“Which means that if this really is Delilah’s blood, it stained the dress recently. Maybe within the last few hours.”
“Do you think she’s alive?” she asked as horror cracked through her soft voice.
“I don’t know, Whitney,” he said, impatiently.
“It doesn’t look like that much blood,” she commented, taking the dress from him and holding it up so that she could eye the length of it. “It looks like she was stabbed or whatever in her lower abdomen.”
Shane’s eyes widened and he came around to look at the dress over Whitney’s shoulder. She was right, and it was just enough information to make him wonder.
“What if she was pregnant?”
Whitney gasped then worked hard to calm her welling emotions. “We don’t know that.”
“No,” he agreed. “We don’t.”
Then after a tense moment of reconsideration, she allowed, “Something like a pregnancy, though, could’ve been a big enough crisis to turn one of her men against her.”
“Delilah goes to one of her John’s,” he proposed, thinking out loud and following Whitney’s logic to its farthest conclusion, “tells him that he got her pregnant. Maybe he holds some kind of standing in town. Or he’s married. Either way, he can’t have this.”
“If she’d tried to extort money from him for an abortion, I’d think any man who was married or needed to keep his relationship with Delilah a secret, would’ve provided it.”
“Maybe she told him she wanted to keep it,” he decided. “And it got her—”
He was about to say killed, but the glint of anguish in Whitney’s eyes prevented him from finishing the thought.
“We’re really getting ahead of ourselves here,” he told her as he rolled the dress into a ball and brought it into the kitchen.
She followed at his heels. Shane kept leftover plastic shopping bags beneath the kitchen sink. He grabbed one now, cracked it open, and set the balled dress inside.
“I’m not Larry Hardcastle’s biggest fan,” said Whitney. “But I don’t see why he’d angrily leave the dress with you if he’d done something to Delilah.”
“Delilah was his meal ticket,” Shane agreed. “I don’t see why he’d kill her either.”
Unless, of course…
Shane had a hard time wrapping his mind around a scenario where Larry Hardcastle, the missing girl’s own stepfather, would attack her for having gotten pregnant.
He reminded himself that he didn’t have any factual reason to believe Delilah had even been pregnant. But Whitney had a point. Delilah’s dark routine of soliciting men to make extra cash had to have been interrupted in a big way to precipitate her disappearance and possible murder. There had to have been some kind of massive change for this to have happened. After all, she’d been doing her thing for years and years without incident. What changed to cause this dark result?
And what would happen next?
Shane sensed, on the level of his instinctual gut, that he had another Polaroid coming to him, and it wasn’t hard to fear the worst, that in it Delilah could very well be dead.
“I have to get out of these clothes,” Whitney commented, glancing at her sweat-stained Yellowstone uniform. “I think I need a shower.”
“Take your time,” he told her.
She was blocking the entryway of the kitchen, pinning him in beside the sink, but she didn’t turn for the bathroom.
Instead, she locked her gaze on the fat plastic bag he was holding and asked, “What are you going to do with that?”
“Hang on to it for now,” he said.
“Shane,” she said in a leveling tone. “What if my daddy comes here?”
“With a warrant?” he asked. “Warrants take time.”
He didn’t need Whitney to point out how bad it would look if Shane was in possession of Delilah’s bloody dress, but the alternative, bringing the evidence in to the sheriff, would incriminate Shane just as badly.
“I wish you knew my daddy as well as I do,” she said in a defeated tone.
“Yeah,” he allowed. “Me too.”
Whitney held her head high, tone rising into an optimistic level, as she promised, “You will.”
With that, she turned on her heel and started for the bathroom to shower.
“You have a fresh change of clothes?” he called out as she reached the downstairs bathroom.
“Fresh enough. I left my shorts and tee in the bathroom,” she said before closing the door behind her.
As soon as Shane heard the shower running, he climbed the stairs and walked into his bedroom. Kneeling at the side of the bed, he felt for one of the shotgun cases, a long and deep sack that would be flexible enough to stuff the swollen plastic bag into.
Once he tucked the evidence securely inside, he zipped the sack closed and shoved it back under the bed.
He could use a shower himself, but the second-floor bathroom didn’t appeal to him in the same way that Whitney’s did.
Moving quickly, he yanked another pair of army fatigue pants from a hanger in the closet along with a forest-green tank top. His closet looked like Ronald McDonald’s—a comical wealth of identical outfits lined up against one another. Shane had his look after all and if it wasn’t broke…
With the clean clothes in hand, he started down the stairs and was pleased to discover that Whitney hadn’t locked the bathroom door.
He gave a little knock, more to announce himself than to ask for permission, and then stepped inside.
“Shane?”
“Who else would it be?”
She let out a little laugh and reminded him, “These days, you never know.”
He stripped down into his birthday suit after setting his change of clothes on the closed toilet lid then pulled the shower curtain aside to find Whitney gleaming with soapy suds and her hair all lathered up. The way the shower water cascaded off her every curve was quite a sight and he felt himself responding to her shape as he stepped into the porcelain tub behind her.
She turned, facing him, so that the shower stream hit her hair as she ran her fingers through to help the shampoo rinse out of it.
