Chapter Eleven
Zeke had thrown himself into his project after Brooke had taken off with Hart. He’d thought about figuring out why the detective had stopped by to pick her up, but it was none of his business.
Maybe putting together a makeshift lab on his ranch wasn’t either, particularly with the stalking threat no longer an issue.
But even if he believed that Royal had done jail time for maybe a justified crime, the man was a potential threat. There were still threats around Brooke and what she was doing. Zeke couldn’t just accept that she wasn’t in some danger.
And he didn’t think she’d accepted that, even if she’d pretended to. Because her things were still in his house. She hadn’t told him to jump off a cliff . . . yet.
Worse, he couldn’t even blame her. He owed her an apology, and that burned. He shouldn’t have kissed her. He shouldn’t have touched her. And he could not for the life of him figure out why his usual iron-tight control had deserted him when it came to her.
He studied his work on the makeshift lab. Only some of the equipment Granger had set him up with had been delivered, but the barn was sparkling clean and what he’d managed to get in terms of tables and whatnot had been set up.
He glanced at his watch and ignored the fact it was later than usual and Brooke hadn’t returned yet.
He wouldn’t read into that. He wouldn’t worry. Hart knew where she was staying. If something bad had happened, he’d have heard by now.
That became a mantra as evening turned into straight-up nighttime, and he stopped being able to distract himself with work. So he’d ended up sitting on the chair that looked out the front window, waiting for Viola to sound the alarm or headlights to appear.
It was nearing midnight when Viola let out a bark and Zeke saw the Bent County cruiser finally drop her off. He was wound so tight, he couldn’t even fully feel relief.
She stepped into the living room, creeping quietly. She looked bedraggled and tired, which was none of his business. None of his concern.
Yet all these things he kept telling himself weren’t his business or concern took up residence inside him. And that stupid kiss this morning had illuminated why.
Zeke was not a man who believed in love that didn’t come from family and trauma ties. There was nothing romantic about the hell of a world he’d been born into.
But he didn’t know what else to call what he’d felt for Brooke all those years ago, and how much those feelings he didn’t understand, didn’t like, didn’t want, still existed within him.
Once she closed and locked the door behind her, she turned and crouched to pet an excited Viola. When her gaze lifted, she jumped a little at the sight of him sitting on the chair.
Brooke cleared her throat and straightened. “You didn’t have to wait up.”
He snorted. Like he would have been able to sleep. “Why’d you work so late?”
He’d promised himself he wouldn’t ask.
She looked at him a little quizzically but took the question in stride as she dropped her bag and then walked over to the couch and sank into it. Viola hopped up next to her. “Break in the case, sort of. Didn’t want to stop until I’d gotten something accomplished.”
She leaned her head on the back of the couch, closing her eyes. “I don’t suppose you’d be up to making me dinner?”
The fact she was asking anything of him—kiss or no—was concerning. So was the way she could just completely forget that kiss this morning. Still, he got to his feet. “You must be starving if you’re asking me to do something for you.”
She gave him the ghost of a smile. “I haven’t eaten since . . . I actually don’t remember. We found something, I guess. It felt like nothing and something all at the same time.”
“I know how that goes. You relax. I’ll fix up something for you to eat.”
He moved into the kitchen, grateful for something to do when everything was whirling inside of him like some kind of storm. Like this morning. Out of control.
And he couldn’t allow that. Certainly couldn’t grab her and kiss her again when she was running on fumes. Or at all, he told himself sternly.
He could throw a frozen pizza in the oven, but he poked around his pantry instead, frustrated with himself for wanting to fuss over her when he didn’t fuss. The only place he even acknowledged that impulse was with his family and he’d never had to act on it. Fussing had always been Walker’s job.
That was why the best Zeke could come up with was a can of stew and some buttered bread and a couple pieces of cheese. It was hardly the stuff of homemade meals, but it was warm and hearty, and hopefully comforting.
He went to tell her it was ready, but when he stepped into the living room, her head was still resting against the back of the couch, her eyes were closed, her breathing even. Exhausted, clearly.
