Mr Serious

Stepping behind Winnie so she couldn’t see, he flipped his brother the bird. “It’s still better than a solid diet of doughnuts, Deputy.” He rubbed his stomach. “In fact, I think you’re growing a bit around the middle.”

Wyatt laughed. “You need to move back to the ranch.”

“You looking for someone to help you with your Dumb and Dumber act?” Waylon teased.

The girl wiggled in her chair. “Yeah, Way-lawn.” She said his name like she had to think about each syllable on its own, and it made it sound like a children’s rhyme. “You come back. And you know what? We have party.”

Waylon chuckled. “Is that right?”

“Uh-huh,” she said with an overly exaggerated nod. “Way-lawn, you and me, we dress up. You help me?”

He’d had bullets whiz by his head in active combat zones, and he’d stepped in front of high-value dignitaries, ready to give his life for the greater good, yet, as Winnie looked up at him, he couldn’t help the fear that rose within him. He had no idea what to do with a kid—especially a kid who wanted to do a craft project. Maybe he’d have more of a clue if she wanted to strip down an assault rifle, but costumes—he was totally out of his league.

Christina gave a wry laugh from behind him. “Waylon doesn’t do that kind of thing, sweetheart. If you want, though, I can help you later.”

He noted the jab she was taking at him, and he couldn’t help rising to the fight. “Nah, Ms. Winnie. Don’t you worry, I got you. You want a costume? I’m your man.” His stomach clenched as he thought about how ill equipped he was for the promise he’d just made.

“Don’t you have a job to do? You know, trying to find my missing, fugitive sister? Or are you going to just let her get away with murdering the vet and William Poe’s wife?” Christina rebuked.

She stared at him, and some of the anger that had filled her features seemed to melt away, replaced by shame. “Look, I’m sorry,” she said, not waiting for him to talk. “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m just...just...”

“Hurting,” he said, finishing her thought.

She sighed, not admitting he was right, but he could see from the way her posture softened that he’d hit the truth. Of course she would be hurting and scared, and probably overwhelmed. Her sister was her only family, since their mother had passed away a few years back.

“I want to find her. Alli needs to come home,” she said, her gaze moving to Winnie and the bandage on her arm.

What was he missing? There was something happening that they weren’t telling him—he could feel it in the air.

“What’s going on?” he asked, tired of skirting the issue.

“Huh?” Christina looked up at him, a look of shock flashing over her features. “What do you mean?”

“You guys are hiding something.” He turned to Wyatt, who all of a sudden seemed wholly consumed by the process of making another sandwich. “What is it that you don’t want me to know?”

His mother walked into the kitchen, almost as if the question had beckoned her to the room. She glanced around at Christina and Wyatt, as if giving them some signal. “Everything’s fine, kiddo. We’re all just worried about Alli.”

“Did she do something you aren’t telling me? I mean, besides murdering Bianca and that other woman and then going on the run?”

His mother smiled. “It’s not what she did but what she didn’t do that is the problem.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

His mother touched his shoulder. “Just work on finding Alli. Then we can deal with everything else.”

Some of the fondness he was feeling toward being home drifted away. He’d forgotten how the family always turned inward first—and because of his time away, he now stood outside the circle.

“Look, why don’t we run over to the impound lot?” Wyatt said, waving the peanut butter–laden knife around in the air.

“You’re not leaving me here alone to wonder what’s going on,” Christina pressed, but she glanced over at his mother with a question in her eyes.

“Don’t worry, I’ll watch Winnie,” Eloise offered.

Whatever was going on revolved around that little girl. Waylon glanced at Winnie. How was she involved with all of this? Was it possible she was Alli’s daughter? Was that why there was such a rush to find the woman—and why they had been adamant that he come home to help them in the search? He pushed the thoughts from his mind. Alli had always told him she was unable to get pregnant. The child couldn’t be hers.

