Epilogue

Epilogue

QUIET AND WILDFLOWERS

Rus and Karen leaned against Karen’s cruiser, which was parked behind the Nissan Pathfinder.

They watched the two women walking warily toward them through a field of wildflowers.

“Your take,” Rus said. “How’s this gonna go down?”

“If it was just you, they’d try to cute their way out of it by flirting, thinking they’re young and pretty, and you got a dick, so you’ll let them do whatever they want.”

“Mm-hmm,” Rus agreed.

“They don’t like me being here.”

“Mm-hmm,” Rus repeated.

The women climbed the ranch rail fence about ten yards from a sign that said Private Property No Trespassing and made their hesitant way to Rus and Karen, eyeing the situation, not only the two law enforcement officers, but their Pathfinder blocked in by two cruisers.

Rus was wearing jeans and a blue button down under a brown quilted vest that had Fret County Sheriff stitched in yellow on the left breast, Detective in smaller lettering under that.

“Is something the matter?” the blonde asked.

“I’m Zachariah Lazarus, detective with Fret County Sheriff,” he introduced unnecessarily since his vest already told them that. He tipped his head to Karen. “This is Deputy Karen Wilkins.”

“Okay,” the brunette said hesitantly.

Rus pulled out his phone, which was already called up to what he needed on his screen.

He hit play and turned it their way.

“Do you recall this incident?” he asked.

Owen Larson had learned that recording these situations was a lot less messy, legally, than filling people with buckshot.

Therefore, Owen could be heard cussing them out for trespassing on his land.

“We—” the blonde began.

Rus turned his phone around, shut down the video, shoved it in his pocket, all while interrupting her.

“That incident happened yesterday. Mr. Larson made it clear when he caught you on his land that he was not happy about it, and he did not want you here. He might not have been nice when he did that, but he doesn’t have to be. You vacated the premises at that time. Now, you’re back. Where are you staying?”

“I don’t think we have to answer that,” the brunette guessed.

Rus nodded.

“Correct. You don’t. Though, I’ll point out right now,”—and he did just that, he pointed—“not only is that a fence, which indicates this is someone’s property, there are also signs posted there,”—he moved his hand—“there,”—he moved his hand again—“and there. Not to mention about every fifty yards all along the boundary of Mr. Larson’s property. These signs are clearly visible and share the fact the owner of this property does not welcome visitors. He informed you of this personally. You returned today, when he wasn’t around, and jumped his fence.”

With a quick glance at Karen, the blonde got a little closer to Rus and smiled.

It was a pretty smile, and she knew it.

But she was a fairy princess (she knew that too).

And that was not Rus’s thing.

“Listen, we’re kind of a big deal.” She pretended humility under a flirtatious look. “We’re vloggers. We travel and vlog about it. We have a big following. Over a million followers on TikTok alone. This wildflower field is gorgeous. Our followers are going to love the footage we have from here.”

Rus sighed.

Then he stated, “I’m uncertain why you’re not understanding me. Yes, that field is pretty, but it’s private property. You can see it from this road, and video it from this road, a road that’s public property.”

“It’s totally better in the field. You wanna see our footage?” she offered.

“No,” he answered. “I’m afraid I don’t have time since I need to arrest you for trespassing. We have a fine of five thousand dollars, this will need to be paid by each of you, and a mandatory jail stay of one week. So now, I have to take you in.”

They both went deathly pale.

“Are you kidding?” the brunette breathed.

“No,” Rus repeated. “This is why I asked where you’re staying. Since we have such steep penalties for trespass here in Fret County, hotels, rental management and campsites tend to be real communicative about that to their clientele.”

He could tell by their expressions they’d been warned.

It was annoying, but since that happened a lot, he didn’t get into it.

He also didn’t share that, if they didn’t act like assholes, Harry had a habit of letting people go early.

As in, within a day.

Though, Harry wasn’t as lenient about the fines.

“Now, Mr. Larson was okay to let it slide once. But you came back. He called it in and communicated he wishes to press charges.” Rus shrugged. “I got no choice. Please turn around and put your hands on the car.”

“You can’t…you can’t do that!” the blonde cried.

“I can, and if it makes you feel better, you’re not the first, and I suspect you won’t be the last,” Rus told her.

“This is crazy!” She was getting louder.

