“I’m beat,” he admitted. “If you mean it…”
“Of course I do.” She smiled at him. Their relationship was getting easier.
“Cait.” He stopped her with a hand on her arm. “We’ll find the son of a bitch.”
She nodded. He had told her as soon as he’d picked her up downtown that a county sheriff’s deputy had found Blake’s camp, tucked on the bank of Bear Creek outside city limits. Neither Blake nor his car had been there, but the tent matched Cait’s description, and when the deputy unzipped the small blue tent, he’d seen a white cardboard banker’s box filled with file folders. The lid, carelessly tossed aside on top of the sleeping bag, had “Ralston” scrawled on it in black marker.
Really? Blake had brought work with him to fill the hours when he wasn’t terrorizing her? Now, that infuriated her, maybe because it said, This man isn’t really crazy.
“I know,” she said, patting Colin’s shoulder.
Black bean and cheese quesadillas were Cait’s go-to dinner when she wanted food on the table in twenty minutes or less. Colin cooperated by putting a salad together while she cooked. Of course, she had to triple the number of quesadillas she made, since her brother’s appetite was considerably heartier than hers.
After they had finished eating she was restoring the top to the sour cream and he was leaning back in his chair, sighing in repletion, when his phone rang. Unfortunately, he kept it with him everywhere but the bathroom, as far as she could tell.
He groaned, looked at the number and answered, listening for a minute before he said, “A what?”
Interest sharpened, Cait unashamedly eavesdropped but couldn’t get anything from his side of the conversation except that he was stunned. “Of course we have to,” he said at one point. “I’ll be there,” he finally growled, ending the call and pushing back from the table.
“As you probably gathered, I’ve got to go in. Unbelievably enough, we’ve had a bomb threat.”
“In Angel Butte?”
His laugh was unamused. “Better yet. The library.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I wish.” He disappeared toward the bedroom, but his voice carried to her. “They have a program going on tonight in the meeting room. Historical society talking about the late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century range wars and vigilantism. To encourage attendance, the children’s librarian is holding a preschool story time to include crafts.”
“Oh, my God. You mean, the library is packed?”
“Yeah.” Badge and gun back at his belt, he was shrugging into the suit coat again as he came back down the hall. “They’re going to start evacuating.”
“At least Nell doesn’t work there.”
Her brother’s eyes met hers. “Yeah. I’ll count my blessings.”
She followed him to the front door, where he paused. “Damn it, I don’t like leaving you by yourself.”
She could see him debating whether she might not be safer with him at the site of a bomb threat. “I’ll be fine,” she assured him before he got too enthused about that idea.
“Lock,” he ordered.
She rolled her eyes but crossed her heart. “Promise.”
With his long stride, he crossed the yard and disappeared through the side door into the garage in only seconds. Cait stayed where she was for a moment. Somebody had actually threatened to bomb the library during a preschool story time. Unbelievable.
A thud brought her head around in time for her to see a blur of movement. Somebody had leaped over the railing and onto the porch. Her pulse sprang into overdrive, and she opened her mouth to scream.
Blake’s hand slapped over her mouth before she could squeak out a sound. He shoved her backward into the house and kicked the door shut behind him. Colin would be backing out of the garage and assume she’d obediently gone back in. He wouldn’t hear a scream now even if she could get free.
On a surge of fear, she thought of Noah, as intent as her brother on saving her. Noah, who wouldn’t understand how she could ever have forgiven Blake for hitting her and let him do it again.
Noah, she thought with anguish.