Blame It on Texas (12 page)

“Is your arm hurting?” he asked.

She looked back. He stood leaning against the door frame, watching her.

“Barely know it’s there.” She looked back at the cat cage, the bag of litter, and the emptied litter box pushed up beside the bed. She saw Lucky peering out from behind the bars, eyeing their visitor with his one eye. Taking a step closer to the bed, she dropped her purse on the mattress, planning to slip it in with her clothes.

Realizing she’d have to ask Tyler for a hand, she looked back. “Do you want to get Lucky?”

His eyes widened. “Now?”

“Yeah.” Hadn’t he said she could bring her cat?

They stood staring at each other.

Finally he said, “I’m not sure now is the right time.”

It took her a second to make sense of what he meant, or rather what he thought she meant. She laughed. He stared at her like she was nuts.

She bit back her laugh. “No, I mean… my cat, Lucky.” She pointed to the cat carrier.

“Oh, you didn’t mean…” He reached up and brushed his finger over his chin as he stared at her and then the cat carrier. “Your… cat’s named Lucky?”

Were his cheeks really turning pink? “Yes.” She grinned. “I meant, did you want to get… the cat?”

His smile spread across his face, and the self-conscious look faded a tad. “I can do that, too.”

Maybe it was his half-embarrassed, half-amused expression. Maybe it was just that she had so much stress bottled up inside her. Whatever it was, she started laughing again and couldn’t stop.

He continued to lean against the door frame, smiling. Her laughter finally faded. Their gazes met and held. The humorous mood slipped into something… different. Different like one of those “romantic music playing in the background” moments again.

“I’m ready,” she said.

He moved in, set the bag of litter in the litter box, picked it up and held it with one arm, and then carefully, as if not wanting to alarm Lucky, picked up the cat cage. He looked back at her. “You do that well.” He started out.

“Do what well?” She followed him down the hall.

“Laugh.”

As silly as it sounded, she sensed he meant it as a real compliment. “Thank you.”

At four, Rick was looking for his card in the Bradfords’ office to punch out when Michael Warren, a police officer for Glencoe and a part-time guard, came to clock in.

“How’s it going?” Michael asked.

“Same old shit, different day,” Rick said. “Be warned. Mrs. Daniels, Bradford’s daughter, is here, and she’s in a talkative mood. I now know more about her problems with her ex, her yoga instructor, her trip to the shooting range, and her latest charity dilemmas than I care to know.”

Michael chuckled. “She was here last week. My head hurt from listening to her. But she did give me a bonus for doing her a favor.”

“You slept with her?” Rick teased, but in truth a couple of times he’d caught the fifty-year-old woman watching him with cougar eyes. He found his punch card and clocked out.

“Hell no. But if she paid me enough.” Michael laughed. “She gave me a fifty-dollar bonus for pulling over the redhead who was following her dad’s limo.”

Rick looked back. “I thought she’d stopped hanging around.”

“She did after I pulled her over and gave her a ticket and told her to stay away.”

Rick had thought it was odd that Windsor hadn’t gotten any more info on the redhead, and now he was a tad suspicious. He almost asked if Windsor knew about this, but decided not to show his cards yet. He had no idea what he was dealing with.

“When did this happen?” He slid his time card into the slot.

“Last Monday, I think. Mrs. Daniels saw the redhead had followed Mr. Bradford’s limo and gave me a call to see if I could put a stop to it. She hasn’t been back since.”

“Did you run a check on her?” Rick asked.

“Nah, I gave the information to Mrs. Daniels. I figured she got Windsor or one of you guys to run the plates.”

“Was her name Kathy?” He tossed out the first thing that came to him in hopes of getting more information.

“No. Her first name started with Z and the last name was Adams. She had an Alabama license plate. It was Zoe.”

“Oh,” he said, pretending it was no big deal, but he repeated the info in his head so he wouldn’t forget it.

Michael moved in and stuck his card into the time clock machine. “She was a hottie, too. The redhead, I mean. Hard to believe that a girl like that wanted to sleep with the old fart. Even with little blue pills, I don’t think he can get it up.”

“That’s probably what she’s hoping for,” Rick said. “There’s not much a woman won’t do for money.” For some reason, he remembered Ellen Wise. Okay, so maybe there were one or two decent women out there. A few who actually cared about their kids, bought them books—even read to them at night. “Have a good one.” Rick walked out of the house, his curiosity piqued about what was going on with the mystery redhead. Had Windsor lied to him about getting info on her? Or had the old man’s daughter even told Windsor she got Michael involved? Who was hiding something and who wasn’t? More important, why?