“Ladies, if you could do as Lieutenant Lazarus asked,” Karen requested, reaching for her cuffs.

The blonde was frozen.

The brunette took a step back. “This is just…it’s nuts. We walked in a field!”

“You walked in someone else’s field,” Rus corrected.

“It’s just a fucking field,” she snapped.

“It’s still someone else’s field. Listen,” he started to explain. “You clearly don’t agree, but to Mr. Larson, you jumping that fence is like you helping yourself to his living room and fridge. He’s a private person. He moved out here for peace and solitude. That’s why he lives here. That’s why he spent a good amount of money to buy a good stretch of land that’s surrounded by nothing but other good stretches of land. And he has the law on his side. Which means, as much as you think you do, you don’t have the right to interrupt his solitude just because you want to. We have a lot of beautiful places in Fret County. Right now, there are wildflowers everywhere. Many of them you can get video of without jumping a fence. You made a choice. Unfortunately for you, it was the wrong one.”

Rus was trying to educate them.

Karen was done.

“What he’s saying is,” she boiled it down, “you fucked around and found out. Now, hands to the vehicle.”

The women looked at each other and fortunately, for once in their pretty-girl lives, they made the right decision.

Rus stood as Karen relieved them of their backpacks, patted them down, Mirandized them, cuffed them and informed them to pay their fines, the county accepted all major credit cards, PayPal, Zelle and Venmo.

When Rus had their packs stowed, and they were in the back of Karen’s cruiser, the brunette threatened, “We’re gonna vlog this and everyone is going to know about this insanity in Fret County. All the shit that goes down here, we should have known. This place is crazy. No one should come here.”

“I’d be obliged if you would,” Rus replied. “You have that many followers, it’d help a lot.”

He shut the door on her.

He moved to his cruiser.

He made sure Karen was all good and rolling out.

Then he followed her into town.

* * *

An hour and a half later,guiding him by the hand, Madden led him to the front of her class.

“Okay!” she called out. “This is my kinda stepdad, Lieutenant Zachariah Lazarus. He’s a detective with the sheriff. But before that, he was in the FBI!”

Rus buried a smile as she paused to preen from the excitement coming from the class.

She mostly gave up the goods with that, but tried to rally by finishing, “So he’s gonna talk to you about being in the FBI!”

She gave his hand a squeeze, beamed up at him, let him go and went to sit at her desk.

He waited until she was there, scanned her class, who were all staring at him expectantly, and he started it with, “Hey there.”

From just those two words, there was a ripple of anticipation through the crowd.

No pressure.

On that thought, he launched in on a very condensed, G-rated version of working with the FBI.

* * *

“And so,I was like, ‘Jeremy, if you save the world from a serial killer, you get to quit and kick back with a cushy detective’s job.’ And Jeremy was all, ‘If I was an FBI agent, I would never quit.’ And I was all, ‘How do you know? You’ll never be an FBI agent.’ And he was all, ‘Yes I will!’ And I was all, ‘No you won’t. I should know what it takes. Even though Rus isn’t in the FBI anymore, all his FBI friends come to the house when he cooks steaks on the grill.’ And he was all, ‘You think you’re so cool because you were kidnapped.’ And I was all, ‘Well, obviously. I mean, they’re making a TV show about me!’”

They were.

Well, not about Madden, specifically, but what happened to her would be in it.

Lucinda was openly annoyed, which meant deep down inside, she was infuriated.

Rus was a lot more obviously infuriated.

Nevertheless, it was bound to happen. Not even a week had passed after Richard Sandusky surrendered himself, and Hollywood and a variety of producers of documentaries, podcasts and the like had been in touch.

Rus shut them down. Lucinda shut them down. Surprisingly, Gary and Dakota Iverson shut them down.

Melanie was in negotiations, but when Gary landed the big lawsuit on her, and it was clear she knew little about her daughter and couldn’t contribute anything substantial, not to mention, she might lead them to a massive libel payout, they backed off.

None of that stopped them.

So now they’d been informed there was a docuseries being made.

More true crime fed to the world.

And the beat goes on.

After his talk with her class, which ended the day, Rus was bringing Madden home from school.

This was his job on days when Jaeger was flying, and today, when Rus was there anyway.

Yes, the man moved back. Too much shit going down in Misted Pines, his daughter kidnapped, that was inevitable too.

