Buch lesen: «Justice is Coming»
“It doesn’t matter that I’m your usual type, because I’m still the wrong woman.”
“You got it.” He flashed a half smile that melted that ball of ice in her stomach. “But then, I’m the wrong man for you.” No half smile now. “And I’m pretty sure that makes this one of those irresistible situations we’re just going to have to resist. Or at least keep reminding ourselves to do it.”
Yes. She wondered, though, if a reminder would be just wasting mental energy. “I don’t want to find you attractive.” But she did. Mercy, did she. On a scale of one to ten, he was a six hundred, and even with the danger, he fired every nerve in her body.
Justice is Coming
Delores Fossen
Imagine a family tree that includes Texas cowboys, Choctaw and Cherokee Indians, a Louisiana pirate and a Scottish rebel who battled side by side with William Wallace. With ancestors like that, it’s easy to understand why USA TODAY bestselling author and former air force captain DELORES FOSSEN feels as if she were genetically predisposed to writing romances. Along the way to fulfilling her DNA destiny, Delores married an air force top gun who just happens to be of Viking descent. With all those romantic bases covered, she doesn’t have to look too far for inspiration.
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Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter One
Marshal Declan O’Malley eased the saddle off his chestnut stallion. He tried not to make any sudden moves, and he didn’t look over his shoulder, though Declan was pretty sure someone was watching him.
That “pretty sure” became a certainty when he spotted the footprints on the partially frozen ground.
What the heck was going on?
Since he’d been a federal marshal for nearly six years, he was accustomed to having people want to do him bodily harm, but threats like that rarely came right to his doorstep.
Or rather to his barn.
Declan put the saddle on the side of the watering trough and adjusted his buckskin jacket so he could reach the Colt in his belt holster. He gave the chestnut’s rump a gentle slap, and as Declan had hoped he’d do, the stallion headed for some hay in the side corral. If there was going to be a shootout, Declan sure didn’t want his horse caught up in the gunfire.
He stepped to the side of the barn door. And waited.
Listening.
But the only thing he could hear was the bitter December wind rattling the bare trees scattered around the grounds. He didn’t mind the cold when he was on his daily ride, but he minded it a lot when he was waiting for something bad to happen.
Or maybe not bad.
He looked at the footprints again. Small. Like a woman’s. He hadn’t been in a relationship in the past three or four months, but maybe this was an old girlfriend come to visit. Still, it didn’t feel like something that simple.
Or that fun.
His house wasn’t exactly on the beaten path, not even by rural-Texas standards. He was literally on the back forty acres of his foster family’s horse-and-cattle ranch. A good ten miles from the town of Maverick Springs, and with not even a paved road leading to his place. Besides, there wasn’t much of value in his small wood-frame house to make it a target for thieves.
Declan glanced around. Kept listening. And when he was finally fed up with the cold, he drew his Colt and moved away from the barn door so he could follow those footprints. From the looks of it, the prints started at the back of his barn, and that meant somebody had probably walked in from the pasture and checked out the barn itself.
Maybe looking for him.
Or looking to make sure he’d indeed gone on his daily ride.
And then the trespasser had made her way to the back of his house. Declan went in that direction now, using the trees for cover.
Finally, he saw something.
Or rather someone.
There was a person dressed in dark clothes and equally dark sunglasses peering around the edge of his back porch. Judging from her size, it was probably a woman, though he couldn’t be positive since his visitor was wearing a black baseball cap slung low on her head, and the brim covered most of her face. Declan expected her to duck out of sight when she spotted him.
She didn’t.
She put her index finger to her mouth in a keep-quiet gesture.
What the hell?
And just to confuse things even more, she motioned for him to come closer.
Declan debated it. He debated calling out to her, too, but she frantically shook her head and made that keep-quiet gesture again.
He looked to see if she was armed. Couldn’t tell. But since she’d had ample opportunity to shoot at him and hadn’t, Declan decided to take his chances. He didn’t put his gun away, but he went closer.