As he took a bar of soap, far more interested in running it over the lines and curves of her supple body than his own, she asked, “Does it help at all, having Delilah’s dress? I mean, having the scent of both her skin and blood?”
He knew what she meant. She was referring to his heightened werewolf senses, but he’d been down that road before.
“There’s a lot of ground to cover in this town,” he regretted to inform her. “Yellowstone is vast and wide. The old Halsey land is almost as dense. The Fist reaches all the way out east into the plains.”
“So that’s a no?”
“It’s a you’re right but it’s not practical,” he countered as he lathered the bar of soap between his hands and brought them to her breasts.
She smiled at him and teased, “I’m pretty sure I got those squeaky clean already.”
“You can never be too clean,” he reminded her with a grin as he caressed his soapy hands down the slick length of her, the stream of water running over her soaked hair and spilling off her shoulders, lapping around the sloping curves of her meaty hips. He found her ass with both hands and began working what was left of the soap on his hands into her firm cheeks.
As he did, he watched her eyes grow dreamy before fluttering closed. She stepped in close and wrapped her slick, slender arms around his muscular shoulders as he caressed the length of her back. She sighed out a moan that he immediately responded to, feeling his erection stiffen and lift in-between her hot, water-wet thighs.
Maneuvering carefully in the slippery shower, he turned with her, switching places so that he was standing under the hot stream.
She squeezed a dollop of shampoo into her palm and once Shane had doused his head under the shower stream, she began lathering and massaging the shampoo into his short crew cut and scalp, as he held her firmly against him, his large hands stroking around h
er hips, up her waist, across her lower back, and around again.
She cleaned him with the bar of soap next as he tested how high he could lift his erection to meet her core. She smiled softly and clamped her thighs together, trapping him, and it brought to mind how he’d very much like to carry her up into his bedroom as soon as they stepped out of the shower.
He pulled her in, bringing his lips to hers as the stream of water spilled down their faces, and as they kissed he growled lightly and held her tight.
Satisfied that they were both clean, he made fast work of turning under the stream to thoroughly rinse himself off then traded places with her so that she could do the same, and soon they were stepping out of the porcelain tub, Shane having shut the water off.
Shane wrapped a fluffy towel around Whitney then grabbed one off the rack for himself, but they didn’t waste too much time drying off.
He liked her damp, her skin warm from the shower. He cast her towel aside, resting it on the sink counter and let his own fall to the tiles, as he pulled her in for a deeper kiss. She moaned into his mouth and he could feel her entire body relax into his strong arms.
He had every intention in the world to scoop her up into his arms and carry her to his bedroom. He was hard for her, harder than he’d been when he’d had the pleasure of tasting her sex as he’d played between her sexy thighs the other night, but the distinct sound of his cell phone vibrating within the pocket of his discarded fatigues interrupted those plans.
“Don’t get it,” she breathed, pulling his face back to hers for another, hungrier kiss.
He let it buzz, his pants rumbling against the tiles with the sustained vibration, as he held her face and tilted her head, deepening their kiss. But he couldn’t let it go. These days, no one called him unless it was important, and important often meant some degree of a serious emergency.
“I have to get this,” he apologized as he picked up his army pants and found his cell phone. “It’s Conor.”
Whitney slumped with disappointment and stared at him like a puppy who knew its big soulful eyes could garner it the treat it wanted. It made Shane smile, but he still answered his younger brother’s call.
“This better be good,” Shane barked into his cell phone, as he watched Whitney cover herself up with her towel. Damn. He wished she hadn’t done that. “What’s up?”
“Dante is back in town.”
“What?”
Shane felt the length of his relaxed body grow instantly tense. He watched, though unseeingly, as Whitney dressed quickly and opened the bathroom door, letting all the steam out.
Conor informed him, “Rachel found him in Devil’s Advocate—”
“PO Clancy?” he asked.
“Who else?” Conor returned impatiently. “He almost put one over on her and would have if I hadn’t come along.”
Devil’s Advocate was the souvenir shop that Delilah lived above. Suddenly, Shane knew it would have been absolutely no coincidence that Dante would’ve set foot inside that particular store. He wasn’t exactly the type who was ever in the market for a postcard or snow globe.
“Where is he?” Shane demanded.
“I don’t know. He raced off down the street in some flashy silver car,” said Conor.
Shane was tempted to ask if Conor’s amethyst had lit up, white-hot and searing, but Whitney was within earshot out in the living room.
“What’s the plan?” he asked instead.
“To find the son of a bitch before the sheriff does,” Conor supplied. “Rachel told me there’s an APB out on Dante. That’s how she tracked him down at Devil’s Advocate. He’s wanted for having taken Reece.”
“He’ll never be arrested for that,” Shane complained hotly. “He’ll put a spell on the whole precinct and moonwalk out of there.”
“Or maybe he wants to get locked up,” his brother countered. “That’s where Angel Mercer is. Hell, if he wanted, he could turn the whole precinct werewolf and further build his army of the damned.”
“Christ,” he muttered, toweling off one-handed and quickly.
“Troy wants all of us at Damned Repair, ASAP.”
