Page 63 of Westin

Clint stepped forward, and Mollohan gave in, brushing past him on his way to the door. When they were gone, Miss Dulcie turned to Westin and gripped his forearms, staring hard into his face.

“You okay, boy?”

He nodded. “I’m fine. I’m sorry he dragged you into that.”

She brushed that away with a little sound and a wave of her hand. “Don’t worry about me. I’ve heard worse, believe you me!”

“Still, it was uncalled for.”

She reached up and touched his face. “You know that my boy died years ago. Killed here on this ranch, right?”

“I know, Miss Dulcie.”

“He was my only child, my only life. I was broken by his death. And then, not long after he died, Asa forced me onto a horse, took me out to watch the ranch hands move the cattle from the lower pasture to the winter pasture. When I complained and asked him why he was being so cruel to me, forcing me out of my safe bed, away from my private grief, he pointed to the boys on horseback and on those noisy ATVs, and he said, ‘This is your family now, Dulcie. These are your boys. As long as you have this ranch, and those boys, you will have a family.’ I took those words to heart, Westin.” She patted his face gently. “You are my boy. And I won’t let anyone, not even that pompous ass, do anything to hurt you.”

Westin nodded, a frog leaping to his throat. Miss Dulcie smiled, patting his cheek again. “Don’t let him get to you. He’s all bark and no bite.”

Westin kissed her forehead lightly. “Thank you, Miss Dulcie.”

Clint cleared his throat, letting them know he’d returned to the room. Westin turned, snatching up his hat from where he’d set it on the low table behind the couch. “We should get back to work,” he said, shooting a questioning look at Clint, his thoughts on Lee.

Miss Dulcie made a gesture with her hand, shooing them out of the room. “I have work to do, anyway.”

Clint was already halfway up the stairs when Westin caught up to him. “She find anything on that memory card?”

Clint shrugged. “I don’t know. I left before she started.”

“She’s alone?”

“She’s in a house full of people. She’s fine.”

But Westin had an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach that made him rush up the stairs, taking the steps two at a time. When he burst through the library doors, he half-expected Lee to be gone, but she was there, typing furiously on the keyboard of a slim laptop. She had earbuds in her ears, so she didn’t immediately realize they’d entered the room. For a split second, he was able to study her without her knowing it. Damn¸ she was beautiful!

“Hey,” Westin said, rapping his knuckles on the table near her as he dropped into a chair beside her. She looked up, her eyes wide, a touch of fear registering in their amber depths. She bit her bottom lip as she studied him, a cloud of emotions rushing over her.

“I’ve got to go,” she said in a flurry of words. “You were right. I never should have come here!”

“Whoa!” Westin took her hand, but she pulled away, sitting back and tugging the earbuds out of her ears. “What’s going on?”

“It’s worse than I thought.” She closed the top of the computer and sat back, running her hands over her face. “I thought it was just about Fang and his little group of drug dealers, but I was wrong. This goes back so much further! And there are so many people involved…”

“Slow down,” Clint said as he also took a seat across from her. “Start at the beginning.”

Lee looked from Westin to Clint and back again, taking a couple of deep breaths. “It’s the box. I should have known the moment I saw it that I was screwed, but I just…” She stopped, choking on her own words. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, her eyes skating over Westin.

“Hey…” He took her face in his hands and caressed her jaw with his thumbs. “You need to take a deep breath. You are safe here, okay?”

She shook her head even with him holding her face. “No, I’m not. They know where I am and they’re coming for me.”

“Who?” Clint demanded.

She leaned forward and kissed Westin softly, then pulled away, standing to pace for a second behind the table before she finally turned, hands on hips, and began talking… “Two years ago, Will and I worked a case in Utah. We’d gotten reports of an increase in fentanyl overdoses in rural areas of the state, so we went out there to check it out. We went undercover as a couple of teachers at a small-town high school where half a dozen kids had overdosed, hoping to find the source of the drug.”

She ran her hand over the top of her head, remembering details far clearer than she wanted to, right down to the smell of the classroom where she’d stumbled through lessons on the Iliad. “After a couple of weeks, we built a relationship with this girl who finally told us where she got the drugs—some farm on the outskirts of town. That’s when we stumbled on the boxes buried in the ground.”

She stopped, her head spinning a little as she tried to recall all the information she’d just discovered from her less-than-skillful computer hacks. “We thought we had a small operation, a couple of locals stealing the fentanyl from a local hospital and selling it to kids who had no idea what they were doing. But it turned out to be just a small piece of a much larger operation. This cartel out of California—”

“There’s cartels in California?” Westin asked.

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