The Marshal's Hostage - By Delores Fossen Page 0,39

he had specifically said he wanted Dallas and his brothers to stay away from the suspects.

“You okay?” Dallas asked her.

She didn’t stop pacing or lip nibbling, but she did glance at him. “Who is he and why would he try to kill us?”

Those were million-dollar questions, but Dallas didn’t have any good answers. He’d already suggested that someone had hired the moron to set the fire.

Or rather the smoke.

The fire was contained in the two metal trash cans where someone had placed ingredients that had essentially made smoke bombs. Crude but effective. The smoke could have indeed killed Joelle and him if they hadn’t escaped through the window.

So was this some kind of warning for them to back off the investigation?

Maybe. And when this SOB started talking, that was one of the things Dallas wanted to know, right after he found out who’d hired this guy.

“Sarah and Rudy seemed mighty helpful,” Dallas remarked. Not really answers to Joelle’s questions, but it helped him to work out everything that was already whirling through his head. “A possible pretense, but we do have other suspects—Lindsey and Owen.”

Joelle made a sound of agreement and then repeated it after several moments. Despite Rudy’s and Sarah’s opportunities to have set the smoke bombs and their somewhat lack of cooperation with the investigation, they still weren’t Dallas’s number one suspect.

Owen had that honor.

Dallas got up from the table where he’d been sitting and went closer to Joelle. Probably a bad idea. With their nerves zinging, any closeness and touch could make things worse. Well, worse personally, anyway. But he was just sick and tired of seeing that troubled look on her face.

He pulled her into his arms.

She made another sound, this time of slight surprise. Yeah, he was surprised, too. After that mistake of a kiss in Webb’s office, of all places, he’d vowed to keep his hands off Joelle.

By his calculations, that had lasted about three hours.

When it came to Joelle, his willpower just plain sucked.

Hers, too, apparently. Because she sure didn’t budge from his arms. “It’s no fun having people want us dead,” she whispered. “I keep going over how to put an end to this, and other than Owen’s arrest, I keep coming up blank.”

Owen’s arrest would do it. Well, it would if he was indeed behind these attacks, and if he was, then maybe Saul could squeeze out a confession during the interview.

Joelle eased back a little and looked him directly in the eyes. “I think I need to come clean.”

Dallas had already considered that. Telling Saul about Owen’s blackmail attempt, about everything. “If we’re in jail, we can’t clear our names,” he reminded her.

She didn’t respond to that, but she didn’t take her gaze off him, either. Joelle pressed her hand to the side of his face, and she got that dreamy look. The one that let him know the attraction was still there.

“Damn you,” she mumbled.

Dallas had anticipated she might say several things, but that wasn’t one of them.

“I was over you,” Joelle added, and her dreamy look morphed to narrowed eyes. “And then you do things like this to remind me why I hooked up with you in first place.”

In case he hadn’t understood, she dropped her eyes to the nonexistent space between them.

“Sorry,” he said at the same moment that she said, “Dallas.”

And she didn’t say it with a mean tone. It was the tone to go along with the dreamy look she’d had just seconds earlier. A tone that was like the start of a kiss. Dallas might have obliged, too, if there hadn’t been a sharp knock at the door. A split second later, it opened, and his brother Clayton leaned in.

Joelle and Dallas flew away from each other as if they’d been caught doing something wrong, but Clayton certainly hadn’t missed it. Later, Dallas figured his brother would have questions about what was going on between them.

Yet something else Dallas couldn’t answer.

“His lawyer’s here.” Clayton tipped his head to the adjoining interview room where their suspect and Saul were still engaged in a battle of silence.

A middle-aged guy in a suit walked in. He went straight to his client and started whispering something. There was an intercom system so that Dallas could hear normal conversation, but he definitely couldn’t make out the whispers.

“We ran the suspect’s prints,” Clayton continued, “and the guy’s name is Tim Avery, an on-and-off P.I. Mostly off. He sometimes works as a handyman, but there’s no record of employment for the