The Right Kind of Trouble (30 page)

“Because of
that
. Because of the bookstore. Because Kevin Towers is dead and he was talking about somebody who hated you.”

Lowering his voice, he turned to her and grasped her arms, pulling her closer.

People around them had fallen back, as if recognizing the raw, painful intimacy of the moment. Raggedly, he pressed his brow to hers. “Somebody wants to hurt you, Mac. They want to hurt you, Brannon, and Neve. So if you want to hate me because I want you safe, then hate me. I can live with you hating me as long I know I took care of you.”

She wrenched away, her voice shaking. “I can take of myself. I've got a dog. I've got an alarm system. Brannon's got more guns than the damn Pentagon by now!”

“Don't bet on it.” Tired now, Gideon stared at her. “And you're still not getting that you are thirty minutes from Ferry. It's a thirty-minute drive and you're not taking it alone.”

She went to argue.

Frustrated, he caught her arm and half-dragged her over into the yawning doorway that led to the burnt-out husk of the bookstore. Two of his officers seemed to understand why and they followed, using their bodies as a barrier to keep people a good ten feet away.

“Don't you get it, Mac?”

She tried to look away, and he shoved his hands into her hair, forcing her to meet his eyes. “Whoever this is, Moira … you
know
him. He knows you, your brother, your sister. This kind of obsessive hate doesn't come without somebody
knowing
you. You might have known him all of your life. You probably trust him … hell, it could be a
her
. We don't know.”

“That's…” She licked her lips. “Gideon, that's insane.”

“Is it? How did they get inside the museum? The alarm system didn't go off. It's Saturday, so the museum wasn't even being worked on. That system is keyed into the department. I would have known. You would have known. How did they get in?”

Her eyes went blank.

“There's an explanation—” She started. She took a deep breath and blew it out. Some of the anger had faded, and he watched as the fear began to leech its way into her eyes. He hated to see it but he'd rather she be aware now. If she was aware, then she'd be more careful.

“Then what is it?”

Her gaze fell away.

A moment passed and she shoved past him.

“Don't make me stick a cop on your ass, Mac,” he warned her.

“Fuck off, Chief.”

“Moira, damn it, would you just listen—”

She spun back around, her eyes wild once more. “I am! You wanted me scared, fine. I am. I'm terrified and now I feel like somebody ripped something out of me too. Maybe you figure I got it coming.”

“What…” He sputtered and shook his head. “Look, just … you need to get some rest. You're exhausted and…”

“Stop telling me what to do!” Her voice cracked as the words came out. “Go do your fucking job so I can go back to my house, Gideon! You hear me? Do your job and find this son of a bitch. If you were any good at being a cop, you should have already found him anyway!”

Gideon stiffened.

All around, people sucked in collective gasps as her words rang out across the gathered crowd.

She blinked, shoulders rising and falling. Then, abruptly, she spun on her heel.

And crashed straight into Brannon's chest.

“Hold up, sis,” he said, looking over her shoulder to meet Gideon's gaze. Brannon gave a single, short nod.

Gideon read an entire conversation in that look.

I'll take care of her.

She won't be alone.

She didn't mean it.

Yeah. He knew all of that.

Still, he had a hollow heart as he turned away and focused on the smoldering remains of the museum.

He needed to do his fucking job.

And she wasn't wrong. If he was any good, he would have figured this out already.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Moira stood at the window staring out at the small town where she had lived all of her life. She loved it.

McKay's Treasure was, in a way, every bit as much her home as McKay's Ferry was. It was her home and the people were her family.

Granted, she didn't always like all of them.

But she knew them. Well, she
thought
she knew them and she felt like she could trust most of them to an extent.

Don't you get it, Mac?

Gideon's voice was a haunting whisper in her ear and although he hadn't said it to be cruel or callous, she felt like curling in on herself and hiding.

This kind of obsessive hate doesn't come without somebody knowing you.

Swallowing, she leaned forward and pressed her forehead to the smooth pane of glass, her hands spread wide on the smooth wood of the window frame. Slowly, she drew in a breath, holding it a moment before she let it out.

You might have known him all of your life.

She wished she could hate him for what he'd said, wished she hadn't felt each word like a knife strike. But now, with her mind cleared, she couldn't do anything
but
think.

Moira had been blessed—or maybe she'd been cursed—with an overabundance of logic. Some people might look toward the end goal. Others might look at the things on the journey. Moira had always been able to see those things on the journey as well as the roadblocks
and
what lay at the end. It was that
end
that had finally helped her to make the agonizing—and now she understood—
wrong
decision to push Gideon away all those years ago.

One day, she'd have to explain.

One day soon.

She'd been so angry with herself, an anger she'd buried down deep, deep inside, but every day it had grown.

The misery that had settled inside her that night when she'd answered the door to find the chief of police, along with Gideon, Ella Sue, and her baby sister, had festered and spread, blooming into a deadly, poisonous thing that had infected her every waking moment—and almost all of her sleeping ones as well.

She'd never been able to show it, either.

Not Moira McKay, the head of the fine, upstanding McKay family—what a fucking joke.

The three of them—Moira and her siblings— had almost been the downfall—no.

“
I
was almost the downfall.” It had started and almost ended with her. All because she had been too proud, too arrogant to see how much help she'd needed. And too pathetically spoiled that day her parents had died. They'd wanted to arrange for Ella Sue to have guardianship of them but Moira had insisted on having her date.

It had taken years, but she'd finally forgiven herself.

Forgiven Gideon too—though she never should have blamed him to begin with. It had taken her even longer to understand that she shouldn't have blamed herself, either.