* * *

THE IMPOUND LOT was attached to the prerelease center on the outskirts of town. It wasn’t much of a place. Wyatt punched in his key code, and the gate of the chain link–enclosed lot opened with a grinding sound. There was a collection of beat-up old cars and one late-model Mustang. Most of the jalopies had flat tires or shattered windshields, and more than a few had both. The lot even had a few campers that looked like they’d escaped the show Breaking Bad, complete with what Waylon was sure were meth labs inside.

He chuckled, but his humor was short-lived as they drove around the corner and came into view of the convicts’ exercise yard. One of the prisoners looked over, and as he caught sight of Wyatt’s patrol unit, he spat on the ground and flipped them the bird. As the other prisoners noticed, the middle finger came in almost a concert-style wave, rippling through the yard.

“Nothing quite like the royal welcome, right?” Wyatt said, ignoring his fan club.

“I’m acquainted with the lifestyle,” Waylon said with a cynical laugh.

Christina tapped her fingers on the car door. “That’s what you guys get all the time? No wonder you both have chips on your shoulders.”

He and his brother looked at each other and shared a smug grin. A few middle fingers were nothing compared to facing down a drunk man with a gun who wanted to kill him for some past injustice he felt he had suffered at the hands of the police. It was a strange feeling to know that most of the time, wherever he went, people despised him.

Sure, it was true most of the population weren’t criminals, but the people they worked with every day weren’t the general public—in his case, the criminals he worked with were even worse than Wyatt’s. For Waylon, when he was working on a base between deployments to war zones, the people he arrested were well trained in weapons and self-defense—his job was to handle trained killers. Wyatt just had to handle drunken idiots.

Wyatt parked his car next to a black Hyundai Genesis. “It was pretty beat-up by the time we got the report that it had been abandoned. You know how that goes,” his brother said, motioning toward the wreckage.

The car had a flat tire on the passenger’s side, and its windshield was shattered. For a moment, Waylon imagined Alli’s car on the side of the road, people smashing it just because they could. People had a strange, innate need to destroy things that stood alone or abandoned. It was almost as though anonymity was enough justification for them to give license to their destructive nature.

“I went over this car with Lyle, top to bottom,” Wyatt said, getting out and walking toward Alli’s car.

“What all did you find?”

Wyatt shrugged. “We ran fingerprints, but nothing came of them. And all we found inside was the normal crap—wadded straw wrappers and a few fries under the seats.”

“But nothing that you think would help us figure out where she could have gone?” Christina asked.

Wyatt looked over at her. “You and I both know she’s in Canada somewhere. She’s probably watching a hockey game, drinking Molson and laughing at how stupid she thinks we are.”

“She’s not like that. She knows you aren’t stupid. She just got herself into a bad spot, and it escalated. I don’t condone what she did, but there has to be more to it than we know. She had her problems, but I never thought she was capable of...you know,” Christina said. She looked down at the ground with what Waylon assumed was shame.

He wanted to tell her he was just as confused and upset a woman he had once loved had made such a stupid series of decisions, but there was no making any of what Alli did better. There was only bringing her back so she could pay for her crimes—and so he could ask her all the questions he was dying to ask. He just couldn’t understand how she had fallen into such a pit of self-destruction. Sure, she had never been exactly healthy, but he’d never thought she was capable of taking a life.

Then again, if he’d learned anything on the battlefield and as an MP, it was that all people were capable of pulling a trigger if the conditions were right.

“I’m sure when we find her we can get to the bottom of this,” Waylon said in his best attempt to make Christina feel better. From the tired look on her face, he had failed.

“So,” Wyatt said, opening the car’s door, “we did find a receipt on the floor on the passenger’s side. We tracked it down—it was to a gas station just outside Mystery. Alli filled up with gas, but beyond that there wasn’t anything usable.”

Waylon stepped beside his brother and leaned over the passenger’s seat. The car was filled with the dirty, stale scent of the long neglected. He pulled the odor deep into his lungs. Over the years he had been around more than his fair share of abandoned vehicles that had been left behind by people on the run. The one scent the car didn’t carry was the putrid odor of death. Its absence was really the only thing they had going for them—at least, for now.

He opened up the glove box. It was empty.

