Chapter Three

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Kit watched Jace's reaction to what she'd just said. And she wasn't surprised that there wasn't much of a reaction at all from him.

His expression didn't change, and nothing decipherable flashed through those ice-blue eyes. He was in the cop mode, but even that mode was always tinged with the whole Viking Warrior vibe he had going on.

A vibe that was even more pronounced now that his blond hair wasn't regulation length.

It was touching the collar of his black tee, and unlike some men, he hadn't styled it within an inch of its life. In fact, it didn't look as if he'd styled it at all. It was rumpled and incredibly hot. Like the rest of him.

And that was something Kit so wished she hadn't noticed.

But she always did.

Always.

"Monitor on," Ruby said, causing Jericho, Jace, and Kit to all shift their attention back to the woman in charge.

A large monitor slid down in front of one of the massive windows, and Kit immediately saw a photo of herself there. Beneath it was her name and some numbers. Probably a case file.

That put a knot in her stomach.

Kit had always thought things might come down to this. To her being in danger and in need of personal protection. That threat came with her father's lifestyle and choices. And while she'd known about some of those choices, she figured her knowledge was a tip of the iceberg sort of thing, that her father had kept the worst of it from her.

Ruby picked up a remote from the coffee table and clicked to the next page. Kit's bio. A very detailed bio, she realized, and yes, her brief marriage to Jace was indeed there.

For three days, she'd been his wife. Three days when she had obviously had her head in the sand to not realize her father wasn't going to allow the wife label to continue.

And he hadn't.

No way would the mighty Ramsey Barclay allow her to be married to someone who'd been raised in foster care. Someone with no pedigree. No money. No connections that her father could tap into and exploit.

Ironically, if her dad had just waited until Jace had become a cop, then the connection would have been in place for Ramsey to try to use. If Jace had let him, that is. And she knew down to the bottom of her heart that Jace wouldn't have allowed it.

Unlike her, Jace would never cave in.

Ruby flipped past the four single-spaced pages of Kit's background. Four ! Jeez Louise, the woman had included every single milestone and hiccup in her life. Kit had always heard that Ruby was thorough, that she ran Maverick Ops like a military campaign, and here was proof of that.

"You stopped working for your father," Jace muttered, obviously scanning the report on her and catching that detail amid all the other info.

"I did," she verified. "I was officially one of his attorneys. A part-time one."

Because of that thorough report, Jace could see where the rest of her time went. She managed the foundation her late mother had started for battered and abused women.

And, yes, her father had objected to her continuing it.

Kit had objected to his constant attempts to shut it down. In the end, they'd reached a standoff of sorts. She would continue to be his attorney in name only if he stayed the heck out of her business life. That pact had worked.

Until now.

Ruby continued to scroll through the report, and she stopped on another picture. This time, it was her father.

"Ramsey Barclay, age sixty-two, born in Fort William, Scotland, but he came to the States with his parents when he was four. He's a long time resident of Texas and has lived on his estate in Bandera Bluffs for nearly twenty years," Ruby spelled out. "Along with him briefly being Jace's father-in-law, he's head of Barclay Fidelity, an investment company that has business holdings in six countries."

"A company that's a haven for money laundering," Jace supplied.

He'd let that cop's attitude slip just a smidge, and Kit heard the disdain in his voice. She agreed with Jace on both his attitude and his conclusion about her father and his company.

Ruby made a sound of agreement. "Ramsey was seemingly untouchable. Now, he's not."

Jace's gaze whipped from the monitor to Kit. "You can't testify against him. You're his lawyer."

" Was his lawyer," Kit corrected. "I resigned from that position. But you're right. I still can't testify about anything I learned while he was my client." And even with her part-time status and limited access to his accounts, she had learned so very, very much.

Enough to want her father in jail for an eternity.

"Kit can testify against this man though," Ruby went on, and she put another photo on the monitor. "That's Marvin Shoemaker."

Again, Kit felt her stomach tighten. The beefy man with the shaved head seemed to be glaring down at her, threatening her with that sneer and cold, hard expression.

"He looks like a thug," Jericho remarked.

"He is one," Ruby verified without any hesitation. "He's forty-one and until recently worked as a security guard/chauffeur for Ramsey. When Kit was outside her father's home last month in Bandera Bluffs, she witnessed Mr. Shoemaker assaulting a woman in the driveway."

