A Badlands Cops Novel

Still, Jamison sped through the dark, not seeing another soul on the streets. He turned onto 302nd, slowed on the gravel road until he spotted Brady’s cruiser. Jamison pulled to a stop behind him.

Jamison got out and opened the back seat door. Without a word, Brady immediately examined Liza. If he recognized her, which surely he did, he didn’t mention it.

“She didn’t fall or hit her head?”

“Not that I saw.”

Brady nodded toward the driver’s seat. “She could have just passed out from shock. Let’s get her to the ranch. I need more space and more light.”

But they both knew a woman who’d grown up in a biker gang wasn’t exactly gun-shy. She’d seen way worse than this kind of wound.

“You sure you want to take her to Grandma’s? Hospital would be...safer,” Brady said carefully.

Too carefully. As if he thought Jamison was still hung up on a woman he hadn’t seen in fifteen years and had gotten over years ago. Years and years ago. This was about the Sons, and it was about keeping someone safe. He’d dedicated his life to keeping strangers safe. Why wouldn’t he keep Liza safe, too? It was just...his job. “I’ll meet you at the ranch.”

Brady nodded and strode back to his car.

They drove, and occasionally Liza would come to, move around a bit, ask where she was. Jamison tried to keep her talking, but she faded in and out. It worried him, even as the fact she kept waking up eased some of his fears.

Finally, he turned off onto the unmarked gravel road that would twist through the rolling hills of the South Dakota ranch and farmland. Then, behind the hills, home.

There was a light on outside the old farmhouse—there always ways. Pauline Reaves was used to visitors at all times of night. She kept her doors open, her windows homey and a variety of weapons within easy reach should any of the bad element ever show up at her door.

It was home, even if he’d spent most of his adolescence in various Sons of the Badlands camps. This house with its piecemeal layout, thanks to being over a century old and needing all sorts of additions and modern conveniences, was his heart and soul.

By the time he reached the end of the gravel road and pushed the car into Park, Grandma Pauline was at the door. Jamison opened the back door of his cruiser and Liza blinked at him.

“Come on now.”

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath before pushing herself out of the back seat. She was on her feet a second before she swayed, so Jamison scooped her up into his arms and started marching toward the house—Brady closing the door for him and following.

Dev’s two ranch dogs pranced at their feet but had been trained not to bark at a Wyatt or a Knight. They whimpered excitedly instead, obviously hoping to be petted.

Brady obliged since Jamison had his hands full.

“I can walk,” Liza said, attempting outrage, though it was weak at best.

“No, you can’t.”

She was too light by half, and her clothes fairly hung off her—except for that too-thin leather coat he did indeed remember from fifteen plus years ago.

He strode through the front door and Grandma didn’t blink an eye as her eldest grandson carried in a bleeding, unsteady ex-girlfriend, followed by another grandson.

Both in uniform.

Brady closed the door, the dogs knowing better than to enter here, where they’d have to trot through Grandma’s kitchen. Grandma Pauline did not allow such things.

“Kitchen,” she instructed. “Best light.”

As if they didn’t already know. It might not be so commonplace these days, but once upon a time the Wyatt brothers had gotten into their share of scrapes and had been patched up in Grandma’s kitchen.

Dev was already there, with one of Grandma’s “medical” sheets laid out over the kitchen table.

He raised an eyebrow at Liza but otherwise didn’t say anything. Not all that uncommon for Dev. But even though he didn’t speak, his disapproval came off him in waves.

Jamison sat Liza down on the table. “Believe me now?” she asked archly, before wincing as she moved the leg that had been shot.

Jamison chose to follow Dev’s example and kept silent.

“Let’s have a look,” Brady offered, approaching the table. He pulled back the bandage and examined the wound under better light. Grandma set a washcloth and small basin of water next to him—the first aid kit already opened and laid out.

Brady ripped the hole in her jeans so he had a large enough space to work. He cleaned out the wound, Grandma handing Liza an over-the-counter painkiller and a glass of water when she hissed out a breath.

