don’t buy that for a second. You’re here for some sleazy story. Here to make my mother look bad somehow,” he accused as he fumbled with the camera’s buttons. “How do I— Where’s the release on this thing, before I have to tear it apart? There’s a memory card in here, right?”
“Don’t you touch that,” Henry managed, but, thoroughly intimidated, he sounded more apologetic than outraged.
Finding the right lever, Rayford ejected the memory card and slipped it into the pocket of his jacket.
“No, please. I don’t—” Jessie shook her head. “Forget that. You can keep it. Just— I need to ask your mother a few more questions. Please.”
“What I need,” he said as he jammed the mini-cam back at Henry, “is for the two of you to get the hell out of my house and off my property before I call the sheriff—or go get my gun.”
Chapter 2
Zach was gratified to see the little cameraman scuttling out the door without a moment’s hesitation.
But the slim, green-eyed woman didn’t move a muscle as she stared him down. “For the record,” she challenged, the wind from the open door whipping her long, red-gold hair around her, “you’re threatening to shoot us?”
Though he’d like nothing more than to answer, Hell, yes, he hesitated for a heartbeat, remembering reporters and their underhanded ways. Innocent as this Jessica Layton appeared, with her tangled waves and a smattering of girl-next-door freckles, there was a stubborn set to her delicate jaw that promised trouble if he wasn’t careful. For all he knew, she had a digital recorder hidden on her and would take his bluff to the law if he were stupid enough to threaten her. Not that Sheriff Canter would likely do anything but escort this troublemaking outsider to the county line, but Zach didn’t need the aggravation.
And he didn’t need her raising more questions about his mother’s strange behavior. Why hadn’t she simply told the reporter what little she knew about Layton’s sister and her boyfriend instead of acting as if there was something to hide? And why had she lied to him about the reporter and her cameraman being lost in the storm and looking for directions?
“I’m not going to shoot you,” he admitted with a shake of his head. “But I promise you, I’ll pick you up like a bawling calf and carry you straight back to your car if you don’t leave.”
To her credit—and his irritation—Jessica Layton didn’t bat an eye at the threat.
“So you’re sending me back out into this storm?” she asked.
“And straight down the road to Dallas, if I have anything to say about it,” he said, thinking of the tears he’d spotted in his mother’s eyes. He wouldn’t have her getting sick again, an illness that had alarmed him into accepting the discharge he’d been offered, as his family’s sole surviving son, and into finally accepting his father’s unwelcome legacy.
The reporter waited without speaking, clearly hoping to make him squirm. But as an officer of the marine corps, he was familiar with the tactic. Had used it himself upon occasion, while staring down the younger pilots he’d trained.
He waited her out, thinking how pretty he might’ve found this clearly smart and stubborn woman if she weren’t some damned reporter, especially one who’d invaded his turf and upset his mother. Did this Jessica Layton have any idea that the woman she’d come here to grill had lost her son—his only brother, Ian—in combat a few months ago? Or that she’d still been reeling from her husband’s death at the time, which had left her responsible for running an enormous spread with no one but hired hands to help her?
“I’ll leave your property,” the reporter finally conceded, “but I’m warning you. I’m not making the drive home until I find my sister—or at least get some straight answers about where she might’ve gone. Because my mother isn’t dying without seeing her again.”
“You—Your mother?” he asked. “She’s—she’s what? You’re saying that she’s sick?”
Her jaw tightening, Jessica Layton nodded. Pain cracked through the mask of fierceness, the pain of a despair barely held at bay. A reminder that death hadn’t made its last stop at Zach’s family’s doorstep.
“I’m sorry for your family,” he said, really seeing the woman behind the reporter for the first time. A gorgeous woman, not just pretty, and one that his instincts assured him wasn’t lying in the hope of getting either an edge or a story. “But you just heard my mother. She has no idea where your sister’s gone.”
“You heard her as well as I did. It’s obvious your mother’s hiding something.” Jessica stared in challenge at his mother on the staircase.
A challenge he cut off by stepping between them, his heart pounding out a warning that this reporter, this intruder in his home, was too dangerous to sympathize with. “You crossed a line today, barging in here with a camera, and you’re crossing another, standing here and calling my mother a liar.” He squared his shoulders and drew himself to his full height. “Now get out before I put you out.”
“I’ll be back,” she assured him, turning on her heel.
And leaving him to wonder, could his mother’s strange behavior have anything to do with another woman who had shown up unexpectedly to knock at their front door?
Reminded of the miracle she’d brought, Zach glanced up toward the landing and glimpsed a tendril of soft golden-brown hair and a pair of eyes peeking through the bars of the metalwork railing.
The green eyes of his four-year-old niece, Eden, who had been dropped off by her mother—an old girlfriend of Ian’s who none of them had ever heard of—in the weeks following his brother’s death. Still in San Diego, packing up the contents of his room in the Bachelor Officer’s Quarters, Zach had never met the woman, but Jessica Layton’s green eyes nudged a suspicion...a suspicion planted by his mother’s too-neat story to the night her “miracle grandchild” had appeared.
The moment the reporter closed the door behind her, the tiny girl—the child Zach swore had restored his mother’s will to live—trotted down the staircase and threw herself into his mother’s arms.
And in a small, sweet voice that drove a shaft of ice through his heart, Eden asked tearfully, “Grandma, is my mama coming back this time? Is she taking me away?”
* * *
“Thanks loads for the backup in there,” Jessie told Henry once she’d climbed behind the wheel.
His bald scalp reddened. “Did you see the size of that guy? And the muscles? Besides, I’ve got at least thirty years on him, or else I would’ve— I could’ve decked him....”
When Jessie raised her brows, Henry laughed at her skepticism.
“You know me all too well,” he conceded with a shrug. “Maybe I wouldn’t have at that, but I could tell that cowboy wouldn’t hit a woman, much less shoot one. You saw how he was with his little mama.”
“I figured the same,” she admitted as she started the car’s engine. “But he wasn’t going to back down from protecting her, either.”
“Protecting? You still think she’s hiding Haley?”
