“Amen,” Grandpa Noah said. “So, what’s the next step we take to nab this little worm?”
Richardson’s phone rang.
“Hey, Connor. What do you have?”
No one spoke as they waited to hear what Connor Talbot had discovered. The look on Richardson’s face told Ian that, just this quickly, they might have a break.
“Okay, thanks. Come on back to the house. We’ll put together a packet and send it off to the police.”
Richardson ended the call and looked directly at his employer—Kate Benedict.
“Connor spoke to Bob Travis. He reported receiving a visit from Baker, just after he’d signed the deal with Ian and Ken. Travis treated him as if he was simply the son of a good friend, coming to check up on him—but he knew the man was livid not to have the chance to buy his business. And then, he gave Connor the name of a man, the owner of a bait and tackle business, who he thinks sold his small business to Baker.”
“Why would a man who has never had any real interest in the sporting goods business be so insistent on getting his hands on one?” Alice asked.
Jake looked at Grandma Kate for a long moment. The nonagenarian’s eyes gleamed, as if she already had the answer. Jake nodded and shared his insight with the rest of them.
“He’d want it if he wasn’t at all interested in the business for the business’s sake but in using that business as a cover for something else.”
“Maybe he didn’t flee New York in fear,” Ian said. “Maybe he came first to Colorado, and then now to Texas, in order to engage in a different sort of business proposition altogether.”
“We need to find out who Baker’s associates are,” Adam said. “In this case, if we find out who, we’ll know what and why.”
“What can we do to help?” Ian looked at Ken and then Alice. “We want to get this toad put away. Because, in my heart, I know he started that fire.”
“My concern is even more basic than that, Ian,” Grandpa Noah said. “He sounds like the vindictive sort. I’m worried what else he might try to pull, either to implicate you in something illegal, or worse yet, harm you.”
“He wasn’t a very brave man, that I could see,” Ken said.
“He wasn’t.” Ian agreed with that. “In fact, I bet if we confronted him, he’d turn tail and run.”
Grandpa Noah turned to Kate Benedict. “Were we ever that naïve, Kate?”
“We were,” Kate said. “But we got over it, and so will they.”
Grandpa Noah pinned Ian in place with a glare. “You’ll stay away from him, and you’ll listen to this. From what we know of this character already, I can tell you he’s a liar and a sneaky one at that. And that vacancy in his eyes tells me he doesn’t care what he does or who he does it to. He won’t quit until he gets his way. And his way appears to be some kind of ill will toward the two of you.”
The truth shivered through Ian. “That’s taking our best principle and showing us its evil side.” He exhaled heavily. “Okay, point taken. So, to echo Grandpa, what happens next?”
“Next, we learn, and we plan.” Adam looked around the table. “And we keep our eyes and ears open. I’m with Grandpa Noah. I don’t trust this bastard at all. So, let’s all of us stay sharp.”
Chapter Sixteen
To Alice’s mind, there was usually one thing that the heroines in her romance novels did, oh, somewhere after the mid-point of the story, that always had struck her as—well, simply not very realistic.
At some point those women would ignore the warnings of their heroes and end up putting themselves in harm’s way. Maybe it wasn’t deliberate, or maybe it was—in a misguided attempt on their part—to do something to help their heroes, men who were perfectly capable of helping themselves in the first place.
Some of the older books used that device as a means of creating a false atmosphere of suspense. It always baffled Alice. It never made any sense to her to toss that element, without warning, into the middle of the book, because, hello, it was a romance novel, and that meant there had to be a happy-ever-after. That, after all, was one of the definitions of “romance” as a genre of fiction.
There’d only ever been one romance she’d ever read that had not delivered on that implicit promise of a happy ending. She’d begun to suspect that particular book was different and did something she never did—she thumbed ahead to the end to read the last few pages.
And promptly threw the book against the wall. That memory brought a grin to her face because she had been in the family room at the farm at the time, but not alone. Chance and Logan had been visiting on that occasion and had both come into the room, their e-readers in hand. Chance had looked up from his reading and said, “Now that’s what I call a bad review.”
Logan had agreed. “Thank God you were reading a paperback and not an e-book.”
What an odd little tangent for my mind to go off on. But it wasn’t, not really. As she watched her men for the rest of the day and took note of the way they really did pay attention to their surroundings as Adam had advised, she finally got a clue. At first, her heart melted, just a little. She hadn’t thought she could love Ian and Ken any more than she already did. But she could! They really cared about her, and they really meant to protect her. Here was the proof, making her heart go all gooey.
And then, the more Alice thought about it, the more that sense of gooey dissipated, to be replaced
