Lucas

by Delores Fossen

  “No, it didn’t.” Minton’s tone was full of sarcasm, too. “I don’t know anything that can help you end whatever the hell’s happening to Hailey. And I won’t know until you tell me everything that’s going on.” He glanced at the mirror. “Including what’s going on with that piece of slime.”

  Hailey wanted to tune Minton out and focus on Eric’s conversation, but Grayson, the lawyers and the DA had moved on to the details of the plea deal, and from what Hailey could tell, Eric was asking for immunity from prosecution.

  Which meant there was likely something incriminating him on those recordings or in the files Hailey had.

  Hailey hadn’t intended to bring up anything to Minton about what Eric had just said, but Lucas obviously had something different in mind.

  “Eric claims he has recordings that he got from his father’s office,” Lucas tossed out there. “He’s working out a plea deal now.”

  And Hailey soon knew why Lucas had done that. He pinned his attention to Minton, clearly looking for a reaction.

  He got one.

  Minton charged toward the window to have a closer look. “Any recordings come under the jurisdiction of the FBI.”

  Lucas huffed. “You seem to keep forgetting that this isn’t an FBI matter. The recordings could be evidence in the recent attacks against Hailey. Attacks that happened right here in Silver Creek.” He glanced at Dade. “Did anyone here in the sheriff’s office request FBI assistance? Because that’s the only way Minton could be involved in this.”

  Dade pretended to think about that. “Nope. No one here made a request like that. Grayson said if we needed help, we’d call in the Rangers. Of course, we won’t have to call very loud since a Texas Ranger is standing right here in this room.”

  Minton’s mouth tightened, but instead of verbal fire at any of the men, he turned toward Hailey. “I’m trying to keep you and your son alive.” He nodded toward Eric. “You’ll need all the help you can get with that piece of slime. He’s dangerous. That’s why you should give me copies of anything you have on him.”

  Lucas’s huff was even louder this time. “This conversation is over.” And he took Hailey by the arm and maneuvered her around Minton and Dade.

  “It’s not over,” Minton insisted. “One way or another, I will get the evidence you have.”

  It sounded like a threat. Worse, it felt like one.

  Hailey reminded herself that Minton could just be focused on the job, but if he was the dirty agent Preston had on his payroll, then she had two snakes to watch out for—Eric and Minton.

  “I’ll take you back to the ranch,” Lucas said once they were out of earshot of Minton. “We’ll wait there until you can get into the files. Maybe by then Grayson will have worked out something with Eric.”

  They went to the front where Lucas had left the cruiser, but before they reached the door, his phone buzzed. Hailey saw Josh’s name on the screen. Since he was at the hospital, she instantly got a bad feeling.

  Lucas obviously did, too, because he belted out some profanity under his breath. “A problem?” Lucas greeted his cousin.

  “Yeah. Please tell me we have something to hold Colleen. Because if not, she’s about to leave the hospital.”

  Hailey released the breath she’d been holding. She’d braced herself for something worse, like an attack. “Did the doctor say it was okay for her to go?”

  “No. But she’s leaving anyway unless we’ve got grounds to hold her.”

  “She was on the surveillance tape with a hit man,” Hailey reminded Lucas.

  But Lucas shook his head. “Not enough since she had an explanation for that, and there’s no proof that she knew who he was. Can Colleen hear me talking right now?” he asked Josh.

  “No,” Josh repeated. “She’s in her room getting dressed, and I’m in the hall.”

  “Good. Then let her leave, but I want a tail on her. Tell me where she goes and who she sees. Because if she’s behind this, she might try to meet with her hired thugs.”

  True. Hailey hated to think Colleen would do that, but this might be a way to be sure.

  “Will do,” Josh said. “Hold on while I send a text to the reserve deputy who’s in the parking lot. He’s dressed in plain clothes.”

  Maybe Colleen wouldn’t notice the man and would do whatever it was she was setting out to do. Part of Hailey wished, though, that her sister had had no part in any of this.

  “Colleen’s coming out of her room now,” Josh added a moment later.

  Josh said something else, something that Hailey didn’t catch. Ditto for whatever her sister said to the deputy.

  “Colleen just handed me a note that I’m supposed to give to Hailey,” Josh finally explained.

  “A note?” Hailey asked. “Why didn’t she just talk to me?”

  “Don’t know. You want me to unfold it and read it to you?”

  “Yes,” she answered as fast as she could.

  Hailey heard the rustling around on Josh’s end, and a moment later he mumbled some of the same profanity that Lucas had just used. “It says, ‘I’m sorry, Hailey. I know you’ll never understand, but I did what I had to do.’”

  Chapter Eight

  “I did what I had to do.”

  Lucas hoped Colleen was referring to checking herself out of the hospital, but he had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  It certainly hadn’t helped when Colleen had managed to ditch the tail they had on her. Now she was in the wind. Could have been anywhere. Heck, she could have been out there planning another attack. Colleen had a lot of questions to answer, but first they had to find her and somehow force her to tell them the truth.

  Of course, in addition to Colleen, Lucas had plenty of other things adding to that bad feeling. Minton, Eric.

