were ticking away, and with each one of them, the risk got higher and higher. Someway, somehow, she had to get this hot cowboy marshal to go along with an asinine plan that had little or no chance of succeeding.
Still, little was better than zero.
Without warning, he yanked the baseball cap from her head and threw it in the direction her Glock had landed. Her hair was in a ponytail, but it dropped against her shoulder. He studied it. Then her eyes. Every inch of her face. Maybe trying to figure out if she was telling him the truth. Or maybe he was just giving her the twice over as she’d done to him.
She hoped not.
They didn’t need both of them feeling this involuntary heat.
“You sure this isn’t about your father?” he pressed.
“I’m sure. I haven’t heard from him since he escaped from jail.”
And she didn’t want to get into that sore subject now. Declan had arrested her father, and then her father had escaped. It wouldn’t do any good to mention that she believed her father was innocent of at least the most serious charge—attempted murder. That really wouldn’t help in getting Declan to cooperate if she questioned his lawman’s skills of apprehending a guilty suspect.
“Could you at least move the gun?” Eden asked. “Because we need to talk. I figure at most I’ve got twenty minutes left before someone will want to know why I haven’t fired a shot.”
She was being generous with that timeline. The mysterious caller had told her to show Declan ASAP what she’d been sent. Why, she didn’t know, but it seemed as if that was only to taunt him.
Or rile him even more than he already was.
Like poking an ornery rattler with a short stick. It hardly seemed wise, but she would show him. And hope for a way out of this.
Declan slid his intense green eyes to the gun, then back to her. “Yes to the talking. No to moving the gun.”
There was just a touch of an Irish brogue beneath that Texas drawl. A strange combination. And one she might have enjoyed hearing if his finger wasn’t on the trigger of the gun pressed to her throat.
“I agreed to kill you because I didn’t have a choice,” Eden explained. No beautiful lilt to her words. Her voice was strained like the rest of her. One big giant nerve. “If the planted info had been leaked, it would have set off an opposing militia group that would in turn kill me, the rest of my family and anyone they thought might be a friend of mine.”
Finally, he let up a little on the pressure to her chest and eased back a fraction. Still close. Still touching. He probably hadn’t realized that he had his right leg shoved between hers. Eden’s gaze drifted in that direction. Then back up at Declan.
Correction. He’d noticed.
But clearly he didn’t plan to do anything about the intimate contact between them.
“I have two sisters,” she added. “They’re nineteen and twenty. Barely adults, and they’ve been through more than enough with my father’s arrest and disappearance. They don’t deserve to die because someone’s targeting you.”
“You could have arranged for them and you to be protected,” he pointed out.
“I did the best I could, but there’s no place to hide from these men. Eventually they’d get through any security I could set up. They proved that by hacking into my computer and leaving that bogus info.”
Declan made another sound that led her to believe he was making fun of her.
“You ever killed a man before?” he challenged, but he didn’t wait for Eden to answer. “My guess is no.”
He put his face right next to hers. So close that the brim of his midnight-black Stetson scraped against her forehead. It was hard to tell where the Stetson ended and his hair began, because they were the same color.
“And my second guess is that you can’t kill me,” he went on. “Of course, that’s not really a guess since I wouldn’t let you get the chance.”
“I wasn’t planning to kill you,” she said, but had to clear her throat and repeat it so it’d have sound. Great. She was acting like a wuss rather than a P.I. with her family’s lives, and hers, at stake.
“You’re here with a gun,” he reminded her.
“I didn’t intend to use it. Well, not to shoot you anyway. I will have to fire, though, because I want whoever’s on the other end of that camera to believe you’re dead. And to make sure that person doesn’t come in here and try to do the job himself, I need to fire soon.”
With his gaze still pinned to hers, he backed up again. “Maybe we should do just that—let the person come in here and try to kill me,” he suggested. “If he’s really out there. He won’t get far. I’m thinking a step in the house. Two at most. And I wouldn’t let him get off the first shot.”
“I don’t doubt it. But I can’t risk that. His death could start a chain reaction that’ll get my sisters killed.”
Thankfully, he didn’t disagree with that. Well, not verbally anyway. “Tell me everything you know about the person who hired you to do this.”
“There isn’t time.” Eden tried to look out the window to make sure no one was coming, but the angle was wrong. “He said I had to have the job done by seven-thirty. It’s seven-twenty now.”
“Make time,” he countered.
Eden huffed and tried to think of the fastest explanation. It wasn’t too hard because she didn’t know a lot of facts. “I don’t have a clue who he is. As I said, he used an untraceable cell phone. It’s the same with the info he emailed me about you. I tried to track down the source, but it led me to a coffee shop in San Antonio where hundreds of people use the internet each day. There aren’t any security cameras and no surveillance feed from nearby businesses.”
He gave her another hard look. “What info about me did he email you?”
“It’s on my phone.”
Eden glanced in the direction of her pocket, where his hip was still brushing against hers. She waited until he nodded before she reached between them, and the back of her hand did more than brush. She had no choice but to touch him in a place that she shouldn’t be touching.
He still didn’t back away.
But Declan did make a slight sound of discomfort.
Eden knew how he felt. This wasn’t comfortable for her, either, and it was even worse because touching him wasn’t nearly as unpleasant as it should have been. After all, he was holding her at gunpoint.
Still, it was time to poke that rattler.
She went through the emails on her phone until she reached the first one the man had sent her. It was a series of photos with just four words: Your target, Declan O’Malley.
She went through the shots, the first a recent one of him wearing his gun and badge and going into the marshals’ building in Maverick Springs.
