“Were you just driving around looking for someone to talk to?” Ted asked instead of answering his question.
The man shrugged and looked away. Ted tried to memorize his face, from the long, sloped nose, the medium-brown hair, the regular brown eyes. There was nothing memorable about him, other than he wore a jacket in this weather. Normal jeans. Regular tennis shoes. The jacket was blue and white and zipped all the way up. Ted started to choke just looking at the guy.
“What’s your name?” he tried. “I can give it to the ranch owner. She’ll call you if she needs another man.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “I was just hoping something would fall into my lap.” He glanced at Ted and gave a small smile. He waved and turned to go back to his truck. Ted watched him go, and the moment he got behind the wheel and closed the door, Ted turned and started back to the ranch.
He’d find Emma in the West Wing, and he needed to talk to her as soon as possible. It took longer than he’d like to get back there, and he was sure the blue truck would be gone, but he had the license plate. He could describe him to Emma and see if it was the same person.
He was panting and sweating when he made it to the steps that led into the house. He burst through the door and called, “Emma?”
His boots clunked against the floor as he hurried down the hall and into the kitchen. “Emma?” Her office had to be somewhere nearby. Right? But he didn’t know where, and he didn’t want to start poking around the West Wing. In fact, he shouldn’t be here at all. Ginger had told him the men didn’t come over here uninvited.
His heartbeat rippled, and he turned toward the hall where he knew the bathroom was. “Emma?”
“Yes,” she said to his left “I’m right here.” She appeared in a doorway, a gray and white cat at her feet. She bent and picked it up. “What are you doing here?”
“I saw the guy in the blue truck,” Ted said, striding toward her. “I got the license plate. Let’s look him up.” He grinned at her as he approached.
She looked at him with shock in her eyes. “Wait. What?” She fell back into the doorway as he pressed past her.
“You have a computer, right?” He entered the office before she could answer. Sure enough, she had a computer on the large desk in front of the window. “Yes, you sure do.” He tossed her another grin as he continued into her office.
He took a seat in front of her computer, well-aware of what he’d just done. He slowed down a little bit and looked back to where she still stood in the doorway, that cat in her arms.
“Can I use this?” he asked.
“What are you going to do?”
“Look up the license plate number,” he said.
“How do you do that?” She finally took a few steps into the office, but she sure didn’t seem to want to. She used the feline as a shield between them, but the cat meowed, and she put him down. He came toward Ted as if they’d be best friends.
“What’s his name?”
“Frisco,” she said, rubbing her hands up and down her arms. The air conditioning sure did work well in the West Wing, and Ted envied her. She wasn’t wearing shoes either, and he liked her hair in a high ponytail and the vulnerability in her face. She still had makeup on, and Ted was starting to realize she wore it every day, even if she didn’t leave the West Wing.
The cat rubbed against Ted’s ankles, and he didn’t hate it.
“You have a way with critters,” Emma said, giving him a smile. She didn’t come any closer though, and Ted suddenly felt her nerves.
“Yeah.” Ted looked at the computer screen. “I won’t close any of this. I just need the Internet.”
“How do you look up a license plate?” she asked.
“In another life,” Ted said. “I was a lawyer.” He glanced at her. “And we learn all kinds of tricks to get information.” He didn’t want to get too deep into what he’d done as a lawyer, because he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to keep his questions to himself.
He clicked and started typing. “There are a lot of things that are public,” he said. “If you know where to look.”
“What kind of lawyer were you?” Emma asked.
Ted heard the trepidation in her voice, and he forced himself not to look at her. Instead, he kept his focus on the computer screen as the State of Texas website came up. “I worked as an assistant prosecutor,” he said. “In the Southern District Federal Court System.”
“Wow,” she said. “That sounds so fancy.”
Ted chuckled as he typed in the license plate division. “It was a massive organization,” he said. “We spanned a couple dozen counties, and there were almost two hundred prosecutors in the office.”
“Hmm,” she said, and Ted sensed she had other questions she wanted to ask.
He swiped and tapped to get to the note he’d taken for the license plate, and he typed it into the system.
“Kind of funny how a lawyer ended up in prison,” she said, trying to be oh-so-nonchalant.
“Oh, you want to know why I went to prison.” Ted leaned away from the computer, because the information was right there on the screen. He didn’t have the same skills with names as he did faces, but it wasn’t going anywhere.
He looked at her, his eyebrows raised.
“I could just look in your file,” she said. “But I thought I’d ask right from the horse’s mouth.”
Ted nodded. “I don’t mind telling you, but I have something I want to ask you too.” He couldn’t have planned his opportunity to find out about her connection to Robert Knight better than this.
“All right,” she said.
“For real?” Ted asked. “I’m
