are we headed now?”
“W4HAV. I want to see where it happened. See if there’s anything the evidence teams may have missed yesterday in the rain.” Marshall sent him a significant look. “I’m taking a personal interest in this case. My wife was inside W4HAV with my sister-in-law and my brother’s baby when this happened. They’d decided to stay inside and wait out the storm because of my sister-in-law’s fear of storms. Had they not…I don’t take that lightly.”
Of course, he didn’t. His wife and his brother’s family were all the family Marshall had in the world. Elliot was going to be hunting the devil now.
Jake would be right there at his side.
No one messed with Jake’s family. No one.
61
Kyle knew it was a stupid mistake. These kinds of things took more planning, more stealth. You didn’t blackmail a trio of lowlife thugs into killing a woman because you were angry at your husband. Nor did you send a sharpshooter out after two high-ranking members of the TSP. Not without weighing all the ramifications.
Damn it. She should have known better.
This would rise up and bite her in the ass. He had no doubt about that.
Kyle bit back the anger. Jennifer had always reacted to anger with pure stubbornness. “What was your reasoning?”
“I need that bastard MacNamara out of the way!” She was storming all around the room. “He sent that Callum after me. Now they are digging into Reggie’s business. I wanted that girl to stop making problems for Wallace. I just need control. I’m losing control, Kyle, and I can’t stand it.”
That was enough to give him pause. Kyle was a silent investor in Jennifer’s son’s business. A position he’d used with Dennis Lee Arnold to his advantage when it had been needed.
If the TSP started digging too deeply, that could make problems for him as well as Jennifer. It bore him paying attention to this now.
Preemptive was his game plan in almost everything.
She had gotten herself far too openly involved with that fool Arnold. Her fingers were in Arnold’s business everywhere.
Kyle was doing his best to clean those fingers out, but it was going to take him some time to accomplish that.
“I’ll handle it.” He needed something to distract MacNamara from Jennifer and Dennis Lee Arnold. Perhaps Jennifer had been on the right track—she’d just taken the wrong turn. She should have come to him first. Then she wouldn’t have fouled it up so badly. “I need some time to think, Jennifer. But…I’ll handle MacNamara. You…with what happened with the man’s niece—” The odds of that happening had been so slim, damn it. It was the truth. “Stay away from anything to do with her. You’re too much of an obvious choice. I’m surprised the TSP hasn’t already been at your door asking questions.”
The TSP detective that was such a thorn in his side was the uncle of the woman Jennifer hated so passionately. That would inevitably lead to problems.
He was going to have to keep a close hand on Jennifer.
Before she did anything else to totally mess up everything Kyle had built in her moments of stupidity.
“Just…keep yourself out of trouble. I’ll handle everything else.”
“Including the MacNamaras?”
“Yes. Including them. I’ll take care of everything for you. Don’t I always?”
Jennifer wrapped her arms around him and clung.
62
Nikkie Jean was working when a tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed, gorgeous man walked into the ER. Next to the chief of the TSP.
It wasn’t her fiancé. Nor was it his clone.
No.
Jake MacNamara was just as pretty in a fully masculine sense.
Well, almost. Her fiancé Caine was always going to be the most beautiful man on the planet. His identical twin Rafe came in a close second. Followed by Allen. Then Jake.
Nikkie Jean may have been responsible for starting the Top Ten at FCGH meme floating around. Her and Jillian.
The blood wasn’t welcome, though. Nikkie Jean was already moving toward them. “Jake? What happened?”
“GSW.” He clutched his hand to his upper shoulder, but he was on his feet. “Chief took one to the left arm. His is worse. May be still in there.”
Another GSW. In a city of fifty-five thousand. That seemed…far too unrealistic to her. What it meant for her adopted city scared her, too. “It almost doesn’t seem realistic.”
“What doesn’t?”
“Why are so many bullets flying in such a small city? Answer me that, Mr. Policeman.”
His eyes darkened, now the same shade as his niece’s. “I don’t know. I’m working to find out. I will too, kid.”
Kid? She shot him a look. She was