“We took all her documents out. They are in evidence, but there really wasn’t anything unusual, just her insurance card and registration.”

He closed it. “Huh.” He stared at the headliner for a second.

Almost as if it were a sign, a wayward fly crawled out from behind the black felt. He reached up and ran his fingers along the edge of the liner. It gaped where the bug had exited. His fingers brushed against something rough—paper.

He pulled the paper out and held it in his hands as he stared at the thing in disbelief. “You went through the whole car, huh?” He lifted the paper high for his brother to see.

“What’s that?” Wyatt asked, his mouth open slightly with shock. “I swear, we went over this thing from top to bottom.”

It was total dumb luck Waylon had found the paper. It was almost like the proverbial needle in the haystack, but he wouldn’t admit that to his big brother. “Hold up your hand,” Waylon said with a mischievous grin.

Wyatt frowned, but he played along, lifting his hand and extending his fingers.

“Oh, yep,” Waylon said. “It’s those stubby fingers that are the problem. You just couldn’t reach it.”

Wyatt balled his fingers into a tight fist, but he laughed. “Real funny, jackass. You just got lucky and you know it. In fact, it probably got loosened up when they towed the car.”

“Wait,” Christina said, “if you guys are done picking at each other, what is on it? Is it from Alli?”

Waylon opened the folded page. Inside was a note in Alli’s jagged, hurried scrawl. All it said was “I’m sorry. But, William, I don’t understand. Why?”

It was almost as if while she had been writing the note, she had been interrupted and she had stuffed it half written in the headliner. What in the hell was it supposed to mean? And why would she leave such an obscure note behind? Had she meant for them to find it, or was it meant for someone else?

He thought he didn’t hate Alli, but in this moment, the feeling threatened to overwhelm him.

Christina glanced over her shoulder and he could hear her breath catch.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Christina said, mimicking his thoughts. “What did she mean by ‘I don’t understand’? She’s the one who started all of this mess. She set the rules to this game.”

He handed the note over to Wyatt. His brother shook his head and slipped it into his pocket. “I’ll get this into evidence, but I have a feeling it’s going to be just about as helpful as the straw wrappers. Do you remember William Poe?”

Waylon had met the county tax appraiser a time or two in passing, but aside from Poe’s relationship with Alli and a brief mention of him in the newspapers thanks to the murder of his wife, Monica, Waylon didn’t know much about the man.

Waylon shook his head.

“Poe is like a greased pig,” Wyatt said. “Just when I think I can pin him down for something, he slips out of my grasp. I thought for sure he was involved with Bianca’s and Monica’s murders, but the guy always has an alibi. Always.”

“And from what I hear, it usually involves politics or a woman’s thighs,” Christina added.

Wyatt laughed. “And sometimes a combination of the two.”

“Did you check his alibi?” Waylon asked.

Wyatt looked at him with a raise of the brow. “Really? Dude, I’m not completely incompetent at my job.”

He instantly regretted asking his brother such a stupid question. Of course Wyatt knew what he was doing—Waylon hadn’t meant to step on his toes, but he was just so used to working alone, or rather, being in command, that coming here and being second in line in the investigation was out of his comfort zone.

“Boys, boys, you are both good at your jobs. Wyatt, I don’t think that’s what your brother meant,” Christina said, trying to smooth the ground between them. “Right, Waylon?” She put her hand on his shoulder and gave it a light squeeze.

“Of course. Sorry, man.”

Waylon stood up, and Christina’s fingers slipped from him. He looked back at her, and he couldn’t help but notice the way the midday sun made her normally icy blue eyes sparkle with warmth.

He forced himself to look away and walked toward the back of the car, stopping by the rear tire on the passenger’s side. As he looked down, something odd caught his eye. “Wyatt,” he said, squatting down and pressing his finger against a deformation in the rim’s surface, “look at this.”

Wyatt came over. “It’s just a rock chip.” But he knelt down beside him.

“No.” Waylon pressed. “Look closer. That, Wyatt...is a bullet hole.”

