Surprisingly, Shane agreed, “You might be right about that.”
“What’d you do?”
“Something that maybe I shouldn’t have,” he offered vaguely.
It hardly satisfied Rick so he provoked, “You kill that girl?”
“What? Hell, no, Sheriff.”
“Then what?”
Shane finally met his gaze and admitted the absolute worst. “I told her I love her.”
If Whitney hadn’t been starting back with her open-faced bun, he would’ve smacked the daylights out of Shane with his greasy spatula. Instead, he only scowled.
“What I miss?” Whitney asked them. “Oh, geez, you’re still harping about the dress, aren’t you?” she asked Rick. “Fine, fine, I’ll get it.”
“No!” Shane barked. All eyes were on him, and Rick was more than interested to hear his reason for being so intense. But all Shane explained was, “Your burger will get cold.”
It gave Rick serious pause.
He piled two burgers onto his Whitney’s bun the way she liked—double deckers an’ all—then slapped a few more on the other plate she’d carried over for Shane. As they settled into their lawn chairs, Rick built his own burger with all the fixin’s, including a generous heap of sweet relish, then he retired his chef’s hat onto the condiment table and heaved his stocky height into the lawn chair beside his daughter.
They ate in silence as they watched the sun lower deeper and deeper in the west, Whitney munching and moaning at Rick’s skilled cooking and Shane scarfing his naked meat down like a ravenous wolf.
Real psycho, that one.
When Rick’s plate was cleared, he set it on the grass beside him and asked, “If you think you’re being framed, who do you suspect?”
“Daddy,” Whitney warned.
“It’s the most open-minded line of questioning I could’ve possibly come up with,” Rick defended. “Don’t act like I wasn’t planning on asking him a thing or two.”
“It’s alright,” Shane told Whitney. “I’ve been thinking a lot about that, myself.”
“You knew the girl?” asked Rick, though it came across like a statement in need of confirmation.
Whitney tried to end the conversation by insisting, “It’s not what you think, and if you’re going to carry on like this then we might as well go on down to the station.”
“Never mind the station,” Rick snapped. “No one’s going there. We’re eatin’ burgers, girl. Relax.”
“Yeah, I knew her,” Shane told him and it had a ring of truth to it. “Unfortunately.”
“Her stepdaddy said she been whoring—”
“Daddy!”
“Larry’s words!” Rick insisted, throwing his hands up in mock surrender. “Not mine!”
“Paying for sex had nothing to do with my relationship with Delilah,” said Shane darkly.
And Rick had to ask his daughter pointblank, “You believe that?”
Whitney sighed with the kind of defeatism that told him she knew she wasn’t going to be able to stop this line of questioning. “I do, and you should, too.”
“I helped her out financially from time to time,” he admitted, “but that was in the hope that she wouldn’t run off to do… what she tended to do.”
“Daddy,” Whitney interjected. “Given the slash across her lower abdomen—”
“How’d you know about that?” he demanded, knowing damn well neither of them had been permitted across the police line.
“I saw the dress, remember?”
“Should’ve been a cop, girl,” he complimented. “You’d be better at it than Clancy.”
“Oh, Rachel’s doing just fine.”
Rick snorted a laugh of disagreement.
“You think Delilah was pregnant?” she asked. “Could you test her hormones or something?”
Rick grew stiff and still. It was a damn good question to ask, one that he hadn’t thought of just yet.
“That what you think the wound across her stomach was all about?” he returned.
“It crossed our minds,” she allowed.
Rick didn’t much appreciate her use of the coupled-up word our. He didn’t want to be hearing any of that we, our, us crap if it referred to Shane and his daughter, but he was too caught up in the idea she’d proposed to address it.
“I’ll look into it,” he said. “You get her pregnant, Shane?”
“No, Sheriff,” he coolly answered.
Thinking out loud, Rick proposed, “So, some John gets her pregnant then kills her over it. Doesn’t explain why she was dumped on your property.”
