by Kait Nolan
“Any word back from the detective?” Harrison asked.
She shifted her attention to Ty. “You already told them?”
“Only the essentials, which is all I know. You’re about to tell us all of it.” Without batting an eye, he turned back to Harrison. “To answer your question, the house was locked but there are scratches around the door where the lock was probably picked. Alarms didn’t go off. I’ll get both of those taken care of tomorrow when we get to Nashville and meet with Detective Fisher.”
The men nodded, as if this made complete sense.
Paisley crossed her arms. “Excuse me?”
Ty shrugged. “There’s no reason to go tonight. Metro PD has eyes on your house, and we already know whoever did it is likely closer to here than there.”
She blinked, trying to process. “You’re going back to Nashville with me?”
“Of course.” His mouth pulled down, as if he was annoyed the thought hadn’t occurred to her. “I want a look at things myself and to talk to Fisher about the case in person. And you need to get more clothes before we come back here.”
“Come back here,” she repeated, her head spinning.
“You’re staying with me until this is resolved.”
If Ty noticed the others’ startled reactions to his announcement, he didn’t show it. He didn’t even seem to be aware of her rising level of annoyance.
“I’m what now?”
“It makes the most sense. You can work anywhere, and I can protect you better here. My town. My turf.”
She waited to see if he’d add his woman. But of course, he didn’t. He was too busy orchestrating her life like some kind of op, as if she were a chess piece on a board instead of a person with wants, desires, and opinions of her own.
“I didn’t ask you for any of this.” Considering there was a potent blend of temper and anxiety kicking through her, Paisley thought she kept her tone admirably even.
“Yeah. And we’ll talk about that later.”
A headache started to claw its way up the back of her neck as the temper won out. She paced a short circuit behind the couch, waving her hand at him. “It’s like Keith Rimmer all over again. You just decided to handle it with no input from me.”
Ty snorted. “He never bothered you again.”
“You broke his nose!”
“He grabbed your ass. I was just supposed to let that go?”
Sebastian raised a hand. “Uh, did you two have an even busier few weeks than I realized?”
“High school,” Paisley bit out. “He did it in high school.”
“Wait, you two knew each other in high school?” Laurel asked.
“We dated for most of it.” The array of “Oh’’s that went around the room made Paisley wonder what Ty might have said about her without using her actual name. That was a question for another time. “In case it’s escaped your notice, we aren’t in high school anymore, Tyson. I’m not yours to protect.”
He closed the distance between them so fast, she stumbled back a step. He didn’t touch her, but she could feel the heat of temper rolling off him in waves. His voice was low, lethal. “If you think I’m capable of walking away again, you are sorely mistaken.”
Her body leapt to attention at the promise and possession in his words. God, she wanted that. Wanted him. But she knew better than to trust it. He’d made it very clear after the wedding that he had nothing to offer.
Don’t make promises you can’t keep.
The words hovered on the tip of her tongue. But that would show her hand, and she didn’t know if this urgency she felt from him would last once the danger was past. Needing to get back on some kind of even keel, she dug deep to find something—anything—that would diffuse a little of this desperate, vibrating tension between them. “You’re a lot bossier than you were at eighteen.”
A hint of humor flickered in his eyes. “Blame the Army.”
Her lips twitched. She didn’t want to leave him, didn’t want to go home. A forced-proximity situation wasn’t the most ideal way to explore things with him, but it was the opportunity she had. She wouldn’t waste it. “Fine, since you asked so sweetly, I’ll stay.”
Ty’s posture relaxed as he visibly dropped from DEFCON 1. “I’ll work on the bossy thing.”
She could imagine other scenarios where that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. “Yeah, we’ll talk about that later, too.” Giving in to the need to touch him, she patted his chest, “Meanwhile, if you want me to spill my guts, you’re going to have to feed me. I believe I was promised nachos.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He skimmed a thumb over her cheek, making her heart jump, even as she reflexively turned into the touch.