Yeah, it was a woman all right. About five-six, with an average build. Judging from the strands of hair that had slipped out from the back of the baseball cap, she was a brunette.
“Inside,” she whispered and tipped her head to his back door. “Please,” she added.
Well, if she was a criminal, she was a polite one, that was for sure. The please didn’t sway Declan one bit, but her shaky voice did. There was fear in it. Or something. Something that told him she wasn’t a killer.
Well, probably not.
He’d been wrong before. And he had the scar on his chest to prove it.
But did that stop him?
Much to his disgust, nope, it didn’t. He’d never been a cautious man, and while this seemed like a really good time to start, Declan went even closer, still looking for any sign that she was armed.
Okay, she was.
Without any prompting, his mysterious visitor opened the side of her jacket to show him the gun—a Glock—that she had tucked in a shoulder holster. Since she made no attempt to draw it, Declan walked even closer, up the side steps. He also tapped the badge he had pinned to his holster, just in case she didn’t know she was dealing with a deputy U.S. marshal.
She kept her head down so he still didn’t have a good look at her face. “I know exactly who you are, Declan O’Malley,” she whispered.
Well, that wasn’t much of a stretch. Everyone in Maverick Springs knew who he was. He and his five foster brothers, who were all marshals, too. Anyone could have found out his name and where he lived within minutes after arriving in town. Heck, he didn’t even have a burglar alarm because he figured no one would be stupid enough to do what this woman was apparently trying to do.
“Inside,” she repeated.
It wasn’t caution but rather common sense that had him staying put when she turned toward his door. “I want answers first,” he insisted.
“Shh.” The fear in her body language went up a significant notch, and she fired a few nervous glances around his yard.
Confused and now somewhat riled at, well, whatever the heck this was, Declan followed her glances but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Only the woman.
He cupped her chin, lifted it.
And groaned.
Yeah. He recognized her all right, and it wasn’t a good kind of recognition, either.
Eden Gray.
What in the Sam Hill was she doing here at his house?
He opened his mouth to demand some answers but her hand flew up, and she pressed her fingers to his mouth. Cold fingers at that.
But soft.
And she smelled like some kind of girlie hand lotion. It definitely didn’t go with that Glock she was carrying or the fact that she was trespassing.
“They might hear you,” she whispered. “Inside,” she insisted again.
“They?”
She eased down her fingers, stepped back and yanked off her glasses. Those eyes caught him off guard for just a moment. Ice blue but somehow without a hint of cold in them. Definitely memorable, but he hadn’t needed to see her eyes to know this was a blast from his past that he didn’t want or need.
Well, a blast he didn’t need anyway.
For a split second, his body overrode his brain, and that whole want thing came into play. In those brief moments, he didn’t see Eden Gray, a person who despised him, but rather a hot woman. One who just happened to be armed and acting crazy.
She swallowed hard.
Something different went through her eyes. Not fear, but Declan recognized the look. It was the quick glance that a woman gave a man when she was interested but didn’t want to be.
Declan was afraid he was giving her the same look right back. Oh, man. One day he was going to learn to think with his head only and not some other body part that often got him into trouble.
She swallowed hard again. Turned. And she eased open the door. Sorry, she mouthed.
Declan didn’t ask for what. He didn’t want to know. He only wanted answers, and that was why he followed her inside to his kitchen.
“Why are you here?” he demanded.
But she still didn’t answer. She hurried to the window over his sink and looked out. She did another of those shifty glances that he often did when he was doing surveillance or in the presence of danger.
“You obviously remember me,” she finally said.
He gave her a flat look. “Obviously.”
“This way,” Eden added. “I have to show you something.” And she headed toward his living room that was only a few yards away.
She would have made it there, too, but Declan snagged her by the arm and whirled her back around to face him. “Remembering you doesn’t tell me why you’re here. Now spill it, or I’m tossing you out.”
“You can’t.” Eden was breathing through her mouth now, and her pulse was jumping in her throat. But that didn’t stop her from shaking off his grip, catching his arm and pulling him into the living room.
“Stay away from the windows,” she warned.
