Текст книги "Nauti Temptress"
Автор книги: Lora Leigh
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Praise for the Nauti Boy series
“The Nauti series is one that absolutely no one should miss. The characters are brilliant, sexy, and real, while the high-octane action and soul-gripping plots have you on the edge of your seat. I loved it!”
–Fresh Fiction
“Steamy, smoking, hot, erotic, risqué. Romantic . . . Intriguing and hard to put down.”
–Night Owl Reviews
“Completely blown away by this surprising story, I could not put [it] down . . . and before I knew it, I had read this entire novel in one sitting. Lora Leigh has spun a smoldering hot tale of secret passion and erotic deceptions.”
–Romance Junkies
“Wild and thrilling.”
–The Romance Studio
“The sex scenes are, as always with Leigh’s books, absolutely sizzling.”
–Errant Dreams Reviews
“Heated romantic suspense.”
–Midwest Book Review
More praise for
Lora Leigh
and her novels
“Leigh draws readers into her stories and takes them on a sensual roller coaster.”
–Love Romances & More
“Will have you glued to the edge of your seat.”
–Fallen Angel Reviews
“Blistering sexuality and eroticism . . . Bursting with passion and drama . . . Enthralls and excites from beginning to end.”
–Romance Reviews Today
“A scorcher with sex scenes that blister the pages.”
–A Romance Review
“A perfect blend of sexual tension and suspense.”
—Sensual Romance Reviews
“Hot sex, snappy dialogue, and kick-butt action add up to outstanding entertainment.”
–RT Book Reviews (Top Pick)
“The writing of Lora Leigh continues to amaze me . . . Electrically charged, erotic, and just a sinfully good read!”
–Joyfully Reviewed
“Wow! . . . The lovemaking is scorching.”
–Just Erotic Romance Reviews
Berkley titles by Lora Leigh
LAWE’S JUSTICE
NAVARRO’S PROMISE
STYX’S STORM
LION’S HEAT
BENGAL’S HEART
COYOTE’S MATE
NAUTI TEMPTRESS
NAUTI DECEPTIONS
NAUTI INTENTIONS
MERCURY’S WAR
DAWN’S AWAKENING
TANNER’S SCHEME
HARMONY’S WAY
MEGAN’S MARK
NAUTI DREAMS
NAUTI NIGHTS
NAUTI BOY
Anthologies
TIED WITH A BOW
(with Virginia Kantra, Eileen Wilks, and Kimberly Frost)
PRIMAL
(with Michelle Rowen, Jory Strong, and Ava Gray)
NAUTI AND WILD
(with Jaci Burton)
HOT FOR THE HOLIDAYS
(with Angela Knight, Anya Bast, and Allyson James)
THE MAGICAL CHRISTMAS CAT
(with Erin McCarthy, Nalini Singh, and Linda Winstead Jones)
SHIFTER
(with Angela Knight, Alyssa Day, and Virginia Kantra)
BEYOND THE DARK
(with Angela Knight, Emma Holly, and Diane Whiteside)
HOT SPELL
(with Emma Holly, Shiloh Walker, and Meljean Brook)
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North 2193, South Africa • Penguin China, B7 Jaiming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 2012 by Christine Simmons.
Cover illustration by Danny O’Leary.
Cover design by Lesley Worrell.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Berkley trade paperback edition / November 2012
eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-58140-7
An application to register this book for cataloging has been submitted to the Library of Congress.
For Bret,
because you’re the son I never imagined you would be,
and you’re turning into a man I find
more pride in each day.
I wish I could take credit
for your compassion, generosity, and strength.
And I hope those qualities always remain
a part of your incredibly giving heart.
Contents
Praise
Also by Lora Leigh
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PROLOGUE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
EPILOGUE
PROLOGUE
The fat, evil little leprechaun was interfering in their lives again in a way they would never recover from. Rowdy could feel it.
It was like a chill chasing up his spine. It was a premonition of hell. It was a certainty that perhaps they should have just shot his ass when he interfered the last time.
But that last time hadn’t been with one of the Mackays, just a friend, and not an old and dear one at that. The brother of an old and dear friend wasn’t exactly the same.