His girlfriend, a lifetime resident of Portland, as were all of her family, had decided not to come with him and was heartbroken he’d left.

History repeating.

It worked though, because Jaeger was a solid individual who loved his daughter, and Rus respected him. Jaeger gave that back.

There were times, however, that Rus couldn’t wade into, when Lucinda and Jaeger butted heads.

They did this about how she was raising a confident girl to be a confident woman who didn’t feel anything was out of reach, and Jaeger was raising a beloved girl who he thought one day would be as awesome as she was now, no matter what she did (though, while she was doing it, she’d be trained to make some man really happy).

It could be said the hot fudge she learned to make wasn’t just an activity father and daughter did together.

It wasn’t overt, it was just the way of the world, which was why Jaeger didn’t quite get it.

Lucinda might lose patience along the way, but for the long haul, she was in it to win it.

Madden changed the subject.

“So, do you think Sabrina will like me?”

“Of course she will, honey. She already does. You FaceTime her all the time. Why would you ask that?”

“Because she’s going to be here…for real…for hamburgers in, like, two hours.”

Sabrina was coming up, meeting everyone in person for the first time, spending her spring break in Misted Pines. Darragh was right then heading to Seattle to pick her up and fly her back.

Sabrina was in fits of happiness at getting a ride in a personal jet, having not really cottoned on that a jet was not a prop plane.

Darragh had a small, personal jet he used for his clients who could pay for it, and his plane was nothing to sneeze at.

Still.

In a week, she’d overlap with Acre for the weekend when he came up to do the same.

Like everything with Lucinda, it all seemed to happen naturally.

Rus took two weeks of vacation after the Iverson case closed, all of it with Lucinda and Madden in Misted Pines.

He’d then worked two months’ notice for the Bureau.

When he was done with that, he’d taken two months off to pack and get his condo on the market.

In this time, he also dealt with his family, who were reeling from the Sandusky arrest, particularly his father, who was now a shell of the man they all once knew. Rus hoped he’d snap out of it, but that hope wasn’t high. And Lucas, whose fury had been renewed by all the things they learned about the man who shaped all their lives.

He’d left that mess in an uneasy détente, but that was how they’d been when they first reconciled, so the hope he had that would get better was higher.

He’d taken some time to end things with Ruth and Penny, doing so remotely.

And he’d spent time with the kids when they came home for the holidays, both of them excited he was moving, and more excited he found somebody who made him happy.

He had not been able to completely avoid Jenn during this time, but he discovered he had a new outlook on that, because her sullenness, sulks and snappishness had zero effect on him.

He frequently flew to Washington in this time period.

He moved to Misted Pines in early February, setting up temporarily in an apartment that was owned by Bonner Enterprises.

Lucinda was in his bed every morning after she dropped off Madden, and Rus was at their house nearly every night for dinner and TV and homework checking and babysitting, which was good, because Hillary transitioned out and into the chorus line to take Brittanie’s place.

He would sometimes spend the night.

But in deference to Maddy, usually, after midnight, he was driving back to his apartment.

It was Lucinda who got fed up with it first.

She wanted to sleep beside him, wake up beside him, and Rus and Madden were so tight, she wanted him to be a fixture in her daughter’s life.

Rus wanted the same things, so he didn’t argue.

Madden and her mom had a convo Rus wasn’t invited to, and Madden was gleeful about the idea. He knew this because Lucinda told him, and because Madden expressed that same thing.

When this was shared, Jaeger was not gleeful, but he didn’t cause a problem.

In mid-March, Rus moved in.

Now it was early April, and his kids were coming to have their first face-to-face time with Lucinda and Madden.

He was thrilled. He couldn’t wait to have all the people he loved together.

“You have nothing to worry about. She already loves you,” he assured Madden.

“’Kay.”

“Let’s go back to Jeremy,” Rus suggested. “Were you okay with the whole—?”

“Rus,” she began, like she was forty-five and he was ten.

He grinned at the windshield because she said his name like that a lot.

“Like I said thousands of times, I’m okay,” she stated. “That guy smelled stinky, and his cave smelled worse, and the good guy turning into the bad guy was weird. But it was just like he grabbed me, then he took me in the woods. Then he gave me a Snickers and talked on the phone with you a lot. So I knew you’d be handling it. Then the good-bad guy came, you were right there in the woods and BOOM!” She clapped her hands. “Ice cream every night for two weeks and Dad moved home.”

