Page 38 of The Moments You Were Mine
“They can’t find Celia,” I said.
Even though she’d come at me hard while Ace was awaiting trial, showing up on campus, at my apartment, and even the stables where I’d boarded Daisy during competition season, I still had no desire to see her seriously harmed. After Ace had been sentenced, she’d disappeared and hadn’t returned once he’d been released. I hoped it meant she’d come to her senses and left the bastard and not that something worse had happened to her.
Dad tugged my braid again. “You’re not responsible for what happened to Celia any more than I was responsible for Theresa Puzo’s death. They made their own choices by getting in bed with the devil.”
Dad and I had both tried to do the right thing and gotten burned by it. We were more alike than I’d ever wanted to admit as a teenager.
“Don’t let your wrongly placed guilt have you answering the phone if JJ calls,” Dad ordered.
“I’ve blocked his number. He’d have to leave a message with the hotel staff to get to me, and I can simply ignore that. He won’t call though. He’s got his hands full with the case against him and dealing with all the loans he took out and whoever he wasstealing drugs for, Ace or otherwise. I’m not worried.”
Dad didn’t look as sure as I felt.
For one brief second, my certainty wavered. I hadn’t listened to my instincts in San Diego. I’d buried all the alarm bells while eking out the last few years of my college freedom.
Never again.
I’d make sure I listened when my gut screamed at me, and I’d do whatever it took to keep me, the ranch, and my family safe. And along the way, I hoped to find my way back to the Fallon I’d once been.
? ? ?
Not even a week later, those instincts were clamoring at me, and I was wondering if I’d ever escape what had happened in San Diego. As Kurt and I stared down at another pretty cow that had been mutilated, I tortured myself over the knowledge that I’d brought this to the ranch. It was absolutely clear it wasn’t a cougar this time—not with the wordsYou will paycarved into her hide.
Bile rolled through me, and for one humiliating moment, I thought I might actually be sick.
I was a farm girl. I’d seen my fair share of blood and guts and gore. Hell, I’d helped deliver babies multiple times, sticking my hands inside and helping the calves work themselves down the canal. I hadn’t gotten sick with the smell of birthing in a barn, so there was no way a dead cow in the middle of a bluebell- and yarrow-covered field would make me lose my breakfast, even if the violence of it tried to bring back nightmares I usually kept at bay these days..
“Cameras?” I asked, turning away from the cow and inhaling the smell of pine the wind brought down off the mountaintop.
Kurt turned with me, pointing a long finger. “Closest is about two football fields to the east. I’ll have Lance pull footage for the last twenty-four hours and see who might have been heading in this direction.”
The wounds on the cow were fresh, the blood hadn’t dried, and the scavengers hadn’t found her yet. We might get lucky with a camera.
“I’ll call Sheriff Wylee,” I told him. “See if he’ll send someone to take a report.”
“You think this is JJ?” Kurt asked. His unibrow was low over warm brown eyes. It had grown impossibly bushier over the last decade. Once, those brows had been pure black, and now they were shot with white, just like his hair. The bits of skin on his face that weren’t covered by a mustache and beard were so wrinkled it looked like a shrink-wrap experiment gone awry.
My teeth ground together at his question, hating how everyone knew what had happened in San Diego. Just like I’d hated the knowing looks I’d gotten from people on the ranch and in town growing up. Everyone in Rivers had known about the love triangle I’d been born into. I was the product of multiple betrayals, and it had been whispered about, even when I was a teenager, becoming especially loud after Spencer’s murder and Dad’s return.
But what was worse than any humiliating stares was knowing this poor cow had lost its life because of me. Someone had hated me enough to come onto my land and torture a nearly defenseless creature. My gut told me there was only a couple of people who had a reason to hate me this much, and I wouldn’t ignore it.
“I’ll call Detective Harris, tell him what happened, and ask if he can find JJ and Ace,” I said. “Neither of them has permission to leave San Diego, so if they’re caught here, they’d be sent back to jail.”
As much as I couldn’t imagine JJ taking a knife to anything, let alone being able to bring down a full-grown cow, he had Ace on his side. And I’d seen Ace that violent. The image of him choking Celia would forever be burned in my brain. And JJ’s face had been almost as ugly at the police station. A shiver ran up my spine.
“You going to call your dad too?”
My chest tightened. “No reason to call him, Kurt.” The man grunted in disapproval, and I added a glare to my words. “You telling me we can’t handle this on our own? That you and the entire security team I’m paying a fortune for need my dad’s help? We need my daddy to fly all the way home from Australia to somehow fix this?”
I’d pushed the right button, gotten his pride involved, andKurt snarled, “We know how to take care of our own.”
I gave him a curt nod. “Damn straight we do.”
Except, I wasn’t sure I did.
I made the mistake of looking at the cow again, and my stomach rolled once more. “I’ll head back to the castle to wait for Wylee’s folks. You want me to send someone to watch over her until they show?”
“No. I’d rather talk personally to whomever the sheriff sends.”
