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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?”
