their prints or tracks in the dust. That chair there—you can see the track in the dust where it’s been moved.”

  “Could be animals.”

  “It’s not. But whoever was here isn’t anymore. Which is good news for us.”

  “How? If someone’s been here, they could come back.”

  “They could, but they didn’t leave anything behind, so I think we’re safe there. We can rest here while we wait for nightfall.”

  “And what happens at nightfall?”

  “We try to find your father’s place. Ideally we do and can case it and formulate a plan of rescue.”

  “Just the two of us?”

  “You know, it could be Cody was here trying to do the same thing we are.”

  Liza figured it was better to agree with him than keep mounting arguments. She wasn’t so sure about Cody Wyatt, but Jamison probably knew his brother better than she did. “It could be.”

  “I know you don’t believe me.”

  “I don’t have to, Jamison. Just like I don’t need you to believe me that I think he’s with the Sons. We can think different things and still do everything we’ve got to do.”

  He scrubbed a hand over his face, then winced at the pain it must have caused his injuries from his previous scuffle. “Yeah.” He blew out a breath, looking around the cabin. “We should rest.”

  Liza looked dubiously at the musty old mattress in the corner. It was better than a cave, she supposed. She inched onto it, wrinkling her nose. Definitely smelly and dusty.

  “Here,” Jamison muttered. He shrugged off his pack and then pulled out a pouch. He untied it and slowly unraveled what became a blanket.

  “Well, aren’t you handy.”

  “Something like that.” He spread out the blanket, waited for her to sit down and then took a seat next to her.

  She looked at him. The weight of the world on his shoulders, as it always was. The battle light that never tired no matter how much his body did. Cuts and bruises across his face that he acted as if didn’t even exist, though they had to hurt. Constantly.

  She reached out and brushed her fingers across his unmarred temple, like she used to do when she was swamped with love for a boy who was way too good for her. Way too good for the world he’d been stuck in. Slowly, he turned his head and met her gaze.

  There were some things just as dangerous as the Sons, and the way he looked at her in this moment was definitely one of them.

  Chapter Thirteen

  He was tired, and he should sleep. Or eat. Or hydrate. He should do a long list of things that did not include sitting here wishing Liza would put her hands on more than just his battered face.

  Her fingertips were solace against all the throbbing and burning. She was all he wanted, and he was tired enough of all this around them to think... It wouldn’t be so wrong. It wouldn’t compromise anything. Even knowing she thought his brother could have gone back. Even though she’d gone back.

  Get up. Focus on the task at hand.

  But he realized here, in this shimmering heat between him and Liza, that all the ways he’d been good and upstanding and dedicated to his job and the law the past fifteen years were only because she hadn’t been there.

  If she had been, everything would have come second to her. It always did. He leaned closer, keeping his arms at his sides even as her fingers slid through his hair.

  “What are we doing here?” she asked, a whisper. Her eyes were shiny, and she shook her head almost imperceptibly.

  But she didn’t move away. She didn’t look away.

  He knew what she was asking, but he didn’t want to answer that question. “Waiting for the sun to set.”

  She tried to smile. “Well, if we’re just waiting.” She slid onto his lap, an easy, fluid movement that reminded him of a past that had been easier, oddly. He’d felt more in danger, more desperate back then, but it had been...youth. He’d thought he could fight for right and always win, but the past fifteen years had taught him otherwise at every turn.

  Right didn’t always win. Good didn’t always come out on top. Yet he’d never been able to give up the hope that it would, that it could.

  And here she was—his good, his hope. He gave himself leave to slide his hands down her back. Fifteen years since he’d touched her like this, but there was no difference in this moment.

  “Do you remember our first time?” she asked, her hands cupping his jaw gently so as to not put too much pressure on his bruises, her mouth brushing just below his ear.

  It was a visceral memory. An awful lot like this—his grandmother’s barn instead of an abandoned shack, safety instead of danger, but Liza making all the moves and him accepting them, even as his rational mind told him not to. Too many things piling against him—knowing it wasn’t the right time, that it wasn’t right, and giving in anyway.

  Because Liza was always right.

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “You wanted to wait. You always wanted to wait.” She looked at him, so close they were nose to nose and he could count every faint freckle that dusted across her nose. He could catalog the way her face had changed and hadn’t. But he only drowned in the dark brown of her eyes.

  “What were you waiting for, Jamison?”

  “I’m not sure I remember,” he lied easily. Because lying to her about how he felt had always been the only thing that kept him on that path to good and right he’d always been striving for.