Chapter Four

Wyatt dropped them off at the ranch so Christina could get her truck and they could set to work. She sent a quick glance over at Waylon. His copper-toned skin glistened in the midday sun, and she couldn’t help the little wiggle of attraction that rose up from her core.

Seeing him in his element, working over the car and finding what the rest had missed, had made some of the anger she had been carrying for the man fall to the wayside. He was good at his job, and he looked even better doing it.

This would have been so much easier if she could just stay firmly planted in her dislike. It made it easier to compartmentalize and keep him as an enemy. Yet every time he joked around, she was tempted to think of him almost as a friend.

He turned to her as Wyatt drove off. “You sure you don’t mind driving me around? I could just borrow one of the ranch’s trucks. You don’t have to keep me company.”

She appreciated the out, but her whole body pushed her to stay with him. “I’m doing this for Alli. I can’t stop looking just because you’re here.”

“Have you been looking for her nonstop since she went missing last week?” he asked. A frown crossed over his face, like he was surprised she had not given up.

“Of course. She’s my sister. I don’t have to agree with what she does, or the choices she makes, but I love her and I want to make sure that she’s safe.”

“If she called or you found her, do you think you’d be able to turn her in to the authorities—or Wyatt?”

She chewed on her lip. She’d already thought about that question, but she had pushed it to the back of her mind. “I need to know she’s safe first, then I’ll make that choice.”

“Does that mean you would let her stay on the run?”

Alli deserved to pay for her crimes. She had murdered, but Christina had to think about Winnie, too. The girl was already bearing the weight of her mother’s choices. If Alli went to prison, Winnie would have to visit that terrible place, but if Alli stayed on the run, things could be kept from Winnie until she was old enough to understand a bit better.

“Like I said, I’ll make that choice when I’m faced with it,” she said. “All I want now is to know that she’s alive and well.”

Waylon glanced down at his hands. “You know what? I get it,” he said, looking at his tanned and calloused fingers. “Your sister has a good heart. I don’t know why she acted like she did, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care about her and what happens to her. I want her to be safe—just like you do.”

The way he spoke about Alli was endearing and completely unexpected. Alli had never spoken of him with anything close to the same warmth. In fact, if Christina had to guess, regardless of what Alli had told her, it was not a breakup he had instigated. If anything, it seemed like he might still have had feelings for her sister when they had split and maybe even now.

Which made the feelings Christina was starting to have for him all that much more wrong. How could she possibly be attracted to her sister’s ex-husband? There was something so daytime gossip show about the whole thing.

She chuckled at the thought.

“What’s so funny?” Waylon asked.

“I wasn’t laughing at you,” she said, trying to backpedal from her bad timing. “It’s just that...” She couldn’t tell him she was laughing about the way she was starting to feel about him.

“What?” he asked, spurring her on.

“It’s just that I think we’re one step away from being asked to be on the Maury show.” She covered her mouth as she laughed and, as she did, the look of pain on Waylon’s face disappeared and he smiled. It was filled with a jovial warmth, and there was even a look of something else in his eyes...something that resembled attraction.

Nope. She had to have it all wrong. There was no way he could be attracted to her.

“I...er...” she said. There was a faint warmth in her cheeks, and she tried to keep it in check. She walked toward her truck with him at her side. “I don’t mean your family. Your mom and dad are great. It’s just with the murders and everything...you know.”

He motioned that it was okay for her to stop her rambling. “It’s okay. I get it. And though my parents’ lives are in order, you and I both know the same can’t be said for the rest of us. That’s without even mentioning this thing with Alli.” He paused. “I can’t even begin to imagine what she told you about me over the years.” He glanced over at her, as if trying to gauge her reaction.

She bit the inside of her cheek. Alli had made a personal habit of ripping her ex-husband to shreds. Alli hadn’t done it in front of Winnie as she had wanted to keep Winnie’s father’s identity a secret from her, but that didn’t change the fact that over the years, some of the things she had told Christina had begun to wear her down and made her dislike him on principle.