Standing in the marina office and staring out the heavy glass door, he wondered what the little bastard was up to this time. His eyes narrowed against the bright summer sun as the fat little bastard, a.k.a. Timothy Cranston, stood at the open back passenger door of the black Ford Excursion, his attention on the occupants he was obviously speaking to. He was apparently debating something with them, Rowdy thought. The tension in Cranston’s shoulders was a sure indication that his frustration level was rising.
There were times Rowdy and his cousins might like the former Homeland Security agent, but other times he was more trouble than he was worth.
Rowdy had a feeling he was about to become more trouble than he was worth again.
“What the fu—hell is he up to?” Natches murmured as he paced to the door to stand beside Rowdy.
Rowdy didn’t miss the word his cousin had almost used instead. A grin quirking his lips, he slid Natches an amused, knowing look.
“Bliss said the F-word the other day.” Natches sighed in disgust. “Chaya’s of course blaming it on me.”
“I never hear it slipping past her lips, I have to admit,” Dawg drawled from behind them. “Warned you about that, cuz.”
Rowdy glanced behind him where his cousin Dawg sat back in the easy chair next to the desk, his long legs stretched out, a newspaper in hand as he read an article on a story he’d been following for a few weeks now.
He seemed unusually interested in the reporter’s far-fetched evidence that there was some conspiracy brewing in the mountains of Kentucky, West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania where homeland militias were concerned. The article was being written by a reporter that had somehow managed to infiltrate one of those militias.
“I’m telling you, it doesn’t slip around Bliss. I don’t want her to hear me talking like that,” Natches bit out in frustration, his arms crossing over his chest as he glared at each of his cousins before turning back to Cranston.
Normally, Rowdy would have agreed, because Natches was normally not one to slip up once he put his mind to something.
“You say it often enough when you think she’s not around,” Dawg said, glancing around the side of the newspaper.
Natches just shook his head.
As he caught the tight-lipped scowl on Natches’s face, Rowdy knew it would do little good to argue with his cousin over it. He was convinced he hadn’t said the word around his daughter, therefore, as far as he was concerned, he hadn’t said it. Until they actually managed to catch him and point it out, then he’d continue to fight against the idea that he’d let it drop. Rowdy was more inclined to think it had happened out of Bliss’s sight, just not out of her hearing. The three of them usually managed to hold back the words they didn’t want their daughters to hear, whether the girls were around or not. They were all too aware of the fact that their girls were growing up and prone to be present whether they could be seen or not.
As far as Rowdy knew, he himself hadn’t said that word since the last time he’d suspected Cranston was up to something.
It never failed that the F-word slipped out whenever that little bastard was messing in their lives.
Holding his hand up in a “wait” gesture to the driver, Cranston closed the passenger door to the Excursion and began walking quickly to the marina offices.
He wasn’t as fat as he was the last time they’d seen him, Rowdy noted to himself. Not that he’d been overly round, but he had been a bit portly.
His brown hair was still a little thin in the front, though, cut short everywhere else and standing on end as the wind whipping off the lake only made it worse.
The tan suit he wore was rumpled and wrinkled, as though he’d slept in it for more than a few days. Beneath the suit, it appeared he might have been working out just a little.
Frowning, Rowdy glanced to Natches, wondering whether he’d noticed.
Natches wasn’t saying anything if he had.
Giving an irritated snort, Natches turned and paced back to the desk and the chairs Rowdy had placed behind it for his cousins. Cranston’s chair sat all by its lonesome in front of the desk.
Stepping back from the door and crossing his arms over his chest, Rowdy scowled as Cranston pushed into the office, his hand moving to smooth his hair back rather than running his fingers through the normally disheveled strands.
And he looked more harried than usual.
If Rowdy wasn’t mistaken, the former Homeland Security Special Agent in Charge of Investigations looked downright worried and possibly even a little uncertain.
“Rowdy, damned good to see you.” Cranston frowned as he stepped into the office and extended his hand. “You ignored my invitation to the party last week, by the way.”
Shaking his hand, Rowdy raised his brows in surprise. “That was really from you? I couldn’t believe it. I was afraid it was a trick to get us all in one place to kill us all at once.”
Cranston’s frown turned suspicious, and evidently the innocent smile Rowdy gave him did nothing to alleviate the suspicion.
Cranston’s jaw tightened.
Turning to Dawg and Rowdy, he sighed deeply.