“Maybe someone thought she and I would be together in a serious way,” he suggested.
“No good,” Rick told him, shooting the suggestion down right quick. “Wouldn’t explain why the murderer killed her. You either want someone or you don’t.”
“Not necessarily,” Shane countered. “Jealous spouses kill their significant others and the lovers they find them with all the time.”
“He has a point, Daddy.”
“And so do I,” Rick snapped. “Why frame Shane? Who would hate him so much to attempt something like that?”
Shane didn’t appear to have an answer for him and Whitney was hard pressed as well.
“Sheriff, you got a line on Dante Alighieri?”
“What do you know about Dante Alighieri?’ he challenged.
But all Shane said was, “Enough.”
“Humph,” he snorted.
It was enough of a challenge to Rick’s skepticism and Shane mentioned, “A lot of the strange occurrences that have been happening around these parts connect directly to that man.”
“No, they don’t,” Rick stated. “Pamela Davenport was responsible for Holly van Dyke and Leeanne Whitaker, I’ll have you know, or didn’t you read about it in the paper?”
“Alighieri is good at getting other people to do his bidding for him.”
“How would you know?” he asked, but Shane didn’t care to elaborate.
“Let’s just say that us Quinns have a way of hearing about things that the police department would never have a prayer of finding out.”
“Like what?” Rick asked him in all curiousness.
Shane shouldn’t have said it. He knew he shouldn’t have said it. But he was finding, the longer he sat out watching the sunset with Whitney and the sheriff, that he wanted the man to approve of him. Whitney was the real deal. She was important to him. Shane wanted her in his life. This wasn’t a fling or a passing feeling. If she wanted to be with him as well, she wasn’t going to make that leap without her daddy’s blessing. It irked Shane, but sometimes a man had to swallow his pride and lifelong animosity towards his adversary, bite the bullet, and do what needed to be done to get what he wanted.
He wanted Whitney Abernathy.
And Rick’s prior intuition had damn near blown him away when he’d offhandedly mentioned that Whitney was pissed at Shane over something. She was. Her bubbly, giggly act had been just that, some kind of performance to prove to her father that Shane made her happy. She’d been looking at the big picture in that regard. But she was still furious that Shane had turned her werewolf without her permission. Up there in the kitchen, every time she’d sensed her father wasn’t spying, she’d dropped the lovey-dovey act and glared at him, hissed through her teeth certain reminders that Shane was still in the doghouse. If Rick was highly intuitive about that, what else did he sense?
Changing the subject so that Rick wouldn’t grill him as badly as the burgers they’d just eaten, Shane said, “Hear you got a werewolf expert coming in from Jackson Hole pretty soon.”
“That I do,” the Sheriff allowed.
“Ima fetch that dress for you now, Daddy,” Whitney said, and Shane lurched up from his lawn chair to stare her dead in the eye. “I’ll be right back,” she said, her tone thick with the subtext that it would be alright.
But it wouldn’t.
If Whitney went hunting through his bedroom for it, she might di
scover the incriminating polaroids. It wouldn’t look good. Not one bit. And Shane wasn’t prepared to lose her over a crime he hadn’t committed.
“He’s in no rush for it,” Shane tried to convince her, but he was wrong about that.
“Hustle up, girl,” Rick instructed and Whitney jumped out of her lawn chair to do just that.
“Be back in two shakes!”
“Whitney, no,” Shane warned, but she was already jogging off towards her cabin.
Crap.
“Worried I’ll rip you a new one by the time she returns?” Rick laughed.
That was the least of his worries, quite frankly, but he mustered an amicable smile and settled back into his lawn chair. If he insisted to go with Whitney, Rick would probably tag along, determined not to allow the two love birds to be alone with one another under one of his roofs.
But the dress wasn’t in Whitney’s cabin. It was still in Shane’s. She only knew that it was in his bedroom, under his bed. And as soon as she started hunting around for it…
He heard her voice coming faintly from the side of Rick’s cabin, “Oh, hiya Ronnie.”