That was pretty much how she’d described it from the get-go.

They kept a close watch on her, because even though she remembered it like this, and the therapist Lucinda had found shared Madden had astounding recuperative emotional powers (not a surprise, she was a Bonner woman) and a very solid foundation of support, it was something they didn’t want to creep up on her.

As for Rus, he saw her shaking, her wide eyes, the perfunctory nodding.

He felt her fear.

So yeah.

He kept a finger on the pulse.

They all did.

“Right, I’ll let it go,” he murmured.

“Like, forever?” she demanded.

“No, because I love you and want to make sure you’re okay. But I won’t ask again for two full weeks.”

“I’m counting,” she warned.

He chuckled.

They drove past the club and then they drove down the slope to the house.

He’d been right all those months ago, Lucinda had a beautiful garden around her house. It wasn’t formal, it seemed to grow wild and carefree, but something he’d learned about her since everything went down, she gardened.

She said it was her meditation.

He was unsurprised her meditation created beauty.

And now that things had started blooming, they had fresh flowers in the house all the time.

He parked next to her Jaguar under the overhang that was hidden by the bulk of the house, and like always, he smiled to himself. Because he knew she wasn’t home (being a wilderness mogul, she worked a lot), but she’d taken the golf cart to her office.

They went in, he and Madden worked together to sort her afternoon snack, and Indira showed so Rus could go back to the office for a few hours before coming home.

As he was driving by the club, he saw a beautiful woman wearing a creamy dress standing at the window in the room above the overhang.

He saluted her as he drove by.

She didn’t move.

Though she was too far for him to see it, he knew she smiled.

* * *

Rus woke with a jerk.

“Honey?”

She was right there.

Always right there.

He touched her anyway.

Lucinda felt warm.

Good.

He tossed the covers off himself and got out of bed.

The house was dark.

It was quiet, save the constant sound of the river rushing over the rocks.

He moved down the stairs and opened the first door to the right.

He looked in.

Shit.

His blood pressure spiked.

No one was there.

The bed was still made.

He turned immediately to the door to his left.

He looked in.

There was a strange glow in the room that came from the dark screen with the word Samsung appearing and disappearing on it in different places.

And two girls, well, one was a woman, were cuddled in bed, asleep, the detritus of the kind of food frenzy that accompanied binge watching littering the duvet.

Sabrina had introduced Madden to Gilmore Girls.

Rus felt his breath coming easier.

He shut the door quietly behind him and walked through the rest of the house, going all the way down the stairs, checking locks on doors, even scanning the garden and the deck.

She was waiting at the top landing for him.

“Okay?” she asked softly as he joined her.

“Yeah,” he replied, still slightly sweaty and wondering if he should take a quick shower.

Lucinda made the decision for him, taking his hand and closing the door behind her as she guided him to bed.

She sat him on the side then knelt on the floor in front of him and sucked him off.

She was insanely good at that.

It was a gift.

Lucinda then pushed and nudged him back between the sheets and joined him there.

“Sorry,” he murmured.

She pressed closer. “It’s okay, baby. Now, sleep.”

It happened.

Too often.

These days, it was Madden racing through the trees, but she wasn’t alone when she found him. She had someone chasing her and one side of her head was caved in from a hammer blow.

Sometimes it would switch up, and he’d walk in to see Brittanie again, round the bed, look at her face, and the face would not be Brittanie’s. It’d be Sabrina’s.

This situation would calm down.

And the longer he was arresting privileged girls who did what they wanted because they were privileged, having no idea Owen Larson might snap and send a shotgun shell through their spine or some predator hiding in the trees could wander into a wildflower field, and they’d never find their way out…

Yeah.

The longer he had of them making their way to Karen’s cruiser, safe and alive, the calmer his nights would be.

He curled Lucinda closer into his body, and she held on tight.

He let out a long breath.

He was having these dreams now.

They wouldn’t last.

And then something would happen, and they’d come back.

But he’d always have this.

His cunning queen with a heart of gold.

So it would suck.

But he’d be okay.

* * *

“Okay, no.”

Rus looked to Kleo. “Why no?”