Dawg was still engrossed in his newspaper, and now Natches had a part of it—the comics, no less—and appeared just as involved in it.
“So that’s how it’s going to be?” Cranston muttered, sounding strangely disappointed.
The look he shot Rowdy had a curl of shame rearing its head that only managed to piss Rowdy off. Hell, he had no reason to feel ashamed.
“What did you expect?” Rowdy asked as he walked to the desk and took his seat behind it. “Come on, Cranston; we know you. When you make one of your infamous requests that we all meet you together, it means you’re going to pull us into one of your schemes, get us shot at, and piss our wives off. We’re not playing this time.”
“Yet here you all are.” Timothy waved his hands out to encompass the room, that glimmer of somber disappointment still gleaming in his eyes.
“Out of curiosity,” Rowdy assured him as both Dawg and Natches lowered their papers with a snap.
The other man sighed—tiredly?– before moving to the desk, though he didn’t sit down.
“There’s no scheme,” he assured them, his voice matching the resignation in his brown eyes.
“Sure there’s not,” Dawg expressed doubtfully. “You’re still breathing; that means there’s a scheme.”
“The party was thrown, Dawg”—he singled Dawg out, and it wasn’t missed by any of them, especially Dawg—“to allow you to meet four young women and their mother.”
“We’re not bodyguards; nor are we in the market for a woman,” Dawg snapped.
At this point, Cranston sat down. Slowly.
His brows lowered, his brown eyes darker and flickering with what Rowdy had always said were the fires of hell. It was actually the green coming out in the dark hazel of his eyes.
They just appeared brown until he was pissed.
He was pissed now.
He watched the three of them silently, his jaw clenched and granite hard.
“At what point have you failed to miss the fact that I am completely besotted by your wives and children? And since you acquired those wives and children, at what time have I asked you to do anything dangerous?” he asked them then, and Rowdy had to admit he hadn’t expected to hear that edge of some emotion akin to hurt in the agent’s tone.
Dawg and Natches both put their papers aside as Rowdy tensed. They’d seen Cranston in a lot of different moods, but they rarely saw him pissed off at them. And they had certainly never seen him give the impression that his feelings were hurt.
They had seen him pissed at others, often– But he’d never seemed to care enough about anyone that they could actually prick emotions they’d never known he had.
“That doesn’t mean you’re not trying to draw us into one of your damned operations,” Natches growled, clearly missing the fact that Cranston didn’t get pissed at them for saying no to a mission.
“Natches.” Rowdy said his name softly, warningly, his gaze locked on the former agent. “Let’s see what he has to say.”
“Why?” Dawg grunted. “He’s obviously out to cause trouble.”
“Or to alleviate some,” Cranston stated softly, the cool smile that crossed his lips sending that chill racing up Rowdy’s spine again.
Cranston stood slowly, the expression on his face hinting at not just anger, but also that inner disappointment that had Rowdy confused as hell. “Had I known this would be my reception, I would have just told you over the phone,” he stated. “Rather than believing we had been friends for the past four years.”
Rowdy’s shoulders tightened as Cranston focused his complete attention on Dawg.
Natches and Dawg had stiffened as well, the undercurrents suddenly whipping through the room finally piercing their suspicious anger.
“Told us what?” Rowdy growled.
He knew Cranston. It was too late to repair whatever insult he’d perceived. Better to just get this meeting over with and find out what the hell was going on.
“Three months ago, Homeland Security received an alert from the Louisville Office of Vital Statistics,” he stated coolly. “Someone was requesting information on Chandler Mackay’s heirs.”
Dawg stiffened further as Rowdy shot him a warning look. They needed to hear what he had to say.
“I thought you resigned from Homeland Security,” Natches reminded him mockingly.
Timothy shook his head, his expression pitying. “Son, you never officially retire from Homeland Security. One of these days you’ll figure that out.”
“I was never part of it,” Natches reminded him.
“No, but Dawg was.” He nodded to Dawg. “And because you’ll stand with him, no matter the danger, that means you’ll be there to realize it as well.”
“Whatever,” Dawg growled. “But DHS and Chandler Mackay are not one and the same. He’s dead, and his heir doesn’t give a fuck, remember?”
