She shook her head, waving his words away with a fluttery motion of her hand. Yeah, like she needed him to make the rejection worse by talking about it…
When she heard him jogging to catch up to her, she jerked open the car door, intent on getting in before he could say another word and add to her humiliation. But the moment she swung open the door, she let out a startled yelp, turning away to avert her eyes and relieved as hell to find Joe’s strong arms going around her and pulling her close.
“What the fuck?” he muttered, seeing the wilted, blood-drenched roses lying on the driver’s seat. His face was hard when he ordered, “Go back inside.”
He didn’t wait for her to move, just swept her behind him and edged her quickly back toward the house before she even had the chance to protest. Once they were inside, he peered through the glass panes in the door, eyes narrowed as he scrutinized the surrounding area. “You’re calling in sick.”
Sadie’s heart fluttered at his concern, but she continued, “It’s not that easy. I don’t have time to find a sub. You don’t—”
“How long’s this been going on?” he demanded, sending a knowing look over his shoulder. When she opened her mouth to deny prior incidents, he interrupted with, “You’re not nearly as upset by this as you should be. So, don’t even try to tell me it hasn’t happened before. How long’s this been going on?”
She hesitated a moment before admitting, “About a year.”
The outrage in his eyes was exactly why she hadn’t said a word. “Are you shitting me?”
Sadie huffed, frustrated with his anger when she’d only been trying to protect him. “Joe, all the books I read on PTSD said—”
“Piss on the books!” he shouted, closing the gap between them in one long stride to take hold of her upper arms. “You should’ve come to me.”
Sadie lifted her gaze to meet his, momentarily mesmerized by the way the morning sunshine streaming in through the kitchen window made the flecks of gold in his whiskey-colored eyes dance with light. “I didn’t want you to worry,” she murmured, damning the way her heartbeat was thundering in her ears, the tempo picking up the longer he stood this close.
He abruptly released her to run a frustrated hand over his golden brown hair, newly shorn high and tight. “Do you have any idea who it is?”
She shook her head. “It started out with just a few poems left on my desk at school, then explicit notes, telling me what he wanted to do to me. I thought it might’ve been a student, so I reported it to my principal. But the notes got more intense, violent. A couple of weeks ago, the roses started showing up.”
“Do you still have the notes?” Joe asked.
She shook her head. “No, I turned them over to the police.”
This brought Joe up short, and his eyes went stormy as he demanded, “Which police, specifically?”
Sadie closed her eyes, instantly realizing her mistake. “Your brother. Tom.”
Joe’s face went rigid at the mention of his eldest brother, his jaw clenched so hard she half expected to hear his molars crack. “I’m driving you to work,” he announced. “And then I’m going to have a word with my big brother.”
CHAPTER 2
Tom Dawson glanced up from his paperwork and frowned. “You’re early for your shift.”
“Yeah, well, I’m clockin’ in,” Joe retorted as he stormed into Tom’s office. He tossed the bag full of bloody roses onto the desk.
“What the hell?” Tom demanded.
Joe jerked his chin at the bag. “You tell me. This was left in Sadie’s car when she dropped by my house this morning. Why didn’t you tell me some asshole was leaving presents for her?”
Tom glanced toward the open door to his office then got to his feet with a sigh and shut it before resuming his seat behind his desk. “Maybe because I knew how you’d react—and so did Sadie.”
Joe raked a hand over his hair, pacing as much as Tom’s cramped office would allow. “This is bullshit, Tom. Bullshit! I can’t believe you’d keep this from me.”
“There’s nothing useful to tell you,” Tom admitted, spreading his hands. “The notes didn’t have any fingerprints on them except Sadie’s. And there were too many prints on the flower boxes and cards to get anything useful.”
“And that’s it?” Joe snapped.
Tom sighed again, this time with an edge of pity. “Whoever is stalking Sadie hasn’t done anything more than send her bloody roses and shitty poetry. I don’t even have a suspect to investigate.”