  She didn’t even pretend to consider his lie. “Of course you do. You remember everything.”

  His mouth quirked in spite of himself. He wasn’t so sure he remembered everything, but he remembered enough. Things he didn’t want to remember or rehash. So, he let his hands span her hips, pull her closer and more flush against him, where he ached for her.

  Always her.

  “I remember you.”

  She let out a shaky breath, searching his gaze for something. Som
ething he didn’t want to give, but she’d always found anyway—always would.

  Always pulsed between them.

  “What was it?” she asked, her voice still just a whisper, even if there was more urgency behind it. “Because I never understood. Maybe I was afraid to. I want to understand now. I know you wanted me, I know you loved me, but you were always pushing me away. You didn’t want to.”

  “No, I didn’t want to.” He could remember his own pious duty so well, and it hurt. It hurt because he didn’t have it in him anymore. He was going to give in to this, and her, when he never would have before. Too old for pious duty, he supposed, or maybe just too cognizant of how little joy there was to be found when she wasn’t with him.

  “So, what was it, Jamison?”

  She was sitting on his lap, the softest part of her nestled against the hardest part of him. Her hands held his face with a gentleness he’d never known in his life, and doubted she’d known in hers. His brother was out there. Her sister was missing. People were dead.

  And they were rehashing old history while they waited for the sun to fall.

  Somehow it seemed like all that fate he didn’t believe in. Like they’d come to the moment made for rehashing. Rediscovering. Here, before they faced potential death and failure. Here, before the true war started—because this would be a war. With the Sons. With his father and hers.

  So, he told her a truth he’d sworn he’d never tell her. “I wanted to do it right.”

  Her eyebrows drew together. “Right?”

  “Get married. Be normal, upstanding people. You were too young for all that. So, I tried to wait until you weren’t.”

  She sighed as if she was in some kind of pain. Then she kissed him, slow and sweet, which was new enough. “I was never too young. And we’re too old for all that now,” she whispered against his mouth.

  “Are we?”

  Her body froze—except for her eyes—which whipped to his.

  No matter how much of the past was here between them, he wasn’t the same man he’d been. Because he hadn’t been a man. Not really. He’d been filled with a youthful sense of right and wrong. An idea he could be noble and good. That life was black-and-white, and he would always follow the white.

  But life was gray, pretty much always, for good men. Only men with empty souls could follow extremes to the ends of the earth.

  So, this wouldn’t be Liza pushing through his defenses. It wouldn’t be her convincing him.

  No, it would be him choosing. Finally, fully accepting the gray areas life threw at him. Because loving her had always been a little bit good and bad—as had she been herself. And was. And always would be.

  Always. Always.

  Slowly, watching her the whole time, he lifted her shirt up and over her head, revealing skin the sun almost never touched. Pale, pale white. A contrast to all that dark hair that swirled around her.

  She’d always been a contrast. Dark and light. Right and wrong. Hope and fear. Instead of choosing one and fearing the other. He chose both, would love both.

  The gold locket he’d given her once upon a time hung from a chain. And while his brain told him not to, his heart was leading. When it came to her, it always had.

  He reached out and flipped the locket open.

  It had been a group shot, he remembered. Grandma had taken it with her old Polaroid camera—all the Wyatt boys, all the Knight girls in front of the barn. She’d taken a few because Brady kept accidentally blinking at the wrong moment.

  Jamison had taken one of those and cut just him and Liza out, tucked it into the locket.

  He opened the flimsy fake gold. Inside was the picture he’d cut out himself, put in there himself. A romantic gesture because he’d been trying to prove to her that life outside the Sons could be something right. Normal.

  It shouldn’t be that it still mattered, that somehow even knowing all he knew he wanted to find a way to give her that. It shouldn’t be that fifteen years felt like nothing since the moment he’d caught her trying to break into his office.

  But it was.

  He moved her onto her back, underneath him. He touched her, a choice—not only giving in. He kissed her—mouth, neck, shoulder. He touched her, gently and reverently. She pulled off his shirt, touching him until his skin felt like it was too tight, and only she could take away all the pressure building inside him.

  Because only she could.

  He slid off her pants, careful of her leg injury. She tugged at his, until they were both naked for each other. Joined. Like they’d always been meant to be.

  The ache was unbearable and he wanted to live in it forever as she arched against him, as she whispered his name, begging for that unnamed release.