He wanted to bundle her up in a bed and let her sleep for at least a day. But then she blinked her eyes open, gaze meeting his like a vise around his chest. Squeezing until he popped.
“Food’s ready,”
he managed to roughly rasp. “But you can sleep.”
She pushed herself off the couch, looking away from him. “If I let myself go to sleep without eating, I’ll regret it. Learned that one the hard way.”
She walked into the dining room, settled herself at the table, made a contented noise at the view of the food or at Viola settling herself on Brooke’s feet.
“Thanks for this. I owe you one.”
He nodded with a jerk, so uncomfortable he could hardly stand it. No one made him uncomfortable. He didn’t let them.
Case in point, he was going to apologize for this morning, because he’d been out of line. He’d been wrong. To be mad at her. To take it out on her. To kiss her . . . even if she’d kissed him back.
He wasn’t fazed by his mistakes. He didn’t marinate in them. No, sir. He dealt. He’d made a mistake, now he’d apologize for it.
“I’m sorry.”
She didn’t look at him at first. Her gaze remained on her bowl before she brought a spoonful of stew to her mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “Sorry for what?”
she asked after too many beats of silence.
Zeke didn’t scowl, though he wanted to. Because she knew for what. There was only one thing to be sorry for. Besides, he could tell by the expression on her face she wasn’t confused—he knew her too well. She wanted to make him say it.
Well, he wasn’t ashamed. He was sorry. So . . . “For kissing you the way that I did. At an inappropriate time and moment.”
She seemed to mull that over but said nothing else. That was fine. They didn’t need to have a conversation about it. The point was the apology. Not coming to some kind of consensus about what was over and done.
He moved to wash out the pan he’d heated her stew in. He’d tidy up the kitchen and go to bed, like she should. He wasn’t going to say another damn thing.
But had she not understood? He’d always thought she had. Wasn’t that why she’d scared the hell out of him? She’d seen through him, too easily. And now she was just . . . sitting there, like his apology or the kiss or something didn’t mean anything.
She had kissed him back. She had not pushed him away. He’d been the one to end it. So there was something, and didn’t they both deserve to go over that something, so somewhere along the line they could move on and all this wouldn’t whirl between them?
“Did I ever tell you why I joined North Star?”
he demanded. When he knew this wasn’t the way around what he was feeling. Because he was angry again, this big, huge thing inside him taking over. No control. No finesse.
“You wanted to help people like your family,”
she said, not quite meeting his gaze. “Your cousin was already in North Star and she brought you in after your stint in the army.”
He shook his head. Even if he was surprised at how many details she’d retained, it wasn’t the real story. Maybe back then he’d told her it was. Maybe he’d even convinced himself it was when he’d been young and in so much denial it should have choked him.
It was hard to look back with a critical eye and know where exactly he’d started to change, mature, evolve. He only knew that, standing in the kitchen of a ranch he’d bought and begun to rebuild, he was different than he had been.
“Yeah, Mallory got me into North Star because our dads were worthless Sons’s pawns and I had some military training. But the real reason I joined the army, joined North Star, was because I couldn’t deal.”
Her eyebrows drew together, clearly not understanding what he meant. And he wasn’t even sure what he meant. Just all of these . . . things rambling around inside him, grappling for purchase. He couldn’t seem to put them away, any more than the words.
Zeke had never admitted that out loud. Never let himself poke into that old feeling. But here it was, and he didn’t know why he thought it a good idea to lay it at her feet, but that’s what he was doing.
And he couldn’t stop.
“I couldn’t hold it together. Every moment since my mother was murdered when I was a teenager, I felt like I was on this edge, ready to explode, because everything mattered too much. Keeping Carlyle safe, figuring out who killed our mother, helping Walker keep us together. It was too much. I couldn’t take it. But the army? North Star? I could do that, and . . . well, because they weren’t my family. Because they weren’t the people I loved. I could set all the feelings aside and do what needed to be done.”
