Ms. Starr’s Most Inconvenient Change of Heart (A Raven's Run Romantic Mystery Book 1)

by Dorothy St. James

  “Damn right, I don’t trust him.”

  “Then take him with you. I’ve had enough danger and excitement in the past couple of days to last me ten lifetimes, thank you very much.” She started to close the bathroom door.

  Logan stuck his foot in the way. “You’ll be perfectly safe with me.”

  “Yeah, right. Safe. What, you’re going on a coffee run dressed like that?”

  “No, I’m not going for coffee. But, Sam, it’s too dangerous to leave you here alone. I can’t take that risk.” When she still didn’t budge, he sighed. “Please, Sam. Please, come with me. I’ve found Rafe. He’s here in Raven’s Run. I’m going after him.”

  Her chin went up a fraction of an inch. “Very well. Give me five minutes to get ready.”

  She slammed the bathroom door closed again.

  I’D CHANGED BACK INTO the sweatpants and sweatshirt and new sneakers we’d bought in town. It’d taken quite a bit of haranguing on my part, but Logan finally gave me the full details of his crazy plan. His partner was on the other side of the lake. Logan planned to capture and question him. So with the cover of night hiding us, we crawled into his uncle’s old johnboat.

  “Wait a minute,” I had to shout over the boat’s old rattle-trap of an engine. “We’re not the police. And if we’re not the cops, how is this not kidnapping?”

  “It’s best if you don’t think about it too much,” he shouted back.

  “Great. It’s kidnapping.”

  When we were about halfway across the lake, Logan cut the engine. We floated for several minutes, listening to the slosh, slosh of water slapping against the side of the boat.

  “It’s me,” came a hoarse whisper from somewhere to the right of us.

  Logan flicked a flashlight on and then quickly off again.

  “Who’s that?” I demanded.

  “Cole.”

  “Your brother? I thought you were dead-set on keeping your family out of your affairs.”

  “I was. I am. But I need someone who can protect you if something goes wrong. And Cole had already offered to help me.”

  “If something goes wrong. You mean, like if you get killed?”

  “It’s a possibility,” he said as if it was as simple as that.

  “Wait. Wait. What do you mean you might get killed?” I so didn’t like where this—where we—were going.

  “Rafe is good at his job. Perhaps better than me.”

  “You need a different line of work.”

  There was a long pause before Logan said, “You’re right. I need to start thinking about finding a different career, one where I can trust those I work with.”

  I gasped. Loudly.

  “What?” Logan demanded.

  “I’m in shock, heart-stopping shock, mind you. You’re admitting I’m right?”

  “Don’t be silly. I’ve never known you not be right, Sam.”

  “Things have changed over the years. I’ve changed.”

  “You might have lost confidence in yourself but from everything I’ve seen, your instincts are as sharp as ever.”

  “If that’s true, let me tell you what my instincts are shouting right now. They’re saying you should let the police, the FBI, anyone else chase after your partner.”

  “There’s no time. Rafe is smart. He’ll be monitoring all official communications. Hell, he’s probably monitoring my throwaway phone.”

  “But you contacted your brother?”

  “I did.”

  “So Rafe might know we’re coming.”

  “He might.”

  My mouth felt dry. I was floundering for something to say to that, something to stop Logan from risking his neck, when Cole’s boat pulled up alongside ours. “Is he still at the fish camp?” Cole asked without any preamble.

  “According to cousin Bob, he is.”

  “He’s at your cousin’s restaurant?” I demanded.

  “No, not the restaurant,” Logan explained as he dug through his supplies. “He’s hunkered down at one of the fishing camps that have been in operation around the lakes ever since they were built in the 1940s.”

  “It can be confusing even for the locals,” Cole said. “The fried food restaurants and the camp sites are all called fish camps around here.”

  “Thanks for doing this, bro.” Logan handed his brother a gun from one of his slate gray bags.

  “Glad to be able to help,” Cole said. Instead of trying to talk his brother out of this fool idea, he checked the gun’s magazine as if he knew how to handle the weapon. “Let’s get this done.”

