Royal Protector

The small effort of standing seemed to weaken him. Though Lucas wanted to know what Lexie had said, his concern for his father took precedence. “Maybe you should lie back down, Pop.”

“No, son. I want to go downstairs. I’ve been aching all morning to get outside and sit on the porch for a spell. Your mother and I used to do that, you know. It was one of our favorite pastimes. After I retired, Rose and I had the time to sit and enjoy the view. Just looking out at the mountains and talking about all the things we’d done with you kids and the way we’d built this place…well, it was a sweet time, son. It truly was.”

Ten years ago, when Will had finally agreed to retire, Lucas had been fully immersed in his career in lawenforcement. Cal had not only had Lucas’s blessing, but a measure of gratitude, when he’d agreed to take over the reins of the Garrett ranch. Cal’s father, Duncan Garrett, had been Will and Rose’s first born son, the older brother Lucas had never known. Duncan’s life had already been lost in the jungles of Vietnam almost five years before Rose and Will Garrett’s late-in-life son, Lucas, was conceived.

After his father’s death and his mother’s subsequent abandonment, Cal and his younger sister, Jolie, were raised as Lucas’s siblings on the ranch. With three active young children to raise, Rose Garrett depended heavily on her older daughter, Maureen. Lucas sometimes marveled at the degree of dedication Mo had shown the family. But if the sister who was some twenty years his senior ever resented the years she’d spent tending her younger brother and two young cousins, she’d never shown it. In fact, if anything, it seemed the difference in their ages had given them a special closeness. Lucas adored his mother, but in Maureen he’d always felt he had a second mom, an older, wiser loved-one to whom he could come for kindly wisdom and counsel.

“If you can just help me down this last step…” Will said. Lucas offered his arm for support. Lucas waited until his father was comfortably situated on a porch chair with a blanket tucked around his legs, then he asked, “What did you and Lexie talk about, Pop?”

“Oh, a little of this and that. Mostly, we talked about her late grandfather, how she could always turn to him. How she still missed him. How she wished she had someone to talk to now for advice.”

“Did she ask for your advice, Pop?

“Well, yes. As a matter of fact, she did. Not outright, in so many words, understand. But I could tell she had a lot on her mind and was just itching to say it.”

Lucas shook his head. Was this the same woman who’d guarded her every comment during their interview yesterday?

“And did you give her advice, Pop?”

“Yes, I guess I did.” He seemed almost happy as he gazed across the front yard at the sunlit meadow. “She asked me if I thought it was worth the effort for a person to fight for what she wanted, even if it was something that didn’t seem like it would ever work out, even if other people disapproved and told her she was dead wrong.”

Lucas knew without asking how his father had answered Lexie’s question. Will Garrett had never run from a fight in his life. “You told her to stand her ground, of course.”

“Damn right, I did.” He nodded to himself. “You know, son, I like that little gal. And I can tell she’s got something heavy on her mind, something big, a problem she’s not sure she can handle on her own.” He met his son’s gaze. “Maybe you can find a way to help her, Lucas. I got the feeling she could use a friend about now.”

Lucas patted his father’s shoulder and smiled. “I’ll see what I can do, but right now I have to get going, Pop. I need to talk to Lexie.”

Will smiled. “You do that, son. You talk to her.” His smiled faded. “But don’t go pushing her too hard with all your official questions, you hear? She’s been through enough.”

Again, Lucas stopped short of making his father any promises where Lexie Dale was concerned.

When he returned to the house he reported to Mo that their father was on the porch, then he hurried up the stairs. What was it about Lexie that caused everybody in his family to want to protect her? First, Mo. Now, his father. Maybe Lexie Dale really was an alien, a supernatural being who’d cast an intergalactic spell over all of them.

He knocked twice on her door and waited. When he heard no movement on the other side, he knocked again. This time louder and with more authority. “Miss Dale. Lexie. It’s Lucas Garrett.” But still there was no answer, no sound at all on the other side of the door.

Finally, Lucas turned the knob and pushed the door open. The room was empty. The bed had been neatly made, almost as if it had never been slept in.

As a number of disturbing scenarios played through his mind, Lucas retraced his steps and pushed out the front door. On the porch, Mo was tending to their father, but Lucas didn’t stop to talk or inform them of where he was going.

As he strode across the meadow toward the cabin, he didn’t know whether to be relieved or concerned by the sight of Lexie’s rented SUV still parked where it had been yesterday in front of her cabin. If she’d walked out of his family’s house without a word to Mo, knowing his sister would be concerned by her unexpected absence, then Lexie Dale’s behavior could only be called rude and thoughtless.

