The Right Kind of Trouble (6 page)

He braced a hand and leaned over the bed, reaching out and catching Moira's chin.

Her breath hitched and she fought her body's natural instinct to gasp. For one moment, their gazes locked and she stared at him. His gaze was magnetic. She could hardly stand to tear her eyes away, but if she was wise, that was what she'd do. That was what she needed to do, what she should do.

But then, he lifted her chin. He was gentle, but the movement still hurt and a weak protest of pain escaped her.

His free hand rested on her forearm, stroking gently. “Somebody was driven to do this to you, Moira. And whoever it was, he had been watching you enough to know that you had developed the habit of going outside at night, walking.” He paused, waiting for her to argue that point. She didn't, though. It was in the report that she'd started taking walks at night—had been doing it for a few weeks, at least. “This somebody is determined and possibly obsessed.” He withdrew his hands—both of them—and there were no lingering caresses, nothing she'd come to associate with Gideon.

She missed them, wanted to grab his hand and draw it back to her face.

“Now.” He shoved both hands into the back pockets of his jeans and strode across the room, staring outside the window into the gray morning. “Now, the two of you want to insist there's nothing but rumors to all these legends, fine. But there's at least one person who is willing to go to desperate lengths to prove otherwise.”

Moira clenched her jaw and then looked down at her board, erasing what she'd written and starting over.

For all you know, this is just some idiot who
was passing through. Or he read about Patrick
on Wikipedia. Aren't you overreacting?

Gideon read it. Then he held out a hand.

She glared at him and erased her message, starting over.

You can talk, jerk.

He just continued to wait, patiently. Like the Rock of Gibraltar.

Snarling at him, she threw it at him. He caught it easily and turned it around.

He took exaggerated care as he erased her message and wrote his own.

Three attacks.

Shayla.

Hannah.

You.

I refuse to believe they aren't connected.

She rolled her eyes and then passed it over to Brannon, mouthing,
He's an idiot
.

Brannon frowned, but she suspected he got the general idea. “Look, Gideon … I can see the attack on Shayla and Hannah being connected—and you didn't mention Roger's murder.”

“That's because he's connected to Shayla.” Gideon turned back to look at them. “But there's a bigger, underlying picture here and we're just not seeing it. This attack on Moira is the first time anything has actually
pointed
at something.”

“Yeah.” Brannon's voice was thick with sarcasm and Moira threw up her hands, dropping back onto the pillow in defeat. “It's pointing to a dead end—
and
to my sister.”

“Trust me, I'm aware.” His voice was hard, tight. He shifted his attention back to Moira and asked, “You always talked about a legacy. I want to know what it is.”

Brannon snorted, but when he started to talk, she rapped the board on the bedrail. He looked over at her and she shook her head. She scrawled a quick note on the board and showed it to him, then erased it before Gideon could see.

“Moira,” Gideon said, his voice heavy with warning.

She wrote another note and showed it to him.

We're the legacy, Gideon. I'm pretty sure we're not buried in the dirt somewhere.

He noted that she'd underlined the
we
.

Then she threw the board down and grabbed the call light, pushing it. Turning her eyes to her brother, she beckoned for him to come closer. Ignoring the pain, she spoke this time, “Make him”—she had to pause a moment and wait for the razor blades that had lined her throat to ease up—“leave.”

She was almost crying by the time she'd said those three simple words.

Brannon caught her hand and squeezed it, nodding.

*   *   *

Gideon heard the words, saw the pain it caused her to speak, and he blew out a breath.

Even before Brannon turned to look at him, he was making his way to the door. As pale green eyes locked on him, he lifted a hand. “I'm going,” he said, voice flat. “But listen…”

Moira wouldn't look at him. She was staring out the window. The sight of her, looking battered and bruised, tore a hole straight through his heart. The beeps and noises of the hospital seemed terribly loud, and he was crucially aware of everything, from the way the hospital gown fell off one pale, smoothly rounded shoulder to the smudge of dirt still visible on the curve of her jaw to the way she kept kneading and twisting the sheets covering her legs. “I'm not done,” he said softly. “My gut tells me I'm right. All the trouble we're looking at? It's all connected to y'all, and I know it. I feel it right to my bones. So whether you like or not, you're going to work with me and help me figure it out.”

Brannon's jaw bunched tight.

Moira's eyes closed.

Neither of them made any attempt to respond.

He gave them a terse nod. “I'll be in touch about the dog.”

Walking away from her caused an almost visceral pain, but then again, it always had.

He stopped once he rounded the corner and leaned back against the wall, staring hard at the vending machines a few feet in front of him. Slowly, he lifted his eyes upward, as though he could see clear through the concrete and steel and plaster, straight up into the heavens. “God, why are you doing this to me?”

He felt like he had a damn hook inside his mouth—or maybe in his heart. His soul. He'd finally done the one thing he didn't think he'd ever do. He'd pulled himself away from Moira, dragged himself out of her orbit, and had even done what he could to form a relationship with another woman. He
liked
Maris. She was attractive and fun. He had serious things in common with her and when he was with her, he was able to forget about Moira … for a time.

But when you're not with Maris, you don't think about her. You don't find yourself waking up hot and sweaty with your fist around your dick, about to come just because you were dreaming about her.

He couldn't say the same about Moira.

The brutal truth was that he could be sleeping in bed with Maris and wake up dreaming about Moira.

Dragging a hand up and down his face, he tossed a frustrated look down the hallway.

She was going to drive him crazy.

That's just all there was to it.

“Where is she?”

The half-panicked question came at him just as he was shoving off the wall, and he found himself face-to-face with Charles Hurst.

Cheeks ruddy, blue eyes partly hidden behind a pair of glasses, the man came to a halt, sucking air hard.

Gideon stared at Moira's ex-husband with little more than apathy.

