Chapter 2 #2
It had been weeks since the old man had ridden out on that horse of his and hadn’t returned.
Weeks of questions I was beginning to wonder if we actually wanted answers to.
Like that skeleton in the cave with the crack in its skull.
Xavier had told us how the poor pilot had died, thanks to his mother’s shocking confession, but Frank had been the bastard who’d left that body to rot out there in the middle of nowhere.
I’d give anything to find out why he’d done that.
Cruel son of a bitch.
That poor bloke’s family must’ve gone nuts not knowing what happened to him. Just like we had when Mom had vanished.
Dad had probably had a hand in that, too.
If I ever found out he’d hurt Mom, I’d fucking kill him. If he wasn’t already dead.
Taking my time, I checked that Comet had enough feed, then picked up the lead rope I’d left coiled by the gate and hung it properly.
Small, deliberate, unhurried actions. Not because I was organized—hell, my place in the loft above the barn was a masterpiece in organized chaos—but because making a cop wait was one of the few pleasures available to me at six in the morning.
I swung up onto Meteor and kept him at a walk, moving back toward the homestead and taking the long way around. I was trying to get my head straight before whatever was waiting for me up there.
During the ten-minute ride, the sky shifted from blood orange to pale gold. The spinifex along the track caught the first light, turning everything copper and amber. Koolaroo looked good at this hour.
I ran through the possibilities of why that cop would show up now, and especially this early. If they’d come from Winton Police Station, then they must’ve got on the road at four a.m. And that was weird. Or extreme dedication.
I frowned. Rose said a police officer was waiting.
She didn’t say it was Bob Ackerman. That was weird, too.
Bob was the only cop who came all the way out here.
After Bob’s last visit, and how freaked he’d been when he saw the state of the eastern outstation, we’d all expected him to come tearing back here with a posse of cops to search the property.
But we’d heard nothing from him since he’d left.
So, if it were another cop waiting for me in the homestead, that would be much worse than Bob.
They could be following up on Bruce Henderson’s ute.
Cassidy had done a number on the vehicle, and Bruce wasn’t the type to let things go.
Or it could be about the fire those bastard Henderson brothers had lit that nearly killed Cassidy and Xavier.
Those idiots were always giving the cops something to do.
It could be about Frank. It could be about the millions of dollars we’d found in the eastern outstation and moved to another secret hiding place.
I really hoped it wasn’t that. I’d want my brothers and Cassidy beside me when that line of questioning came up.
By the time I reached the homestead yard, I’d already decided how this was going to go down. I’d be polite enough that Cassidy would be impressed if she heard about it, and short enough that the cop got the message.
I tethered Meteor to the railing and tossed him some hay. Then I scraped my boots on the step, pulled open the screen door, and walked through the dining room toward the kitchen.
The air was filled with the delicious smells of fresh coffee, toast, and a buttery sweetness from something that Bella had probably just pulled from the oven. We were lucky to have her here. Declan was even luckier. He hadn’t stopped grinning since she’d moved into his place permanently.
The police officer was sitting at the kitchen bench, and this was no bloke.
My breath caught as she turned.
The air left the room. Or maybe it left me. I couldn’t tell which.
Sapphire Delaney.
Fire.
She looked exactly the same as she had ten years ago, and yet also completely different.
Golden hair pulled back in a ponytail. Blue eyes that stole my breath clean out of my chest. The cop uniform sat on her like she’d been born in it, pressed and fitted, and the Queensland Police badge caught in the morning light from the kitchen window as if she’d polished it this morning. Which, knowing her, she probably had.
She stood. “Hello, Kayden.”
Her voice hadn’t changed, and the way she said my name hit me like a brick. Everything else I could armor against—her face, the way she carried herself, the fact that she was standing in my kitchen in a cop uniform.
But the way she said my name went straight through me like it always had.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I didn’t move closer. I couldn’t think straight enough to move.
Rose poured coffee into the good mugs. She only brought those ones out for guests she actually liked. She slid them across the counter and headed for the door. “I’ll leave you two to it.”
Sapphire pulled her shoulders back, leveled her chin, and pinned me with those blue eyes the way she always had. “I’ve been sent by Senior Sergeant Ackerman to—”
“Bob sent you?”
“Senior Sergeant Ackerman, yes.” A flicker of annoyance crossed her face. “I’m here regarding your father, Frank Branson.”
Bella appeared from the far side of the kitchen and threw a dishcloth over her tray of muffins. “I’ll come back later,” she said, and headed out the door like she was expecting knives to be thrown at her back.
I leaned against the doorframe and crossed my arms. I still wore my sweat-soaked shirt, had horsehair on my forearms, and probably still had dirt on my face from Comet making me faceplant.
I looked exactly like I was … a man who’d been up since four, working an animal that had just kicked him in the chest.
Sapphire looked like a recruitment poster for the Queensland Police.
“What about Frank?” I asked.
“Your father has been reported missing. It’s my understanding he left the property several weeks ago and hasn’t returned.”
“Who reported it?”
She tilted her head slightly. “That’s not relevant to—”
“It’s relevant to me.” I held her gaze. “Who reported it? Because I know damn well none of us did.”
“I’m not here to discuss the source of the report. I’m here to conduct an investigation into your father’s whereabouts.”
“An investigation,” I repeated, making sure she heard the sarcasm in my voice. “The old man rode out. He hasn’t come back. Yet. It’s the outback. Koolaroo is a big property. It takes time to travel from one end to the other. Didn’t they cover that at the academy?”
Her jaw tightened, but she didn’t bite like I wanted her to. “When was the last time you saw your father?”
“The day he rode out. Same as everyone else.”
“And did he say where he was going?”
“Frank doesn’t tell us shit. Frank does what Frank wants. Always has.”
She pulled a notebook from her top pocket, flipped through a few pages, and wrote something down.
I remembered that about her—the way she was always writing things down in that neat, precise hand that was the complete opposite of my scrawl.
To-do lists. Notes to herself. Like she could organize the world if she just wrote it down clearly enough.
I shut the memory down before it led somewhere I couldn’t come back from.
“Did anyone attempt to search for him when the horse returned without him?”
“We looked, but we didn’t find anything. Like I said, it’s a big property.”
“And yet the horse came back. So, Frank couldn’t have gone that far.”