His eyes searched hers for another long moment before he turned away, wiping the emotion from his face. “Y’all eaten?”
Paisley didn’t actually hear their responses. She was too busy trying to catch her breath. Duke trotted over, leaning against her legs and head-butting her hand to demand pets. She buried her trembling fingers in his fur.
As Ty moved to the kitchen, Ivy wandered over, murmuring sotto voce, “Lucy, you got some ’splaining to do.”
“See,” Sebastian insisted. “He smiled.”
Laurel poked him in the ribs.
“Keep it up, Donnelly, and you forfeit your dinner rations,” Ty called from the kitchen.
“Just callin’ it like I see it.”
Because she still felt a little shaky, Paisley circled around and dropped onto the sofa. Duke sprawled at her feet. “Okay, so, not that I don’t appreciate the collective support, but I’m not exactly clear on why you’re all here.”
“Ty called, we came,” Sebastian said simply. “It’s what brothers do.”
“And because, collectively, we can bring to bear considerably more brain power than has likely been devoted to your case by Metro PD,” Harrison added. “I guarantee they haven’t had a profiler look at your situation.”
“Profiler?”
Ivy took a seat, leaning against her husband and looking faintly embarrassed as she raised her hand.
“I thought your degree was in psychology.”
“Forensic psychology. I originally intended to go into the FBI before I decided I preferred dealing with murder on paper.”
Paisley stared. “How did I not know this about you?”
“Never came up. Plenty from our pasts hasn’t.” She shot a pointed glance at Ty.
“Subtle,” Paisley muttered. “And don’t think I won’t remember this next time I get a wild hair to write romantic suspense.”
“Noted. But for now, what’s going on?”
“I don’t actually know where to start. It’s hard to say what the beginning was.”
“What’s the first thing that gave you hinky vibes?” Laurel offered her own wry smile. “Recovering attorney.”
“There were packages to my P.O. Box. The contents weren’t overtly threatening, but they struck me as odd. Usually, when fans send me stuff—which isn’t all that often—there’s a letter that comes with it, gushing about my books and telling me about why they think I’ll like whatever it is they sent. It’s lovely, really. But this wasn’t that. They were anonymous. No return address, no signature. No explanation at all. Just this printed card with ‘Your biggest fan’ on it. Maybe I’ve read Misery one too many times. I told myself I was being paranoid after I got mugged. Looking for conspiracies that weren’t there.”
“You got mugged?” Guard dog Ty was back, handing her a beer. “When?”
She sipped to wet the throat gone dry. “Back in July. Classic attacked in a parking garage situation by a guy in a ski mask. I wasn’t hurt, really. Just scared. He got away with my my purse. I reported it to the police, of course, but nothing ever came of it. There weren’t any cameras and no leads to follow.”
“When did the packages start?” Harrison asked.
“About four months ago.”
“What made you decide to go to the police?” Laurel asked.
>
“I didn’t go to them initially. I mean, what was I going to say? Someone is anonymously sending me Starbucks gift cards and my favorite tea, and I’m freaked out about it? It was mostly just a feeling of…something being off. Then one day I ran into a police contact of mine at the post office when I went to pick up my mail. There was another package. He saw my face and asked about it.”
“Fisher,” Ty concluded.
“Yes.”
He finished passing out beverages to everyone else. “How exactly do you know him?”
Not Detective Fisher. Just a surname. Paisley wondered if he recognized that shade of green he was wearing. “Joel is one of the instructors from the citizen’s police academy I took last year.”
Ty frowned. “Why did you go to a citizen’s police academy?”
“Book research. I thought it would help me make some connections with actual law enforcement who would let me pick their brains for plot purposes. Which it did. I got a friend in the crime lab out of it, too.” She shrugged. “Anyway, I told him I had the heebee jeebees, and he said he’d open a case, just to be safe. I really appreciated the fact that he didn’t tell me I was crazy. When the package turned out to be a Funko Pop! Jessica Fletcher, I was back to thinking I was just paranoid.”