"It was his ex-girlfriend who'd come to get back her house key from him," Kit said, taking up the explanation. "He punched her and was kicking her when I gave him a shot of pepper spray, kneed him in the balls, and called the cops."

Kit had to stop and fight back those horrible images. Jace likely had his own set of images like that. A huge set, considering he'd been a cop. And Kit wasn't sure how he managed to live with them. They haunted her every single night.

Jericho, however, leaned over and gave her a high five. "Good job going for the balls."

Despite the thick tension in the room and inside her, that made Kit smile. But not for long though because Ruby continued with the horrific details of that attack she'd witnessed.

"The ex-girlfriend suffered serious injuries, including head trauma that robbed her of memories of the incident," Ruby spelled out. "Shoemaker was arrested, and because of his previous arrests, this could send him to jail for a very long time. Now, he's out on bail, and he wants to deal."

"A deal where he spills on Ramsey in exchange for a reduced sentence," Jace grumbled.

"Got it in one," Ruby confirmed. "So far though, Shoemaker hasn't spilled anything about Ramsey and likely won't until he's forced to do that in court two days from now. He's almost certainly hoping that Kit won't end up testifying, which would significantly weaken the prosecution's case against him to the point that he would probably walk."

Yes, and Kit didn't want to live with that. There'd be no justice for the woman Marvin had assaulted.

Jace looked at Kit again. "And you need me to keep you alive so you can testify." But he didn't wait for a response. "Why me? Why not some other bodyguard?"

"Because I trust you with my life," she said.

Kit hadn't meant to make that sound so, well, intimate. But it was. And it was the God's honest truth. In fact, at the moment, Jace was the only one that she did completely trust to keep her from dying.

A single muscle flickered in Jace's jaw.

Either he'd sensed the intimacy, too, and was uncomfortable with it, or else he was realizing just how much danger she was in. What he didn't realize, yet, was the rest of it.

The other reason why she'd needed him to be her bodyguard.

Jace was not going to like that part any more than protecting her.

"Please tell me Marvin's in police protective custody so he can't be murdered before he goes to trial," Jace remarked.

"He is at a SAPD safe house, and so far, he's been smart enough to stay put and not make any overt threats to Kit to try to intimidate her," Ruby supplied, and she clicked the remote to bring up another picture. "Now, Jace, here's what you're up against on your assignment to protect Kit. This was taken in the parking lot outside her downtown law office yesterday afternoon."

Kit hadn't seen this particular photo, and she assumed that someone at SAPD had taken it as part of the investigation into the incident . However, she certainly recognized it. It was a photo of her car, both the driver's and passenger's doors open, with SAPD cops searching the area around it.

"Someone put a rattlesnake in my car," Kit said, wishing she didn't have a quiver in her voice. Wishing, too, that just saying it aloud didn't cause her to feel the terror all over again when she'd gotten into her car and had heard the tell-tale sound of a rattler.

"Shit," Jace muttered. Okay, that wasn't a stony cop response. "Were you bit?" he asked her.

Kit shook her head. "It was coiled on the seat, and it struck out at me, but it got my purse instead." And because she needed a moment of levity, she added, "I'm not sure if I should frame the purse for saving me or throw it in the trash because it might have a fang or two stuck in it."

"Frame it," Jericho suggested, joining in on the levity. Jace didn't. He had his cop's face back in place.

Ruby moved onto another photo. "This is the feed taken from a traffic camera right by the parking lot of Kit's office."

She clicked through the series of still photos that had been culled from the camera, and it showed a man wearing a black ski mask behind the wheel of a white Honda. The shots progressed to showing the vehicle moving directly toward Kit's car, but the camera angle was off to show anything that happened in the next five minutes or so.

"The Honda was stolen about an hour before this footage," Ruby added a moment later, "and SAPD haven't been able to identify the driver. Understandable since at no point did he remove the mask."

"How the hell did he get a snake in her car?" Jace asked.

"The person jimmied the lock on the passenger's side and slipped a burlap sack onto the seat," Ruby supplied. "Then, somehow he must have managed to open the sack without being bitten. I'm having other camera feed analyzed to see where he came from and where he went."

Kit was hoping the techs at Maverick Ops would be able to do just that. But she was guessing the driver had taken measures to prevent being tracked to or from a place that would help identify him.

