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Right.
She was still okay.
It was hard to forget how bad things had looked when we first found the wrecked truck, or how small and helpless she had seemed once we’d pulled her out of there.
She was lucky. That truck was old, but it had been built to last. Built like a fucking tank. Even so, there were a few minutes initially when I wasn’t sure if she was going to make it. She’d had a nasty cut on her head and had lost a lot of blood—and that was before we even knew about the concussion.
But then she had opened those pretty green eyes and I knew—I knew it right then and there—that she would pull through. She was strong. She was a fighter.
And at least she wouldn’t have to fight by herself for a while. Cole and I were here to do the fighting for her—or at least to help her however we could.
From the corner of my eye, I saw him stir in the chair next to me. We’d been here just like this, side by side, watching over her ever since we’d brought her back from the hospital. I wasn’t even sure why we were here when my house was bigger and probably more comfortable, but I hadn’t questioned it at the time. It had been a shorter drive to Cole’s house than to mine or Janessa’s, so here we were.
And just like I hadn’t questioned the destination, Cole hadn’t questioned me staying here. Which was good, because I wasn’t going anywhere. We would both be right by her side whenever she woke up—and every time she woke up—until she was feeling better.
“You can’t sleep, either?” Cole asked, his voice low and tired.
“Not my shift to sleep,” I answered.
He grunted but didn’t argue, probably because he already knew it wouldn’t do any good. I would sleep when it was my turn. Not until then.
“What about you?” I asked. “You have two hours left until you need to wake up and take over watching her.”
“I can’t sleep for shit,” he said. “My mind keeps going back to… you know. To everything.” He paused, then shifted in his seat to face me. “Do you think the fire had anything to do with the poisonings?”
So much had happened in such a short period of time that I hadn’t even tried to connect any of the dots yet. Which was probably not a great thing for a sheriff to admit, but there was no denying where my mind had been.
I’d been thinking of one person.
This red-haired, fiery, independent beauty lying in the bed just a few feet away from me.
She had taken up all of my thoughts since the moment I’d met her, and it took some real effort to push those thoughts aside to make room for anything else.
But the town of Bliss was depending on me to do my job, and I really did want to catch the bastard behind all of the poisonings. The bastard who had beaten Derek Winslow. The bastard who might have set fire to the Thoresons’ pasture.
I belatedly realized Cole was still staring at me, still waiting for an answer. “I hadn’t thought much about it, to be honest,” I said. “We won’t know for sure that it’s arson until the fire department has finished investigating. But I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find out there was a connection. After seeing what happened to Derek, there’s not much I’d put past the person at this point.”
Cole pressed his lips together and stared across the room toward the window for a few moments. I had seen that look plenty of times over the years. He was going over the facts in his head, doing his best to construct a timeline, to remember places and faces and conversations in the hopes of finding a shred of evidence we may have overlooked.
It was one of the things that made him so good at his job—that and the fact that he gave zero fucks about going toe-to-toe with even the most hardened criminals. He might be hotheaded sometimes, but he had an impressive eye for detail that had saved my ass more than once.
“I just can’t figure out how it’s all related,” he said after several more seconds had passed. “The fire. The violence. The poisoning. For all we know, this son of a bitch might be the reason Daisy Lynn ended up in that ditch.”
My stomach clenched, and I felt a rush of pure anger flood my system. Daisy Lynn had been mumbling almost incoherently when we found her, but she had definitely seemed convinced that she’d hit something. Or someone. But there was no sign of any other person at the site of the accident. The only blood we found on the vehicle was in the cab of the truck and had clearly come from her head wound.
Still, the thought of someone out there trying to hurt her made my blood boil so quickly and unexpectedly that it took me a moment to realize Cole had continued talking.
I shook my head, trying to clear away the thoughts of what I would do if I got my hands on the person responsible for all of this. “Sorry, what? I must have missed that last part…”
He smirked. “You mean while you were sitting there snorting like a bull and looking like you wanted to murder someone?”
Cole knew me too damn well. I would have laughed if it wasn’t such a serious issue.
“Anyway,” he continued, “I was saying none of it makes any fucking sense. And what’s the deal with the different poisons? The hemlock and the Monensin? We have all of these random facts and pieces of evidence, but what’s the connection?”
“I wish I knew,” I said. “But we do have one thing working in our favor. Whoever is behind all of this is getting sloppy. They aren’t doing a very good job of covering their tracks. We may not be able to put all the pieces of the puzzle together yet, but we will. Soon.”
“I hope you’re right,” Cole said. “I can deal with a lot of things. I’m not bothered by threats or danger, really, as long as I know where it’s coming from. But this? Not knowing where to look next is the part that’s killing me.” He nodded toward Daisy Lynn’s sleeping figure. “And I won’t forgive myself if something happens to her. I don’t know what I’d do. I can’t even think about it without…”