She turned to him. “Are you trying to set your daughter up?”

From his chair up on the deck, sitting next to Kleo, he scanned the crowd.

Cade and Delphine had thrown a big barbeque for Sabrina and Acre. And it was with zero surprise that, when they arrived, Rus saw Sabrina clock Jason and Jesse Bohannan.

Knowing both of them better, it was with less than zero surprise Jace then clocked Sabrina.

“Jesse’s going to go for someone edgy, like Lucinda, or another take on that, you,” he told her. “Jace needs a princess he can spoil.”

“Oh my God.” She sounded close to hurling. “You’re setting your daughter up. She’s your princess, and the king is picking who to hand her off to.”

“It’s not active.” He didn’t quite deny it. “I just showed Delphine a picture of her—”

“And conned the most meddling stepmother in MP into throwing a big barbeque so they’d meet.”

Rus shrugged. “Now it’s up to them.”

His gaze went to the pier, where both of them were sitting next to each other with their feet in the water, the lake their view.

Sure, Madden was with them. And Celeste. And Keyleigh and Declan.

But it was a start.

Maybe.

“This is convenient,” Kleo noted. “Since, if they click, she’ll move up here to be with him, which means close to you.”

“Mm,” Rus hummed.

“You’re diabolical,” she muttered.

He turned to her. “Do you know anyone who might fit with Acre?”

She shook her head vehemently. “Don’t drag me in. I’m not going to be a part of this.”

And to emphasize that point, she got up and walked away.

Lucinda, who was standing at the deck railing, talking to Megan Nichols, was watching them.

He grinned at her.

She shook her head and gave him a small eyeroll, but he saw her lips quirking.

She had told him, later, it meant a great deal to her he’d added Kleo to his team when they went after Madden. With Rus and Kleo going to get her daughter, she was still terrified, but it gave her a measure of calm.

Rus had essentially adopted Kleo as his little sister.

Which meant, of course, he piled as much shit on her as he could shovel.

She pretended she didn’t love it.

But she absolutely did.

Moran took Kleo’s place.

“Heads up, brother”—he tipped the neck of his beer to the dock—“think there’s a situation happening there.”

Rus just sat in the sun, took a sip of his own beer.

And smiled.

* * *

Lucinda wanderedin wearing her preferred pajamas.

These were ivory satin, a bralette and what she described as tap pants.

She matched her bedroom, which matched her house. It was clean-lined, modern, intensely feminine and, as for that space, it was all done up in ivory, taupe, soft gray with accents of gold.

She’d told him she’d happily redecorate it for him, but since he felt surrounded by her there, and he’d never felt safer in his life than he did with her, he didn’t want her to change a thing.

He was in bed reading, pillows shoved up against the gray upholstered headboard, his back and shoulders to them, his legs in pajama bottoms stretched out on the ivory covers.

She put a knee to the bed and then stretched out on her side close to him, elbow in the bed, head in hand, eyes to him.

“Happy?” she asked.

“I think the first part of what Kleo describes as my diabolical plan to matchmake Jason and Sabrina went well.”

Her lips curled.

She knew of his plan.

She kept mute on the subject.

But he sensed she agreed.

Then she said, “I’m glad for that, honey, but I meant generally.”

He was confused.

“Generally?”

She flung her arm out to indicate…what?

He didn’t know but he took a stab anyway.

“I love this room, baby, I told you,” he said low. “It’s very you. And I’m very into you.”

Her face got soft, but she replied, “You live in my house, Rus, with me and my daughter. Except for taking over the basement, which you’ve declared your intention to make your mancave, and then moved forward with that by starting demolition, it’s us. It’s not you.”

“Is it you two? And not me?”

“No. It’s all of us.”

“Yes,” he said. “I agree.”

“I worry,” she admitted.

His brows drew down.

He didn’t like that.

“Have I given you a sense I have an issue with this?”

“Did you give Jennifer a sense that her demands on your time and attention, which were impossible to meet, especially with the career you chose, were dragging on you?”

Ah.

He put his book aside, took hold of her, pulled her up him then rolled them so he was looming over her.

“You aren’t her,” he said.

“No,” she agreed.