“Have any idea why you might have passed out?” Brady asked, his voice calm and pleasant. “Recent head wound? Any other injuries?”

Liza shook her head.

“Pregnant?”

“No,” she said flatly, and her gaze stayed resolutely on where Brady worked on her thigh.

“When was the last time you ate, girl?” Grandma demanded.

Liza ran a shaky hand through her hair as Brady rebandaged the wound. “I don’t...”

“Girl needs a meal,” Grandma said firmly, already moving for the refrigerator.

“Broth, Grandma,” Brady ordered.

At Grandma’s harrumph, Jamison knew Liza wouldn’t just be getting broth.

The woman in question looked around the kitchen from her seat atop the table and tried to smile, but it frayed. “Didn’t expect half the Wyatt crew at my beck and call.”

“Don’t get shot, then,” Dev replied sharply.

“I’m no doctor,” Brady said, interrupting the back-and-forth, though his comment made both Jamison and Dev shift because Brady certainly would have made a good physician. But an elderly woman raising six boys in the middle of nowhere, South Dakota, didn’t have the kind of resources to make that happen.

So, Brady had become a paramedic and a cop, and he was excellent at both, but the two older brothers often wondered what if...?

“My guess would be the loss of consciousness came from a combination of a lack of food and shock. There aren’t any other symptoms that point to anything more going on. Get enough food in her, keep the bandage clean, she should be fine.”

“She is sitting right here.”

“That she is,” Brady replied with a patient smile. “You’re going to want to take it easy. And you’re going to want to tell us why someone’s shooting at you.”

She leveled Jamison with a haughty look. “I guess your brother can explain it.”

Jamison held her stare. “Liza thinks her father murdered Carlee Bright, and that her half sister, who witnessed it, has been kidnapped and is in mortal danger. Like Liza herself apparently is.”

THE WAY JAMISON so neutrally delivered the details of her situation made her shiver. She instantly had a blanket draped over her shoulders, thanks to Brady.

Silence descended over the kitchen, except for the sounds of Pauline puttering at the stove.

“How do you know Carlee is dead?” Jamison asked.

“Now you’re interested?” she retorted. She felt shaky and off-kilter and her leg throbbed where the bullet had—thank God—just grazed her.

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say interested. Obviously you’re mixed up with something involving the Sons,” he said, gesturing toward her torn jeans and the bandage. “I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if your father killed Carlee. I’m having a harder time imagining he’d harm his own daughter. If only because you’re still alive. He’s had ample time and reason to kill you.”

She glanced at the three Wyatt brothers standing next to each other. Each with arms crossed over broad chests. They had the physical look of their father—big men, hard men. Dark hair and eyes that ranged from brown to green. Their jaws were chiseled, their mouths all in firm disapproval.

All had aged, Dev most especially. He didn’t just look weathered, he looked...beaten. She knew any questions about his limp would be met with stony silence.

Just like she knew the Wyatt boys had souls, thanks to the woman bustling around her now. Ace had no soul, Liza knew. His sons had been born or become good men in spite of it.

“Gigi is four years old,” Liza said, trying very hard to find the balance between overwrought and detached. If she was too emotional, they would dismiss her. If she wasn’t emotional enough, they’d think she was some kind of plant sent by Ace. “She saw my father kill Carlee.”

“Why would the Sons of the Badlands be scared about what a four-year-old girl says?” Jamison returned. “Surely there are enough kids running around those camps who’ve seen as much. And they have no recourse. There’s no one to tell who would do anything about it.”

“She told me, Jamison,” Liza said, trying to eradicate the lump in her throat. “She told me. The next day she was gone. I... Someone’s been following me ever since. They know I know and now someone’s shot me. After I approached you.”

“Aren’t you one of them?” Dev returned, as hard if not harder than Jamison.

One of them. Years ago Pauline would have demanded an apology out of Dev, defended Liza to anyone that her ties to the Sons of the Badlands were severed.

But that was just another thing she’d lost when she’d gone back to them—Pauline’s trust. There was no point being sad about it. She was here for Gigi, not herself.