Rowdy’s head whipped to Dawg. Hell, Dawg hadn’t said the word “fuck” since his daughter was still crawling.
“I remember.” Cranston nodded. “But tell me, Dawg, would you turn your back on Janey if she needed you?”
“Janey is family.” Dawg came out of his chair, causing Rowdy and Natches both to stand with him, as Timothy had always said they would do.
“So are the four young girls sitting in that vehicle outside,” Cranston stated. “They’re your younger sisters. Four girls, Dawg, still in their teens with no place to go because DHS found the property your father had bought for them, and because he hadn’t changed the title over to the mother, they seized the property as well as the bank accounts their mother was using to help support the girls. They’re homeless, without resources, and Mercedes never allowed the girls to work. She wants them to get an education. Now, are you going to turn your back on them as well? Let me know if you are, so I can have DHS drive them to the nearest corner and put them and their few belongings out. There might be some room left under a bridge somewhere.”
Dawg sat down slowly, at the same time Rowdy and Natches found themselves sitting as well. Rowdy’s knees felt damned weak, and his senses in chaos. God only knew what Natches, and even more so, Dawg, were feeling themselves.
Rowdy stared at Cranston, shock warring with the resurging shame. Hell, they should have known that invitation to dinner that they had ignored a few days before—Cranston never invited a soul to dinner—was more than some ruse.
“Chandler Mackay has been dead for thirteen years.” Dawg shook his head, obviously trying to reject the information. “That can’t be possible.”
“The youngest girl is sixteen.” Cranston nodded. “Not one of them is more than one year younger than the sister born before her. When their mother lost the little boy she’d been carrying, the year your father was killed, he never returned to the Texas home he’d bought, though payments on it were sent from a Cayman account until DHS was able to shut the account down and trace the payments. Now, what do I do with them?”
Dawg shook his head.
“Fine.” Cranston nodded his head. “I’ll tell the driver to take them to Somerset and drop them off.”
He turned to leave.
“Wait.” Rowdy stepped forward, desperation and surging disbelief making it hard to think. “The Nauti Buoy is empty right now. Put them there.”
Cranston turned back, his lip curling in a disapproving sneer. “Son, their mother, Mercedes, is as proud as they come. She’s not going to just unload her daughters on a bachelor barge and consider herself lucky. If she had been that sort of mother, then I would have handled this far differently. She wants to meet you. She wants to be accepted, not pushed to the side until forced to come begging.”
There was something in Cranston’s tone that Rowdy had never heard before: an edge of bafflement as well as respect.
There weren’t many people Timothy Cranston respected.
From the corner of his eye Rowdy watched a muscle jump in Dawg’s jaw.
“How old are the girls?” Dawg finally snapped.
“The eldest girl, Eve, turned nineteen on New Year’s Day. Piper turned eighteen in February. Lyrica turned seventeen in March, and little Zoey just turned sixteen this month.” Timothy gave them all a hard look. “Hell of an age to live under a bridge, don’t you think? Ever been there, Dawg? Ever seen what it was like? What it’s going to be like for four teenage girls that I’m betting my pensions are still virgins?”
They all had. They’d had nightmares for weeks.
Timothy sighed heavily. “Their mother, Mercedes, was only fourteen when she gave birth to her first child. She would have had five children if she hadn’t lost the boy she conceived only weeks after Zoey was born. Her body was just too weak for another child. She developed an infection that forced the doctors to do a hysterectomy. She’s thirty-three years old with four girls to raise, and she’s not lazy any day of the week, but neither does she have family and only very few friends. Those friends are not in a position to help her. The only education she’s had since she was fourteen was what she’s taught herself. How do you go to college with four babies?”
Dawg was slowly shaking his head. “She was a baby herself,” he whispered hoarsely, his eyes filled with horror. “She was just a baby. Fuck me. God, she’s younger than I am.”
She was almost seven years younger than Dawg, and she had four children by his father. It was unthinkable, even knowing the depraved bastard Chandler Mackay had been.
It was all Rowdy could think. All any of them could think, he imagined.
“He raped a baby.” Dawg’s voice sounded like a wheeze.