“I don’t care about décor. Your house is the shit. I love the kitchen. I love the garden. I love the river. I love the privacy. I love Madden. I love you. My kids have their own rooms where they can be here with us and know they’ll have space. They won’t need it long, but it’s nice they know they have it. They both love it up here. They both love me with you. They think you’re cool as fuck, Acre’s words. Sabrina said, ‘She’s amazing, Dad! I wanna be her when I grow up.’”

“I know, but—”

“I’ve never been happy, Cin,” he whispered. “Not until I came to Misted Pines and met you. Not once. Not without questions or worries or weight. I don’t care that my job is about investigating trespassers who property owners give me all the evidence I need for an arrest. Or high school pranks that are solved in a day. I come home to you and Maddy, and I’m great.”

“Something ugly will come down the line,” she warned. “It always does.”

“It does and it will, but it’s not relentless. It’s not me working day to day in a sea of every possibility people can make of doing stupid, ugly, greedy, selfish shit that affects lives. I’ll take months of quiet and wildflowers before the next big thing blows up in our faces.”

He dropped closer to her.

“I’m happy. I promise. I wake up and go to bed happy. And part of that is, if something ever weighs on it, I know I can tell you and you’ll listen to me.”

“You’re sure you don’t want to get married?”

They’d had the discussion.

She didn’t want it either, for different reasons, mostly having to do with the fact she thought it was an outmoded tradition that tended to levy heavy sociological and emotional burdens on women.

He couldn’t disagree.

That wasn’t why he didn’t want to do it.

He didn’t want to do it because he didn’t need a piece of paper and a promise to the government to make him commit to the woman he loved…and her daughter.

When he started tearing down walls to build his mancave, that was when he committed.

And as far as he was concerned, the discussion was closed.

But in order to give her peace of mind, he’d reopen it.

“Yes,” he answered. “Are you sure?”

She nodded.

Right.

Discussion closed again.

“Have fun at the barbeque today?”

She nodded again. “I think Madden has a crush on Acre.”

“It’s a different kind entirely, but Acre has a crush on Maddy. He won’t grow out of his, but she’ll grow out of hers.”

“I don’t know. She has good taste. Like her mom.”

All right then.

Fuck it.

He kissed her.

They were in the attic room on the top floor, the better to give Lucinda a massive bathroom and closet.

And the walls were solid.

So Rus committed to something else.

Putting effort into giving his woman an orgasm.

Then, since everyone he loved was under one roof, and they were all like him—happy—Rus fell into a dead sleep.

And he didn’t wake up.

* * *

Cin

They were downby the river, her girl and her man.

Cin stood in the window, her arms crossed in front of her, and watched them.

Brittanie had long since been swept away, fattening up fishes and becoming one with the silt.

They had a date tonight, Rus and Maddy. There was a movie on in town that Maddy wanted to see. They were going to get popcorn and M&Ms and Reese’s Pieces and have dinner after at the Double D.

Rus loved his second chance to be a girl dad, and he didn’t hide it.

He was also so grateful for Cin, he let her feel it always. Sometimes in a glance over coffee before she left to take Maddy to school. Sometimes not releasing her eyes when he was moving inside her in their bed.

She knew, here, with her and Madden, after a lifetime tethered to people who didn’t let him be all he was, finally, he was free.

He’d been crouched, but she watched as he stood, so tall, those shoulders so broad, his body lean and muscled and strong, the sun glinting in his dark hair.

He was so fucking beautiful.

He was also a bona fide hero, the real kind who rode himself ragged in the pursuit of justice.

Last, he was her miracle, the man he was, the woman she was.

That he’d be hers.

That he’d return the favor, and love her as the woman she was, letting her be free.

There wasn’t a Bonner woman in her line who’d encountered a man like Zachariah Lazarus.

Rus had told her what that man had to say, and Richard Sandusky got one thing right.

Rus was pure.

He was beauty.

On this thought, Cin walked out the back door, got in her golf cart and put it in gear.

She reversed out, her champagne gold, slingback pump pressing the pedal.

She adjusted it to drive, and in her head, she could hear Rus giving her shit about putting off in her golf cart to go rule her empire.

But she was putting off in her golf cart to go rule her empire, being the first in the Bonner line herself.

This being knowing a man she’d give it all up for was hanging with her daughter at the river.

Needless to say, these thoughts in her head, as she putted to work in her cart, Lucinda Bonner was smiling.

The End