Just on principle and because he was now about twelve steps past being ornery, Declan considered doing the opposite of anything she was asking. “Give me a reason why I should stay away from my own window.”
“There’s a tiny camera attached to the big oak on the right side of your front porch.” Her breath trembled in her throat. “And they’re watching the front of the house. Maybe trying to listen, too.”
Declan shook his head, stared at her and made a circling motion with his gun for her to continue. He needed more. A lot more, but he needed that “a lot more” to make sense. So far, that wasn’t happening.
“Did you miss a dose of meds or something?” he asked.
“No.” She stretched that out a few syllables. “I’m not crazy. And I have a good reason for being here.”
He stared at her, made the circling motion with his hand again.
“I got here about a half hour ago, while you were out riding,” she said. “I’ve watched you for the past two days, so I know you take a ride this time of morning before you go in to work.”
Well, it was an answer all right, but it didn’t answer much. “You watched me?”
She nodded.
“Really?” And he didn’t take the skepticism out of it, either.
Until this morning when he’d reined in at the barn, he hadn’t felt or seen anyone watching him yesterday or the day before. Of course, he’d had a lot on his mind what with his foster father, Kirby Granger, battling cancer. The thought of losing Kirby had been weighing on him. Maybe enough for him to not notice someone stalking him.
He looked her straight in the eye. “Are you going to make me arrest you, or do you plan to keep going with that explanation?”
She made a soft sound of frustration, looked out the window again. “I’m a P.I. now. I own a small agency in San Antonio.”
She’d skipped right over the most important detail of her brief bio. “Your father’s Zander Gray, a lowlife swindling scum. I arrested him about three years ago for attempting to murder a witness who was going to testify against him, and he was doing hard time before he escaped.”
And this was suddenly becoming a whole lot clearer.
“He sent you here,” Declan accused.
“No,” she quickly answered. “I’m not even sure he’s alive.”
Okay, maybe not so clear after all.
“But my father might have been the reason they contacted me in the first place,” Eden explained. “They might have thought I’d do anything to get back at you for arresting him. I won’t.”
He made a sound of disagreement. “Since you’re trespassing and have been stalking me, convince me otherwise that you’re not here to avenge your father.”
“I’m not.” Not a whisper that time. And there was some fire in those two little words. “But someone’s trying to set me up. Earlier this week someone broke into my office, planted some fake financials on my computer and changed the password so I can’t delete them from the server. That someone is trying to make it look as if I’m funneling money to a radical militia group buying illegal firearms.”
Declan thought about that a second. “Lady, if you wanted me to investigate that, you didn’t have to follow me or come to my ranch. My office is on Main Street in town.”
Another headshake. “They didn’t hire me to go to your office.”
Mercy. It was hard to hang on to his temper with this roundabout conversation. “There it is again. That they. They put up the camera that you don’t want me to go to the window and see. So who are they?”
“I honestly don’t know.” She dodged his gaze, tried to turn away, but he took hold of her again and forced her to face him. “After I realized someone had planted that false info on my computer, I got a call from a man using a prepaid cell phone. I didn’t recognize his voice. He said if I went to the cops or the marshals, he’d release the info on my computer and I’d be arrested.”
And maybe she would be. Because some cops might assume like father, like daughter.
But was she?
Declan pushed that question aside. Right now, that didn’t matter. “This unknown male caller is the one who put the camera outside?”
“I think so. If not him, then someone working with or for him. All I know is it’s there because I saw a man wearing a ski mask installing it right after you left for your ride.”
He shook his head. “If they sent you to watch me, why use a camera?”
“Because the camera is to watch me,” she clarified. “To make sure I do what he ordered me to do.”
“And what exactly are you supposed to do?” Declan demanded.
Eden Gray shoved her hand over her Glock. “Kill you.”
Chapter Two
Declan O’Malley came at her so fast that Eden didn’t even see it coming until it was too late.
Even though he was tall and lanky, he still packed a wallop when he slammed into her, knocking her back against the wall. In the same motion, he ripped her gun from her shoulder holster, tossed it behind him and jammed his own weapon beneath her chin.