When he met her gaze, it was shocked and on his, the piece of cheese in her hand clearly forgotten since she didn’t bring it to her mouth. He felt like he’d run a marathon. It was hard to breathe. It was hard to . . .
Everything was just hard because she was sitting at his kitchen table, as pretty as the day he’d met her, even though she was run ragged. And what did it say about him that he was having this conversation with her when she was exhausted and hungry?
But she was in his kitchen, and the past four years had disappeared because she’d never been off his mind. He’d ended things, and he’d been living with a heavy, ignored regret ever since. Keeping it buried underneath action—North Star cases, then helping Walker track down their mother’s murderer. And for the past few months, he’d had nothing to do except deal with the fact that he was almost thirty years old and likely still had a hell of a lot of life left to live.
With no missions on the horizon. Just all that life.
He hadn’t wanted to miss her, hadn’t wanted to wish she was somehow present when he’d had this realization life existed beyond a death wish.
But he had missed her. The whole time, and now she was here and . . . in danger. Danger.
“So it’s like that all over again,”
he continued, because apparently once he started spouting all this, he couldn’t contain the rest. And maybe something could ease if she understood. How hard this was. How much she meant. “This untenable pressure. The thought of anything happening to you is more than I can bear. You matter too much.”
She blinked at him once before returning her gaze back to her bowl. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this,”
she said quietly.
“That’s fine.”
And he meant it. He wasn’t interested in a walk down memory lane. Or he thought he wasn’t. But he was the one who’d started all this. He could have let her eat and go to sleep. He could have said he was sorry and left it at that. He was the one pushing.
He didn’t need to push, not if she didn’t want to. This wasn’t four years ago. He could give her feelings, her wants, the space they needed. Even if they weren’t him.
Seemed about the way things usually went anyway.
He finished cleaning the kitchen and then noticed she’d eaten most of her food. She handed him her dishes and he washed them. She dried them in a quiet, easy show of teamwork.
So much about them wasn’t easy but working together always had been.
She gave him the dried dishes so he could put them away. Then she turned from him, no doubt to go upstairs and go to sleep. She clearly needed a really good night’s sleep. Hopefully she wouldn’t wake up at the crack of dawn to sneak out tomorrow morning like she had this morning.
She paused before stepping out of his visibility. When she spoke, it was quiet but so damn sure every word landed like a stab wound. He’d had a few of those, so he knew.
“You didn’t love me, Zeke.”
He inhaled sharply. “You really don’t think I was in love with you?”
He stared at the back of her head, at the careful way she held herself. He really hadn’t thought she could hurt him quite that viscerally. How could she have gone through what they’d been to each other and think that?
“You said you weren’t.”
That, he knew he’d never said. He’d never used the word love. Ever. “No, I said I didn’t see a future. Because I didn’t. A future meant having . . . hope. It meant caring more about survival than anything else. And you said it yourself back then. I had a death wish. Danger didn’t faze me because if I didn’t make it out, oh well.”
She turned to face him and there was no shock on her face. Those were words she’d said to him all those years ago. She’d known, even then, he hadn’t valued his life that much. But he wasn’t sure he’d ever shared all the why behind it with her.
So when she didn’t speak, that’s what he did. Like this was some kind of confession and the dark feelings he kept locked down had to come out for him to be saved. Absolved.
“I used to think that if I died doing something honorable, my siblings would be proud,”
he said while she looked at him with heartbreak in her eyes. “It took . . . maturity, I guess, to realize they’d just blame themselves.”
He wasn’t even sure when that realization had happened. Maybe when he’d been shot in the showdown that had taken down their mother’s murderer. The way Carlyle had lost it. The way Walker had babied him afterward.
The way the Hudsons had somehow absorbed them into their world just because Mary had fallen in love with Walker. Or maybe, more importantly, because Walker had fallen head over drooling heels for Mary.
“Well, I’m glad you realized that,”
she said, her voice sounding strangled.
“Me too.”
He wasn’t sure he had been, until this moment. Glad maybe not for himself, but for the people he cared about.
