enough anyway...” He seemed to brace himself. “Brick...” He raked his fingers through his graying hair.
Sometimes it hit her how much they’d both aged. Like now. Normally when she looked at her husband, she saw the young, big strong man he’d been when she’d fallen in love with him. She was still desperately in love with this man, looking past the gray and the wrinkles and the slight stoop of his broad shoulders.
“Brick has gotten himself involved in a case that could blow up in all of our faces,” Hud said finally.
“I thought he was technically still on medical leave?”
“Tell that to him. I told him until I got the release from the head doctor...” He met her gaze. “He’s still having the nightmares, I know he is. He thinks he’s fine. You know him.”
“Is this about the woman he found?”
Hud nodded. “She escaped from the hospital after taking a nurse’s clothing and leaving the woman tied up under the bed.”
Dana gasped. “This is the same woman that someone had abducted and held?” He nodded. “Why would she do something like that?”
“I suppose she’s scared. Or she heard Billings homicide was on its way to question her. But what complicates it is this cop who’s after her...”
“The one who attacked our son?”
For a moment, he looked surprised that she’d heard that detail through the grapevine. He shouldn’t have been. He had to know how talk moved down this canyon.
Hud sighed. “We had her behind bars, but Brick broke her out. Now the two of them have gone after the woman who escaped the hospital. Brick to save her and...who knows what Mo has planned.”
“Mo?”
“Maureen ‘Mo’ Mortensen, the suspended cop who your son is now mixed up with.”
Dana had to bite her tongue. She’d been against Brick going into law enforcement from the beginning. For years she’d worried about Hud’s safety every time he left the house to go to work. She didn’t want to have to worry about one of her sons, as well.
“He was born to do this,” her husband said as if seeing her expression. She met his gaze, too upset to speak. “I didn’t encourage him. And I certainly didn’t approve of this. But you know how he is.”
“He wants to please you,” she said, her voice breaking. “He idolizes you, so of course he wants to follow in your footsteps.” Hud said nothing. Clearly he had to know there wasn’t much he could say. She saw how difficult this was for him. He was worried and upset. She felt her anger vanish as quickly as it had appeared.
Stepping to him, she wrapped her arms around him. He pulled her down on his lap and buried his face into her neck. “Brick will be fine,” she whispered. “He’s enough like you, he’ll be fine.”
Hud nodded against her shoulder, and she tightened her arms around him as she hoped it was true. His cell phone rang, making her groan. That was another reason she was anxious for him to retire. They deserved peace and quiet at this age—not the constant sound of a phone ringing at all hours and Hud having to go take care of marshal business.
She stepped from his arms so he could take the call. But she didn’t go far. If this was about Brick... She listened to her husband’s side of it, something about a motor home being found. So not about Brick.
Turning away, she headed toward the kitchen to bake something, anything. That was what she did when she was upset—bake. She didn’t want to know about the dark things her husband dealt with daily. She didn’t want to think about what Brick had involved himself in or how dangerous it might be.
She turned on the oven, anxious to smell something sweet filling up the old ranch house kitchen.
* * *
“I CAN’T BELIEVE Natalie would stop this soon,” Brick said as he looked around at the busy main street as people were enjoying the warm summer night. Everywhere there were tourists with their campers and sunburned kids, fishermen wearing fly vests, an older couple sitting outside eating ice cream cones and watching all the activity. “But I can see where she could blend in here since the locals seem to be outnumbered.”
His comment rated him one of Mo’s smiles. This one actually reached her blue eyes. He felt himself grow warm under the glow of it and warned himself to be careful. If she turned it on him too much, he might find