“Yeah, I thought so,” he said, as though he could read her mind. “Listen, Alli and I had a tough relationship.” He said the word like it tasted of spoiled shellfish. “We never should have gotten married. I just thought that what we had was what love was supposed to be. I supported her—emotionally, mentally, even physically sometimes. It only made sense that we took the leap and made things official. But as soon as we got married, it was like a switch flipped. She went from bad to worse.”

Christina should have been offended that he was saying her sister was bad, but she really didn’t have a platform to argue anything different. Alli made poor choices on a regular basis.

“I thought I could handle her mood swings, but in the end—when she started sleeping with other men—I just couldn’t have her in my life anymore. We weren’t good together. We never were. It was just time that I left. She’s the reason I went back to active duty. And you know what? I’m glad that I left. It was far better than letting your sister rip my soul apart.”

His candor came as a surprise, so much so that Christina didn’t quite know how to react. She should have stood up for her sister, yet at the same time, she could feel for Waylon. Her sister had a way of tearing down the people she loved. It was just a part of her personality, as if by pushing away the people she loved the most, she could protect herself from being vulnerable or at the mercy of others’ feelings. It was almost as though she wanted to hurt them before they had the chance to hurt her.

It undoubtedly came from their childhood. Their parents had been emotional train wrecks—a world of constant cheating and berating. It was the reason Christina had sworn off men for the last few years. She had come too close to following in her parents’ footsteps. Not loving was just so much easier than living a life like that of her childhood.

“Alli had her fair share of problems, and maybe a few extra, too,” she said, giving him a knowing smile.

“I have mine, too,” he said, making the desire she was feeling for him even more intense.

Waylon wasn’t a perfect man, but Alli had been wrong when she’d told her that he didn’t have a heart. Even now, when he had the chance to make Alli the fall guy, he took his lumps.

She threw him her truck keys. “Remember how to get around?”

His face pinched. “This old town ain’t that big. I think I can remember where the Poe place is.” He got into the driver’s seat and revved the old truck to life.

Christina laughed as she slid onto the truck’s bench seat—far too close to the man who was starting to make her heart do strange things. “You got that right.” Sometimes, just like this truck, the town was entirely too small for comfort.

“Why did you come here?” he asked as he steered the truck onto the road. “I mean, no offense or anything, but there’s so many amazing places in the world—places where anything you want is at your fingertips. Why would you, a woman in her late-twenties who could have anything—and anyone she wanted—come to a place like this and stay?”

Did he really think she could have anyone she wanted? She almost laughed at the thought.

The only men who had ever seemed to be attracted to her were emotional nitwits. They were just too much like her father—wanting her when it was convenient for them, and then forgetting about her when it wasn’t.

She refused to chase another man. She wasn’t the kind of woman who pursued men and made things fit when they truly didn’t. She wanted the elusive unicorn—the kind of guy who actually made the effort, the kind who wanted her for her and not what she had between her legs, and the kind who fit into her life naturally instead of feeling like a fish out of water.

She glanced over at Waylon as he drove. He would fit right in. It was his family’s ranch. He knew everyone. It was neutral ground and a commonality that she would have with only a few, but his passions didn’t seem to lie within the boundary lines of the guest ranch. Rather, they seemed to be following his heart all around the world—living for adventure. He seemed like the kind of guy who was far more at home jumping out of an airplane than sweeping a floor.

He lived for his dreams.

She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the window. If only she had the same freedoms.

There had been a brief period of time, right after she had moved out of her mother’s house after her parents’ divorce, when she could have escaped. She could have gone anywhere in the world. At the time, she’d barely had two dimes to her name, but if she had truly wanted to get out, she could have. There was nothing holding her back—except her own fears and feelings of inadequacy. She hadn’t wanted to travel the world alone. Adventures alone were nothing compared to adventures with someone you loved—and that feeling had led her straight to her sister, and the gates of Dunrovin.

Until now, she hadn’t looked back. Yet, sitting next to Waylon—a man who was living his dreams—Christina couldn’t help but feel like she had missed a chance of a lifetime. Now she couldn’t go—she had to think of Winnie. She had to think of her life at the ranch. Family, and the ability to support them, came first.