She nodded carefully, like she was afraid she might shatter if she moved too quickly. “Good night, Zeke.”
“Night.”
And only after she left, the dog padding behind her, did he realize he’d been hoping for a different outcome. Because he could tell himself the old reasons for not wanting her in his life . . .
But they just weren’t true anymore.
Brooke opened her eyes to sunlight streaming in through the window. It was later than she should have let herself sleep, but her head had hit the pillow last night and she’d been out.
No energy to work through everything Zeke had told her. The way he’d looked at her. But it was the first thing on her mind this morning, even groggy and still tired.
You really don’t think I was in love with you?
He’d sounded so shocked, and worse, hurt. And maybe he was right. Maybe he’d never told her he hadn’t loved her, but he’d never told her he had. Then he’d broken it off with her because there’d been no future. Was she really supposed to believe that had been love on his part?
She’d found an entire skull yesterday with no other bones in the immediate vicinity. She needed to get to the police station and process it and send it down to Cheyenne. She needed to check on her lab results for the last set of bones and write up a report for Thomas so he could take the multiple murderer theory to the rest of his investigative team.
She could not lie in this comfortable bed and think about Zeke loving her. Or that kiss yesterday morning that already felt like a month ago.
But for just a few more minutes, she let last night’s conversation replay in her head. She’d had her own terrible childhood with parents who hadn’t cared, and the hell of being separated from Royal and bouncing around foster houses as a teen, but Zeke’s story of his mother’s murder had always struck her as more sad.
He’d loved his mother and lost her in tragedy. No hope there. She’d only ever loved Royal, and she hadn’t really lost him. Maybe their separation had been hard, but she’d always had hope for a future where they were together again.
In fact, at the moment, her brother was another item on her to-do list, because she had to tell him that their father was still in jail, so whatever he thought was happening . . . wasn’t.
Probably.
She shook it away. One step at a time, and work had to come first right now. So she took a shower, got dressed for the day, and typed a to-do list into her phone to help her feel somehow in charge of the overwhelming amount of tasks she had to accomplish.
When she went downstairs, Viola greeted her with a wagging tail and happy yips at the bottom of the stairs. Brooke smelled coffee and bacon. For a moment, she stood and felt a pang.
One she didn’t have time to dissect.
When she stepped into the kitchen, Zeke was putting two plates piled high with eggs, bacon and biscuits on the table.
“You don’t have to keep cooking for me, Zeke,”
she said because it settled in her chest like a heavy weight. Why was he doing things for her all the time? “I am capable of feeding myself.”
“Sure,”
he replied easily. “But isn’t it nice to have someone else handle it? You’re busy, Brooke. I’m not. I can handle a few chores. Besides, last night wasn’t much. I’m not much of a dinner cook, but I can put together a mean breakfast.”
He gestured to the table. “Sit. Eat.”
She looked at the table, hesitating. Because she was afraid she’d . . . get used to this. Someone taking care of her. Because she’d never once had that.
Except when she was with him.
But she wasn’t with him. He was just acting as . . . bodyguard. Maybe there’d been some personal conversations. A kiss. That was just . . . sorting out a past. When she walked off this ranch, it wouldn’t be like him breaking up with her all over again.
She couldn’t let it be.
“Hart called,”
Zeke said. “He had court this morning, so couldn’t be out at the cave, and Laurel’s still out. He said he could send another deputy out with you, but he’d prefer from here on out it just be the detectives if you didn’t mind taking the morning off from excavating.”
She wasn’t sure why the detective had shared that information with Zeke rather than leave her a message or text on her own phone, but didn’t know if she wanted to dig too deep into anything that involved Zeke at the moment.
So she sat and ate breakfast next to him. She didn’t say anything. She really didn’t know what to say, and he seemed to be in the same boat. The only sounds in the kitchen were the scraping of forks and the dog occasionally huffing at their feet.
They even washed the dishes in silence. But once they were done and before she could excuse herself, Zeke opened the back door from the kitchen.