Joe pulled a hand down his face, hating how helpless he felt. The asshole had been right outside his fucking house, a couple of yards from his door. And he’d moved fast. Sadie had only been inside for a few minutes. And Joe hadn’t noticed, hadn’t heard anything. Not the car door opening or closing, not another car’s motor. Which meant the guy had probably parked his car down the street and walked to Joe’s house from wherever he’d parked. Hell, for all he knew, the guy had left his little present and then waited in the bushes, hoping to get a glimpse of Sadie’s reaction, taking off only after Joe had ushered Sadie back inside. What if he hadn’t followed her outside? What would’ve happened then?
“You know how these kinds of things work, Tom,” he said. “From everything Sadie’s told me, it sounds like the guy’s upping his game. He’s been content to send her poetry, notes until recently. But they’re growing more explicit, more violent. And now he’s leaving bloody flowers in her fucking car? What’s next?”
Tom spread his arms. “What do you want me to do, Joey?”
“What do I want?” He tossed the other bag he carried onto Tom’s desk.
“Jesus Christ!” Tom cried, his chair rolling back several inches with the force of his startled reaction.
“I want you to help me find this asshole before Sadie ends up like this!” Joe ground out, jabbing a finger at the mutilated rabbit inside the gallon-sized Ziploc bag. “That’s the source of the blood on the roses. I found it in my fucking mailbox, Tom.”
Yeah, that’d been a nice surprise. Joe had noticed that his mailbox was ajar when he was backing out of the driveway to take Sadie to work and stopped to check it out. Clearly, the stalker had wanted it to be found, had wanted to send a message to Joe, a separate threat just for him that underpinned the one he’d left in Sadie’s car. And the best part? The rabbit’s head had been ripped off. Not cut off. That would’ve been humane by comparison. This sick bastard had ripped the motherfucking head off.
And he hadn’t been content with that. Oh, no. He’d also gutted it, probably with a pocketknife, and a dull one at that. It was this kind of savage violence that spoke of something more than just a secret admirer who’d taken things too far. He was dangerous, unstable. And it was only a matter of time before he was no longer content to gut rabbits.
“This bastard is off his fucking nut,” Joe assured his brother. “Considering there was no blood on my driveway or in the grass around the house, I’m guessing he caught the rabbit and gutted it to bloody up the flowers ahead of time and brought the corpse with him.”
Tom nodded, his brows furrowed. “As careful as he’s been up until now, preparing everything ahead of time to leave for Sadie makes sense. But my guess is ripping off its head and leaving it in the mailbox for you to find seems like an impulse of rage, probably because she was with another man. You need to be careful, Joe.”
“I’m not worried about me,” Joe informed him. “I’ll take the bastard out if he wants to try something with me. But I can’t just sit here with my thumb up my ass and wait for him to make a move on Sadie.” What he didn’t need to say was that when this guy finally did show himself, he knew it would be because he couldn’t control himself anymore, couldn’t restrain his obsession with Sadie any longer. And after seeing the guy’s handiwork on the rabbit, the thought of this sicko getting his hands on Sadie scared the shit out of him.
&n
bsp; “I know how much Sadie means to you,” Tom told him, his tone infuriatingly calm. “She means a lot to all of us. Hell, she’s like the kid sister we never had.”
Kid sister. Right…
“But I can’t assign a deputy to be her personal bodyguard for who knows how long,” Tom continued. “Aside from sending out a couple of guys to process Sadie’s car and take prints off your mailbox to see if we get anything, there’s not shit I can do, and you know it.”
“Put me on it,” Joe suggested without hesitation. He’d been mulling over just this kind of solution on the drive over to the department. When Tom opened his mouth to protest, Joe said in a rush, “You know the guys are nervous about me coming back on duty, but the Old Man wants me back on the job. So assign me to the case. You’re car two. Who’s going to argue with you about it?”
