I shrugged. I wouldn’t have thought so a week ago, but again, I knew that all operatives were equally important to the powers that be at Dragon. They probably would have done this for any of us.
We boarded the plane and Kirsten’s eyes got as big as saucers. It wasn’t e top of the line, but it was an impressive plane. The seats were leather, the amenities—seat warmers and personal televisions, work stations and satellite phones, and two flight attendants—were definitely more impressive that what was on her barebones plane. Despite Kirsten’s family wealth, she’d always lived a humble existence. This was several steps above that.
We settled in seats toward the front of the plane. I reached over to help her with her seatbelt, purposely allowing my fingers to linger in places that brought a burning blush to her face. I smiled, loving that I had that power over her once again.
Hayden took a seat in the row in front of us, turning his chair so that we were forced into an intimate little circle. Megan joined us, her expression kind and empathetic.
“I can only guess what the two of you have been through in the past few hours, but we need to know what we’re fighting if we’re going to be able to help you.”
Kirsten slid her hand into mine, squeezing tight enough to block blood flow.
“It’s my fault,” she said. “If I hadn’t called Kevin and dragged him into my family’s business”
“It’s okay, babe.” I leaned close and nuzzled her jaw with my nose. “Let me explain, okay?”
She nodded, squeezing my hand again.
“It’s really simple,” I said, launching into the whole story. I told them about Kirsten’s call, about driving out to the ranch, about Dallas and her marriage plans, about the pre-nup and the wedding that was supposed to take place that morning. And then I explained how I happened to be the one to find Jason’s body.
“The maid let me in and I knew immediately that something was wrong. His body was behind the couch, a pool of blood forming on the carpet. There was no sign of struggle, nothing disturbed about his clothing or his body. He was lying on his back, his eyes open. It looked as though someone he knew and trusted shot him either without warning or in a situation where he didn’t believe the person would actually pull the trigger.”
“And the gun?” Megan asked. “It was under the body?”
“It looked like someone—”
“Was trying to hide it,” Hayden said.
I nodded in agreement.
Megan focused on Kirsten. “Is there anyone in your life who would want to hurt you? Someone who would know you didn’t want this wedding to take place and who knew you’d have your gun in your bag?”
Kirsten considered her questions for a moment.
“Everyone knew about the gun,” she said, glancing at me. “It was a gift from my dad. Everyone on the ranch, everyone who came to the ranch, they all knew that I carried it with me almost everywhere I went.” She chewed on her lip a second. “I don’t know who all knew about my feelings toward Dallas’ fiancée. Trevor knew. My parents. Probably the maids at the house overheard me on the phone once or twice complaining about it. But I don’t know who else might have known.”
“Who’s Trevor?” Hayden asked.
“My brother.”
Hayden’s eyebrows rose at my answer, but he didn’t say anything else. I didn’t talk much about my family at work. Never felt like it was appropriate to share my private life with the people I worked with. I think the only person I might have mentioned family to was Rhett.
And that was because we were comparing family hurts late one night after we’d had a few too many drinks. Rhett beat me hands down, what with her dead dad and her alcoholic mother. My beef with Trevor was nothing compared to that.
“You run your family ranch?” Megan asked, studying Kirsten with interest. “Are there people who don’t like that arrangement? Cousins or uncles or neighbors?”
“There’s that neighbor,” I said, remembering Kirsten’s confrontation with the neighbor the night she showed me around the ranch.
“Mr. Marconi,” she said. “He’s angry that we built an airstrip at the edge of our property where it meets the property line of his horse farm.”
“Why?”
“Because he claims the planes coming and going agitate his horses. That it’s causing problems with his business.”
“But you raise horses,” I said. “Does it agitate them?”
Kirsten shook her head. “Never has.”
“What kind of horses to you raise?” Megan asked.
“Thoroughbreds.”
“You race them?”
“We used to. My mom’s horses won the Preakness Stakes and Belmont Stakes a few times, but they never could win the Kentucky Derby.”
Megan’s eyebrows rose. “Impressive.”
“Now we train them for other stables. It’s a very lucrative business. Keeps the cattle side of the business afloat.”
I glanced at her. That wasn’t the first time she’d mentioned the cattle side of business having trouble. I wondered just how much it was actually struggling.
“Any other enemies?” Hayden asked, pulling the conversation back on track.
“Not really. I mean, there’s always the activists, but I don’t think they’d be quite this clever.”
“Activists?” Hayden’s eyebrows rose. “What activists?”
“Animal activists,” I answered for Kirsten. “They think cattle ranchers treat their animals poorly, purposely locking them up in stables to overfeed them and prevent them from exercising the weight off. Or overbreeding them. Sometimes they’ll actually come to the ranch and protest at the gates, especially around market time. There have been a few times when they accosted members of the family out in public—they threw blood on my mother once and splattered Kirsten’s mom with paint. But they’ve never become more violent than that.”