It was a saving grace if Shane had ever heard one. He was on his feet in an instant, the sheriff at his heels. When they reached the side of the mansion-sized cabin, they found Whitney standing with a shaggy haired, lanky young man who was dressed in a Yellowstone uniform.
“I heard they found Delilah,” Ronnie said worriedly.
Chapter Fourteen
WHITNEY
Ronnie looked sick to his stomach.
“Oh, Ronnie, I’m so sorry,” Whitney said, pained for him. His eyes looked red and swollen as if he’d been bawling them out all afternoon. “Delilah was found.”
“Was… was she… Is she…?” He couldn’t get the words out to ask whether or not Delilah Dane was dead or alive, but judging by the nauseous look on his face, Whitney could tell he already knew.
She glanced over her shoulder, having sensed Shane rounding the side of the cabin. Her father was also starting over. She returned her attention to Ronnie and regretted to inform him, “She’s been killed.”
Overcome with emotion, Ronnie keeled over and braced his knees. She thought he might throw up, but he only let out a strangled series of wet sobs. She neared him and stroked his back, apologizing in a tone that she hoped was soothing.
He had obviously cared for Delilah a great deal. Whitney hadn’t realized how much the exotic beauty had meant to Ronnie. He’d always been just the young kid who admired Delilah from afar, but Whitney now understood that unrequited love could run extremely deep.
As he straightened up, he whimpered, “I never got to tell her how I felt.”
“I’m sure she knew, Ronnie,” she assured him.
His brow furrowed and a far-away look came over him as though he was remembering some missed opportunity he might have had with Delilah.
“I never grew a pair and asked her out,” he said, taking a dark stab at humor that referenced how Whitney had teased him at Yellowstone.
“It’s probably for the best that you hadn’t,” she offered. “Delilah was leading a very different kind of lifestyle, one that you probably shouldn’t have gotten mixed up in.”
Rick neared them and said, “Anything I can do for you, son?”
Ronnie’s mouth twisted into a frown and it looked as though he might break down in tears all over again.
“Did you drive here?” she asked him, thinking it might be safer if her father drove him home.
“Ah, yeah,” he said absently as he held his attention on the sheriff. “Can I talk to you?”
Whitney and Shane exchanged a puzzled look as Rick put his arm around Ronnie and started him off on a little walk towards the driveway.
“Sure can,” said Rick as they meandered away.
Secretively, Ronnie mentioned, “It’s about Delilah. About…” He trailed off as though he couldn’t emotionally bring himself to voice whatever was troubling him.
“About what, son?” Rick asked tenderly.
As Whitney watched them, she got a strange feeling. Ronnie no longer seemed like the lovestruck mourner that couldn’t come to grips with Delilah’s death. Did he have information?
“What’s going on?” Shane asked her in a private tone.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “That’s Ronnie. I work with him over at Yellowstone. He carried quite a torch for Delilah.”
When Rick and Ronnie reached the dirt driveway, Rick deposited the kid into the passenger’s seat of his SUV, shut the door, then doubled back to meet Whitney and Shane.
“Kid’s got something to tell me about Delilah,” he informed them. “I’m going to handle it at the station.” He pointed his finger in Shane’s face and warned, “No hanky-panky.”
“We’ll clean up,” Whitney offered, too interested in what Ronnie might have to say to combat her daddy’s insulting assumption. “You think he knows what happened to Delilah?”
“Maybe,” said Rick. “Only one way to find out.”
“Was he that close with her?” Shane questioned.
“I wasn’t even that close with her,” Whitney told them. “Delilah could’ve been close with anyone, I wouldn’t know.”
Rick took off his apron and handed it to Whitney and they watched as he lumbered back to his SUV. When he drove off with Ronnie, Whitney turned to Shane and said, “Come on, let’s start cleaning up.”
