AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You dropped your phone and mentally turned everyone in the waiting room into suspects.”
“Hey, you cleared the Shepards.”
“Do you ever just cooperate?”
“Not usually,” she replied with zero remorse. “Seriously, changing phones is a mistake. If he thinks he’s getting under my skin with creepy messages, he’ll stay focused on me. Perceived success fuels the power-hungry types.”
He put the car into gear and eased out of the parking space. “So you’ve given up the idiot with a grudge against buildings theory?”
“Sadly, yes. I liked that theory.” It let her keep her independence. “It seems unlikely anyone with a beef against the court house would be inclined to find my phone number and send that kind of text.”
“And refer to you as a royal.”
That bothered her too. More than she intended to admit to anyone. It meant Morcos had turned a Special Forces soldier into an informant. Then or now. She shivered. Or he’d managed to outwit the computer encryption of the op somehow. Again, either back then during the op or through some traitorous connection now. She wasn’t sure which scenario frightened her more.
“Can you at least take out the battery until we get you moved in to Ruth’s place?”
“Sure.” She removed the protective case and popped the battery out, showing him the separate pieces before tossing them into her computer bag. “Where are we going?” She’d expected him to turn back toward town, toward the motel.
“I was instructed to get my things together first.”
“Ah.” And wherever he lived, he didn’t want to risk unwanted attention. Couldn’t blame him. He probably had lots of family in the area he didn’t want to expose to her current trouble.
“You do know the sniper could simply be tracking the vehicle?” His jaw clenched. Of course he knew. What was wrong with her today? She usually managed things—and people—better than this. Contrite, she apologized. “I’m not always the voice of doom.”
Carson shrugged. “Stress happens.” He was handling all of this with remarkable calm while she couldn’t shake the image of Bart falling to the floor.
She studied the landscape, trying to distract herself. They passed a sign for hayrides, a Christmas tree stand, and a few minutes later he slowed the car for a four way stop with harvested fields on all four sides.
“Were these cotton or tobacco?” When she’d first arrived in the area, she’d found the farmland charming. It seemed like they grew everything from apples to zucchini out here. She wasn’t a stranger to the process, having helped with her grandmother’s productive garden plot in a corner of their small back yard in the city, but real agriculture and the community attitude was vastly different.
“These were all cotton.”
“Hmm.”
“There’s a cotton museum over in Bishopville if you want a history lesson.”
She’d been through Bishopville a couple of times on errands for Cypress Security, and remembered seeing a small sign for the cotton museum. No way it would compare to the museums she’d grown up with in New York. The entire town of Bishopville could probably fit in one wing of the Met with room to spare.
“I’d like that.”
“You’re serious?”
“I enjoy a good museum.” If cotton was all the history she could get her hands on right now, she’d make the most of it. “Has to be a good distraction, right?” Not that she wanted a distraction as much as she wanted a real-time location of Morcos and his sniper pal.
“I guess. For about five minutes.”
“It doesn’t excite you because you grew up here, but I’m going with the ‘when in Rome’ philosophy.”
He turned off the road onto a gravel track shaded by a canopy of trees. “You seem better suited to Rome than Haleswood.”
“Is that some sort of crack on my ancestry?”
A laugh rumbled out of him. Or maybe it was a sigh that got tumbled around by the bumpy road.
As they emerged from the trees, she forgot any cracks about ancestry and gasped at the sweet little house with gingerbread detailing perfectly flanked by green topiaries. Low hedges framed flower beds that were dormant under a fresh layer of red cypress mulch now, but she could imagine them bursting with color the rest of the year.
“You live here?” It looked like something out of a fairy tale.