Tom frowned at the slang term for the sheriff’s second in command. “I might be executive deputy, but I still can’t put you on the case,” he insisted. “It’s personal. You couldn’t be objective.”
“Bullshit,” Joe shot back. “I know I’ve been through a hell of a lot, Tom, but I need you to trust me. So pull strings, kiss asses—whatever you have to do in order to make this happen. I’m not letting something happen to Sadie because of red tape.”
“I can’t assign you, Joe,” Tom reiterated, holding up his hand, halting the furious protest that immediately rose to Joe’s lips. “But I can’t control what you do on your own time either—like look over the case file. And if you offer up any suggestions based on your own observations…”
Joe gave him a terse nod. That was good enough for him. Now, he just needed this asshole to make a mistake. One mistake. And then he was going down.
• • •
“Hey, Ms. Keaton.”
Sadie glanced up from grading quizzes on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and offered Sam Hittle a smile. “Hey, Sam. Did you forget something?”
The tall, powerfully built senior grunted. “Left my book.” He held up his bulky Norton Anthology. “Again.”
Sadie gave him an amused grin and folded her hands on her desk. “This is becoming a habit. Something tells me you’re forgetting it on purpose. Not subconsciously trying to avoid the unit on women’s literature, are you, Sam?”
“Of course not, Ms. Keaton,” he drawled with a hint of sarcasm, giving her a disarming smile that brought dimples to his cheeks, a smile that was no doubt the reason for the throngs of high school girls that flocked to every single one of his football practices to sigh and giggle over the handsome boy.
When she gave him a knowing look, the impudent cad winked at her and brandished the anthology like a trophy before pivoting and jogging toward the door. But he came to an abrupt halt at the doorway when he found it blocked.
“Sorry, dude,” Sam said in a rush, holding up his free hand.
Sadie struggled to stifle the gasp of surprise—and desire—that escaped her when she saw Joe standing in the doorway, dressed in his Class A’s and looking hot as hell. She’d never thought of herself as a holster sniffer—the term the deputies used to refer to the law enforcement groupies who threw themselves at anything and everything with a badge—but she had to admit, raw masculinity and fierce authority looked seriously freaking good on Joe.
“Dude?” Joe repeated, giving Sam a stern look. “That’s ‘Deputy Dawson’ or ‘sir’ to you, son.”
Sam cast a glance over his shoulder at Sadie. “Oh, hey—is this the guy?”
She flushed for the second time that day when Joe sent her a questioning glance. Oh, good. More humiliation. Because she hadn’t been tormenting herself with memories of their kiss and his subsequent backpedaling all day or anything…
“You’ve heard about me?” Joe asked, not moving his gaze away from her face.
“Oh, yeah,” Sam told him, ever helpful. “When you were on deployment, we did a big care package project for honor society. And thank-you letters at Thanksgiving and stuff. It was pretty cool. Thanks for your service, man—uh, I mean, sir.”
Joe’s brows lifted slightly. Then he finally turned his attention to Sam and shook his extended hand, giving him a terse nod. An awkward silence fell in the room for a few seconds before Sam jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Well, I guess I better get to practice before coach kicks my ass.”
Sadie gave him a disapproving look. “Language, Sam.”
He just grinned and slipped through the doorway when Joe took a step inside.
“You told your students about me?” Joe asked as soon as Sam was gone.
Sadie busied herself with her papers, gathering everything together now that her ride was here—and to keep from having to look at him too long for fear of breaking out into spontaneous drooling. “Of course,” she said with a shrug. “I thought it would be great for the students to support our troops as part of their service projects.”
Joe’s smug grin grew. “There are plenty of servicemen and -women in the county you could’ve mentioned.”
Yeah, but I wasn’t in love with any of them…
“It helps if they can make a personal connection,” she evaded. “Several of the students knew someone deployed, but most didn’t. I gave them a name and a face, a real person, to make the project more meaningful.”