Tears burning her eyes, she closed them. Those tears fell like acid down her cheeks as memories of the days, weeks, months, and years that followed beat at her.

If she'd just called Gideon and told him they needed to change up their plans, maybe Mom and Dad would have been alive, maybe not. She didn't know.

That
was the reason she'd hated herself for all those years and why she'd pushed him away—she didn't deserve to be happy. That was what she'd believed, why she'd pushed him away.

Some selfish part of her had thought maybe he'd realized the ugliness that was festering in her and that he would come to hate her, and she hadn't wanted that. Another part of her had wanted
him
to be happy even if she'd never allow it for herself. But no matter which way she'd looked at it, eighteen years ago she'd seen no happy ending for them. Not together.

So she'd pushed him away.

It had only been in the past couple of years that she realized how stupid she had been and only in the past few months that she had taken the next few vital steps—forgiving herself.

Forgiving him … well, that had been the first—and easiest—thing to do, something she'd done years ago without even consciously realizing it. He'd done nothing wrong.

It was her own lack of guilt that had taken all this time to accept.

She'd mentioned the stubbornness of Scots and Southerners to Gideon just days ago—had it even been a
full
day? She wasn't sure, but while she was possessed of that annoying logic, her own stubbornness had blinded her to so many things until recently.

Now, though, with the blinders ripped away, that frustrating and nagging logic was pointing out small little details from the past few months.

Neve's arrival in town.

The trouble she'd had.

Shayla's odd death.

Hannah's accident.

They'd attributed all of Neve's troubles to Clyde, save for the drugs. Brannon had hired an investigator that had turned up proof that William hadn't even hit the state yet when that happened.

Somebody else had done that—somebody who
didn't
know Neve intimately.

You could have known him all your life
.

“No,” she murmured. “He would have known that.”

Neve's fear of needles was legendary. It was one thing that had been joked about often enough that it had even reached Moira's ears when her little sister had still been in high school—
At least they don't have to worry about her doing those kind of drugs you shoot up. She'd pass out before she even touched the damn thing.

It had alternately embarrassed and enraged her, the way they'd talk about Neve, but then Moira would go home and Neve would be in trouble again, or money would missing from yet
another
store in town—or some other thing that had always been tied in with her baby sister.

Tucking the drugs into the back of her mind, she swung her focus to another element—another piece of the puzzle.

Hannah. She didn't know exactly where things stood with that. Brannon had pushed for information and Gideon had shared
some
of what he had. Some, not all.

Whoever had attacked Brannon, whoever had chased Hannah that night in the winery, might as well have been a ghost. Senator Henry Roberts was connected to some of Hannah's troubles—
some
—not all. He sure as hell hadn't been the one chasing them through the winery. He'd been very busy being dead and all.

William couldn't have killed Shayla.

Neve's head spun as she ticked off one detail after another, pushing each one off to the side once she'd decided it wasn't pertinent to what was going on
now
.

She had facts, she had information—Brannon had pushed for some, Gideon had given what he'd felt he could. The man and his badge, she had to give him credit, he stood by that badge and the oaths he'd taken. But she had access to other information, thanks to her hardheaded brother. He had quietly used the investigators McKay Enterprises had access to, copying her and Neve on all reports.

“Take William out of the picture,” she muttered, turning away from the window and pressing the tips of her fingers to her eyes.

If they only pinned Neve's attack, and the mess with Ian's bike, on William … then everything else …

Everything else.

Don't you get it, Mac?

Somebody she knew, and knew well, just as Gideon had said. But he was wrong on one front. He—or she—hadn't known her, or her siblings—their
whole
lives, or if he had, he hadn't known them well. A distant connection. Somebody fairly local.

“It could be anybody.”

Swearing under her breath, she rubbed at the back of her neck and lifted her eyes to the ceiling as a headache pulsed behind her eyes. How many people did she
know
? How many people had a reason to hate the McKay family or McKay Enterprises and its various business arms?

If she looked at it from a personal standpoint … well, they had a list of people who didn't much care for them and a list of people who outright hated them—on a personal level. On a business level, those lists got even longer.

“Kevin,” she whispered. “Kevin works—
worked
—for McKay.” Maybe that was where she needed to focus. If somebody had approached Kevin, it was more than likely it had happened through McKay Enterprises. Screw all this bullshit about familial connections—she'd heard Kevin talking about having no family. She knew what it was like to
miss
something. She had her brother and sister, yes, but she'd spent the past twenty years missing her parents, just wishing they were there to tell her which step to take, which decision was the right one. All somebody would have had to do, she suspected, was talk to the guy for twenty minutes and they'd know he was lonely, that he wanted to … belong. Maybe he'd just been an easy way in.

But everything seemed so ugly. So personal.

Don't you get it, Mac?

She closed her eyes and made herself think back—again—over everything that had happened. The bullshit report to the museum, the attacks on Hannah and Brannon, the drugs planted on Neve, the fires in the bookstore and the museum. All ugly, cruel things. Some small and petty, others big and dangerous. But all of them designed to strike at them, designed to hurt.

“We know him,” she whispered.

*   *   *

“It's somebody I know,” she whispered. “He knows
us
.”

Just like Gideon had said. Right before she yelled at him and told him to do his job.

A headache pounded behind her eyes and she rubbed at the back of her neck. Her thoughts just wouldn't shut down and she couldn't get away from
any
of them.

It was why she hadn't wanted to be here. If she'd gone home, she could have hidden from this reality, but here at Brannon's she could still smell the stink of smoke and see the movement from the firefighters down at the blockade they'd erected at the end of Main. The one thing she couldn't do was shut down her thoughts.