“I wonder what he knows about her,” Shane commented as they rounded the side of the cabin and came to the condiment table.
“I doubt if it’s very much, to be honest,” she said as she piled the dirty plates and began loading her arms with items from the table.
Shane folded the lawn chairs, grabbed as much as he could from the table, and followed her up the deck stairs into the kitchen.
“My dad will handle it,” she said. “Plus, this will give us time to get over to your cabin, get the dress, and bring it over. Maybe we can glean something at the station when we drop it off.”
As they continued to clean up, making several trips into the kitchen until nothing but the grill was left outside, Whitney began fighting the urge to confront Shane all over again.
She had too many emotions roiling through her to sort through. Her anger had faded into the territory of resentment for the fact that he’d turned her without discussion or warning. She still felt an incredible desire to mount him, aroused to crippling heights. And now she didn’t know what to think of Delilah’s body having turned up on his property. All she knew was that if she opened her mouth to address any of it, the floodgates would burst, and she wouldn’t know how to control herself.
“You okay?” he asked her when she’d returned the final condiment into the refrigerator.
“Don’t ask me that,” she warned.
“Your father said something interesting to me,” he commented.
“Interesting, huh?”
“Intuitive,” he corrected.
“Yeah, he does that from time to time.”
“He knew you were upset with me,” he told her, and she faced him from where she stood in front of the closed refrigerator.
She didn’t know what to say, but initiating a huge fight in her daddy’s house would do neither of them any good since Whitney was pretty damn sure she would end up tearing his throat out, or having rough, violent sex with him. Either way, she wouldn’t want to be caught in the throes of either should her daddy come back.
Shane neared her and dared to take her by the hips. As he closed the gap between them, he asked, “Can’t you see that this was inevitable?”
“Can’t you see that I’m in no mood right now?” she countered.
A slight grin tugged at the corner of his sexy mouth. “Like the mood that came over you in my truck?”
“I don’t know what that was.”
“I do,” he assured her, bringing his face close to hers. “And I liked it.”
“I don’t know what to do with you, Shane,” she
said in a huff. “I don’t know whether to kill you or…”
“Or rip my clothes off,” he supplied.
“Something like that,” she admitted, though it was the wrong thing to say.
He took it as an invitation to stoop down and kiss her. She allowed it and reciprocated much more than she would’ve liked. The next thing she knew, she was wrapping her arms around his muscular shoulders and trying to gauge if they might get away with sneaking up into her old bedroom.
No, that would be too dangerous. Her daddy hadn’t murdered Shane. She didn’t want to push their luck so she urged him back, placing her palms against the firm wall of his chest that she might prefer tasting, and suggested, “We can get washed up at my place, then we need to deal with that dress. He’s not going to drop it.”
Shane searched her eyes for a long moment, but he didn’t release her from his strong embrace. “I meant what I said earlier.” When she didn’t indicate that she knew what he was referring to, he clarified, “That I love you.”
She felt every urge in the world to say it back. It was true. She loved him and knew it and also hated it. Had he not forcefully grabbed her wrist and sank his fangs in, they wouldn’t be here right now, a wall of animosity between them. Why did he have to ruin everything? Why had he felt entitled to do so?
“Why did you do it? And don’t tell me it was to protect me from your pack. That’s a flimsy reason, and you know it.”
“Because I do love you.”
“But not enough to propose formally, not enough to convince me to go through the whole ritual or whatever, like Troy did with Reece and like Kaleb did with Lucy,” she reminded him, feeling sour all over again.
“I’m asking you right now, is that what you want?”
“I said it once and I’ll say it again, you have terrible timing.”
“Well, is it?”
“Why couldn’t you have asked me that before you turned me, huh?”
“I told you, I’m flawed.”
“Yeah, well, now I have to decide whether or not I can live with your particular brand of flawed for the rest of my life, don’t I?” she challenged. “Come on,” she suggested as she stepped through the sliding glass door out onto the deck, “you stink.”
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