  Chapter 30

  The sun had risen higher over the horizon than Logan liked by the time the two boats rowed to the shoreline. He grumbled about it as we went aground under the heavy canopy of oaks.

  “Stay in the boat,” he ordered as he stepped onto the sandy shore. “Stay with her,” he then said to Cole.

  “Wait. You’re not seriously going in there alone?” Cole asked before I had a chance.

  “Stay with Sam.” Logan’s voice had an unusual edge to it. “Keep her safe.”

  I tried to call out and stop him, but he’d already started jogging toward the dense stand of trees. Logan shouldn’t be running toward danger alone. He needed someone to watch his back.

  Cole must have agreed with me.

  “Stay here,” he barked and then trotted after his brother.

  I hunkered down in the boat. I’d been so eager to have Cole go with his brother a moment ago, but now as with only the crickets and frogs for company, I wished for Logan or Cole to get back to the boat to keep me company. The longer I sat there, the tighter I had to hug myself to ward off the nervous shivers that grew stronger with every passing moment.

  What is that?

  Leaves had crunched somewhere nearby in the woods. I scanned the inky black shadows of the forest, searching for something I knew I couldn’t see.

  “It was probably a mouse. Or a bird. Doesn’t the early bird get the worm? Well, those worms are in the ground. Right?” I whispered to myself.

  The leaves crunched again.

  “Cole? Logan?” I whispered not loud enough to startle a sharp-eared bird in the leaves. “A bird. Just a bird.” I closed my eyes and tried my best to picture a cute little fuzzy brown bird poking around in the leaves, making all that noise.

  Although I managed to picture that bird, my imagination also conjured an all too realistic facsimile of Rafe—tall, dark and deadly—coming through the woods toward me.

  My fingers curled around the oar Logan had left at the bottom of the boat. It was my only weapon, that oar. And while I didn’t think I’d need to use it, I felt better gripping it as if it were a Samurai sword and I was a highly trained warrior.

  When I opened my eyes, the vision of Rafe, alive and real as anything, stalking toward me remained. It had to be my panicked imagination playing tricks on me.

  I blinked.

  Nope. He was still there.

  He snarled as he lunged toward me and grabbed the bow of the boat. With a scream, I smacked him on the side of the head with the oar I’d grabbed.

  “You,” he wheezed accusingly, still reaching for me.

  I smacked him again.

  LOGAN HAD JUST REACHED Rafe’s tent and discovered it empty when he heard Sam’s scream. With a curse, he charged back toward the boat. He pulled his gun out of his holster as he sprinted faster than he’d ever run in his life.

  Halfway back to the shoreline, he collided with what felt like a tree.

  “Dammit,” the tree cried from where it’d landed on the ground.

  “Cole? Why aren’t you with Sam?” He pulled his brother up.

  “I was heading back there. She screamed.”

  “I know. I heard. Why the hell aren't you with her? Protecting her? Rafe isn’t in his tent.”

  With that news, which must have sparked a new urgency in his brother, Cole managed to outpace Logan. But only for a few yards. Fear and determination proved to be a powerful combination fo
r Logan. No one, not even a world-class athlete would have made it to the lake’s shoreline before him.

  With his gun leading the way, he burst out onto the small sandy beach prepared to sacrifice his life to save Sam’s.

  What he found nearly made his heart stop in his chest.

  Sam stood like a valkyrie balanced on the boat’s bow, the oar held like a mythical goddess’ spear prepared to strike down any warrior who displeased her. On the ground at her feet lay Rafe. A small dark puddle that appeared to be blood ringed his bruised head.

  “Sam? How did—?”

  Rafe was a highly trained warrior.

  A part-time model, full-time librarian shouldn’t have been able to get the upper hand like this.

  “He came at me. So I hit him.” There was no emotion in her voice. She might as well have been describing her shopping list.

  Cole finally caught up to them.

  “Tie up Rafe,” Logan ordered as he tossed down his backpack. “You’ll find zip ties the front pocket.”

