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“Is my family, our family…are they all okay?” LaDonna asked as the back door opened andFredcame in. Her eyes immediately went to her husband. Sean would never forget the hope on her beautiful face in that moment.
All LaDonna Brown really wanted was to go back to the life she’d left behind.
Fred was a tall man, at least six foot five. The man he had been originally would be around sixty-five or so now.Fred’sdocumentation listed him as sixty-two years old. LaDonna was fifty now in reality, but her ID listed her as a few years older.
She’d practically been a child bride, in Sean’s opinion. Fred Brown was far too old for her. He’d robbed the cradle. And then, seven years later, he had destroyed her world.
By being arrogant, cocksure, and a little greedy. Getting involved with men Fred should have known to avoid. It had all boiled down to a restless need to prove himself or something. And a quest for money. Reckless, thinking his charmwould make everything fine.Controlling and demanding, full of so-called righteous fury.
Instead, it had cost his wife four of her children.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen next. But…I thought you deserved to know that somethinghashappened. And…” He leveled a look at LaDonna. She had always been a lot easier to handle than Fred.Fred just infuriated him on such a deep level. Sean almost wished he’d never been assigned the Browns in the first place. But LaDonna and the girls deserved someone to look out for them. So he stuck it out, even though he’d considered asking to be reassigned so many times before. “I think it’s time you told your daughters the truth. All of it. I think they deserve to know.”
If everything went well, the Brown family could return to where they had come from. Could try to build a life no longer having to look over their shoulder for the threat they knew was out there coming for them.
Could visit their four older children’s graves, if nothing else.
LaDonna would befreeof the damage Frederick Arnold Brown had caused twenty-three years ago forever. It was all Sean wanted. To give her back what had been lost.
As much as he could anyway.
His smile spread as the back door opened and there they were. LaDonna’s daughters. So beautiful. So perfect. Just like their mother.
And far more than Fred Brown could ever deserve.
Dylan looked up, a grin crossing her pixie-beautiful face. “Uncle Sean!”
He opened his arms. The little thing came right to him, just like she always had every time before. No. Fred Brown didn’t deserve his daughters or LaDonna for a single hot minute.
9
The manhe was supposed to meet up with again was waiting for Wayne just outside a cafe in Sublette County. Jason Smith-Morris had the look of his biological father, but he was shorter. Uglier. Colder. Morris Preston was a monster. Wayne had long known that.
But the monster Morris Preston hadfatheredwas far, far worse.
“About time, Pryor. I didn't think you were going to show.”
Wayne studied the younger man he'd known since the boy had been eight. The years hadn't been exceptionally kind to Jason. It had once been plain old Jason Smith. But the man had addedMorristo the name the instant he'd hit eighteen. It had been his way to taunt Morris Preston that the boy knew about his parentage. And was daring Preston to act on it.
Preston had. But he'd kept this animal on the sidelines, on a leash with what he knew about Jason's mother.
Where the body was. Literally.
It made Wayne physically ill to imagine it. Only a monster could have done what Jason had back then. And since. “What do you want from me?”
“I need to get in to one of Preston's old places. He has a safe room. There are things in there we both probably want before the bumfuck cops in Masterson put it together that he might have hidden things…elsewhere. I have afrienddelaying the investigation, warrants, that kind of thing now. But time is running out.”
Morris Preston’s world was most certainly unraveling. It had kept Wayne up at night, worrying about it.
Morris Preston had kept a house on the edge of Masterson County. It had been where he'd lived with whatever number wife he was on, his two legitimate sons by his first two wives, his three daughters who were near the same age as Wayne's own girls by the third wife, and Wayne thought that one of the articles on the news sites had mentioned there was a much younger son now as well.
“What do you need me to do? Not that I am saying I will. I gave up Preston's way of doing things years ago. I'm not interested in going back.”Hell, Wayne had mended his ways. He went to church every Sunday and sang in the choir. He wasn’t Morris Preston’s lapdog anymore.
“Get me in to good old Daddy's place and in that special little room of his, and we'll call it square. I'm not interested in anything resurfacing right now, either. I have...plans.”
Wayne just bet he did. “Who got the main house now that Preston got caught?”
Morris had multiple properties in southwest Wyoming. What Jason wanted could be anywhere.