  And Hailey.

  Hailey, though, was a bad feeling of a different kind.

  Once again, he had no choice but to take her to his house at the ranch. It was either that or spend more time at the sheriff’s office, and neither of them wanted that. In fact, Hailey had jumped to say yes when he suggested they go.

  Hailey had jumped yet again when they’d arrived home and Tillie had offered to show her how to give Camden his bottle. Now Lucas was supervising that while he waited for updates on both the plea deal and Colleen.

  “He really is a little miracle,” Hailey said, smiling at Camden while she burped him.

  Of course, Hailey was in heaven over doing something as simple as feeding and burping their son. “You might not call him a miracle when he wakes up every three hours,” Lucas joked, because he thought they could use some levity.

  At least, he could use it, anyway. His muscles were knotted so tight that his back and shoulders were hurting.

  Hailey smiled, and he got a knot of a different kind. This one in his stomach. He remembered that smile. It was one of the first things that had attracted him to her, and even now it stalled his breath in his chest. Then she chuckled when Camden let out a burp that sounded as if it’d come from a grown man drinking beer. Lucas didn’t join her on the chuckling, but he’d had the same reaction the first couple of times it had happened.

  His phone dinged with a text from Josh.

  Lucas glanced at his watch. “You should be able to get into the storage cloud to retrieve those files.” That would get his mind off her smile and back to what he should have been focusing on.

  She nodded, her forehead bunching up. Obviously she didn’t want to let go of the baby just yet, but Lucas needed to see exactly what Hailey had against Eric.

  Hailey kissed Camden, and she waited for Tillie to come and take the baby before she got up from the chair. She made her way to Lucas’s office just up the hall. It seemed as if each hour she was walking a little better, but she still caught onto the wall to steady he
rself.

  And she also caught onto him when she eased into the chair.

  “Sorry,” she said. No doubt because she felt his muscles tense. “I know it bothers you for me to touch you.”

  Yeah, it did. But not in the way she was thinking. It bothered him because it reminded him of things he shouldn’t have been remembering. Instead of mentioning that, though, Lucas just motioned for her to get busy on the laptop.

  She nodded, looked disappointed that he hadn’t addressed the elephant in the room—the attraction. Something he had no plans to address.

  “It’ll take a couple of minutes for me to get through the passwords and security questions,” she said just as his phone rang.

  Since it was Grayson’s name on the screen and no doubt a call about the investigation, Lucas answered it on speaker. That way Hailey wouldn’t have to lean too close to him to hear.

  “We worked out a plea deal with Eric,” Grayson said. “A limited one for both of us. He’ll get immunity only if there’s something of evidentiary value on the recordings. The second condition is that the immunity will cover only one criminal count. A count that doesn’t include murder or accessory to murder.”

  Lucas looked at Hailey. “Any chance of Eric having murdered someone?”

  “Not that I know of,” she answered. “From what I learned, the DeSalvo family crimes seemed to be limited to money laundering and the sale of illegal arms. Of course, it’s possible someone was killed during those deals, but the deals I had knowledge of were mainly Preston’s, not Eric’s.”

  That didn’t mean Eric didn’t have any side deals of his own. But then, if he had, there was no way the man would give Grayson evidence to incriminate himself for murder.

  “What did you mean about the deal being limited for both Eric and you?” Hailey wanted to know.

  “The recordings are on old compact disks, and Preston set it up so they can’t be copied. Eric wants the disks to stay here in the sheriff’s office, and that means I’ll have to tie up some manpower to listen to them.”

  Eric had probably added that into the deal to make sure Minton and the FBI didn’t get their hands on them. Or maybe Eric had another reason for doing that.

  “Did Eric give you any idea what was on the recordings?” Lucas asked Grayson.

  “He says he hasn’t listened to them all. Which I find hard to believe.”

  So did Lucas. Eric didn’t seem like the sort to shoot himself in the foot by handing over anything that could be connected to him beyond the limits of the plea deal. Still, there might be something that Eric had missed.

  “But what Eric did say,” Grayson went on, “was that there are dozens of recorded conversations with his father and his business associates. Of course, he didn’t get permission from any of these people. But there are names, he claims, that we can use to make some arrests if we can link those names to the crimes.”

  Yeah, because the recordings themselves probably wouldn’t be admissible in court since Preston didn’t get prior consent from at least one of the people he was recording. Then there was the problem of the tapes being in the hands of one of their suspects, one who could have doctored the conversations.

  “I’ll call you as soon as we have the recordings. Let me know what you find out from Hailey’s files,” Grayson added before he ended the call.

  Lucas put away his phone and watched as Hailey accessed the site. Thankfully her fingers were working better than her legs. She had no trouble typing.

  No trouble cursing, either.

  That bad feeling in his stomach went up a couple of notches.

  “The files are gone?” Lucas concluded, but he hoped he was wrong.

  Hailey didn’t answer him. She kept mumbling profanity. Kept searching through the storage cloud. Even though Lucas was far from a computer expert, he could see that all the files were empty.

  Except one.