“The chick from Murder, She Wrote?” Ivy asked.
“Yeah.”
“You always loved that show,” Ty murmured.
“Still do. I watch reruns when I can’t sleep, which I’ve probably mentioned on social media at some point or other. It was, in a sense, thoughtful. But more came. One here. Two there. And then, a couple of weeks ago, I got the first mailed directly to my house.”
“Somebody found out your home address,” Sebastian observed.
“I don’t use a pen name. A determined person with reasonable computer skills can find it. But nobody ever has before. It freaked me out, so Joel had Rico—he’s my pal in the crime lab—go over it, but there was no trace evidence that could lead anywhere. He said that since there weren’t any overt threats and no actual laws had been broken, there was basically nothing he could do. I got home from that conversation to find another one sitting on my doorstep. No address at all. Just placed dead center of my welcome mat. That one was the collar I found on Duke. After that, I decided it would be prudent to get the hell out of town.”
Ty crossed his arms and glowered. “You should have told me.”
“Growling at me about it isn’t going to change the fact that I didn’t, so stop.”
Ivy narrowed her eyes. “It’s odd. As you say, nothing seems overtly threatening, but it sounds like each one has gotten a little more personal. Like the sender is saying ‘Look, see, I know you.’ And certainly, the switch from the P.O. Box to showing up at your house would have been worrisome on its own. But it’s a gigantic leap to go from packages, to breaking in, to finding you here. There’s frustration in the action. You clearly weren’t behaving in the way the sender wanted or anticipated. The question is, what do they want?”
“I think the more immediate question is whether she was followed directly or tracked.”
Paisley felt the blood drain from her face again as Ty’s words sank in. She hadn’t had time to think that far. “I don’t see how I could have been followed directly. It would have taken time to get into the house to retrieve the collar. And I spent nearly an hour driving around the city before I even left town, just in case someone was watching.”
He made that growling noise again, and Paisley just pointed at him in warning. “I felt stupid when I did it.”
“Clearly your instincts are better than your logical brain. Give me your phone. I’ll check it for tracking software.”
Harrison and Sebastian rose. “We’ll sweep her car.”
Paisley wondered how exactly this had become her life, where three highly trained former Rangers were suddenly in charge of her personal security.
Laurel shoved to her feet. “Well, clearly not charring dinner is going to be on us. Come on, ladies. We’ll all think better with food.”
Ivy stood, too. “Just keep the onions away from me. The smell has been turning me green.”
Paisley looked up from digging in her purse for the car keys. “Since when? You’re the only person I know who loves French onion soup as much as I do.” Her gaze zeroed in on the ginger ale in Ivy’s hand instead of the beer everyone else was drinking and realization dawned. She hadn’t imagined it possible to smile after the events of the night. “Seems I’m not the only one with some ’splaining to do.”
“It’s subtle, but you can just see the scratches here.”
Ty crouched down, examining the minute signs of lock picking Joel Fisher pointed at with a pencil. “That’s the only signs we’ve got?”
The detective straightened, crossing his arms. “There’s a partial footprint by the back fence, but with all the rain we had a couple days ago, any tread is entirely obscured. We can’t even get a good estimate on size. Only prints on the door are Miss Parish’s. Officers canvased the neighborhood, but nobody reported seeing anything.”
“Maybe there will be something more inside. You haven’t been in?”
Tall, with a rangy build and a craggy face that spoke of a lot of time outdoors, Fisher shook his head. Ty pegged him around mid-forties, though the job had added some years to that.
“Wanted to wait on Miss Parish and her key rather than doing any more damage or potentially obscuring evidence.”
“Any more damage? Did they ransack my house?” Paisley’s voice shot up half an octave.
“No, no!” Fisher soothed. “We didn’t see any evidence of that through the windows. But we didn’t see any need to bust in the door either.”
