“I’ll be back in the morning.” He tossed her a key, probably for locking the door they’d come through.
“But… where will you sleep?” The drive back to Naughton wasn’t far, but he looked so tired.
“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “You just concentrate on staying alive.”
That sobered her. A bomb? The ball taken? Stuff was moving too fast for her to process.
She followed him and stood at the base of the narrow staircase. He climbed to the top but paused before heading out.
“Don’t let anyone in.” There was that caustic edge to his tone again. “Whether you think he’s your trusted friend or not.”
Obviously he meant Ames.
Before she could clear the air of all the toxins floating between them, Dane disappeared from view, leaving her with a thousand unanswered questions.
__________
Dane got back in his truck. Hiding Brooke and her aunt on the boat was the right thing to do. No question.
Protecting her physically was a no-brainer.
But going to bat for her as her attorney was a tougher decision. If he did, his career could go up in smoke, now more than ever.
He glanced back down the pitch-dark line of boats to where he’d deposited Brooke. Leaving her behind sliced at his soul. Someone needed to watch over her. Geez. Somebody, some villain, left a bomb in her apartment.
Things had just gotten serious.
Dane’s first instinct was to stay there at his uncle’s yacht, keep two eyes on Brooke day and night. But his truck would be a tip-off if someone was not just threatening the museum but also hunting her down.
He started the engine and drove back to Left Field. Police were still there, but Ames Crosby was just heading out. Not that Dane had any desire to chat him up, he was just glad to see him leaving, even if it wasn’t in handcuffs.
At least the bomb hadn’t exploded. If it was a bomb. He’d get the police report tomorrow.
The town clock tower chimed two o’clock.
Somebody had to keep an eye on Brooke.
Dane parked his truck at Left Field and then walked the quarter mile back to the dock, a sleeping bag from his truck slung over his shoulder. He spread it out at the head of the dock, the night too stifling to climb inside it. If he just rested here, he’d know whether someone approached. He could sleep light, keep an ear out.
She’d be safe. He’d make sure. The slosh of waves lapping against the sides of the docked boats lulled him into rest, finally. The big empty sky above him and the big empty ocean to the east clarified things, put them into order of priority.
No question, Dane’s career was worth a lot less than Brooke’s life. Or even her happiness. Or her safety.
He’d be by her side on Tuesday, no matter what. Even if he had to finish Brooke’s hearing only to get disbarred by the beige ethics prosecutor.
I’m a man with basically nothing to lose.
Except Brooke’s trust.
__________
Dane knocked on the door of the boat and poked his head in after unlocking it with his other key. He needed to see that Brooke was okay. Oh, and grab a shower.
“Knock, knock.”
Speaking of showering, out of the tiny bathroom, wrapped in an oversized fluffy white towel, emerged Brooke. Steam billowed around her, and she looked fresh, clean, and gorgeous.
Dane about dropped the paper bag filled with breakfast he’d brought for her.
“Dane!”
“Hello, there.” He stepped into the cabin, shutting the door behind him. “This is even better than when you were in the swimsuit competition.” Her skin sparkled with the drops of water beading up on her shoulders. He moved toward her, compelled by every force in the universe to touch that skin…
“Turn around. I’m not decent.”
“Oh, I’d call you decent. More than decent. You’re stellar.”
With her face blushing, she clenched the towel and disappeared into the bedroom, breaking the spell on him just a little.
“You, Dane Rockwell,” she said through the lightweight door to the bedroom, “vacillate wildly between prince charming and the charming rogue.” She poked her head out the door, her hair dripping, and reignited the spell. “You’re so nice one minute and such a cad the next.” She disappeared again behind the closed door.
“That’s why you can’t stay away from me.” He took a step toward the door, his hand resting on it, but pulled it away quickly as if it was red hot. He could not do this. Not today.
Finally she emerged, just after he got his willpower back; he’d been imagining how many different calibers of pistol Quirt would use to shoot him if he misused Brooke. She looked so pretty, clean. And he’d let her stay that way.
