Page 62 of Rescued By the Mountain Man

His thick brows lowered, and his old Tennessee drawl rumbled over me. “Okay, sure. What do you have for me?”

Drawing up a chair, I told him all that’d been uncovered in the last twenty-four hours, and while his eyes widened with increasing unbelief, I laid out the full situation. “I need to know if anyone in this town has any connection with New York or a criminal background.”

He sat back and rubbed his face. “I don’t know about that, Donovan. I know no one is squeaky clean, but I doubt any of our good guys have a connection with criminals or anyone who might have a reason to direct bad people our way.”

Rubbing the back of his neck, Tom said, “It sounds disjointed to me, Warrick. I mean, what are the odds of someone knowing who Miss Harrington is, knowing who her stalker is, and sending that stalker information about her? Isn’t that one in a million? Or trillion?”

He was right—that didn’t make sense. Unless that stalker had eyes in every state, in every city and every town, this wasn’t possible. Even more, only the police in New York knew where she had gone, so either the leak came from them or there was some other variable I wasn’t seeing.

“There must be something,” I told Tom. “Can you look into it for me? Any reason someone might have a reason to stab someone in the back? A huge debt, a drug problem, family ties to criminals, hell, jaywalking. Ask if anyone has seen any strange guys around the place, or if anyone was asking questions they shouldn’t be asking, okay?”

“Sure,” Tom replied.

We shook hands, and I left to go check on Santos—unfortunately, I got there as they had him in the MRI machine, and he was slated to be doing a lot of tests after, so I returned to Silver Ridge and got to Riverbend Café, needing a pick-me-up.

“Donovan.” I looked up to see Carl Benson walking into the shop. “Nice seeing you here.”

Benson was a local businessman and a member of the Town Council. He was about six feet three inches tall and had dark brown hair that curled up at the edge of his collar. He wore a suit, not as expensive as Drayton's, but with some zeros behind it.

“Same to you. Treeve said you were in New Jersey?”

“New York,” he replied. “Got family up there and I was looking into starting a new business with my sister. The man she married is a bum, so I needed to set her up to be self-sufficient.”

New York, huh.

“Oh,” I said as my coffee and sandwich were delivered. “What does your family do?”

“A little bit of this, a little bit of that,” he said, shrugging. “We’re sommeliers, so the business, hopefully, will be wines.”

It felt like a stretch, but anyone and anything with a connection to New York had my back up. “How is the big city?”

“Hectic, as usual.” He shrugged, while my waiter set my coffee and sandwich down. He ordered from the same waiter, then added, “It’s a mess in the city. Last night, some high-profile FBI agent was killed, and no one knows who did it.”

My hands went still. “What?”

“Yeah,” he shrugged. “Some money laundering case or something. I hadn’t really listened closely.”

“Oh,” I nodded. “I heard you voted to give Drayton Jr. his father's spot on the council. Don’t you think someone who lives here and knows the town would be better than some rich prick with no connections here?”

Benson looked mulish. “I can see your point, but the Draytons have connections everywhere, in the States and around the world, Donovan. I was the one who invited them here because I know the connections we can get out of them.”

How far is your nose up their butt?

“I see,” I replied. “You’ve got to tell me what use the Draytons are in this town because I honestly don’t see it.”

Benson took it as an opportunity to go on a spiel about the benefits the Drayton family had done for the town: funding a proper waste disposal system, investing in the Silver Spur, furnishing some fishermen with equipment and boats…

I listened in as he spoke, but something caught my attention, “What? O’Hara’s debt? What debt?”

His brows lowered. “You don’t know? I thought it was common knowledge by this time. A couple of years ago, Jake was in the weeds after a freak storm affected his ranch. Drayton senior loaned him about a million dollars to refurbish his place, and he used it. So yes, he is in Drayton's debt.”

Did that make a difference about…anything?

“Oh, I see,” I replied, dusting my hands off. “Maybe I can give the Draytons the benefit of the doubt.”

Nodding, I left the shop and decided to head back to the ranch. But before I did, I stopped at Hank’s store and got some chocolates for Zoe. It was midday, and by the time I got back to the ranch, all I wanted to do was go and see her—but Marie stopped me.

“Sorry, boss, but Evie is in your office, waiting to talk to you,” Marie said, while wiping her hands. “She didn’t tell me what it was about but she insisted that she had to talk to you.”

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