Things We Never Said (Hart's Boardwalk #3) - Samantha Young Page 0,87

firsthand knowledge of her traitorous little ways.” Kell looked directly at me. “I haven’t seen such a gleam of determination in her admittedly beautiful eyes since she first decided to go after Cooper.”

Jess gave a sharp intake of breath behind me, and her hand came to a rest on my arm.

“Not that it’s anyone’s concern here.” He smirked knowingly at me. “Mind you, if you’re friends with him, Dahlia, maybe you ought to warn him.” With a wink and a “ta ta,” he skipped out of the bookstore as if he hadn’t just detonated a social bomb.

Dana Kellerman was pursuing Michael?

Oh, hell no!

Michael would never fall for her crap, right?

Then again, he and Cooper weren’t that dissimilar, and Cooper had fallen for her crap before he knew better.

Dana was beautiful.

Like, on another planet level of beautiful.

I felt sick.

“Dahlia, Michael loves you,” Bailey said, her voice soft, reassuring.

I lifted my eyes to meet hers. “And when he realizes he’s made a mistake coming here for me, who will he turn to then?”

Her sigh was sad, almost weary. “If you’re so determined not to be with Michael, then why do you care?”

“Because he deserves better.” I snapped to my feet. “If I think he deserves better than me, then for sure he deserves better than the selfish, nasty cow that is Dana Kellerman.”

The girls called after me as I rushed out of the bookstore, but I didn’t want to be around anyone. I had to plan. Somehow, I had to make Michael see he and I were a bad idea while I kept him and Dana apart without him suspecting it was jealousy.

It wasn’t jealousy.

It was friendship.

Okay.

It was jealousy too.

However, there had to be a way to do this without making it seem like it was jealousy.

It was Day Four, as Michael was calling it. Day four on the job in Hartwell and he was getting antsy not seeing Dahlia. Time was almost up on that. Striding into the station that morning, two coffees in hand, Michael said hello to Bridget and a couple of the deputies. As he turned down the corridor that led to Jeff’s office, he saw Deputy Freddie Jackson coming toward him.

The deputy’s eyes narrowed on Michael and as they neared each other, Freddie’s gaze moved past him, determinedly not looking at him. Michael noted the way his hands clenched into fists at his sides. For a man who had been smart enough to cover his own ass for years, his reaction to Michael wasn’t smart.

“Deputy,” Michael acknowledged him.

Jackson’s expression was full of loathing. He didn’t return Michael’s greeting.

Shaking his head, he continued toward Jeff’s office.

Jeff believed Jackson was taking payoffs from the Devlin family in return for providing them with information he picked up at the station and city hall. Jeff suspected Jackson was the one who’d bugged his office. Moreover, he was concerned about complaints of trumped-up charges filed by Jackson over the last two and a half years. He’d pulled people over for speeding, had claimed to find drugs in a car in one situation, and charged another with drunk and disorderly. Things that were hard to prove either way without reliable witnesses, of which there were none in these cases.

The drugs could have been planted by Jackson, but there was no proof. The people he’d charged were people with businesses in Hartwell, people who had ended up either selling to Devlin or getting into bed with him in the business sense. Jeff believed Jackson was helping to intimidate and harass the people whose businesses were of particular interest to Devlin.

Moreover, Jeff suspected Jackson had been covering up crimes committed by the Devlins, including an attack on Bailey Hartwell last year. The eldest Devlin son, Stu, had broken into Bailey’s inn wearing a ski mask and when Bailey caught him in her office, he attacked her. She was adamant it was Stu, but there was no evidence to prove it. The idea of someone attacking Dahlia’s friend pissed Michael off. The fact that Jack Devlin started sleeping with Bailey’s sister Vanessa, who owned a share in Hart’s Inn, which led to Vanessa offering to sell her share of the inn to Ian Devlin, only substantiated Bailey’s claim that it was a Devlin who attacked her that night. Jeff explained Vanessa had sold her share to Bailey’s fiancée instead, thankfully cutting the Devlins out. Still, they were a shady family, and the idea they had a cop on the payroll didn’t sound too farfetched.

Jackson’s edgy behavior

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