right, you have a deal,” she said, tenderly caressing her daughter’s head.
So the rumors were true after all. Motherhood had softened Lucy Sharpe.
Ben stood quickly, giving a wink to the little girl. “Thanks for the assist, kid.”
Lucy ignored the comment, but let go of Gracie’s hair long enough to point a finger at him, the nail precisely the color of those Black Cherry roses down in the lab.
“You are on a leave of absence,” she said. “That means you do not have a single Bullet Catcher resource at your disposal.”
What? No vast database, no private jet, no brotherhood of back up, no instant access to top secret government information?
“No problem, Luce.” He punctuated that with a confident smile that didn’t exactly match what he felt inside. “I got my own resources. Here.” He touched his temple. “And here.” And his gut.
“Use them wisely, Mr. Youngblood, because this is your last chance.”
~*~
Callie Parrish dropped to her bare knees and swallowed a curse that probably had the devil doing a happy dance in Hell. But right that minute, she didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything but the dozens of bare-naked rose bushes that stood like beheaded little soldiers in the middle of the flower farm.
Mud squished and stones stabbed her skin, but she didn’t even notice the discomfort as she touched the raw wound of a hastily cropped rose bloom.
“Unbelievable,” she muttered, peering down the row in the hopes they’d missed a bush or two. But no, the entire bed—at least four dozen healthy rose bushes—had been snipped and stripped.
Her entire crop of Black Cherries had been decimated. Misery crushed her chest, as strong as that morning she’d held Granny Belle’s hand and listened to a shocking, heartbreaking, and truly amazing story. She’d made her great-grandmother a promise that day… a promise that someone had just stolen along with a whole bunch of rare roses.
Who would do this to her? Why? So few people even knew that she grew Black Cherry roses. Yet someone had marched over five acres of flowers to clear out the only blossoms worth a hundred bucks a dozen.
Injustice rocked her right down to her rubber muck boots. Without this source of extra income—the only dime not accounted to the wolf at the door with a mountain of unpaid bills in his teeth—she couldn’t even dream of granting Granny Belle her one and only final request.
Those ashes weren’t going into the Seine anytime soon. And as far as the answers Callie longed to have… well, it looked like any chance of finding them got clipped away with the roses.
Just as tears welled, she heard a car engine and the growl of tires digging into the gravel drive. God, let that be a customer who’d seen her homemade sign on the highway. But, the way things were going today, it was probably some misplaced tourist trying to find their way down to Disneyworld.
She swiped a stray hair off her face and stuck it into her baseball cap, streaking her cheek with mud. Taking one last look at the chopped and naked bushes, she hitched her cut-off overalls and started across the farm, trying not to think about how long it would take her to make that money back.
She cocked an ear toward the shed that doubled as a storefront, expecting someone to call out, as the occasional retail customer did when she was in the field. When she didn’t hear anything, she picked up her pace, plucking at the thin tank top that already stuck to her skin in the brutal Florida sun.
Don’t leave, don’t leave, she pleaded silently. Every penny counted now.
As she rounded the pine grove, she spotted a sleek gray sedan, worth more than the mortgage on the farm. Definitely lost tourists, then. Make a pity sale, Granny Belle would say. Today, she needed a sale and the pity.
The car was empty, so she brushed more dirt off her hands and face and grabbed the rusted handle of the storefront door, opening her mouth to call out a greeting—the breath instantly trapped in her throat.
Her mouth stayed open, hanging in shock at the sight of a man behind the sales counter digging through her coffee can of receipts like it was a cookie jar and he was starving.
Another dang thief?
“Can I help you?” she demanded, her hand still on the door in case she had to bolt to the house and get her rifle.
“Jesus Christ.” He flipped a yellow slip of paper, tossing it aside