“Not much more than.” Timothy sighed, the compassion he felt in this moment making his shoulders droop as he watched the three men, wishing he could hide this part from them. “Chandler bought her from her parents in Guatemala. She was pregnant with his child when he slipped her into Texas and procured papers for her. She knew no English, had no way of supporting herself, and she didn’t have the option of running. If she ran, he told her the police would find her, and they would then send her back to Guatemala without her babies.”
“The babies of a rapist?” Dawg whispered as he stared back at Timothy in shock. “And she stayed?”
“She loves those girls, Dawg,” Timothy assured him, the sorrow he felt at this moment more than he wanted to deal with. “She’s given everything to her daughters, and survived at less than poverty level with the funds Chandler had arranged for her to receive along with the few jobs she had working under the table. He didn’t provide her a car; he didn’t provide her a means of supporting herself. And he paid others to ensure she didn’t date, have lovers, or dare to marry. If she attempted to have a lover, he promised her, then he would take the children, have them split up and placed in foster homes, and have Mercedes sent back to Guatemala. Then he proceeded to describe to her in graphic detail a horror story of what American foster families did to the little girls given to them.” He said the last with a sneer. “You can imagine the nightmares he gave her. The one time she dared to assert her independence and attempt to acquire her GED to enable her to acquire a better job, he had her babies stolen as she slept. She was a month getting them back and they all still have nightmares of those weeks.”
“He was a monster,” Rowdy whispered, his stomach roiling at the thought of what his uncle had done to another innocent child.
“Exactly,” Timothy agreed. “Hell is what she has lived in for quite a while. Then the money that paid the bills was suddenly cut off, the house taken, and with it the vehicle she busted her ass for years to buy because she’d been forced to forge Chandler’s name to it to acquire it. She was thrown on the streets and taken in by one of the Texas-based Homeland Security officers there that day. The woman called me immediately. She knew I’d worked the Mackay case here, and that I was still in the area. They were ready to fucking deport her, Dawg, and do just as Chandler warned her, take her children and put them in foster homes. I went after them, had them set up in a safe house until I could verify everything and run DNA tests on the girls.” He wouldn’t give any of them a chance to deny the girls or their mother. “They’re definitely Chandler’s daughters,” he told them. “And considering the fact that I made damn certain the majority of what Chandler had, that I knew of, was very illegally placed in your name and backdated far enough that it couldn’t be taken, I thought perhaps you could help Mercedes and her daughters. Because if you don’t, then she doesn’t have a chance of remaining in the States with those girls.”
The fact that he wasn’t so certain that Dawg would help wasn’t lost on Rowdy.
“You said she worked.” Natches looked as dazed as Timothy had felt as Mercedes told him what her life had been.
“She did, at a restaurant. She worked cleaning homes, or whatever she could do and still take her kids, until Eve was old enough to help with them, allowing her to take on additional house cleaning jobs to provide a little more for her children.”
“She couldn’t have made much,” Rowdy whispered. “Not with four girls to care for.”
“She had to have made friends.” Dawg seemed more in shock than anything.
“Would you have, if it meant your children would be placed in foster care if your so called friends or employers ever learned the truth of your presence in America, or the life you were being forced to live?” Timothy asked.
“Why keep the kids?” Natches questioned. “She had to have hated Chandler.”
“Her daughters are her heart and soul. Never doubt that.” Timothy sighed, wondering whether he had been wrong all these years about the honor and integrity of the three men he was facing.
As he opened his lips to say something more, Rowdy’s gaze jerked to the door.
Timothy felt his stomach drop as the door was pushed open, and the tiny, delicate little bundle of fire, Zoey Mackay, burst into the office.
“They don’t want us, do they?” Pain radiated in her face, her voice.
She could have been Dawg’s daughter, so much did the kid look like his own kid, Laken: delicate and fragile, long black hair falling down her back, celadon eyes filled with tears, her face sculpted into lines of such beauty it made a grown man want to weep.
Timothy rushed to her, bending to one knee as he placed his hands lightly on her fragile shoulders and stared into her eyes.
“Zoey, I told you to stay in the vehicle until I finished,” Timothy reminded her, his tone gentling.
Hell, he couldn’t yell at her; he couldn’t get mad at her. She knew the hell her mother and sisters faced if Dawg turned them away.
Dawg rose slowly to his feet, causing her to flinch as she followed the movement.
