It appeared that Dawg had been right after all.
ELEVEN
“I hope the three of you have some damned good explanations, because I’m not really happy with you right now.”
Sheriff Ezekiel Mayes, Zeke to his friends, didn’t bother glancing at Crista or Kelly Salyers, who had arrived at the diner with her fiancé within half an hour of the initial explosion. He trained his light brown eyes on the three cousins instead, a hard frown pulling at his forehead.
“Don’t look at me, Zeke.” Rowdy shook his head, his short black hair gleaming beneath the bright overhead lights. “I just came by to make sure they were still alive.” He nodded toward his cousins, a friendly smile on his lips, though his gaze was cool and warning.
The three cousins sat at the large, round table in the back of the dining room. Kelly was placed between Rowdy and Natches, and Crista between Dawg and Natches. The scene couldn’t have been more incriminating, considering the Mackay cousins’ reputations.
“Zeke, you keep forgetting they’ve grown up.” Kelly leaned forward, propping her chin on her hand as she braced her elbow on the table and grinned back at the sheriff with a winning smile.
“And you used to be such a sweet, honest little thing.” The sheriff clucked in disapproval. “Lying for these boys only gets everyone in trouble, Kelly. Remember?”
Kelly grimaced. “They caught him.”
She was obviously talking about the stalker who had nearly killed her and the three cousins last summer.
“I could have caught him faster if these three yahoos had told me what the hell they were doing,”
he grunted, eying the yahoos in question. “Am I going to get any better answers this time?” His gaze finally moved to Crista. “Alex asked me to watch after you before he left, Crista. Are you going to help me out?”
She tried to smile, but her face felt frozen. “Zeke, if I knew anything, I promise I’d tell you. I don’t know myself what happened.”
Zeke grunted at that. “You have a homemade detonation device set in your vehicle that created enough heat to burn your flesh off your bones, and you don’t know why?”
Crista’s stomach rolled threateningly.
“Hell, Zeke, go a little easier on her,” Dawg bit out. “She doesn’t know what the hell is going on, and neither do we. I heard the ignition click and jerked her out of the vehicle in time. It was that simple. I do have a bit of experience with these things, you know.”
Zeke’s gaze lingered a little too long on Dawg before he turned back to Crista. “I’m going to have to start warning the women around here about getting mixed up with these boys. Bad things seem to follow them nowadays.” He took the remaining chair, straddling it with an easy motion and leaning his darkly tanned forearms on the table as he stared back at Crista. “Why does someone want to kill you, Crista Ann?”
She felt the color leech from her face as Dawg’s arm suddenly came around her shoulders, his chair moving in closer to hers.
“For God’s sake, Zeke,” he snarled. “Have a little compassion here.”
Zeke didn’t take his eyes off her. “Crista, you’re a smart girl,” he said softly. “Alex raised you to think on your feet. Let me help you.”
She shook her head. She had already ignored Dawg once by leaving the store and coming out on her own. She had almost died because of it. She was too stunned now, too frightened, to consider ignoring him again.
“I don’t know why.” Her lips felt numb, her body cold.
“Any strange goin’ ons?” Zeke’s gaze sharpened as Dawg’s hand tightened warningly on her shoulder.
She could feel his heat surrounding her, but it wasn’t touching the core of ice that seemed to solidify inside her chest.
She shook her head. Lying. She was lying through her teeth to friends now, covering up something that Zeke should know about.
“If nothing’s going on, then why did Alex call me last week and ask me to keep an extra eye on you?” he asked her then. “He said you had mentioned some strange things then, Crista.” His voice was gentle but firm. He knew she was lying.
“I’m not used to living alone,” she whispered. “I was a little freaked out when I talked to him. The house sounds funny sometimes.”
And it did. Sometimes, she could have sworn someone was moving around the house at night, though she had never been able to find any proof of it. That wasn’t a lie, but it felt like one, because she wasn’t telling Zeke the whole truth.
He sighed then. “Anyone from Virginia that you think might want to hurt you? What about that guy Alex said you were living with? Mark?”
“Mark Lessing.” The tension around the table was suddenly thick enough to cut with a knife.
Dawg tightened subtly, his body seeming to shift with dangerous force.
She looked at him in confusion, seeing the glitter of an inner flame in his eyes that had the blood suddenly rushing through her body with dizzying force. She swallowed tightly before forcing her gaze back to Zeke.
“Mark wouldn’t hurt me. He has no reason to want to hurt me.”
“So your relationship with him ended amicably?” Zeke asked curiously. “That’s a little unusual.
Relationships don’t just end with no anger on either side.”
“Nothing ended.” She shrugged. “I came home. Mark agreed it was time. End of story.”
Zeke glanced at Dawg. “You believe that?”
“What kind of game are you playing, Zeke?” Dawg asked then.
Zeke blinked with a look of studied male mockery. “Just trying to figure out the rules of the game you’re playing, Dawg. Leave me in the dark, and that’s what I tend to do.”
“He’s not playing any games.” Crista clenched her fists in her lap as she fought to control the shaking of her limbs. “Nothing has been going on. Mark wouldn’t hurt me, and neither would anyone else I know. I don’t know what happened out there or why anyone would want to hurt me.”
And she was a lousy liar.