“Kill me?” His teeth were clenched now. Jaw, too. And even though there were no lights on in the living room, she had no trouble seeing the venom in his eyes.
Eden was certain there was no venom in hers. Just fear. It’d been a huge risk coming here. From everything she’d read and heard about him, Declan could be a dangerous man. Still, she hadn’t had a choice. If she was going to die, she’d rather it be at his hands than others’.
“The man who called me on the burner cell ordered me to kill you,” Eden managed to say. Though it was hard to speak with the marshal’s body pressed against her chest. It was hard to breathe, too.
But maybe Declan himself was responsible for that.
Eden had known that he fell into the drop-dead-hot category. Tall, dark, deadly. However, what she hadn’t known was that despite the danger and this insane situation, she would feel the punch of attraction. She’d never expected to feel it for this man, but it was there.
You’re losing it, Eden.
Declan O’Malley was the job. For some huge reasons, especially one, he couldn’t be anything else.
“Why does he want me dead?” he demanded.
“I don’t know. That’s the truth,” Eden added when he made a “yeah, right” sound. “He just told me if I didn’t kill you that he’d release the info he planted on my computer.”
No “yeah, right” this time, but his left eyebrow lifted. “You’d kill me rather than risk charges for funneling money to a militia group?”
Eden lifted her own eyebrow. She wasn’t feeling especially brave, definitely not like the cocky man looming in front of her. The seconds were ticking away, and with each one of them, the risk got higher and higher. Someway, somehow, she had to get this hot cowboy marshal to go along with an asinine plan that had little or no chance of succeeding.
Still, little was better than zero.
Without warning, he yanked the baseball cap from her head and threw it in the direction her Glock had landed. Her hair was in a ponytail, but it dropped against her shoulder. He studied it. Then her eyes. Every inch of her face. Maybe trying to figure out if she was telling him the truth. Or maybe he was just giving her the twice over as she’d done to him.
She hoped not.
They didn’t need both of them feeling this involuntary heat.
“You sure this isn’t about your father?” he pressed.
“I’m sure. I haven’t heard from him since he escaped from jail.”
And she didn’t want to get into that sore subject now. Declan had arrested her father, and then her father had escaped. It wouldn’t do any good to mention that she believed her father was innocent of at least the most serious charge—attempted murder. That really wouldn’t help in getting Declan to cooperate if she questioned his lawman’s skills of apprehending a guilty suspect.
“Could you at least move the gun?” Eden asked. “Because we need to talk. I figure at most I’ve got twenty minutes left before someone will want to know why I haven’t fired a shot.”
She was being generous with that timeline. The mysterious caller had told her to show Declan ASAP what she’d been sent. Why, she didn’t know, but it seemed as if that was only to taunt him.
Or rile him even more than he already was.
Like poking an ornery rattler with a short stick. It hardly seemed wise, but she would show him. And hope for a way out of this.
Declan slid his intense green eyes to the gun, then back to her. “Yes to the talking. No to moving the gun.”
There was just a touch of an Irish brogue beneath that Texas drawl. A strange combination. And one she might have enjoyed hearing if his finger wasn’t on the trigger of the gun pressed to her throat.
“I agreed to kill you because I didn’t have a choice,” Eden explained. No beautiful lilt to her words. Her voice was strained like the rest of her. One big giant nerve. “If the planted info had been leaked, it would have set off an opposing militia group that would in turn kill me, the rest of my family and anyone they thought might be a friend of mine.”
Finally, he let up a little on the pressure to her chest and eased back a fraction. Still close. Still touching. He probably hadn’t realized that he had his right leg shoved between hers. Eden’s gaze drifted in that direction. Then back up at Declan.
Correction. He’d noticed.
But clearly he didn’t plan to do anything about the intimate contact between them.
“I have two sisters,” she added. “They’re nineteen and twenty. Barely adults, and they’ve been through more than enough with my father’s arrest and disappearance. They don’t deserve to die because someone’s targeting you.”