“Tell him I’m on my way,” said Shane. “And tell him I’m bringing Whitney.”
“Fuck, Shane, no, you can’t,” he objected with a strained voice. “Have you forgotten what happened to Kaleb?”
Shane hadn’t. But this time, unlike his older brother, Shane wouldn’t run the risk of getting lynched.
***
At the same exact time that Shane was emerging from the bathroom and getting a dark, protective, radical urge as he locked his gaze on Whitney, in the heart of the Fist Sheriff Rick Abernathy stood before the jail cell that contained one very weary-looking Angel Mercer.
She was still seated in a slump on the bench, her back to the bullpen. She had to sense that Rick was standing behind her, staring at her, his footfall had been enough of an announcement, and yet she hadn’t glanced over her shoulder. He didn’t have to see her face to understand that she felt heartsick, and part of him really felt for her.
The neighboring cell where Jack had been held was empty and open. Jack was tucked inside one of the interview rooms, meeting with his attorney from Jackson Hole.
If Rick was being honest with himself, he didn’t give a good goddamn about the assault charge. He wasn’t interested in holding Jack Quagmire or throwing him in prison for a lousy month or two for having taking a mean swing at him. He was interested in catching Dante Alighieri, who he now knew was right here in Devil’s Fist. The brazen son of a bitch had come back. Officer Clancy had, of course, messed up the arrest.
Leave it to a woman to blow such a critical encounter. The good Lord in heaven had practically handed Dante to Rachel on a silver platter, and what did the girl do? She’d gotten all paralyzed with her feminine fears and had let him get away. Sheesh, and she thought she deserved to make detective.
Not on her life.
But the defeated-looking blonde sitting in the jail cell in front of him wouldn’t likely make the same mistake. Rick didn’t have a whole lot of information about Dante Alighieri, but Angel Mercer certainly did, and if she ever wanted to see the light of day again as a free woman, she would tell Rick everything she knew about him. She would provide the necessary information for Rick to capture and arrest Dante. And in exchange, he’d let her walk out of here.
“Angel,” he said warmly, though he kept an air of authority in his commanding tone.
“Is it my turn with the attorney?” she asked in a small voice without turning around.
“Angel, honey, come on over here so I can talk to you,” he suggested, but she said nothing, did nothing, only remained facing the concrete wall like a child punishing herself in the corner. “I want to get you out of here just as badly as you do, sweetheart, but you’ve got to talk to me.”
“I have nothing to say to you.”
“I think you do, Angel.” When she remained as silent as the wall she faced, he tried a different, more honest tactic. “I’m not trying to lock you into no charges. You understand me? That’s not why I want to talk. I have a way out for you. You hear? But you’ve got to talk to me.”
Finally, she angled those cool, blue eyes of hers over her shoulder at him.
Good, he had her attention.
“Let’s get you on into one of the interview rooms so we can have a chat without a line of bars between us, how ‘bout?”
“What do you want to talk about?” she asked cautiously.
“I want to talk about gettin’ you out of here, how’s that?”
She seemed skeptical, distrusting.
“Now look, honey,” he said, speaking firmly. “You put one over on me and I put one over on you. You had me thinking I might take you out for some good times and where’d that land ya? What do ya say we leave the past in the past?”
She snorted a laugh that he didn’t much appreciate and he had half a mind to let her rot in there, but the risk of letting Dante Alighieri slip
away a second time was greater than his ego at this point.
He unlocked her cell and swung the creaking door open.
“I need a lawyer present,” she informed him, though she did him the courtesy of turning around and facing him fully from where she sat.
“You don’t need no lawyer,” he insisted. “This ain’t a trick, Angel, now get your ass up off that bench and come with me.”
“I’ll talk right here.”
How in the hell would that be better for her? Women!
“Fine,” he allowed, but waved her on over with a flick of his thick fingers.
She was reluctant, stubborn as far as Rick could tell, but she slid up off the bench and eased her cautious way over to the open jail door, coming face to face with him. Of course, she had her arms folded and everything about her posture was defensive, but he’d like to think she’d let all that go as soon as she fully understood what he was really after. It wasn’t Angel Mercer’s freedom.
“Now,” he asserted as he looked down into those big, beautiful blue eyes of hers that at one point he’d hoped would be his. Man, he deserved a good woman in his life. It was time. Enough years had passed since his precious Sally-Mae had been taken from him, and he could’ve spent the rest of his life gazing down into the beautiful face of a woman like Angel Mercer. He felt a twinge of remorse that that didn’t happen to be his fate. But being bitter about it would get him nowhere. “If you tell me what I need to know, and it pans out on my end, then I’m going to drop all the charges against you. It’s critical that you understand that, Angel, and that you don’t blow it for yourself. You give me what I need, and you’re no longer an accomplice. You’ll be a material witness. You listening?”
“I’m listening,” she echoed.
The woman looked drained, but there was enough of a glimmer of hope beneath the mask of her distrust that Rick felt optimistic this would turn out to be a win-win conversation.
“I know you have ties with Dante Alighieri,” he stated, and when her mouth popped open to object, he cut her right the hell off. “Don’t deny it, Angel. You’ve had dealings with the man.”
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