  Hailey clicked on it, and when Lucas saw what was there, he was the one cursing. Not files to incriminate Eric. There was just a single document with one sentence written on it.

  I did what I had to do.

  It was the exact wording of the note Colleen had left with Josh, but in this case it didn’t make sense.

  “Why would Colleen want these files deleted?” Lucas asked. “From what I can tell, Colleen despises Eric.”

  Hailey groaned, obviously still dealing with the bombshell of what her sister had done. Or else what someone wanted them to believe Colleen had done.

  “She does,” Hailey confirmed. But then she shook her head. “Or maybe that was all a pretense. I just don’t know anymore.”

  Another groan, and she buried her face in her hands for a couple of seconds. When she lowered them, Lucas spotted the tears in her eyes.

  Oh, man. Not tears. Not now. He was already feeling raw and exhausted, and he was a sucker for a woman’s tears. Especially this woman. Because this was quickly turning into a very bad day for Hailey and this investigation.

  She stood and looked around as if trying to decide what to do, but Lucas could see that there wasn’t much fight left in her. “Colleen must hate me to side with a snake like Eric.”

  “Maybe she didn’t have a choice. Maybe Eric has some dirt on her. Something that would send her to jail.”

  The tears continued. “Yes, but she knows those files are meant to protect Camden and me from Eric. Or from any of Preston’s thugs who might be out there ready to carry out their late boss’s dying wish to see me dead.”

  She was right. And Lucas had had enough of the tears. Before he could talk himself out of it, he reached out and pulled her into his arms. Of course, Hailey had been in his arms since she’d come out of the coma. It’d been necessary to keep her from falling.

  This was different.

  Lucas could feel it. And Hailey could feel it, too. She didn’t go stiff as she had the other times they’d touched in the past twenty-four hours. She sort of melted against him.

  “I’m just so scared,” she admitted. “Not for me but for Camden and you. For your family.”

  “No one is going to hurt Camden or my family,” he assured her. Not that he was in a position to give that kind of assurance. Not with hired guns after them. Still, those hired guns would have to get past him, and since he was protecting his son, Lucas had no intention of making that easy for them.

  Hailey looked up at him at the exact moment he looked down at her. Lucas silently said more of that profanity. He was so not ready for this. Well, his mind and heart weren’t, anyway, but the rest of him seemed to think it was a good idea to kiss her or something.

  Especially something.

  The heat came. Memories, too. Vivid memories of Hailey naked and beneath him in his bed. The very bed that was just up the hall.

  She didn’t look away from him, and hell, he didn’t look away, either. They just stood there with all those bad thoughts running through his head. Lucas was within a fraction of a second of acting on those bad thoughts by kissing her, but Hailey cleared her throat and stepped back.

  “I’m sorry,” Hailey said, rubbing her forehead and dodging his gaze. “I know that makes things worse.”

  It did, and Lucas didn’t want her to clarify that. Or talk about it. Hell, he just wanted to concentrate on anything but this ache that was begging him to have sex with her right here, right now.

  “You should try to call Colleen and ask her about this,” he managed to say, and he handed her his phone.

  Focus. He needed to deal with the problems of the investigation and not create new problems by having his body go rock hard with thoughts of Hailey.

  She nodded. “I’m not sure if Colleen still has the same number. Until I came out of the coma, I hadn’t been in touch with her since Preston’s trial, and that was over eighteen months ago.”

 
It was a long shot, but it was one that paid off. In a way. Colleen didn’t answer, but when her voice mail greeting kicked in, Hailey and he got verification that her sister had kept the old number.

  “Call me ASAP,” Hailey said when she left the message, and there was a definite urgency in her tone.

  But whether Colleen would phone her back was a different matter. After all, even though she’d been injured in that car accident, Colleen had still managed to elude the reserve deputy. Something Lucas wished he’d handled differently. He should have requested one of the regular deputies to follow her.

  Hailey sank back down onto the chair and gave a heavy sigh. At least she wasn’t crying, but this was obviously getting to her. Or rather, it was, until she looked up at him again, and there was something in her eyes. Not attraction this time.

  “What if Colleen and Eric believe I have hard copies of everything that was in the online storage?” she asked.

  It didn’t take long, only a few seconds, for Lucas to figure out where this was going. And he shook his head. “You’re talking about setting a trap. Definitely not a good idea, because it could send those hired killers after you again.”

  “The hired killers will come no matter what. I’m not sure why, but obviously the person behind this sees me as a threat. Or maybe the things that I know are what he or she considers the threat.”

  That was true, and it didn’t rule out any of their suspects. Minton could want anything destroyed that could link him to being a dirty agent. Eric could be trying to save his butt from going to jail. And Colleen? Well, Lucas still didn’t know why she was seemingly playing on Eric’s side in this, but it was obvious she didn’t want her sister to have any incriminating evidence about the man.

  Or maybe the information in the file incriminated someone else? Like Colleen herself?

  Too bad they didn’t have the real files to examine.

  “Just think this through,” Hailey pressed. “We could leak that the computer files have been erased and that I’m getting the hard copies to give to Grayson. We could say that I’m getting them from a safe deposit box or something.”