She looked exactly the same as she had ten years ago, and yet also completely different. Golden hair pulled back in a ponytail. Blue eyes that stole my breath clean out of my chest. The cop uniform sat on her like she’d been born in it, pressed and fitted, and the Queensland Police badge caught in the morning light from the kitchen window as if she’d polished it this morning. Which, knowing her, she probably had.
She stood. “Hello, Kayden.”
Her voice hadn’t changed, and the way she said my name hit me like a brick. Everything else I could armor against—her face, the way she carried herself, the fact that she was standing in my kitchen in a cop uniform.
But the way she said my name went straight through me like it always had.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I didn’t move closer. I couldn’t think straight enough to move.
Rose poured coffee into the good mugs. She only brought those ones out for guests she actually liked. She slid them across the counter and headed for the door. “I’ll leave you two to it.”
Sapphire pulled her shoulders back, leveled her chin, and pinned me with those blue eyes the way she always had. “I’ve been sent by Senior Sergeant Ackerman to?—”
“Bob sent you?”
“Senior Sergeant Ackerman, yes.” A flicker of annoyance crossed her face. “I’m here regarding your father, Frank Branson.”
Bella appeared from the far side of the kitchen and threw a dishcloth over her tray of muffins. “I’ll come back later,” she said, and headed out the door like she was expecting knives to be thrown at her back.
I leaned against the doorframe and crossed my arms. I still wore my sweat-soaked shirt, had horsehair on my forearms, and probably still had dirt on my face from Comet making me faceplant. I looked exactly like I was … a man who’d been up since four, working an animal that had just kicked him in the chest.
Sapphire looked like a recruitment poster for the Queensland Police.
“What about Frank?” I asked.
“Your father has been reported missing. It’s my understanding he left the property several weeks ago and hasn’t returned.”
“Who reported it?”
She tilted her head slightly. “That’s not relevant to?—”
“It’s relevant to me.” I held her gaze. “Who reported it? Because I know damn well none of us did.”
“I’m not here to discuss the source of the report. I’m here to conduct an investigation into your father’s whereabouts.”
“An investigation,” I repeated, making sure she heard the sarcasm in my voice. “The old man rode out. He hasn’t come back. Yet. It’s the outback. Koolaroo is a big property. It takes time to travel from one end to the other. Didn’t they cover that at the academy?”
Her jaw tightened, but she didn’t bite like I wanted her to. “When was the last time you saw your father?”
“The day he rode out. Same as everyone else.”
“And did he say where he was going?”
“Frank doesn’t tell us shit. Frank does what Frank wants. Always has.”
She pulled a notebook from her top pocket, flipped through a few pages, and wrote something down. I remembered that about her—the way she was always writing things down in that neat, precise hand that was the complete opposite of my scrawl. To-do lists. Notes to herself. Like she could organize the world if she just wrote it down clearly enough.
I shut the memory down before it led somewhere I couldn’t come back from.
“Did anyone attempt to search for him when the horse returned without him?”
“We looked, but we didn’t find anything. Like I said, it’s a big property.”
“And yet the horse came back. So, Frank couldn’t have gone that far.”
I studied her. We’d both done our schooling through the School of the Air. The online platform dragged education out to kids in the Outback, whether they wanted it or not. I’d hated every minute. Nothing I’d learned in front of that screen had helped me do jack shit on Koolaroo. Sapphire, on the other hand, had topped every damn test and more.
“Senior Sergeant Ackerman has asked that someone from this family escort me around the property, including the outstations.”