  Knowing his brother could hold his own with a wounded Rafe even if his partner decided to wake up before they had him secured, Logan moved cautiously toward Sam who still hadn’t moved.

  “Don’t hit me,” he said, holding up his hands as he approached. He’d seen the signs before. She was in shock and probably not thinking straight. If he wasn’t careful, he would end up on the ground next to Rafe.

  He reached out to her. “Give me the oar.”

  “I can’t. He might get back up.”

  “I doubt that, Sammy Jammy. You did a good job on him. I have a feeling his head is going to be buzzy for hours.” He braved another step closer.

  She raised the oar like she might swing it at him. “He grabbed the boat. I thought he was going to kill me.”

  Unlikely. If Rafe had wanted Sam dead, she wouldn’t have seen him coming, and she’d be dead. It was as simple as that.

  He looked down at his friend, who was starting to come around. Cole had his arms tied and had started working on securing his legs with the zip ties.

  “What were you planning?” Logan quietly asked Rafe, not expecting an answer. There’d be time for interrogations later. What they needed to do now was to get back to the cabin and get Sam back to safety.

  In order to do that, he needed to get that oar out of her hands.

  “Perhaps you could hand the oar to me?” he tried again and took another step toward her. The direct approach hadn’t worked the first time, but what the hell. Couldn’t hurt to try again, could it?

  He ducked just as she swung. The bottom of the oar brushed the top of his head. It didn’t hurt. It only messed up his already disheveled hair.

  “Oh God, oh God, oh God, Logan. Did I hit you?”

  The oar clattered to the bottom of the boat. Her hands dropped uselessly to her sides.

  “I’m okay, baby. Takes more than that to knock me down.” He pulled her into his arms and held her as if nothing else in the world mattered but her. Because, God help him, it was true.

  Then and only then, with her secure in his arms, did his heart finally started working normally again. “You’re safe. You’re safe.”

  He’d never felt anything more satisfying than holding this beautiful woman in his arms and having her cling to him too.

  It was a feeling he never wanted to lose.

  Chapter 31

  A cold wind blew across the lake as the johnboat motored toward the cabin, which had recently come into view. The sun had risen above the cabin, but hadn’t yet crested over the ancient oaks, so the cabin was still shrouded in shadows.

  Shadows that moved.

  Logan shivered.

  “Cole,” he called to his brother who followed closely behind with Rafe bound and gagged in the bottom of his boat. “I need you to hold back.”

  His brother’s gaze, which had locked onto the cabin and the shadows surrounding it, narrowed. “You want to put Sam in the boat with me?”

  “What? Why?” She squinted toward where the two brothers were watching but clearly had missed the signs that they had visitors.

  “No, she stays with me,” Logan said with a sigh when his mind was shouting, “Hell yeah. Put her in Cole’s boat.” But leaving her behind would only raise suspicions. Why he thought he needed to keep Rafe a secret, he had no clue.

  He had nothing other than a niggling feeling at the back of his neck that things weren’t as they should be.

  “What’s going on?” Sam demanded, this time with a tone that told him he’d have a fight on his hands if he didn’t answer her right away.

  “Thacker’s back.”

  “Oh.” She frowned as she stared at the cabin. “I hope he didn’t blast down the door again.”

  “Blast the door? What?” Cole demanded.

  “I’ll tell you later.” Logan had enough to think about. He should have contacted Thacker about Jason Billings’ surprise arrival and even more surprising revelations. But he hadn’t. He wondered if Thacker and his men had found and talked with Jason already. If they had, that could be a problem. Though, he had no clue why it’d be a problem. Rafe was clearly as guilty as hell. Still, a part of him wanted to protect his former partner. “Stay out here and act as if you’re fishing until I signal you.”

  “Got it.” Cole pulled out a fishing rod from where it’d been tucked under a side railing. “I’ll wait here unless I hear shooting. And Logan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Whatever’s going on, be careful.”