But what if she hadn’t walked out, Lucas thought, what if she’d been taken by force? The thought propelled him even faster across the meadow. When he reached the cabin, he was surprised to see the door that opened into the small two-room cabin standing wide open.

“Lexie!” he called out as he crossed the small yard and walked up onto the porch.

There was no answer, but what he saw as he stood on the threshold stopped him cold. The interior of the cabin looked like a scene from a low-budget horror movie. The small, hand-hewn, knotty pine table and chairs had been overturned. The bedding had been ripped off the bed and the mattress pulled from its pine frame. Each of the six drawers had been pulled from the dresser in the corner and the contents dumped in a heap in the middle of the floor. The clothes strung all over the room were distinctly feminine. Lexie’s clothes. But where was Lexie?

Where was the deputy assigned to guard the cabin last night? Had Lexie’s change in venue pulled his attention away from the cabin? The questions came to Lucas in rapid succession, but there would be no answers, not until he found Lexie.

With his gun drawn, Lucas moved carefully into the room. When he’d made certain no one was waiting behind the door in ambush, he made his way toward the bathroom.

Past the open door, he saw her. Seated on the floor, surrounded by the chaos of the ransacked room, she seemed almost in a state of shock. The shower curtain sagged behind her, where it had been torn from the rod. All of her belongings had been ruined. Her cosmetics were everywhere, crushed underfoot on the floor, along with a tangle of jewelry and the remains of a broken hair dryer.

“Lexie!”

She turned and looked up at him, seemingly oblivious to the blood trickling from her left hand.

“What the hell happened here?” He moved into the small room and reached down to pull her to her feet. “My God, are you all right?”

She allowed him to pull her to her feet. “I— I’m fine. I just walked in and found it like this.”

“You’re bleeding.” She looked down at the broken pieces of a perfume bottle still in her hand.

“Here.” Carefully he took the jagged pieces from her and dropped them onto the floor. She stood without speaking as he wrapped her hand in the lone towel still hanging on a hook over the sink.

The look on her face was haunted and her eyes shone with unshed tears. Lucas put his arm around her and led her out of the cabin and onto the sun-drenched porch.

“What’s this all about, Lexie?” he asked her. “Why would someone want to do this to you?”

When she looked up at him, he found he had to steel himself against the abject vulnerability reflected on her face. “It—it’s hard to explain,” she began. “I— I can’t—”

“But you have to,” he said softly, firmly. “I can’t protect you unless I know what’s going on. I can’t help you until you trust me. Trust me, Lexie.”

She met his gaze with a look that told him she longed to do exactly that, to place her trust in him and damn the consequences that until this point had her scared silent.

She opened her mouth, but then closed it again without saying anything. The lawman in Lucas sensed she was ready to crack. If he pushed her now she might be able to give him the answers he needed to catch a killer.

But the man in him held back, momentarily overwhelmed by compassion for a woman who he sensed had already been through more than her share of pain. He remembered his father saying she needed a friend. Was it possible to be that friend and still do his duty?

“Come with me, Lexie,” he said quietly. “We’ll talk in town, at my office.”

She hesitated for a moment and looked back at the ravaged mess inside the cabin. “But what about—”

“I’ll have my men take over here, and see to your things.”

Then he put his arm around her and walked with her across the meadow and into his family’s home where he knew, at least for the moment, she’d be safe.

THEY’D SPOKEN LITTLE on the drive into town, and they remained separated by an uneasy silence while Lucas ushered Lexie past Sylvia’s desk and into his office. It wasn’t that he’d gone soft, he told himself as he directed her to the chair opposite his desk. He did not intend to let her off without another round of solid questioning. But she had been through another ordeal this morning and it seemed only right to give her a little time to recover from the shock of finding her possessions rifled. Besides, giving her time to mull over the seriousness of her situation just might convince her to cooperate.

“Make yourself comfortable,” he told her. “Can I get you something? Coffee? Tea? A lawyer?”

“I don’t need a lawyer. Not unless you’re planning to charge me with something.”

Lucas shook his head. “No. But I do need answers, Lexie. And I don’t intend to let up until I get them. If you’d feel better with counsel present, now’s the time to let me know.”

“I don’t need a lawyer,” she said calmly, in a voice that revealed none of the emotion he’d witnessed less than an hour ago inside the ransacked cabin. “There’s nothing more to say. I told you everything yesterday.”

“I remember what you said.” Lucas leaned back against the edge of his desk and folded his arms across his chest. “All right. Then let’s talk about today.”