“Any word on Left Field? Is it in smithereens?” She slid the back of her sandal over her heel. “I didn’t hear any explosion or smell smoke.” It was only a half mile as the crow flew from here, so signs of an explosion could have reached the boat; only it hadn’t exploded.
“I went by the police station. Bomb squad came in, examined it. It had all the hallmarks, but none of the explosives.”
“So it was a fake?” Brooke sat back, dropping her other shoe. “I overreacted?” To his surprise, she looked embarrassed.
“Uh, no. You reacted perfectly. Err on the side of caution when someone plants a bomb or a fake bomb in your house. That’s the rule of thumb.”
“But why?” She grabbed the dropped shoe and tugged it on. “Scare tactic? This might be something about the ball. Or the hearing.”
“Pretty suspicious timing.” As was Ames’s appearance. The police had questioned Crosby, but they’d let him go. Dimwits.
“Who are the suspects?”
“They interviewed Crosby.”
“What? Why?”
“Uh, because he was lurking outside Left Field at the time the bomb appeared? And because he is connected to Sarge LaBarge?” Not as connected as he used to be, what with the alleged divorce, but still. “Come on. You have to agree the police were right to question him.”
Brooke crossed her arms over her chest. “You didn’t seem at all surprised to see him in Maddox last night.” Her gaze turned hard. “You knew he was in town. And you didn’t tell me.”
Dane might as well come clean. “I heard he might come back, but I didn’t know for sure.” Why did he feel like he was skirting the truth on this? “Your friend Pansy told me.”
“I know. She just texted me this morning about that.” Brooke pointed at her phone on the coffee table, clearly out of sorts. “You should have warned me. I got blindsided.”
Hot shame spread through Dane’s chest. He’d tried— really tried— to warn her. Or at least say something about it. But the words had lodged in his throat like a bad chicken bone.
“I need to go talk to him.” Brooke stood, gathering the key to the cabin and her phone.
Dane jumped up. “What? No.”
With a hand on her hip, she said, “Don’t you trust me?”
This question, so pointed, made him splutter silently. Yes, he trusted her. But he didn’t trust Ames Crosby.
Could anyone trust Brooke’s feelings when she was around Crosby? Sands shifted beneath Dane’s feet. “I think it could be dangerous,” he finally said.
“Dangerous.” She leveled a look at him. “No way did Ames plant that bomb.”
“There are a lot of different kinds of danger.” It came out low, gravelly. Much more raw than he’d intended it to.
She reached out and took his wrist in her fingertips. The place where she touched him grew hot.
“If I just go through my trials, they don’t change me. I have to let them go through me, too.”
In a second she’d dropped his arm and gone up the steps.
And with that, he’d lost her.
Chapter Eighteen
Own Recognizance
Even though every step added more cement to her legs and more molasses to the front walk, it onl
y made sense for Brooke to go and question Ames.
Tuesday was coming soon, and if Dane had actually walloped the guy there was no chance Ames would view him as anything but hostile.
Hostility had definitely been coming off Dane in waves, but there was no way Ames had planted that fake bomb last night. Nuh-uh. But he had been closer to old LaBarge than anyone else Brooke knew, and Ames might know something.
Much as her stomach was not up for the acrobatics of visiting a guy with whom her last conversation had been about spending the rest of forever together, Tuesday’s hearing required it.
Clearly, Ames’s reappearance had been the bit of information Dane had been harboring. He’d tried to tell her in the truck last night, but he probably hadn’t known how to drop the bomb. Speaking of bombs.
But also speaking of bombs, Ames did not leave that one in her house.
Without any other leads, she first tried the brick townhouse Ames rented when he’d lived in Maddox the year before.
Irritation with Dane cropped up over and over, though, as she kept putting one sandal in front of the other up the petunia-lined walk. How could he think Ames planted a fake bomb in her house? That he was there as some kind of spy for the baseball case on Sarge LaBarge’s behalf?
Come on.