Yup, his curiosity was piqued, all right. Getting into
his car, he decided he wasn’t playing in the dark anymore. If they wanted his help, they had to fill him in. He pulled out his phone and saw he’d missed a call. From Candy again.

“No fucking way.” He tossed the phone in the passenger seat.

CHAPTER TEN

T
EN MINUTES LATER
, Zoe parked beside Tyler at the Only in Texas office. She’d been so off her game from everything that happened, she hadn’t even bothered to ask where they were going. He’d said, “Follow me,” and like a lost puppy she’d done it.

Blind faith. Scary stuff. If there was anything to be learned from this whole Bradford issue, it was that trusting someone was risky business. She spotted a beat-up Saturn parked in the back of the lot. The sight brought the memory of her sixteenth birthday tiptoeing across her heart before she could stop it. Her parents had taken her out and bought her a slightly more than used Saturn with plenty of dings and dents in it. Then, they’d all piled in her very first car and went to eat at an expensive steak restaurant. It had been her best birthday, and the last one she’d celebrated with her dad. He’d died three days later from a heart attack. No one had called her princess since.

Questions bounced around in her head like Ping-Pong balls. How could her mom and dad have sat there celebrating her birthday and pretending to be her parents?
Why had they kidnapped her? How could they have lied to her all those years? Had their love been a lie, too?

Tears filled her eyes when she realized that now even her memories were tainted.

She took a deep breath, getting oxygen to her brain, and told herself to get a grip. Told herself she would get through this. That she would survive. She was a survivor.

“Like you.” She glanced over her shoulder. Lucky sat in the carrying case with his salmon-colored nose pressed against the metal bars. Unlike most cats, Lucky didn’t mind being confined in small spaces. He’d spent so much time in a small cage at the vet’s office healing from his burns that even now, she regularly found him sleeping in the pet carrier.

A tap at her window had her opening the car door. Tyler stood there. She’d handed him his shirt when they walked out of her apartment, but he hadn’t put it on. It was probably still damp, but wasn’t that better than running around in a wife-beater T-shirt with her blood on it? Someone was bound to start wondering how he’d gotten her blood all over him. Someone like LeAnn. And what was he going to tell her? Oh, we were just trying out different positions.

Realistically, she knew his main objective had been to keep her down, but he’d put a sexual slant on the whole situation. And now she couldn’t seem to forget it.

She stepped out of the car. “Can I bring Lucky in here, or are we going to just be here a few minutes?”

He hesitated. “Bring him in. But we may have to close him in one room because of Bud.”

“Bud?”

Tyler opened the rear car door to get the carrier out. “The dog. I’m not sure if he’s cat-friendly.”

Tyler pulled the carrier to the edge of the seat and leaned down to peek inside. Lucky had his back to the cage’s front.

“He’s shy,” Zoe said.

“Not like his master,” he said.

While Zoe tried to figure out if that was a compliment or an insult, Tyler picked up the cage. Without a shirt, his biceps bulged slightly with that little bit of weight. When they passed Tyler’s car, she saw his shirt hanging in his backseat.

She slowed down. “Shouldn’t you put on your shirt?”

“It’s still wet.” He kept walking.

She moved in step with him. “It might be better than trying to explain.” She pointed to his shirt. “The blood.”

His brows pinched in puzzlement. “They know you were shot. LeAnn’s going to check you out, remember?”

“I know, but…” She waved at the stain again.

He put his hand over the dark red smear on his shirt. “I didn’t realize it bothered you. I have a shirt in the office.”

“It doesn’t bother me, but it might bother LeAnn.”

He shot her another puzzled look. “She’s a nurse. She sees blood all the time.”

“But it’s my blood and it’s on you.”

He paused in front of the door and gazed at her. “Why? Oh, you think that… LeAnn’s…”

“I’ll tell you what LeAnn is. LeAnn’s pissed.” The beautiful brunette standing at the door did look upset.

Zoe shot Tyler an I-told-you-so look. And while she knew she had no right, none whatsoever, she felt a bit of jealousy. Then that unjustified emotion turned to another equally unjustified emotion. Anger. While Tyler hadn’t actually crossed a line, he’d done his share of flirting.
Enough that she hadn’t thought he was otherwise committed. Enough that if there hadn’t been bullets flying around, she might have even responded to some of that flirting.