"Rattlesnake venom is rarely fatal," Jericho threw out there. "So, was this a scare tactic?"

"Maybe not," Jace interjected. "Kit has asthma…or rather she did," he amended after he paused.

For some stupid reason, it made her feel good that he'd remembered that about her. Then again, she'd nearly died in his arms from an asthma attack when they'd been nineteen. So that memory would likely stick with him. Jace had saved her then by getting her inhaler from her purse and administering it himself to her since she'd been too out of it to manage it.

The following day he'd asked her to marry him.

Kit had always wondered if he'd done that as a response to nearly losing her. That had certainly played into why she'd jumped to say yes. Played into it, but that wasn't the sole reason. She had been in love with him.

Heck, maybe she still was.

"I do have asthma, and sometimes I do have to use a rescue inhaler," Kit explained for Jericho's benefit. "If I'd been bitten, it's possible that would have triggered a fatal asthma attack." She lifted her shoulder. "Still, that would be a long shot so I guess it was a warning to try to get me to back off. I'm not," she emphasized, looking at Jace when she said that.

Jace certainly didn't give her any indication he was convinced of that. And she understood why. When they'd gotten married, she'd sworn to him on their late mother's graves that she wouldn't give into her father's demand about the annulment.

She had given in.

And any trust Jace had once had in her was long gone. Ditto for the love. But the heat was still there.

"You believe that your father or Marvin hired this man with the snake?" Jace pressed. "Because the build of the guy in that ski mask is wrong for it to be your father or Marvin. They're both beefy, and this guy isn't."

Both Kit and Ruby made a sound of agreement, and it was Ruby who continued with the explanation.

"Marvin doesn't appear to have the ready cash to hire someone, but it could have been her father who arranged this," Ruby admitted. "After all, Ramsey was furious with Kit when he learned she'd called the Bandera Bluffs' cops on Marvin. But the ski-masked guy with the snake could have also been a pal of Marvin's. Because if Kit can't testify about the attack, then Marvin won't need to spill about his former boss."

Clearly, that didn't please Jace because he muttered more profanity under his breath.

"Or it could have been someone else who hired him," Ruby tacked onto that a heartbeat later.

Jace definitely looked ready to jump on that, but Jericho spoke before he could voice anything. "Any other attempts to kill you?" he asked Kit.

"Possibly," she answered. Probably , Kit silently amended. "I have an older brother, Trevor, who helps run my father's business. This morning he came by my office to try to talk me out of resigning as Ramsey's attorney. While he was there, he drank some coffee, and he became ill. I called an ambulance, and when his blood was tested, it showed traces of a poison."

Jericho and Jace exchanged glances. "Were you the intended target or was Trevor?" Jericho asked.

"Probably me since Trevor poured the coffee from the pot in my office. I'd poured myself a cup, too, but I hadn't drunk any of it yet." Kit paused. "SAPD is investigating who had access to my office. It's possible someone broke in last night and put the poison in the coffee, the cups or the pot."

"Is Trevor all right?" Jace asked.

She nodded. "He's been discharged from the hospital." And now, Kit had to voice the unthinkable. "There was only a small amount of poison in his system. Not nearly enough to kill him. In fact, it was barely enough to make him sick."

Kit waited for Jace to process that. It didn't take him long.

"You believe Trevor might want you dead?" Jace asked.

"It's possible," she managed to say. "Jace, I'm so sorry," she blurted out.

Of course, that confused him, and he was about to realize that she wasn't apologizing for someone trying to kill her.

Kit took the phone from her pocket. Not her phone. But Trevor's. Or rather one of his phones anyway.

"This fell out of my brother's pocket when the EMTs were loading him into the ambulance, and I picked it up," Kit explained. "It's not his usual phone. His usual has a case with the family company's logo on it."

"It's a burner," Ruby provided, her tone as grim as Kit's own. "And since the screen wasn't locked, Kit was able to read the text."

Jace leaned in, his gaze skirting over the words. Words that would no doubt feel like a punch to him. At least that'd been her reaction. A horrible punch to the gut that had robbed her of her breath and had sent her straight to Maverick Ops' headquarters.

"Everything's in place," Jace read aloud. "Our cop is in the loop, and Jace Malley will be taken tonight. If your sister won't try to save him and if she still wants to tell all, then Malley dies right along with her."

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