“Regardless, if they really thought you knew something you’d already be dead,” Jamison said, his voice flat and his eyes hard.

He was right, which scared her more than anything, but it also crystallized something about Jamison for her. If he didn’t want to help her, she wouldn’t be here. He would have taken her to the hospital. Not home.

He might put on the gruff, aloof cop act, but he’d brought her home. To his grandma’s. Because even if she’d only had four years over at the Knights’ ranch, Grandma Pauline had been hers, just like Duke and Eva Knight had been something like parents.

But she hadn’t been able to stay with them. When Jamison had convinced her to escape the Sons with him, when he’d given her this home and family, she’d thought she could do it. She’d been sure she could accept her sister was a lost cause.

The more she’d been given at the Knights’, the guiltier she’d felt that her sister was still in that awful place. The more she’d seen Jamison’s brothers thrive—because he’d saved them before he’d saved himself—the harder it had been to live with herself.

She’d had to leave the Knights and go back to the Sons, to try to save Marci. In the end, it had been a lost cause. Marci didn’t want to leave, didn’t want to see the good in the world.

But Gigi was only four. She had a chance at a real life. A safe, good life. So, Liza had given up on one sister and focused on another.

Now she had no one and nothing—here, where she’d once been loved. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t use what she knew to get Jamison’s help.

“I just need to find Gigi, and I can’t do it on my own. You know I can’t ask for help in that place.”

“And you know I can’t help you in that place.”

She closed her eyes against that simple truth. She just kept hoping... No. She didn’t have time to hope. Gigi’s life was at stake.

“One of you will help me,” she said. “You know too much what it’s like to be a kid in that place. You know what it’s like to watch horrors, to lose your mother and only have an awful, scary father left. One of you has to help me. You know it.”

No one said anything for the longest time. Pauline handed her a warm mug of broth and a plate with a sandwich on it.

Liza looked at the elderly woman handing her food and wanted to break down and cry, offer apologies and beg for forgiveness.

But fifteen years was too long, and she had bigger issues at hand.

Eventually Brady turned to face Jamison.

“You’re still on duty,” he said, keeping his voice low as if she wouldn’t be able to hear it.

Jamison’s jaw tensed.

“I’ll take your car back. Take your place till shift change. If something goes down, it’ll be both our butts in a sling, but I’ll do it.”

Jamison only nodded. Brady gave her one last enigmatic look, kissed his grandmother on the cheek, then left the kitchen.

Still, Jamison didn’t say anything. No one offered to help. They maintained their silence and Liza tried to ignore panic. She had to eat, that much was for sure. Too many days trying to keep out of reach of the Sons, while also trying to find Gigi, had left her with almost no supplies and far, far too long between meals.

But it was hard to eat when your stomach was twisted in awful knots. When every move felt like one that might end Gigi’s life, or her own.

She swallowed some broth, doing everything she could not to cry.

“You boys go make up two rooms,” Pauline ordered.

Dev and Jamison looked like they wanted to argue, but Liza knew they wouldn’t. Not with Grandma Pauline.

They turned and left the kitchen, leaving Liza alone with her food and the woman she’d looked up to as a teenager.

“You eat that all up before I let you out of my sight, you hear?”

Liza nodded, her vision wavering. This time not from exhaustion or losing consciousness, she didn’t think, but because her eyes were full of tears.

“None of that now, girl. You’ve got a life to save. How are you going to do it?”

“I don’t know,” Liza whispered. “If Jamison won’t help me, I don’t know what I’ll do.” She wouldn’t have said that aloud to anyone else, but she knew Pauline would keep her shameful weakness a secret.

In her no-fuss way Pauline used a dish towel to wipe the tears off Liza’s cheeks. She picked up the sandwich herself and held it out to Liza until she accepted it and took a bite.

“Jamison will help you. Stomp around a bit and put on the manly act, but he’ll help. Won’t be able to stop himself.” Pauline studied her. “But you can’t let that stubborn pride of yours get in the way, girl. And he can’t let his.”

All Liza could think was: good luck with that.