He nodded, strolling toward her, a hint of his grin still tugging at the corners of his full mouth, making her wonder what he was thinking, for he was clearly preoccupied as he visually inspected the room, taking in her surroundings with his scrutinizing gaze.
“So,” she said, trying to keep her tone light, “how’s your shift going?”
He grunted. “I haven’t even had so much as a traffic violation. I’m sure Tom thought he was doing me a favor by putting me in a slow area, but it was boring as hell. On the upside, it gave me time to go over your file.”
She swallowed hard, waiting for another admonishment for not telling him about her stalker, but when it didn’t come, she was glad to change the subject. “Did you hear from Kyle?”
At the mention of his younger brother who’d broken family tradition—and their father’s heart—by joining the FBI instead of the sheriff’s department, Joe’s smile actually reached his eyes. “Yeah. Called to tell me I was a total loser and that I’d probably fuck up my first day back.”
She laughed. “Nice. Dare I ask how you responded?”
He chuckled. “There was more than a little profanity involved. And I might’ve invited him to bite my ass.”
Brothers.
Being an only child, she’d never quite understood the Dawson brothers’ brand of affection for one another. But having grown up next door to the houseful of rowdy boys, she’d always had a front-row seat to the brawls in the front yard that often ended in bloody noses, black eyes, and more than a little laughter. They might talk tough and give each other a hard time, but they’d always have each other’s backs.
“Any chance he’ll be coming back to town soon?” she asked, trying not to focus too much on the way his uniform hugged his broad shoulders and toned pecs.
Joe shook his head. “Nah. He’s determined to stay pissed at the Old Man. And you know my dad—no way in hell is he going to admit he was wrong.”
She caught the bitter note in Joe’s voice and decided to change the subject once again, “Any word on my car?”
“The guys towed it in for processing,” he told her, turning his back and giving her a good look at a ridiculously fine ass as he skimmed the student poetry she had hanging on the bulletin board. “You can borrow mine until they’re finished.” Before she could ask about its return, he turned back to her and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “How recent are these poems?”
She shook her head, a little confused as to why he’d be asking. “Uh…they were from an assignment we did a few weeks ago in my creative writing class. I do a poetry unit at the beg
inning of the school year.”
She could practically see him mentally sorting through the data as he tried to put the pieces together—and the frustration when the pieces didn’t fit. “Any of the students last year have a similar writing style to your stalker?”
Her eyebrows came together in a frown. “I didn’t really try comparing any of them.”
He jerked his head toward the doorway. “Who was that kid?”
Her brows shot up. “Sam? He’s one of my best and brightest. Honor student, star athlete.”
Joe heaved a sigh, clearly having hoped she’d have something else to say. “Any other students come to mind? Pissed off about grades? Any bullies—or kids being bullied—who’d be trying to get your attention?”
She shook her head. “No one comes to mind. Just the same teenage angst and attitude I always get.”
“You said that the notes were showing up on your desk at first, right?” he asked, his brows knit together tightly in a dark frown. “Whoever was leaving the notes had to have access to your office. And the school’s doors are always locked during the day.”
“But not after school,” she argued. “Too many activities going on. And even though I lock my classroom before I leave, all the building locks are keyed the same. So anyone with a key could still get in—staff, teachers, student assistants, cleaning crews… It’s hardly Fort Knox after you get inside the building.”
He put his hands on his hips in frustration, the position making his biceps bulge beneath the fabric of his shirt. “What about parents or colleagues? Any of them unusually friendly? Or unfriendly?”
She’d certainly had her fair share of irate parents over the past few years, but she honestly couldn’t think of anyone who held a grudge or what would be considered an unhealthy obsession. Was she being too naive? Had she missed something somewhere? Had she overlooked some vital clue? “No,” she told him, wishing she could give him something to work with.
“What about that ex of yours?” Joe asked, an edge in his voice that was unmistakable. Her heart fluttered at the thought that he might actually be jealous. “The beefcake.”
Way of the Warrior Page 12