  Then slow and sweet was gone. That old desperation conjured by talk of the past...by talk of a future.

  Knowing history couldn’t be erased, and the future wasn’t a given, they gave themselves to each other. Falling over a blissful edge wrapped up together, just like then. Just like now.

  * * *

  “LIZA.”

  Liza didn’t want to leave this warm bubble of sleep, no matter how incessant Jamison’s voice was. She wasn’t sleeping on the floor, and she wasn’t cold. It was nice here, and she burrowed deeper into the soft blanket under her cheek.

  “Liza.”

  But she was colder than she had been, because Jamison’s body was no longer next to her. She blinked her eyes open. There was still a hint of sun shining through the window, so they couldn’t have slept more than an hour or two.

  She glared at him. Then remembered the whole point of her life was saving her sister, not sleeping.

  Certainly not having sex with her ex-boyfriend from fifteen years ago.

  But looking at that serious expression, the mussed hair and bruised face, she thought ex-boyfriend was hardly the right word. He was the love of her life. Then. Now. Always.

  She’d said they were too old for things like marriage and being normal and doing it right, and he’d said “Are we?” like they had some kind of future spreading out before them.

  It would be suicide to believe there was, but she could see it too clearly, feel it too clearly to resist.

  If she survived this, maybe they could find each other again. Maybe.

  But just like always, they had to survive first.

  “I found something,” he said, his voice devoid of all emotion. His eyes, though... She could see he felt everything she did right there in his eyes.

  But he’d found something. “What kind of something?” she asked in a sigh.

  “Get dressed.”

  She grumbled through it, finding her clothes had been laid out neatly beside her. She almost asked him where he came from—but she knew his kindness was simply a mix of two things. One, the fact that he’d spent his first five years living with Grandma Pauline and his mother, before his mother had been fully converted to the Sons’ way of life and Ace had decided he didn’t want any good influence on his children. Two, something innate inside him.

  Dressed, she pushed herself off the bed. “It’s still light out.”

  “Not for long, but that’s not why I woke you up.” He nodded toward the hall and led her back to the bathroom.

  “I got up to use the bathroom and I saw this weird light. Green. Coming from a crack in the wall. I guess it was too light to notice it earlier.”

  “Let me guess. Nuclear waste.”

  But he didn’t even try to crack a smile at her joke. He squatted down next to a place where he’d apparently pulled off a piece of the wall. Inside the dark hole was something completely incongruous to this whole place. Some kind of...computer.

  “What does it mean?” she asked. There were boxes and flashing circles on the screen. The green light Jamison must have seen was from the power light on the side of the laptop.

 
; “Well, whoever was here before us left this behind. It means we’re not safe here. That’s for darn sure, but... It’s explosives, Liza. Whatever this is, it’s controlling explosives.”

  “What?” she all but screeched, trying to figure out why on earth he was being so calm about being blown up.

  “I don’t understand it all—don’t know enough about it. But it’s marking down time before explosives go off.”

  “Here?”

  “No. No, I think...” He shook his head. “I don’t know enough about it, but it might be your father’s place. This is something like a blueprint,” he said, pointing to the screen. “There’s a house—decent sized. A horse stable here. A shed of some kind over here.” He traced the squares and rectangles on the screen. “And each of these blinking dots is a point where explosives will go off. Is my guess anyway.”

  She grabbed his arm, suddenly icy cold. “But Gigi is there.”

  “We don’t know that for sure,” he said, so measured and so cop she wanted to scream.

  “But she could be, Jamison. She could be there, and someone’s going to blow it up.” She squeezed the arm she was holding. “Cody. Cody wasn’t that far away. He’s the only one we saw, and if this is blowing up the Sons, this has to be Cody’s. They’re not blowing up themselves.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past them, but...” He sighed. “Cody seems likely.”

  “Get him to stop it. Jamison—you have to get him to stop it.”

  “How? I don’t know where he went. He told me to stay away.”

  Liza whirled out of the bathroom. She didn’t have time to argue with him. She didn’t have time for anything.

  “We have to split up. I’ve got try to find the house and rescue Gigi. You find Cody.” She grabbed her boots, and he grabbed her wrist, stopping her forward movement.

  “We don’t split up. You said that.”

  She didn’t want to; that was the worst part. “We do when a little girl’s life is at stake,” she returned, jerking her arm out of his grasp. “There’s not enough time to do both together. Someone needs to stop Cody, and someone needs to get Gigi. Now.”