“Well,” Kirsten said, drawing out the word. “There was this one time when my dad was out on the winter pasture. Someone took a couple of shots at him and hit his horse’s hindquarter. The cops eventually arrested one of the activists, a woman who turned herself in because she felt so bad for injuring the horse.”
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“You weren’t around. It was about four years ago, right before he retired to California.”
I hated that idea, hated that I wasn’t made aware of someone I cared about finding themselves in the middle of a battlefield. It could have just as easily been my father.
“We’ll check into the activists, just to be sure. And this neighbor. Marconi?”
“Julius Marconi,” I said.
Hayden nodded, typing the name into his phone. I suspected he was sending it in a text message to Waverly. I was pretty sure Dragon couldn’t function without Waverly and her staff, especially in this digital world where everything was on a computer somewhere.
Megan stood up and leaned over Kirsten, touching her shoulder lightly.
“You get some rest now. We’ll get in touch with the office and get things going. We’ll find out who’s behind this.”
“Thank you,” Kirsten said, catching Megan’s hand before she could pull back.
“Kevin is a valued member of our team and you are his family. We’ll do all we can to make this right.”
Kirsten glanced at me, her eyes clouded with emotion. Megan touched my shoulder too, winking with a look that told me exactly what her words had said to Kirsten. She had my back. And then she walked off with Hayden trailing behind her, disappearing behind a door at the back of the plane that led to a small office.
“You’ve done well,” Kirsten said. “They’re good people.”
“They are.”
She shifted slightly, laying her head on my chest. I wrapped my arm around her, my mind once again working the puzzle of who might be behind this mess. Kirsten wasn’t the easiest person to get along with, but she wasn’t the kind to attract a lot of enemies, either. She was strong, capable, and intelligent.
She knew when to fight, when to back down, and when to compromise. She was a lot like her father that way. And her father couldn’t have made the ranch what it was if he’d made dozens of enemies.
It had to be personal. And that meant that I was going to have to ask hard questions that I’d hoped to avoid up to this point.
“Babe,” I said, “I need to know some things.”
“Like what?” she asked, her voice a little muffled from the way she was sitting.
“I need to know if there’s someone in your personal life who could be holding a grudge against you.”
She sat up and looked at me, confusion darkening her green eyes. “What do you mean? I thought we just talked about that.”
“We talked about business grudges. What about ex-boyfriends? A boyfriend’s former girl? Someone you fired from the house? Some friend who felt slighted by a missed invitation?”
A slow, flirty smile touched her full lips. “Is this just an excuse to clarify the whole ‘I waited for you’ thing? Did you not believe me?”
“It’s been nine years. There had to have been a boyfriend, or a guy with a crush.”
“There were a few crushes. A couple of guys in college, but it never got to the commitment level. And there was this guy a year or so ago, a distributor for the AG company we use. He would make his delivery late in the evening so I’d feel obliged to invite him to dinner. But when he tried to kiss me, I shut it down.”
“There was no one else?”
She touched my face, her thumb dragging over my bottom lip. “No one.”
“What about the house?” I asked, snagging her hand and kissing her palm. “You let any maids go when your parents left for California? Fire a gardener or two?”
She thought about it for a minute. “Tina wasn’t thrilled when Momma moved her to part time, but she understood. She was having health problems and Mom was afraid they would get worse if she kept working such long hours, going up and down those stairs. But she promised to keep paying her full salary.”
“Do you? Still pay her full salary?”
She nodded. “And her daughter makes more than most of the new maids.”
“Anyone else you can think of who might be angry with you personally? Or the family in general?”
Her eyes darkened as she thought about it. But then she shook her head again.
“Not a soul.”
I pulled her back down against my chest, sliding my arm around her. I held her there, more afraid than I was before. If it wasn’t someone in her life, someone who had a personal reason to hurt her, then this might just be more complicated than a few days investigation could solve. If we ever solved it.
We could be in real trouble here.
Chapter 14
Hayden
I dropped into a chair in front of the narrow desk where Megan had set up her laptop already, her fingers flying over the keyboard and her eyes glued to the screen.
“I sent a text to Waverly and told her to check out the name she gave us.”
“I know. I’m just checking out these activists.”
I sat up a little straighter, locking my hands together between my thighs. “What do you think? You think she’s innocent?”
“Kevin swears he was with her all morning and she didn’t have the opportunity.”
“He could be lying. You saw the way he was looking at her.”
“Of course I did. She’s the one who got away for him. But that doesn’t mean he’s lying.”
“Men lie when it comes to the women in their life. It’s just a fact of life.”
Megan looked at me over the top of her computer. “Yeah? Would you lie for Waverly?”
I felt heat burst over my face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that I know there’s something going on there. I saw the way she was looking at you the night those idiots shot up the lobby at Dragon. She’s in love with you.”
I knew it, but I wasn’t about to acknowledge it out loud. That would have made it way too real. “She’s not in love with me. We just have … an arrangement.”