“Morning, Chuck.”

Charles drew himself up to his full height—two inches, give or take, taller than Gideon's five ten, and stared down his nose. “Don't be petty, Gideon. Where's Moira? Is she…” He closed his eyes for a moment. “She can't be hurt too seriously or you wouldn't be out here trying to annoy me.”

“I live to annoy you, Hurst. Don't you know that?” Since Charles was trying to swing his dick, Gideon rocked back on his heels and crossed his arms over his chest. “Before you go taking off to check on your former wife, I got a few questions. Mind telling me where you were last night?”

Charles looked taken aback. His mouth flattened out and then he took a slow, controlled breath. “Is this your idea of entertainment or am I to believe you actually think
I
could have hurt her?”

“Just doing my job.” Gideon shrugged. “You don't mind me doing my job, do you?”

“Yes, Chief Marshall. You do your job … you continue to play these petty games with me while the woman I love lies suffering in her room alone.” The acid in Charles' voice, underscored by the cool, crisp tones of London, might have cut a lesser man to size.

“Nah.” Gideon shrugged. “She ain't alone. You know how those McKays are. None of them are ever really alone. Brannon's in there with her. We got a few minutes. Now … your whereabouts last night?”

*   *   *

“Two? Marshall, you're trying to kill me. You got any idea what my wife will do to me if I let
two
of our babies go?”

Gideon rolled his eyes. “Zeke … now correct me if I'm wrong, old man, but I'm pretty sure the reason you breed and train these dogs is so you can sell them.”

On the other end of the line, Zeke made a disgusted snort. “Shit. I breed and train these dogs because I love them. I only sell them because I got no room for all of them.” He sighed and then blew out a breath. “Who is it you're needing them for?”

“A couple of friends.” He was proud of himself. His voice didn't hesitate at all when he called Moira a friend. He pulled his cruiser up in front of the police department and climbed out, switching the Bluetooth off as he lifted the phone to his ear. He hated the stupid gadget, but he had to set an example for the people of McKay's Treasure. If he didn't want them driving and talking on their phones, then he couldn't be doing the very thing he told them not to do. “Moira McKay was attacked—”

“Wait a minute. Did you say
McKay
? As in the fucking
McKay
family?”

Gideon came to a stop. “Is there a problem?”

There was a period of a silence so strained, Gideon thought he could hear some imaginary prickle in the airwaves between them. Then, finally, Zeke said in a terse voice, “I don't think I got two dogs to spare.”

Without another word, the old man hung up.

“What the hell?”

“Chief?”

Gideon looked up from his phone and met Pendleton's eyes, found his second-in-command eying him oddly. “You ever get the feeling that life would be easier if you just moved to a deserted island and lived by yourself?”

“Yeah.” Pendleton nodded, his hangdog face pensive as though he indeed did consider that very thing on a regular basis. “But here's the problem. Where the hell am I going to get coffee, beer, and books if I'm living on a deserted island?”

“I hear you can get anything online—find somebody to ship to you.” Gideon held the door open for him as they shoved into the warmer air of the station—and like a switch had been flipped, the low buzz of chatter went abruptly silence.

“Well. Nice to see business carried on as usual while I was taking some personal time,” Gideon said with a wry shake of his head.

Griffin Parker cut him off. “Is Moira okay?” he demanded.

“She's…” He stopped and then shrugged. “She will be. She's too stubborn not to be.”

Griffin opened his mouth, then stopped. Finally, he said, “Any idea what the perp wanted?” He angled his chin over at Pendleton where he sat with Detective Deatrick Outridge “Pendleton all but glued Deatrick's mouth shut, and Hoyt isn't saying anything, either.”

“There's nothing to say right now.” Gideon cut around the younger cop.

Destination: his office.

Goal: silence.

If he had enough of it, he thought he could maybe string together some sort of cohesive theory on what was going on, why. All of it. It was just a matter of degrees. Everything was connected. He just had to find the connection.

And two fucking dogs.

 

CHAPTER SIX

“You're going to make yourself go blind.”

Maris came up behind him and rested one hand on his shoulder, her chin on the other.

Gideon grunted and didn't look away from the computer. Over the past few years, one of the trusts set up by the McKay Foundation—who else?—had paid for the library to digitize much of their archive, including many historical documents pertaining to their ancestry.

He'd spent every free second of the past eighteen hours going blind looking for solid data on an elusive treasure—or maybe it was illusive. It was hard to get a grip on it … or just it might not exist at all.

No.

There was something there.

He knew it in his gut.

There was something there and he just had to find it.

The phone rang and he snatched it up, stared at the phone number for two seconds before he tossed it down. It wasn't anybody from the department, and it wasn't Zeke. Therefore, he didn't want to waste time making nice.

“You're worked up.” Maris straightened up and rubbed his neck. “What's the deal?”

He opened his mouth, a biting answer lingering there, but he stopped himself before he could let the words fly out. It wasn't her fault that he was in this state.

He couldn't even blame the woman who was tangentially responsible, and he knew it.

As long as he was around Moira …

He closed his eyes as the truth struck him.

He'd idly considered the idea before, but now he realized he needed to do a lot more than
consider
. It wasn't enough that he'd stopped holding out and hoping. Wasn't even enough that he'd tried to date another woman. Slowly, he straightened up, his back screaming from being hunched over the computer for hours on end.

There was a tie that ran between them, him and Moira.

What he needed to do was sever it—get the hell out of her orbit so maybe time could lessen the impact she had on him.

He needed to leave Treasure.

And fuck all that he figured it out now, when she was in danger, when everything was winding up to a fever pitch. A deserted island wasn't in his future, no. But neither was Moira McKay.

“Gideon?”

He reached up and caught Maris' hand, squeezing it gently.