Justice is Coming

Because he was feeling it, too.

As soon as he figured out how, he was going to make it go away. He didn’t need the kind of trouble that Eden Gray brought with her. Especially since he’d been the one to arrest her father. Even though she didn’t appear to be holding any grudges about that, maybe those blue eyes were concealing things well hidden.

She looked away from him. “Where are you taking me?”

“Since the EMTs are going to be tied up with the gunmen for a while, first stop is the hospital. You should be checked out by the doctor, and Kirby’s there. He was a little weak after his last cancer treatment, and they decided to keep him a day or two.”

“I’m sorry. How sick is he?”

“Sick,” Declan settled for saying, and it was all he intended to say on the matter. Kirby could be dying, and there was nothing he could do about it.

“Maybe questioning him is a bad idea then,” she added.

Yeah, it was. Kirby didn’t need this while he was trying to recover, but there was no way to keep the news of the gunfight from him. Even while he was in the hospital. Someone would let it slip, and Kirby would be furious that he hadn’t heard it from Declan. Besides, Kirby might be able to shed some light on the note.

“I don’t need to see a doctor,” she said. She reached out and touched his chin. “But you should.”

Declan hadn’t been expecting that touch, and he actually flinched. First, from the contact. Then the little zing of pain as her fingers grazed his skin. When Eden drew back her fingers, he saw the blood.

“You might need stitches,” she suggested.

He jerked down the visor with the vanity mirror and had a look. Yeah, his chin was cut all right, but there was no way he’d take the time to get stitches. He reached over to the glove compartment, the back of his hand brushing against Eden’s jeans-clad leg, and this time she was the one who flinched.

“Good grief,” she mumbled. “What’s wrong with us?”

Oh, she knew what.

So did he.

“My advice?” He took some tissues from the glove compartment and pressed them against his chin. “Pretend it’s not there.” Since she didn’t question what it was, he figured they were on the same page.

Talk about lousy timing.

And bad judgment.

Of course, that idiot part of him behind his jeans’ zipper was a bad-judgment magnet. He had a way of hooking up with women who could give him the most amount of trouble in the least amount of time.

The most fun, too.

Still, this went beyond his fondness for bad girls whose middles names were Trouble. Because this bad girl had been sent to kill him.

“Any chance your father’s behind this?” Declan came right out and asked. He expected her to have a quick denial and figured she wouldn’t admit that Zander Gray would try to kill his own daughter.

“There’s no way he would put me at risk like this.” She paused. “But he hates you. A lot. And he blames you for his arrest.”

“He should blame himself. He’s the one who tried to murder a witness.”

“He said he was innocent and I believe him.”

Not exactly a surprise. “Well, I’m just as adamant that he’s as guilty as sin.” Declan took the final turn toward town. “Would he include you in any plan to get revenge against me?”

He looked for any signs that she’d been lying, that she’d been in on this plan from the beginning—all to help her father get back at him.

“No.” There was just a slight hesitation before she repeated it.

Maybe she wasn’t as certain as she wanted to seem. Declan sure wasn’t, and her father gave them a starting point. But before trying to track down the man who’d been a fugitive for months, he needed to deal with the note.

Well, maybe.

It was possible that Kirby would be too weak to talk. Still, he could at least have Eden checked out to make sure she was okay. He didn’t see any cuts or bruises, but she’d hit the ground pretty hard when he had dragged her off the porch and away from those bullets.

He pulled into the parking lot of the hospital and looked around to make sure they hadn’t been followed. Something he’d done on the entire drive. The missing gunman probably wouldn’t choose Main Street for an attack, but Declan didn’t want to take any chances.

“This way.” He led Eden through a side door for one of the clinics located in the hospital. It was an entrance he and his brothers had been using a lot lately so they wouldn’t have to go through the newly installed metal detectors and disarm. With Kirby’s frequent stays in the hospital, it saved all of them some time.