“You could have arranged for them and you to be protected,” he pointed out.
“I did the best I could, but there’s no place to hide from these men. Eventually they’d get through any security I could set up. They proved that by hacking into my computer and leaving that bogus info.”
Declan made another sound that led her to believe he was making fun of her.
“You ever killed a man before?” he challenged, but he didn’t wait for Eden to answer. “My guess is no.”
He put his face right next to hers. So close that the brim of his midnight-black Stetson scraped against her forehead. It was hard to tell where the Stetson ended and his hair began, because they were the same color.
“And my second guess is that you can’t kill me,” he went on. “Of course, that’s not really a guess since I wouldn’t let you get the chance.”
“I wasn’t planning to kill you,” she said, but had to clear her throat and repeat it so it’d have sound. Great. She was acting like a wuss rather than a P.I. with her family’s lives, and hers, at stake.
“You’re here with a gun,” he reminded her.
“I didn’t intend to use it. Well, not to shoot you anyway. I will have to fire, though, because I want whoever’s on the other end of that camera to believe you’re dead. And to make sure that person doesn’t come in here and try to do the job himself, I need to fire soon.”
With his gaze still pinned to hers, he backed up again. “Maybe we should do just that—let the person come in here and try to kill me,” he suggested. “If he’s really out there. He won’t get far. I’m thinking a step in the house. Two at most. And I wouldn’t let him get off the first shot.”
“I don’t doubt it. But I can’t risk that. His death could start a chain reaction that’ll get my sisters killed.”
Thankfully, he didn’t disagree with that. Well, not verbally anyway. “Tell me everything you know about the person who hired you to do this.”
“There isn’t time.” Eden tried to look out the window to make sure no one was coming, but the angle was wrong. “He said I had to have the job done by seven-thirty. It’s seven-twenty now.”
“Make time,” he countered.
Eden huffed and tried to think of the fastest explanation. It wasn’t too hard because she didn’t know a lot of facts. “I don’t have a clue who he is. As I said, he used an untraceable cell phone. It’s the same with the info he emailed me about you. I tried to track down the source, but it led me to a coffee shop in San Antonio where hundreds of people use the internet each day. There aren’t any security cameras and no surveillance feed from nearby businesses.”
He gave her another hard look. “What info about me did he email you?”
“It’s on my phone.”
Eden glanced in the direction of her pocket, where his hip was still brushing against hers. She waited until he nodded before she reached between them, and the back of her hand did more than brush. She had no choice but to touch him in a place that she shouldn’t be touching.
He still didn’t back away.
But Declan did make a slight sound of discomfort.
Eden knew how he felt. This wasn’t comfortable for her, either, and it was even worse because touching him wasn’t nearly as unpleasant as it should have been. After all, he was holding her at gunpoint.
Still, it was time to poke that rattler.
She went through the emails on her phone until she reached the first one the man had sent her. It was a series of photos with just four words: Your target, Declan O’Malley.
She went through the shots, the first a recent one of him wearing his gun and badge and going into the marshals’ building in Maverick Springs. It appeared to have been taken from a camera with a long-range lens.
Eden showed Declan the photo and went to the next one, a close-up of him at the diner across the street from his office. Probably taken with the same long-range camera since it had a grainy texture.
“Did you have any idea you were being photographed?” she asked, hoping that maybe he’d seen the person who’d snapped these shots.
Declan shook his head, and while his expression didn’t change much, Eden figured that had to bother him. It was a violation, something she knew loads about since this whole computer-hacking incident.
She clicked to another photo of Declan in his truck, turning onto the road that led to his foster family’s ranch and to his own place. The next shot was of his license plate.
And then Eden got to the last one.
The puzzling one.
It was an old wedding photo of four adults and a young boy. Even though the person who’d emailed it to her hadn’t identified by name all the people in the group shot, he had said that the child was Declan. He was about four years old, dressed in his Sunday best, and the people surrounding him were his parents, an uncle and the uncle’s bride. They were all smiling. A happy-family photo.