“I want to show you something, if you’re up for a little walk?”
She hesitated. He wasn’t exactly . . . acting like himself, but she couldn’t sort out what that meant. He was more calm than he’d been yesterday, but there was a kind of grimness wrapped into it that she didn’t know how to parse.
“Okay.”
They both got shoes on and then she followed him out into the sunny late morning. Viola dashed into the yard, then dashed back, over and over again, making Brooke smile as they walked to a building. A barn, she supposed.
Zeke stopped at a normal-size door on the side of the barn, pulled a key out from his pocket, and unlocked it. Then he held the key out to her.
She frowned.
“It’s yours,”
he said, pushing the key into her palm. Then he shoved the door open and gestured her inside.
She stepped into a darkened barn, though it didn’t smell like a barn. It smelled . . . clean. And when lights flipped on above her, she realized why. This was no barn to house horses or store crops. It looked like . . . a lab. Her old lab at North Star, to be precise.
“Is this . . . ?”
She stepped forward then stopped herself and looked back at him.
“It’s a private lab. To run whatever tests. Granger helped with the supplies, information to make sure everything is up to code, just like you used to have at North Star. So it should be most of what you need, but he can get us anything else. A few things he sent need to arrive yet, but we’ll get there.”
Brooke felt frozen in place. It was set up perfectly. Not quite like any of the labs she’d worked with at different police organizations, but that’s because they were often multipurpose, underfunded and overcrowded.
Her North Star lab had been different—set up exactly the way she liked—because they hadn’t exactly always been working within the law. “I’m not sure anything I do here would hold up in court.”
That was a very ungrateful thing to say. When he’d gone to all this trouble. When he’d reached out to Granger. When she could test that skull here immediately.
Zeke shrugged and didn’t voice any irritation with her response, even though he had every right to. “You don’t have to use it. Or you can use it in conjunction with the lab in Cheyenne. Up to you.”
Up to her. But that was ridiculous. This whole thing was so damn ridiculous. “Why did you do this?”
“Because I was worried the lab in Cheyenne and the sheer amount of people dealing with your case might have something to do with what was going on with you being followed. So, I got the ball rolling with Granger, and then it just felt like you might as well have some space here to work. You’ve got a lot of remains to work through.”
Didn’t she just.
And because her heart seemed too big for her chest, and her eyes were full of tears she wasn’t about to let fall, she changed the subject entirely.
“How is Granger?”
she asked, inspecting one of the machines. She would have thought he’d gotten rid of all this once North Star had disbanded. She should have known Granger MacMillan might have let North Star the entity go, but he wasn’t about to not have the means to help anyone who needed it.
“Looks like him and Shay are swamped in foster kids and farm animals.”
Brooke smiled. She hadn’t talked to her old North Star bosses in a while. She hated to bother them when they had this new life they were building.
“Do you keep in touch with anyone else?”
“Oh, sure. Here and there. You don’t?”
She didn’t want to answer that. So many of her old North Star friends she’d retreated from. Because they’d all been starting new lives, and she didn’t want to be some old reminder, some old burden. So she’d just . . . held herself apart. She’d never refused a call, but she hadn’t made any. She’d kept to herself.
It was a bit of a surprise Zeke hadn’t. Zeke who had provided this . . . It was really too much. To think about the two people who’d run North Star, who’d taken down the Sons and saved so many people, now married and raising kids and farm animals and just living a normal kind of life . . . While she was standing here with Zeke.
All she’d ever wanted and known she couldn’t have.
That, she just couldn’t deal with right now. Old feelings. Mixed-up nostalgia and dreams and delusion.
So she turned to Zeke. The emotional stuff didn’t matter, did it? She had a case to solve. And now she had some things she could do right here. Everything else he’d said last night didn’t matter, even if deep down she wanted it to.
They’d had their chance. It hadn’t worked. She had bigger things to concern herself with right now.
So she smiled at him, and focused on work. “Want to help me smuggle a skull?”
His mouth quirked. “You know me so well.”