Dane had to be wrong. Right?
She raised her hand to ring the bell. It hovered a moment as the hot summer air clogged her lungs. What exactly was she going to say to him?
Before she could come up with all the awkward options, the door swung open behind the screen door. “Oh.” Brilliant opening, Brooke.
Here came the internal gymnastics— mostly tying all her intestines in a complete knot, intertwined with her aorta and her windpipe.
“Brooke? I was just going to the police station to see if they had found you, and whether you were okay.” In the daylight Ames looked older, but the first year as a doctor would do that to anyone— the way hospitals ran them ragged, exhausting them to within an inch of their lives. It probably gave the doctors empathy for the nearly dead people they were treating.
Otherwise he looked the same. Same golden Ames.
“Uh, I’m fine.” Other than her knees turning to liquid and her throat closing over. Totally fine.
Ames’s shoulders drooped. “Whew. I mean, bomb threats! What’s going on?”
So he didn’t know? That fact dislodged some of the knotting inside her. She had a job to do, and she could pursue the fact that the bomb seemed to surprise him.
“I’m not sure. It seems like someone doesn’t want Left Field to open.” Brooke watched closely to gauge his reaction, but it seemed so open and sincere.
“I saw your aunt Ruth. She’s excited about the place. She should be. It’s great. And you can show off your grandfather’s baseball collection. I mean, if he hadn’t chartered the first official Little League program in Maddox, my life as a kid would have stunk. I lived for that stuff, you know?” He was talking like things hadn’t altered between them, like she had no reason to wish he would spontaneously combust.
“What are you doing here, Ames?” It came blurting out before she could soften it.
“At my house?”
“You know what I mean. In Maddox. Lurking at my apartment near midnight. Reinserting yourself into my world. You have a wife. You married into the wealthiest, most powerful family in the Chesapeake Bay region. Quit messing with that. Go away.”
Ames’s face fell. “You want me to leave?” He drew back into the house a little.
Brooke didn’t know. “I’m going to trial against your father-in-law in three days.” It was Saturday today, if she could keep these days straight, considering the craziness of them.
“He’s not my father-in-law.”
“You married his daughter. That’s how those things work.”
Ames shook his head. “It ended. A year to the day. That was the deal.”
“Deal?” If only she could have given him some sort of emotional MRI to see what he truly meant. “What are you talking about?”
Ames opened his mouth to answer.
Brooke cut him off. “Never mind. I need to focus right now.” She shifted gears, away from potential personal anguish and back to the pressure of her current reality.
“There’s a trial that can make or break my future. I put everything I have into Left Field— even the life insurance money from my parents’ accident. It’s all tied up in this museum.” Her voice got a hitch in it when she realized she still had to pay back Mr. Earnshaw and that this thing was a doomed venture. “If the judge doesn’t rule in my favor on Tuesday, my dear sweet aunt, who took me in after my parents died, will have no future. She’s put everything into this museum, too. I have everything to lose.”
She hadn’t meant to be so candid, or so dramatic. But seeing him had triggered a waterfall of words.
Ames stared at the cement stoop. “You don’t have to tell me about Sarge LaBarge or his ruthlessness.”
Brooke’s head popped up. She blinked a few times.
Ames came out onto the step beside her, standing far too close. Brooke should have stepped back, put a healthier distance between them.
“What do you know about him?” Brooke crossed her arms.
Ames pushed around her, went down the steps and then turned. Instead of walking off, he took a seat on the top step of his small porch. Potted geraniums flanked the front door, and the powdery floral scent wafted on a breeze.
He took out a tin of mints from his shirt pocket. He offered her one. She refused.
“Faro LaBarge.” He shook his head slowly. “Piece of work.” He patted the step beside him. There wasn’t really room for her to sit, but it seemed like he was insisting, so she perched on the corner of the stoop. The cold of the concrete seeped through her jeans into her skin.
Her arsenal of probing questions was small. “I was thinking of something that rhymes with work.”