Zeke breathed out wearily as he leaned back in his chair and regarded them all cynically. “When you think you can tell me the truth, Crista, you know how to get hold of me,” he finally said, then stared back at Dawg. “You know what Alex will do if she gets hurt, right? He’ll come down on the three of you like a wrecking ball. It won’t be pretty.”
“Come on, Zeke, threats don’t work.” Dawg rose from his seat before gripping Crista’s arm and drawing her up with him. “If you have any more questions, she’ll be on the boat with me or working in my office.”
Zeke’s gaze flicked to the hold Dawg had on her before his eyes lifted back to hers.
“If she’s not in trouble, then why isn’t she staying at her place?”
“Because she moved in with me yesterday,” Dawg answered coolly. “We were heading to her house to pack her stuff when this happened.”
Crista was suddenly aware of the other diners packed into the restaurant, their curious gazes following them, even though the table had been moved far enough away to give the sheriff the privacy he needed to question them.
And those curious diners couldn’t have helped but overhear Dawg’s little announcement.
“Well, I know where to find her then, that’s all that matters.” Zeke moved smoothly to his feet, his leanly muscled body flexing in frustration as he glanced around the table again. “Natches, Rowdy, next time I have proof you’re pulling ops behind my back, I’m going to arrest every damned one of you. I’m giving you fair warning now.”
Ops. Operations. Crista knew that word, she had heard Alex use it often enough.
“Save it, Zeke.” Natches followed Rowdy and Kelly as they rose from their seats as well. “We’re not running ops on you. And if we were, we would know how to cover our asses.”
Zeke breathed out in exasperation. “Unfortunately, that’s too true.” He stood as well, his gaze coming back to Crista. “Have you talked to Alex yet?”
She shook her head. “He’s out of the country.”
Zeke nodded. “I put out a call to his CO, and he told me the same thing. Any idea when he’ll be back?”
“When he gets back.”
Zeke’s questions were beginning to grate on her nerves, especially when it was more than obvious that he knew the answers before he did the asking.
Zeke nodded again, his gaze going over the five of them before it landed on Kelly once more.
“You’re letting them get you in trouble again, Kel. Not a good idea?”
At that, Kelly’s laughter whispered around the table. “Zeke, they are trouble, remember? But in this case, I promise you, I’m innocent as a babe.”
His lips twitched at that, and an edge of amusement filled his gaze. “Course you are, Kel.” He chuckled. “And it’s more than obvious that fiancé of yours is a damned bad influence. Not that I expected anything less. You, my girl, are a little too easily taken in by that rogue’s smile of his.”
“Ease up, Zeke.” Though his voice was amused, there was an edge of steel in Rowdy’s voice.
“We need to get Crista back to the marina and let Dawg get her settled. Her nerves are raw, and so are ours. Like you said, you know where to find her if you have any more questions.”
Crista let Dawg lead her from the diner then, aware that the sheriff watched them leave, suspicion shadowing his gaze. Not that he didn’t have a damned good reason to be suspicious. She knew Zeke, and knew, from the conversations she had with her brother in the past, how seriously he took his job and the protection of the county. And suspicion meant a challenge to Zeke. He wasn’t going to just let this go.
“Just hang on.” Dawg’s voice was a whisper of sound as he led her from the diner. “We’re almost clear.” He turned to Rowdy. “Did you bring the pickup?”
“Dad drove yours in,” Rowdy answered softly as they moved toward the parking lot. “He’s waiting to take your Harley back to the marina. We sure as hell didn’t want to leave it here.”
Crista wrapped her arms across herself as Dawg led her to the big black pickup truck that she had ridden in the day before.
Her life had definitely gone beyond Mercury in retrograde. Car bombs were major catastrophes, not fate fucking with you.
“We’ll meet you back at your place,” Rowdy told him as they neared the pickup, and Ray Mackay opened the door and stepped from it.
Rowdy’s tan pickup sat beside it, and Dawg’s and Natches’s cycles on the other side. Ray lifted the rifle he carried from the seat, unloaded it, and calmly reached in to hang it on the gun rack that stretched across the back window.
“Few curiosity seekers and that rabid little twit Johnny,” he grunted as they neared him. “Little bastard. His daddy would roll over in his grave if he knew how that boy turned out.”
Crista stared at Ray in surprise. “Johnny Grace?”
“Grace my ass,” he muttered. “That bitch that spawned him had to have gotten the sperm donor from someone other than Ralph. Ralph was a fine man. Ain’t none of him in that boy.”
“Easy, Dad.” Rowdy’s voice was clearly warning. “Johnny probably just wanted to check on Crista. They’re neighbors. Kind of.”
Ray’s eyes speared into her then. “Don’t tell me you befriended that little shit?”
“Johnny’s always been kind to me, Mr. Mackay,” she said, wishing she didn’t sound so weak, so tired. “He wouldn’t have meant any harm.”
She was aware of the gazes now trained on her in disbelief. Her chin lifted. She didn’t base her opinions or her friendships on others’ opinions, and she wasn’t going to start now. “Fine. For some reason you don’t like Johnny, and from what he said earlier, there’s not a lot of love lost. That’s none of my business, and it has nothing to do with me.” And she was too tired right now to make sense of any of it.