“You’re having an affair.” She smiled again, her eyes dropping back to the computer. “I think it’s great.”
“Do you?”
There was grief in her next words, grief that told me we were still on the same wavelength when it came to Sam.
“It’s been five years,” she said softly. “Sam would be the first person to tell you to get on with your life.”
“I wish she would. I wish she was here, sitting beside me, telling me what I should do with my life.”
“Some people believe that’s possible,” Megan said, glancing at me again. “Maybe you should go visit a medium.”
I groaned. “That’s just a lot of tricks and lies.”
“Some people believe in it.”
“Not me.”
Megan shrugged. “Sam was my best friend from the time we started high school. She was there for me through everything: the beginning of my relationship with Luke, the day he left for Basic, the day I left for Basic. She was there when Luke left me at the altar, there when Peter died,” she said, putting air quotes around the word died.
“She was my rock through it all. I know her better than I know myself and I know she would want you to be happy. She wouldn’t like you living in her condo and cutting yourself off from the people around you. She wouldn’t like that you haven’t found a new love.”
“She was the only love I will ever have.” Since when had I switched from feeling like I was betraying Sam to feeling like I was betraying Waverly? Because I did, and the guilt in my mouth tasted bitter.
“Was she? How do you know if you don’t try?”
“What about you?” I demanded, hating the direction this conversation was taking. “Do you really think she’d want you with Luke after everything we’ve learned about what he did? Do you really think she’d be impressed with the fact that he was working with the bad guys. That he delivered Peter to the bad guy?”
Megan shook her head, her eyes glued to her computer screen again. She knew what I was talking about. Five years ago, Megan’s brother had gotten himself involved in the actions of a rogue CIA agent who was using a terrorist cell he’d formed to make himself rich off of multiple governments’ panic.
It turned out that Luke not only helped Peter fake his death to get him out of harm’s way, but that he was working on the orders of the very rogue CIA agent everyone was looking for. Luke could have saved Peter and his family the heartache of his faked death, saved Peter from two years of captivity, and countless people around the world from the actions of the terrorist cell if he had simply looked closer at the evidence and realized sooner who the criminal really was.
And if he’d stopped working for the rogue agent and sabotaging our investigation into the whole mess.
“Sam would have understood that we all make mistakes. Luke thought Edgar Olsen was the only one in the CIA he could trust at the time. He didn’t know.”
“But if he hadn’t listened so blindly to Olsen—”
“He didn’t know, Hayden.”
She looked up at me, her expression one I knew far too well. She wanted me to back off. I slid back down in the chair, stretching my legs out under her desk.
“We can’t undo what’s already been done. But we’d be pretty stupid if we didn’t remember and allowed it to happen again.”
Megan’s jaw tightened. “You do remember that this is my husband we’re talking about, right? A man who was once your closest friend? The reason you and I know each other at all?”
“I know.”
“You’re walking a thin line.”
“Don’t I always?”
She sighed. “You are incredibly important to me, Hayden. Not just because of our shared connection to Sam, but because I trust you more than I trust just about anyone else in my life. Please don’t push this issue. Don’t make me choose.”
“Okay.”
“And don’t
be so hard on Waverly. If you don’t care about her, tell her before she falls too deep.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She turned her focus back to her computer after one last, long stare at me. “It’s going to take a while to get much information on these activists. I never realized there were so many people passionate about cows …”
Chapter 15
Kirsten
We landed in Houston well after dark. Exhaustion had begun to settle in halfway through the flight. Getting in an SUV and rushing across town was just more effort than I thought I could expend. Without Kevin’s arm around me, I’m not even sure I could have climbed into the damn vehicle. Being wanted for murder was so much harder on my body than riding the trail with the cattle on a late fall afternoon.
The house they were putting us in was a cute little ranch at the back of a cul-de-sac. They drove right into the garage and walked us into the house through the small kitchen. I stumbled a little as we entered the living room. Kevin lifted me into his arms like I was a child and carried me into a large bedroom, laying me in the center of a soft, luxurious bed.
“Don’t go,” I said, snagging the front of his shirt as he pulled away.
“I’ll be back.” He kissed the center of my forehead, then the tip of my nose. “I’m not leaving you ever again.”
I watched him go, my heart aching with the familiarity of his movements mixed with the new, my mind noting all the changes in him since the last time we saw each other. I was so overwhelmed with gratitude at just seeing him there that tears filled my eyes.
Despite everything—my emotional state and the voices I could hear out in the living room—I fell asleep. I was in a dream landscape before my mind even realized that I was fully asleep. I was on the ranch watching Trevor brand one of the new calves, which was unusual on its own because Trevor worked more with the horses than the cattle. It should have been his father. But he was branding the calf and Elizabeth—Tina’s daughter—was standing behind him, whispering something in his ear. I couldn’t imagine what they might be talking about. As far as I knew, Trevor had never had a conversation with Elizabeth.
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