Chapter Three

“I don’t like it.” Dev leaned more to the right than the left, because his left leg was bad. A gift from Ace when Dev had been a young cop determined to take their father down.

Each of the Wyatt boys had learned, in their own way, that you didn’t take the Sons down without getting hurt.

None of them had let their past experiences sway them completely, but each of their obsessions had been stilted by Dev’s near-death encounter ten years ago. Jamison had found it necessary to give up on revenge in the face of his brother almost dying.

Jamison sighed. “What do you like, Dev?”

He didn’t answer that question. “She can’t be here.”

“And yet, here she is.” Jamison hadn’t thought it through, bringing her here, but there was no other option. He knew what it meant for himself, for his brothers. It was getting pulled back in when they’d all silently agreed to stay out.

No matter all those old feelings and promises, this felt something like inevitable.

They’d escaped the Sons of the Badlands, but their father still existed, still ran a group full of criminals, no matter how many of his biological sons had gone into law enforcement.

“You’re not just bringing trouble home, you’re bringing it to the Knights’ doorstep, as well.”

That poked at Jamison, but he had to believe he could handle it. “She seems fine. We’ll get out of here in the morning.”

“We?”

Jamison stood from where he’d made up the bed for Liza—perfectly because he knew Grandma would still box his ears if he didn’t do the chore correctly.

“Do you remember what it was like to be four years old in that place?”

Dev was quiet for a moment, then shrugged and didn’t meet Jamison’s gaze. “I didn’t know any better.”

“You know you did. And if that little girl saw something—”

“And if that not-so-little girl is BS-ing you, then what? You wind up dead?”

“I can see through Liza’s BS.” God, he hoped he was older and wiser than he’d been at twenty-two.

Dev laughed coldly. “Since when? You thought you two were going to get married and be the example for any kid stuck in that hellhole. A fairy tale told to dirty faces so they could believe they’d escape someday. Then she ditched you. For them.”

It stung, because the truth could, but Jamison was too old to get riled up about his brother’s barbs.

“I’ve got too many what-ifs, brother. I can’t take on another. I’ll be careful, but I’ve got to help her find this little girl.”

Which was enough of an emotional truth for Dev not to say another word. They moved to the room across the hall, which had been the room Jamison and Dev had shared years and years ago. Now, Dev slept downstairs in the mudroom converted to bedroom.

Taking the stairs every day was too hard on his leg. Especially in the morning, when it was stiff from sleep.

“You’ll have to be careful. You can’t trust her. No matter what memories she stirs up.”

“I don’t trust her,” Jamison said, maybe a pinch too loudly. Because his instincts when it came to Liza were a mess, that was for sure. But he knew it. If you could identify a problem, you could address it. So, there’d be no trust. He’d follow his own instincts and beliefs and—

“Good to know.”

They both looked up to find Liza in the doorway. Jamison didn’t feel particularly guilty—it was something he would have said to her face. But something about how pale she was and the sleeve of saltines in her hand poked at him.

He stood stiffly. “Your room is across the hall.”

She glanced behind her, then smirked. “Lucky me.”

She walked over to her room, favoring the leg that hadn’t been shot.

“Watch yourself, J. She is nothing but trouble. I can guarantee it.” Then Dev did his own limping out of the room.

Jamison let himself breathe in and then out a few calming times. Liza was no doubt trouble, always had been, but that didn’t mean he could ignore a four-year-old stuck in a bad situation.

She was hardly the only little girl in a bad situation associated with the Sons, or the world at large, for that matter. As a cop Jamison had come to accept that he couldn’t help everyone, but that he should certainly try to help whoever he could.

He opened the dresser drawers in his old room until he found what he wanted. He walked across the hall, knocked perfunctorily before opening the door.

She swore at him, then stood there glaring.

She’d taken off the ripped jeans, which had messed with the bandage. Now she stood only in a long-sleeved T-shirt and her underwear. Her legs were as long and mesmerizing as he remembered, and he stared a beat too long.

But that didn’t mean he didn’t know how to recover. He gestured at the bandage. “Need help?”