“You call up and say someone is shot and you’ll be here in fifteen minutes, and it’s been almost thirty!” Her gaze dropped to Tyler’s shirt. “You aren’t hit, are you?”

“No.” Tyler pointed at Zoe.

LeAnn faced Zoe. “Where are you shot?”

“Arm,” she and Tyler said at the same time.

“Come on.” LeAnn grabbed Zoe by the hand and led her inside.

“It’s not bad,” Zoe said as she was being pulled past the casket and down the hall. It still freaked her out a bit to see it.

“I got supplies set out in here.” LeAnn took Zoe past the office and into another room with a large conference table. “Sit down and let me see.”

“It’s just a scratch.” Zoe looked over her shoulder to see if Tyler had followed her. He had, and he smiled at her as if he had some inside joke.

When he moved into the room, he shut the door and sat the cat carrier down in the corner. Everyone just stared at each other for a second, and the silence seemed long.

“I should probably introduce you two,” Tyler said. “LeAnn, this is Zoe, our new client. And Zoe, this is Mrs. LeAnn O’Connor—wife of Tony O’Connor. Dallas’s brother.”

She wasn’t sure who Tony or Dallas were, but the way Tyler said, “Mrs.” and “wife” told Zoe he knew she’d misread the whole LeAnn situation. And yeah, she’d misread it. But in her defense, he hadn’t actually made it clear.

“Let me see the wound,” LeAnn said, drawing Zoe’s attention.

Zoe pulled up her sleeve.

“Does she need to be seen by a doctor?” Tyler asked.

Zoe rolled her eyes. “It’s a scratch.”

“I’m warning you now,” Tyler said to LeAnn. “She’s going to fight you if you say she needs to see a doctor. She’s stubborn.”

Zoe’s mouth dropped open. LeAnn glanced back at Tyler. “No name calling.” Then she looked back at Zoe. “Do you want him to leave? I’m good at getting rid of men.”

Though LeAnn appeared to be joking, it was Tyler’s frown that made Zoe smile. “No. He’s fine.”

LeAnn gawked at the Band-Aid. “Where did all that blood come from?”

“This is it,” Zoe said, and shot Tyler an I-told-you-so look.

LeAnn looked back at Tyler. “You said she was shot.”

“She was,” Tyler said. “And it was bleeding a lot.” He motioned to the front of his shirt. “And she was hurting like hell.”

“It didn’t hurt
that
bad,” Zoe said.

“You were gritting your teeth.”

“I was panicked. I’d never been shot before. Or had a gun pointed at me.” She cut him a hard stare, so he understood she was referring to him and his gun.

“Which is a miracle considering that neighborhood,” Tyler countered.

“It’s not that bad of a neighborhood,” Zoe said.

“Do you want me to print the list of crimes that happened there just last week?”

“Don’t argue with my patient.” LeAnn slipped on a pair of rubber gloves and pulled off the bandage.

Zoe flinched when the Band-Aid pulled across the wound and a stream of blood started streaming down her arm.

LeAnn eyed the wound. “It is pretty deep.”

“Told you,” Tyler said.

“But,” LeAnn continued, “it’s not bad enough for a stitch. If we wash it and put some antibiotic cream on it, it should be fine.”

Zoe shot Tyler another smirk, then focused on LeAnn. “I already did that.”

“Okay. But let’s do it one more time. If you don’t mind.” LeAnn waited for Zoe to agree. “I am a professional.”

“That’s fine,” Zoe said.

“Great. But if it does start looking infected, you need to go and see a doctor.”

“We will.” Tyler moved closer to the table.

We?
Zoe wondered, and even LeAnn looked back at him puzzled.

Suddenly, the door behind Tyler opened and in walked a dark-haired man, early thirties, with a beer in his hand. He nodded a quick hello at Zoe. Zoe nodded a quick hello back. He was attractive, but he didn’t hold a candle to Tyler. Without realizing it, her gaze went back to him and she admired his abs. Again.

Surprising herself by her wayward thoughts, she felt her cheeks grow warm. Why was she thinking about looks when… Had she lost a lot more blood than she realized?

“Tyler, I didn’t know you guys got here,” the newcomer said as another dark-haired man—roughly the same age
and bearing a striking resemblance to the first—came through the same door. They had to be brothers, Zoe decided. Maybe even twins. The second brother nodded another quick hello at Zoe, and she did the same again.