“Yeah, jerk. For sure.” Ames put his mints away. “But I know stuff. For one, he’s never been sergeant of anything— except at military school, where he got sent for being a belligerent teenager.” Ames scoffed. “Drill sergeant for a day. The nickname stuck because of the rhyme.” He made eye contact with her and said, “Speaking of rhymes.”
She broke the eye contact, which was prickly, not warm. Dane might be right about him. She couldn’t tell. Ames definitely had a motive, but whether it was to harm her or to harm LaBarge, she couldn’t tell.
“Why is he doing this to Aunt Ruth?” Or to Brooke, for that matter? “Are you here so you can warn me?”
He looked down at her. “I’m here for a lot of reasons, Brooke.”
When his eyes fell on hers this time, they snagged against something deep inside her. A barb. “I only want to hear the reasons relevant to Tuesday for now.” Where had for now come from?
Ames frowned. “Right. Well, maybe I ought to talk with your lawyer, then. Because I have a lot of information relevant to your Tuesday.”
__________
“But Dane,” Brooke said, her eyes pleading with him, “I honestly think it’s worth the risk.” She’d told him about LaBarge’s false identity as a sergeant. “He says he knows more, but he wants to tell my lawyer.”
The last person Dane Rockwell wanted to depend on for information to win Brooke’s court case was Ames Crosby. Especially when Dane himself was abandoning her at the last second.
He should tell her. He had to tell her. Soon.
“You’re not seeing how unwise this is,” he said instead.
“You’re not seeing how little time we have.”
Oh, yeah, he was. From inside his brain came the constant ticking of two separate doomsday timers set a half-hour apart.
“Look, let’s hear him out.” She looked up into his eyes, and his will softened. As always. “If it’s a dead end, that’s all we can do. But just because he’s Ames Crosby doesn’t mean we should write him off as a potential testimony against LaBarge.”
Ev
en though Dane would rather have had mushy apples lobbed at his head, he tucked in his shirttail and headed over to the coffee shop a few doors down from Left Field, where Brooke insisted he come and meet up with Crosby.
The three of them sat at a table near the window.
“So?” Dane planned on monosyllabic communication with Dr. Jackwagon as much as possible. He resisted the urge to ask, What’s in it for you, bucko?
“So,” Ames said, shifting in his seat. “So I recognize you. We’ve met.” Ames rubbed his jaw. Yeah, his jaw would remember. Ames released a heavy sigh that said he still knew he deserved the left hook.
“Tuesday is court.” Dane gave a curt nod to signal Ames to spill it. They didn’t have all day.
“He knows something about Faro LaBarge. How he operates. How he thinks.” Brooke gave an encouraging nod to both of them.
A psych eval? That wasn’t what Dane expected. He’d thought this would be some kind of he-yells-at-his-kids tell-all. Maybe not.
To Dane, Brooke cast her pleading eyes. How could he refuse that?
“Go on.” Dane nodded, not ready to start taking notes yet. Crosby’d better say something worth hearing first.
Crosby looked over at Brooke. His eyes lingered on her too long, and the old itch to punch the guy came bubbling back up in Dane’s gut. He tamped it down.
“He’s got a pattern,” Crosby began. “It’s his usual method of operation. Four things.”
“Four, huh?” Dane still didn’t get out his pen.
“First, character assassination. Simultaneously he pulls out the physical harm card. Meanwhile, he’ll work up a feasible lie. And finally, he’ll finagle a way to get exactly what he wants, even if it’s incrementally. He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t care who he hurts. He gets what he wants. Period.” The doctor spat the last word.
Dane processed Crosby’s list of four. Some of them lined up with what they’d already seen: the threat of physical harm— assuming LaBarge was behind the bomb threat. Then there was the other threat, when LaBarge came drunk to Brooke’s door last week. That had been a different type of threat. What had he said? He knew she was a forger and intended to prove it? That gelled with Crosby’s theory about character assassination.
Wills & Trust (Legally in Love Collection Book 3) Page 18