“Oh. Well, can we go inside now and see whatever there is to see?”
He held out a hand toward the gate that led back around to the front of the bungalow. “After you.”
Together they trooped around and up the steps to the front door. It was a hell of a different experience than the last time Ty had been here. That night, the only thing on his mind had been the miracle of running back into to Paisley after all these years and finding his way into her bed. He was in mission mode now.
Once she’d unlocked the door, he laid a hand on her shoulder. “Let us go in first and sweep the place. I don’t expect anybody to be here, but just to be safe.”
Fisher stepped into position, and Ty opened the door. The alarm tone countdown sounded as he slipped inside.
“Alarm’s still set.”
Ignoring his order, Paisley ducked around him and made a beeline for the panel on the wall, punching in a code to disarm it.
“If they came in the back door, why didn’t the alarm go off for the intruder?” Were they going to find the collar she’d received exactly where she left it? Had there been a duplicate just to freak her out?
Paisley bit her lip. “Um…there’s no sensor on the back door.”
“What do you mean there’s no sensor?” Fisher demanded.
“Well, there was originally, but I kept forgetting about it and setting it off when I let Duke out in the morning, so I had it disabled.”
Ty stared at her. “Are you kidding me?”
Her cheeks flushed. “You know I’m not a morning person.”
He and Fisher exchanged a can-you-believe-this look, and Ty filed that under things to deal with later. With a shake of his head, he resumed the sweep.
No one was in the house. Nothing had been ransacked.
Fisher holstered his service weapon. “Is anything missing?”
“I don’t know. I don’t see anything right off hand. The electronics are still here.”
“Whoever broke in didn’t come for electronics,” Ty pointed out. “Where did you have the collar stored?”
She led them to a back bedroom and opened the closet. “Since I started getting creeped out, I put everything in this…” She trailed off, rising to her toes and running both hands along a shelf. “The box is gone. Ever
ything I still had was in there.”
“And yet nothing looks disturbed,” Ty observed. “Almost like somebody knew exactly where it was.”
Fisher rocked back on his heels. “Did you tell anyone where you were keeping the stuff?”
“No. Almost nobody knows about the problem at all.”
Ty didn’t like it. Last night they hadn’t found a tracker on her phone or car or anywhere in her things. But if the perpetrator was close enough to lay hands on the dog, he could have removed it. It’s what he would’ve done.
“Maybe there are cameras. Bugs. Something that would’ve told our perp where to look.”
“Cameras!” Paisley crossed both arms tight over her middle, her cheeks going pale. She was just getting one hit after another.
Wishing he’d kept the idea to himself, Ty curved his hands around her shoulders, aware of Fisher’s speculative gaze. “It’s just another avenue to check. Why don’t you go on and start packing?”
“Yeah, okay.”
They waited until Paisley had made her way down the hall.
“She’s going back to Eden’s Ridge?”
He knew what Fisher was asking. Much as he wanted to stake his claim, he needed to be a cop here first. “She’s got friends there. Let’s search the place.”
An hour and a half later, Fisher screwed the last air vent cover back in place. “Nothing. Hopefully that’ll put Paisley more at ease.”
“Maybe. But if someone broke in to take the evidence, it wouldn’t be hard to pull any surveillance equipment as well.” He’d have preferred to do an electronic sweep rather than a manual one, but he didn’t have access to that kind of equipment now, and in all likelihood, their stalker wouldn’t have access to the kind that would be easy to hide.
“Come on. Do you really think that’s what happened?”
“You have a better theory?”
Fisher shot a glance toward the front of the house, where Paisley had disappeared, and dropped his voice. “I’m just saying, it’s awfully convenient that I tell her I can’t do anything with what I’ve got so far, and we suddenly have a big jump from mailing shit to dropping off a package in person, to alleged breaking and entering, to someone following her. Why the escalation?”