It didn’t make Declan happy now.
He closed his eyes for just a split second, and then he cursed, using some really foul language. And Eden knew why. She, too, was personally familiar with bad memories. And despite the smiles, this photo was indeed a bad memory, because in less than twenty-four hours after it’d been taken, Declan’s life had turned on a dime.
Or rather turned on a different kind of metal.
Some bullets.
“The information this hacker gave me was that the photo was of your family in Germany,” Eden said. “They were all murdered when you were four years old.”
Declan took a moment, inhaled a slightly deeper breath. “Why the hell did he send you that?”
Eden shook her head. “I was hoping you could tell me. The person also said your name had been changed after the murders.”
“It was. Twice. But as far as I know, no other living person has that specific information. Except maybe my family’s killer.”
Was that it? Was that the connection?
“What does this photo have to do with the order the hacker gave me to kill you?” she asked.
He snatched the phone from her, backed up, but he still didn’t lower his gun. He kept it aimed right at her while he glanced out the window. Maybe to see if the camera installer was returning. He apparently wasn’t, because Declan’s attention went back to the photos. There weren’t more to see, but he paused for a long time on that last one.
The bad-memory one.
“I’ve been digging, but I don’t have many answers,” she admitted. “Still, I have to believe that picture has something to do with all of this or he wouldn’t have sent it to me.”
Eden paused, hoping Declan didn’t shoot her for asking what she had to ask. “What do you remember about your family’s murders? Who killed them? Because the person sent me links of the old crime, but all the articles said the culprit was an unknown assailant.”
A sterile term for something far from sterile.
“I don’t know who killed them.” He was in control again. The tough cowboy lawman, and he was glaring at her, maybe because he didn’t believe she was innocent in all of this.
And maybe she wasn’t.
Eden didn’t know if she was one hundred percent blameless, but that was what she intended to find out—after she bought herself and her sisters some time.
“I don’t have any memories of the attack,” Declan finally added. “According to the shrink the cops made me see, I blocked them out.”
Too bad. But Eden cringed at the thought. Maybe blocking them out had been the only way Declan had survived. That and being hidden in a cellar while his family was murdered. If he hadn’t been in that cellar, he would have been killed, as well. In fact, Eden was afraid that Declan was the reason they’d been killed in the first place.
Judging from the look in his eyes, he thought so, too.
He groaned, dropped back another step and shoved her phone in his front pocket. Maybe so he’d have a free hand to scrub over his face—which he did.
“What’s the first memory you do have after the murders?” she asked.
“A few days later.” And that was all he said for several long moments. “The local cops put me in protective custody, gave me a fake name and eventually sent me to a distant cousin, Meg Tanner, in Ireland. I lived on and off with her and then some of her friends in County Clare for eight years before she brought me to Texas.”
Yes, because Meg had learned she had Parkinson’s disease and could no longer take care of Declan. Or at least that was the info Eden had been given by the mystery person who’d orchestrated this visit to Declan’s place.
“Eventually your cousin took you to the Rocky Creek Children’s Facility,” Eden supplied. “Why there?”
“She just said I’d be safe there. I got another name, the one I use now, and Kirby said I shouldn’t talk about my past to anyone. So I didn’t.”
Eden took up the rest of the explanation. “The facility didn’t normally take boys your age, but they made an exception. Actually, someone there faked the paperwork so you could be admitted.”
Declan glared again. “How do you know that?”
“Despite what you think of me, I’m a good P.I. I know how to find information, even when someone wants that information hidden.”
Though it had been especially challenging to get any records from the notorious facility because of an ongoing investigation into the murder of the orphanage’s headmaster, Jonah Webb. According to what she’d learned, Webb’s wife had murdered him sixteen and a half years ago when Declan was just thirteen years old and his five foster brothers had all been living at Rocky Creek.
And Webb’s wife had an unknown accomplice.
Declan and all five of his foster brothers were suspects. So was their foster father, Kirby Granger, the retired marshal who had “rescued” Declan and his foster brothers and then raised them on his sprawling ranch.
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