“If they wanted us, it wouldn’t take this long,” she accused him, her voice rough, big tears filling her eyes as she turned back to Timothy. “They would have wanted to meet us by now.”
“I was just asking some questions.” Dawg could feel something inside his soul bleeding.
He hadn’t thought Chandler Mackay could do more to make him hate him. That it was possible for the bastard to make him despise him more than he already did.
Until he stared at the girl glaring back at him.
She looked like an older version of his precious Laken.
His baby was only three, and already, her delicate, too fragile body was forced to keep up with the fire that burned in her soul.
“What kind of questions can’t we answer?” Zoey propped her little fists on her hips angrily, demanding that he take her into consideration, that he make a choice and he make it now.
“Zoey, Mr. Mackay and his cousins might have liked a few minutes to process everything,” Timothy chastised her gently as he straightened and stared down at her.
“And what makes you think Momma has time for him to process anything,” she cried out, her voice trembling as the tears that filled her eyes suddenly spilled down her cheeks as fear and anger filled her expression. “He’ll either help us or he won’t. Either way, Momma’s sick again—”
Timothy moved.
Rushing past the little girl, aware Dawg, Rowdy, and Natches were moving quickly to follow behind him, Timothy ran for the Excursion at a run.
Racing to the passenger-side door opposite the office he saw the young Homeland Security agent standing next to Mercedes Mackay, his expression concerned.
“Agent Rickers,” he snapped. “What’s going on?”
“Mr. Cranston.” Agent Rickers straightened quickly and moved back, his young face pale. “She’s weak again, sir. I was trying to make her more comfortable.”
The other girls had moved farther back to the third row of seats, watching their mother fearfully as she breathed heavily, her pale face reddened, perspiration pouring from it.
“Timothy, I’ll be fine,” Mercedes promised weakly. “You know how frightened they get.”
But she wouldn’t be fine, and Timothy knew it. Not if she didn’t get the help she needed.
“My dear, you should have sent one of the girls for me before you became so ill,” he chastised her as he took the damp cloth the other agent had been using to wipe the perspiration from her. It did little to cool her skin. Few things did when such attacks occurred. They came with a suddenness that couldn’t be predicted, and often left just as quickly.
“Timothy, get her in the office; we’ll call for Doc,” Rowdy ordered from the other side of the vehicle.
“Come on, Mercedes.” The gentleness in the leprechaun’s voice shocked not just Rowdy, but his cousins as well, though the young women in the vehicle didn’t seem surprised at all.
Cranston picked her up as though she weighed nothing, and she had to be three inches taller, at least, than the former agent.
Pick her up he did, though, and carried her quickly into the office, all the girls at his heels.
“What’s wrong with her?” Rowdy questioned the older man as he laid her on the office couch, the girls hovering around her.
Cranston sighed heavily. “The doctors aren’t certain, but she’s refused to see the specialists she’s been referred to.”
“Why?”
Cranston’s jaw tightened, a muscle ticking at the side furiously. “No insurance and no money, Rowdy. I told you, once Homeland Security found that Cayman account two years ago, they’ve had to live on what she had saved and the money she made working three jobs. She refused to let the girls work. The girls weren’t even aware Mercedes was no longer receiving the money until DHS showed up at the house and threw them out.”
Rowdy started to say more, but the sight of three concerned women moving quickly across the parking lot had a grimace pulling at his lips before he turned to his cousins. “Shopping trip’s over,” he announced, nodding toward their wives as they moved purposefully for the office.
“Where the hell were they?” Natches rubbed his jaw in confusion.
“My guess, close enough to see why the hell we tried to push them into going shopping this morning.” Rowdy sighed. “We’re getting out of practice, boys.”
“I thought someone was calling a doctor.” The little powerhouse who had interrupted the meeting earlier stood from where she had been kneeling next to her mother.
“Zoey, enough,” Mercedes chastised her. “Where are your manners?”
“They promised, Momma.” Pleading with her eyes, clearly afraid for her mother’s health.
“I sent the text,” Rowdy promised her. “His nurse just texted back.”
He handed the girl the phone.
“Half an hour.” She murmured the nurse’s reply before handing the phone back to him and staring up at him with eyes the same pale, intense green of Dawg’s, yet in this child’s eyes lurked a deep, haunting fear he knew he’d see in his nightmares.