“Yeah. Why don’t you put your hands on me while I’m half-naked?”

He raised his gaze to meet hers. “Worried you can’t control yourself around me, darling?”

She scoffed, but the corner of her mouth kicked up with some humor. “Fine. Help.”

He placed the map on the bed and then crouched down by her leg, refitting the bandage and smoothing the tape over. It required touching warm skin and a copious amount of control not to remember all the times he’d touched her for completely romantic reasons.

They’d been different people way back then—smooth skin or not.

He stood and didn’t dare look at her face. “Let’s talk logistics.”

“God, that’s so hot,” she said dryly.

He sent her a look, saw her pulling her jeans back on and shook his head. “Wait.”

She frowned, good leg in one leg of the jeans. “Huh?”

He strode out of the room again, went rummaging through his old drawers, found an old pair of gym shorts and returned to her room. “Here.” He tossed them at her.

She caught them and studied them, then shrugged and dropped the jeans. She slipped the shorts on, tying the drawstring tight. They landed below her knees, although she was a tall woman herself. But it was hardly a good idea to be wearing shorts on a cold early-spring night in a rickety old farmhouse.

“Now, it’s not near warm enough up here for that, so why don’t you crawl under the covers?”

“You’re really going to have to stop coming on to me, Jamison.”

“Ha ha. Get in bed.”

She fluttered her eyelashes at him as she slid under the covers, trying—and failing—to cover up the wince of pain as she presumably laid her weight a little too hard on her wound.

He picked up the map he’d brought in and smoothed it out over her lap. “Where?”

Her hesitation spoke volumes and reminded him of all the ways she’d once fooled him.

And never would again.

“You and your cop buddies can’t go in there guns blazing. Gigi won’t be the only one hurt.”

“Do you see a slew of my ‘cop buddies’ crowding in here, Liza? Or is it just you and me?”

“It’s complicated. Surely you understand that.”

“Either you can tell me where the main camp is and I see what I can do to help Gigi, or you sleep off your gunshot wound and fend for yourself tomorrow in the morning.”

She looked up at him, her dark eyes too direct and assessing. As if she still knew him, understood him. “You’d love to believe you’re that tough, wouldn’t you?”

“Try me.”

LIZA LOOKED AT the paper map—of all things—of South Dakota spread out on her lap. She knew exactly what he wanted to know, and that she had all the information he desired. Except she didn’t hesitate for the reasons he thought.

Jamison saw dealings with the Sons as black-and-white. He believed you were with them or against them—he’d had too many years winning against them as an officer of the law. He was a man after all, and it was so easy to see the world as with you or against you when you held the power.

But Liza had lost in that world, and losers had a much more complicated view of things.

She was worried about Gigi, about how to get to her. She was worried about anyone who risked their life to help her—because lives were on the line.

But specifically she worried about involving Jamison.

She knew Ace Wyatt would someday decide to exact revenge against his sons. He had plans, but he was a patient man. He’d go after them when they least expected it, when Ace most needed it. She knew Ace was always looking for that perfect moment to make it poetic justice or divine revenge or whatever went on in his head.

She didn’t want to send Jamison riding into Sons territory knowing it could be the shot that started a war.

You know he’s your only chance or you wouldn’t have come here. Besides, you think Ace Wyatt doesn’t know exactly where you are?

She looked up at Jamison—now in immediate danger because of her. She’d been shot. Of course Ace, or even her own father, had sent someone to do that. If either had pulled the trigger, she knew damn well she’d be dead.

The shot was meant to be a warning. Furthermore, whoever had shot her would have followed her. Jamison was involved now, whether he chose to be or not.

Guilt swamped her. She looked down at the map, surprised to find tears clouding her vision. She didn’t think she had tears left anymore. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“There are a lot of things you could be sorry for, Liza. I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific.”

She would never be sorry for leaving the Knights to go back to the Sons all those years ago, but she didn’t think telling him that in the moment would do any good for either of them. “I’m sorry for this, because they’ll know you’re involved, even if you decide not to be. Whatever happens, this will be the start of something. I didn’t think that through.”