  “ANY LUCK TRACKING DOWN the murdering head of Global Tech?” was the first question Logan asked when we stepped off the boat to greet Thacker who’d been waiting for us on the dock.

  “You tell me,” Thacker said, his tone cautious. “Billings suddenly dropped off the face of the earth last night. Did you have anything to do with that?”

  Logan shrugged and then turned to offer me a hand in climbing out of the boat. “Wish I could say I did. But we’ve been stuck here. How could—?”

  “You’ve disabled your tracker. You could have gone anywhere in the world in the past twenty-four hours and I wouldn’t have known.” Thacker took the opportunity to frown at me as if it were my idea to dig out Logan’s tracker.

  “We were both in the cabin all night,” I said without any of the telltale heat flooding my face when I lied. We were in the cabin all night. And thinking about what we’d nearly done in the cabin—in Logan’s bed—did start to make me feel a little flushed.

  Still, I should have felt at least a little guilty for omitting the part about Jason breaking into the bedroom like a madman and almost shooting Logan’s head off. But I didn’t.

  Not even a crumb of guilt fell my way.

  I was beginning to understand Logan’s reasons for holding back the truth and bending it whenever necessary. Someone like Thacker, a man who saw nothing wrong with secretly injecting tracking devices into his employees as if they were animals, didn’t deserve my trust, and he certainly didn’t deserve my honesty.

  “You were in the cabin all night? Is that so?” Thacker stepped toward me like a man who wanted to do harm.

  Instinctively I retreated. Only, there was nothing but wide-open lake behind me. Logan caught me around the waist before I splashed into the cold water.

  “Thacker, don’t be an ass.” Logan held my hand as he led the way back up to the cabin. “You and I both know you’ve researched every little detail in Sam’s life, which means you know she never lies.”

  “No one is that perfect,” Thacker grumbled. “No. One.”

  “Sam is,” Logan said as we entered the cabin’s cozy living room.

  “Thank you.” Despite the tension filling my body, I smiled.

  “Well, you are. Perfect, that is.”

  “Okay, okay.” Thacker wedged his way in between us, breaking apart our clasped hands in the process. “Clearly you two were in the cabin all night getting...um...reacquainted. That, I can believe.”

  Jerk. I bit my tongue to keep m
y opinion to myself and looked around, wondering if Thacker’s team of men had searched the house and if Jason was even still in the cabin. When we’d left, Jason had appeared to have taken up residence on the sofa with no intention of going anywhere until the virus had either been deployed or destroyed.

  Clearly, Logan was wondering the same thing. It took him a moment to turn his roaming attentions back to his employer. “Leave Sam out of our business.” His voice was low and deadly.

  Thacker smiled. “Got it. And the virus? What are you doing about it?”

  “I’m trying to write a code that’ll disable it. A long shot, really. The virus was sent out to all the devices that use Global Tech’s virus protection programs and apps in the latest update.”

  “Sure. Sure.” Thacker didn’t seem to be listening.

  “And what’s happening back at headquarters?” Logan asked.

  “The rest of the team is still looking into the code you described, since we can’t go breaking into Global Tech’s computers. It is against the law, you know. Unless you left out a vital piece of information, they don’t see a virus downloading onto anyone’s devices—or code that looks as if it’s anything that can cause any harm.”

  “But the—!” I started to protest.

  “I’m just reporting what the others have told me. Even so, I told them to keep working on possible solutions.”

  “Tell them not to put themselves out,” I said rather more sarcastically than I’d intended. But really, how could Thacker be so dense? Logan had risked his life to get what little information he had. “With or without your help, Logan will stop the virus,” I baldly added.

  “You sound very sure of that.” From anyone else, that might have been a compliment. From Thacker it sounded like a threat. He ran his hand over the top of the fireplace mantle. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  “Perhaps,” I said. And yes, even though it was the truth, my cheeks did start to burn. Luckily, Thacker didn’t seem to notice.

  “I’m not here to test your abilities or argue about whether this virus exists or not.” He reached into the leather briefcase he’d been carrying with him.