When the Bough Breaks (Rose Gardner Investigations #6) - Denise Grover Swank Page 0,6
him. Needless to say, my shower had been the talk of the town for weeks.
I hadn’t let the incident bother me too much then, but now I wondered if the whole out-of-wedlock thing was a bigger issue than I’d realized. “What if it really is my character that’s influencing Mike to keep me from the kids? Maybe I’m just imaginin’ that he has criminal ties.”
“I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion,” he said. “Of course he’s gonna spin it like that for his parents.”
“Maybe,” I said, staring down at my phone.
“Rose.”
I looked up at him.
“She’s full of shit. You’re no more of a bad influence on the kids than the donuts Mike gets for ’em at Dena’s cupcake shop.”
“Dena makes donuts now?” I asked, trying not to cry.
He grinned. “So I hear. I can’t step foot in the place.”
My stomach sunk. Dena was his ex-girlfriend, and she whispered malice-laced gossip about me into the ear of every person who walked through the doors of her bake shop. “You’re givin’ up so much for me, Joe.”
“If you think I gave up Dena for you, then you’ve got another think comin’. I broke it off with Dena because I came to my senses.” He gave me an ornery grin. “Besides, I hear the donuts at the Stop-N-Go are ten times better.”
“Liar.”
He laughed and shifted the truck into drive. “Enough of that nonsense. Let’s go pick up some steaks, and I’ll grill ’em for dinner. You call Neely Kate.”
Just as I was about to place the call, Joe’s phone rang. He glanced at the screen and frowned before he answered. “Chief Deputy Simmons.”
There was a moment of silence, then Joe shot me a glance and said, “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
He hung up and gave me an apologetic look. “I’m sorry, Rose. I have to go into work. I’ll drive downtown and pick up my car.”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not, but one of the conditions for me takin’ two weeks off after the baby’s born is that I have to be called in on all big cases until the baby’s born.”
“It’s a big case?”
He frowned, then said, “They found a body at a neighborhood construction site.”
I tried not to flinch. It had been months since there had been any murders in the county, so I took it as a bad sign that this was happening now.
He put a hand on my arm. “Don’t be lettin’ your imagination run away from you. It could have been a squabble between two coworkers.”
“Or it could have something to do with Hardshaw or James.”
The Hardshaw Group was a crime syndicate based in Dallas. They were like a cancer, spreading out and metastasizing in small towns and counties all over Texas and Oklahoma, leaving death and destruction everywhere they’d taken over.
Neely Kate had landed on their radar years ago in Oklahoma, when she’d killed (in self-defense) the son of Arthur Manchester, one of the three men who ran the group. We’d taken to calling them the Hardshaw Three: Tony Roberts, Arthur Manchester, and Randall Blakely. All successful businessmen in their own right, but greed had driven them to try their hand at illegal pursuits.
Their interest in Neely Kate had likely been further stirred upon realizing she was an unrecognized Simmons child. And so they’d planted Ronnie Colson in town years ago to spy on Neely Kate. He’d married her even though he didn’t love her. Even though he was already married to someone else.
And sometime in the last few years, they’d also sunk their hooks into Skeeter Malcolm. He had been working with them on the sly, without telling any of us, helping to lay a foundation for them to come in and set up shop. All while Joe, Neely Kate, Jed, and I had been trying our hardest to keep them out.
After I’d discovered James’s betrayal, Tim Dermot, a criminal with a group of men of his own, had banded the criminals of the county together in an attempt to stop Hardshaw from moving in. Dermot and Jed had asked me to lead them as the Lady in Black, and I’d held several meetings with an eye toward forming a plan for keeping Hardshaw out of the county. Only my mediation hadn’t helped much, and we’d never really gotten anywhere.
Then we’d discovered the FBI was investigating Hardshaw, and we’d disbanded the group and let our guard down. We’d lulled ourselves into complacency, and now…now I was scared to death Hardshaw was still a threat and that my