farewell to Logan? Was one of them the shooter? Did he realize that he’d hit him? Maybe he thought he’d killed him.
He could have killed Mrs. Payne, too. Hell, with as wildly as he’d been firing, he could have killed her. If Logan had ducked faster, the bullet that had hit him might have struck her instead. His reflexes had slowed at the wrong time for him, but the right time for her.
She shuddered but refused to give in to the fear that had paralyzed her at the cemetery. Anger was better; it made her stronger.
“Stacy!” Milek greeted her with a hug, his eyes bright with the sheen of inebriation. He was the lightweight of the family and could only handle a drink or two.
She slammed her palms into his chest, shoving him back with such force that he nearly fell over. But Garek, also standing at the bar, grabbed him and kept him upright.
“What the hell!” he protested.
“What the hell!” she yelled back at him. She didn’t care if she hurt their feelings now. She was so pissed over getting shot at that she actually understood Logan Payne intruding on her father’s funeral. “Which one of you idiots shot up the cemetery?”
“What?” Garek asked.
“I nearly got shot,” she said.
“What! Are you okay?” Milek asked, grabbing for her again.
She jerked back. “I’m fine.”
“It must have been Logan Payne,” Milek murmured. “He must have shot at you...” A look passed between him and his brother—a look of rage and revenge.
“No,” she said, in response to that look as much as her brother’s statement. “Logan Payne is the one who got shot!” As if they didn’t already know that...
“What’s going on?” Aunt Marta asked. “This is inappropriate talk for a funeral...” She sniffed her disdain of her husband’s niece and nephews. She had never approved of them because they were a convict’s children. Her own husband was a criminal but since he had never been caught, he wasn’t as unseemly as his brother and his offspring—mostly because of the lavish lifestyle his actions afforded her.
“Is Payne dead?” Milek asked.
Stacy’s stomach pitched as she remembered the blood on his tuxedo. She shook her head. “No.”
His mother had forced him to go to the hospital to make certain that the bullet had only grazed him as he’d claimed. Mrs. Payne had wanted Stacy to ride along—probably so that she could propose marriage between Stacy and her son again. Even if she talked Stacy into her outrageous plan, there was no way in hell that Logan would ever agree to become her husband—even if it were only pretend.
“That’s too bad,” Milek murmured with regret that Logan lived.
Had Milek been the shooter? Was that why he was drinking so heavily? Or was drinking his way of mourning their father?
Stacy wanted to mourn their father, too, but she’d hardly had the chance between Logan and the shooting. Before she could say anything else to her brothers, Aunt Marta grasped her arm and tugged her aside. Probably for another lecture on funereal etiquette.
“Why are you so angry with your brothers?” she asked.
Why was she so angry? Was it because if they were the shooters, they were risking prison again? Or was it because if they were the shooters, they were trying to kill Logan Payne?
She shook her head. “I’m not...”
“They are struggling with your father’s loss,” Aunt Marta said. “They didn’t get the chance to say goodbye that you got.”
“They could have stayed behind at the cemetery.” She suspected at least one of them probably had...
“At the prison,” Aunt Marta said. “The warden called you to see your father...”
She almost wished she had been spared seeing him like that, but he had asked for her. He had wanted to talk to her. She shuddered now as she remembered seeing him as she had, in so much pain, his life slipping away from him...
“What did he say to you?” her aunt asked.
Stacy tilted her head in confusion, uncertain that she’d heard the older woman correctly. They had never been close—at her aunt’s choosing. She was hardly going to share any secrets with the woman now. “Why do you care?”
“I’m just curious...”
The woman was too self-absorbed to be curious about anyone but herself. She only wanted to know about things that might affect her. Why did she think Stacy’s father’s last words might concern her?
Stacy had no intention of satisfying the woman’s morbid curiosity, so she turned away from her. But Aunt Marta grasped her arm in her talonlike fingers and asked again, “What did he say to you?”
The woman was persistent, or as Uncle Iwan would admit when he had too much to drink, a nag. She wasn’t going to give up until Stacy gave her an answer. Any answer might do...
So she shook her head. “I couldn’t understand him...”
Aunt Marta expelled a little breath—as if she were relieved. Had her brother-in-law taken one of her secrets to his grave?
Stacy had actually misled her aunt. She’d understood what her father had said, she just hadn’t understood why he’d said it. When he’d spoken them, Stacy had put no credence in her father’s last words. She’d blamed the strange statement on the painkillers they’d given him to make him comfortable because they hadn’t been able to do anything else to treat his injury.
She still didn’t understand why he’d said what he had...
“Son of a—!” Garek said as he turned toward the entrance to the pub’s back room.
Logan Payne walked in as if he’d been invited. But Garek had been right to stop himself from finishing his curse. Mrs. Payne was the sweetest woman Stacy had ever met—the most forgiving and generous woman—and probably one of the smartest, as well.
“I thought you got shot,” Milek drunkenly murmured. Had he thought that because of what Stacy had said or because he’d thought he’d hit him?
Logan probably wondered the same thing, because his eyes narrowed with suspicion. He gestured toward the tear in the shoulder of the tuxedo he still wore. It was even more rumpled and smudged with dirt and blood now. “The bullet barely grazed me,” he replied. Then, with a sneer that was somehow both infuriating and sexy as hell, he added, “Somebody’s a lousy shot.”
Garek chuckled. “Then it can’t be any one of us who’s shooting at you. We would have hit you by now.”
Despite her brother’s bravado, neither he nor Milek were expert marksmen. They weren’t killers, either, even though they had actually killed before. And if Logan kept goading them, they might kill again—right here.
Stacy had to do something to diffuse the potentially dangerous situation. It wouldn’t be just dangerous for Logan,
