Chapter Twenty-Five #2
But he’d give the guy credit. He straightened his shoulders a little and stepped forward. Landon closed the door behind him.
Bo still held back, but he was at least in the living room now.
“Sorry, Sam. I … I thought if I called first, I’d talk myself out of coming and you made it sound … important. So I wanted to…” He trailed off. Never finished.
“You don’t have to be sorry, Bo.” Sam had stood on his arrival, now she was moving toward him. “Sit. Eat some pizza. There’s plenty.” She started maneuvering him into the empty spot on the couch. Next to where Landon had been sitting.
Landon didn’t retake that seat. He stayed standing while Bo sat, and Sam shoved some pizza at him.
Bo took it, looked at it, but didn’t eat it. He cleared his throat. He looked to Sam, kind of helplessly. “I don’t know how I could help with any of this stuff. I’m more in the dark than anybody.”
“Maybe you can’t help, but we don’t know that unless you’re here,” Sam said. She took Landon’s vacated seat. Landon flicked a glance at Nate to see what his reaction to that was.
If there was one, Landon couldn’t read it.
“Bo, I think the defense is going to use you to try to prove something,” Cal said. Cal wasn’t looking at Bo though, he was looking at his hands.
“What could I prove?” Bo asked. He sounded a little panicked. “I’ve never met the guy. I never even met the … dead woman. I don’t know any of you. Even if we are…” He flicked a glance at Glenda, then quickly away. “Related.”
Landon didn’t want to feel sorry for that guy, but that last sentence snuck under his defenses. He couldn’t imagine trying to make sense of any of this on his own. Even if his relationship with his brothers was rocky, still being healed, he had them.
He had Aly, and that was everything.
Everyone in this room knew enough to just … understand. Bo had been thrust into something unfathomable.
“I only came to Sam because…”
“Because what?” Sam asked. She was gentle with this guy in a way Landon had never really seen her be. He couldn’t say he liked it.
“I had Montana ties, according to that old DNA test,” Bo said, looking down at his hands. “It made sense to come here. I … I thought of it on my own. I’m sure of it.”
“Okay, but I’m not the only PI in Montana, Bo.”
He looked pained. He closed his eyes. “I know. I know it. It was Cody. My cousin Cody gave me your name. Claimed he’d seen some story about some old case you’d solved. He thought you’d be a good fit. That’s what he told me.”
Sam’s expression went flat. “I don’t think we can write that off as a coincidence. Someone wanted you here. Someone wants to use you.”
And it was no secret as to who. Somehow Dad wanted to use Bo, and somehow Dad—or his lawyer—had the contacts to make it happen.
“There’s more, I guess,” Bo said uneasily. “I don’t know if it means … but … I just thought … you mentioned the trial and…”
“Bo, just tell us,” Sam encouraged.
*
Nate leaned forward in his seat, waiting for Bo to spit it out. He knew the kid deserved patience, but damn if Nate wasn’t out of it.
What could they have accomplished already if Bo could get his shit together and help? Where would they be if he wasn’t a bumbling coward?
Not fair. Nate knew it wasn’t fair. So he kept his mouth shut.
“This guy came to my hotel room Saturday night,” Bo said very carefully. “After we had, well, not dinner, but the whole … thing.” He gestured toward Glenda.
“Guy? What guy?” Sam demanded.
Bo chewed on his bottom lip, looking concerned and like he didn’t want to answer that question.
Nate knew for certain that Sam’s silent urging was what got Bo to keep talking. That Sam was the only hope to get through to this guy.
“Yeah, just some guy I’ve never met or known. He said … he said he wanted to help me. All I had to do was meet with him. I said no, but he kept insisting. Keeps … showing up, calling.”
“I wish you’d told me earlier, Bo,” Sam said, sounding distraught. “We could have tried to intervene in some way. We could have…”
“I keep thinking I should go home. I wasn’t sure I was going to stay. I wasn’t sure … I wasn’t sure all this was something I wanted to get involved in. So, I wasn’t going to tell anyone.”
“But now you are sure?” Nate asked carefully.
Bo looked at him. He had an assessing way about him, but it wasn’t sly or calculated. It was like he just never could be sure of himself. He didn’t look around the room. He kept his focus mainly on Sam, sometimes on Nate. But he tried not to acknowledge anyone else in the room.
He might be twenty-five, but he was clearly just a kid. Overwhelmed by the wrench a little truth had thrown into his life. Nate wanted to feel sympathy, but what he really wanted to say was Suck it up and join the club, kid.
Knowing Sam wouldn’t approve was probably the only thing that kept him from doing it.
“Sure? No. I’m not sure about anything,” Bo said miserably.
“But the guy won’t stop bugging me. I don’t like it, and I don’t want to meet him, but I don’t want him to follow me home or start bothering my family.
So I need this one thing to stop. Can you help, Sam?
Just … get him off my back or whatever. Is that too much to ask?
” He asked this like a genuine question.
Like if she said, Yeah, that’s beyond my paygrade, he’d understand. “I don’t know what to do.”
Sam grabbed her purse, pulled a folded-up piece of paper out of a file. “Does this guy look anything like this?” she asked, handing Bo the paper that Hayes had given her in court earlier this week.
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s him.” Confusion in his expression, Bo looked up at Sam. “How did you know?”
“He followed me around a while back, tried to break in at Honor’s Edge. We wanted to ID him. We know he’s got a connection to Bennet’s lawyer, and that he’s interested in you.” Sam’s gaze moved from Bo to Glenda. But she didn’t mention Glenda.
“Who is he?” Bo asked, frowning at the picture.
“A private investigator by the name of Kevin Roth. Out of Wisconsin.”
Bo studied the picture, but he shook his head while he did. “Why would a PI from home follow me here?”
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Sam said.
“You can go home, Bo. I understand why you’d want to.
But the truth is only going to follow you no matter what I do.
I think we’ve come too far now. And wouldn’t you rather find the truth on your own timeline, rather than someone else’s?
Because I think the truth, or at least a truth is going to come out sooner rather than later. ”
Bo didn’t have an answer for that. Nate wasn’t sure if it was disagreement he didn’t want to voice to Sam or simply not knowing how he felt about her question.
But Nate knew how he felt. Knew what he wanted. And maybe it wasn’t fair to use Bo Lake to get it, brother or not.
Nate didn’t care about fair, couldn’t, until his father was sentenced and behind bars for good. Sometimes fair just didn’t exist in this life.
“I think you should take the meeting, Bo.” Bo recoiled, but Nate continued. Because he had an idea. “Find out what they want from you, and then maybe we can figure out why.”
“And stop it in its tracks,” Cal added.