AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Lyrica stared back at Tim as he read the investigation report her brother-in-law, Brogan Campbell, and her future brother-in-law, Jedediah Booker, had brought into Tim’s office earlier. Dawg, Natches, and Rowdy had helped, he’d stated, and they’d verified everything through the Kentucky State Police as well as the Department of Homeland Security.
The contact list on her phone had been jammed by a high-tech device that affected only the numbers on that list when they were attempting to call Lyrica. The device was new technology, and detection for it hadn’t been perfected yet.
“Fourteen hours after you were shot at, a young woman perfectly matching your description was found two blocks over,” Tim continued, watching her somberly. “She was an informant for the state police on a drug gang moving into the area. Everything points to a case of mistaken identity.”
Were they crazy? Did they really believe something so preposterous?
“Mistaken identity?” Tilting her head, she stared back at him in disbelief, certain she must have misheard him.
“Lyrica, I’ve had this investigated on three different fronts.” Tim leaned forward, his somber expression and fierce hazel eyes piercing. “We’ve covered it ourselves. We’ve followed every lead, every shadow that could be found. The state police have covered it on their end and the Department of Homeland Security sent a team out to look into it as well. We’ve all come to the same conclusion. The assailants thought they’d found the informant they were looking for when you checked into the hotel. You should be safe now.”
She should be safe now? She’d gone through all this because they were searching for someone else? Someone had died, even though Lyrica had been mistaken for her?
And why did she have such a hard time believing this?
“This can’t be real,” she whispered painfully, staring around the room at the men that filled it. “It’s just wrong.”
It didn’t feel right. Nothing had felt right since the night she had stepped out of that elevator and realized someone was in her hotel room.
Her brother grimaced, his pale green eyes filled with regret and concern. “Sometimes the realization that there are no monsters in the shadows is the greatest battle, sweetheart.”
And how very skewed was that one?
“Great.” Rising quickly to her feet, she ran her hands down the sides of her hips, straightened the hem of her cotton shirt, then faced her family with that same sense of unreality. As though she wasn’t fully there, yet wasn’t really dreaming either.
The odd sensation had her off balance, and it refused to allow the fear that had filled her for the past weeks to recede.
“I’m going back to my apartment, then,” she announced, ignoring Dawg’s objection.
It was instinctive, she thought. Two weeks of believing she was in danger, only to be told there was really no danger, left her sick to her stomach with the knowledge that she seemed to be the only one that found this mistaken identity supposition to be so very convenient.
No one should have died. But someone had to throw her family off the fact that she was going to die. Or was she simply so paranoid now that she couldn’t see the truth?
“Lyrica, wait another day or so.” Tim came slowly to his feet, the white shirt he wore folded back at the sleeves, his slacks still appearing freshly ironed.
Sometimes it was very hard to associate the man she had known for the past few years with the man her brother and cousins knew before he met her mother, Mercedes.
“I’m not waiting, Tim. I’ve waited two weeks just to learn that someone else was murdered that night despite the fact that I nearly died as well.” Shaking her head, she ignored the fact that Dawg stood silently, his pale gaze far too intense and knowing. “I want to be alone for a while. I want to be home.”
In the short time she had lived there, her apartment had become home. It had become a haven away from the craziness that her family could sometimes be. That their lives never failed to be.
It wasn’t Dawg’s fault. It was just that he had a past, one that had already threatened her older sister Eve. He was terrified it would affect her and Zoey now. But he didn’t stop there. No, Dawg worried over every phase of their lives, even their nonexistent-because-he-fucked-it-up love lives.
Of course, he knew where Alex and Brogan had found her before he’d been told what had happened. They wouldn’t have hid it from him. And if Brogan and Jed hadn’t told Dawg, then gossip would have reached him quickly. There had been no fewer than twelve police officers with the chief of police when Alex rode with Brogan and Jed to collect her.
Some boss at DHS had found out about it, called Timothy, and informed him of everything he knew. From there, as she heard it, it had taken less than ten minutes to have a full squad of officers as well as Natches’s brother-in-law and chief of police and his former partner Jed, a DHS agent still working in Somerset on a case no one dared to talk about for some reason, heading her way.
Two days later Dawg was back a week early from the Caribbean and her life had changed so irrevocably that she had no idea how to get it back.
“Lyrie.” Dawg breathed out roughly, his still far-too-handsome face appearing more lined than it had been when he’d left three weeks before. “Take a few days here with Mom. Christa and I will head home tonight . . .”
“You think I want to leave because of you, Dawg?” she asked as she shoved her hands into the pockets of her jeans. “I’m not Eve, Piper, or Zoey. Your interference doesn’t make me want to run from you, remember? I just move in and make you crazy.”
He grinned, as she knew he would. They could look back at the four months she had lived with him just after they’d come to Somerset and laugh now. Then, they’d lived in a state of constant warfare with Christa, who was always either amused with both of them or furious with both of them, caught in the middle.
Finally, out of sheer desperation Dawg had sworn, on his marriage license even, that he would never interfere in her life again. To her knowledge, of all four of his sisters, Lyrica was the only one he kept that vow to.
He’d sworn it on his marriage license and she’d made him do it. Because there was nothing Dawg loved more than his wife and child.
