Reeve and Parker exchanged glances. “What was anyone even doing up here on branding day?” Parker asked his boss. “I said it seemed suspicious how there were so many new guys this year. You thought I was being paranoid.”
“Let’s not make any rash conclusions. There are ways to get on the land back here without passing through the front gates. This could have been anyone.” Reeve said “anyone” as if he might mean someone in particular. Someone who wasn’t on the ranch at all.
He gestured at the graffiti on Jenkins’s body. “Even if this Buddy person did this, he’s not the one behind it.”
The hair stood up on the back of my neck, and I had that eerie feeling of being watched.
Reeve nodded to one of the guards, who then pulled out his cell phone and made a call. “Yeah,” he said, not bothering to step away, “we need a deeper investigation of everyone on the Callahan crew list, particularly someone named Buddy. That’s the only name I’ve got, obviously it might be a nickname. Also, all recording equipment that has a view of the shed and the yard around it needs to be pulled and watched starting around noon. If you see the dog in any of the footage, mark that.”
“The only cameras we have focused out here are on the shed itself,” Parker said, shifting his jaw like he wished he had snuff tucked in his cheek. “We don’t have anything watching the trees beyond.”
Reeve’s expression remained stoic. “We could get lucky. Security footage will at least rule out some possibilities.”
Parker scratched behind his neck, then turned his whole body toward Reeve. “It’s him, isn’t it?” He didn’t leave any chance for response, apparently confident in the him he guessed was responsible. “What do you think he means by ‘MINE’? The land? Is he trying to stake some claim to Kaya?”
Reeve shook his head and I suspected it meant he didn’t know rather than a firm no. He was still studying the animal on the ground. “Have you turned the dog over?”
“Right,” Joe agreed. “We need to see if there’s more.” He grabbed Jenkins’s front paws while Parker took his hind legs and together they flipped the dog to his other side.
As Reeve must have guessed, there was painting on this side of his body, too – SHES.
“Shes?” Parker pronounced the word with a short e vowel.
“It’s missing the apostrophe,” Joe explained as he stood, wiping his hands on his pants.
“She’s mine,” Reeve said quietly, putting the words together.
Parker squinted up toward Reeve. “But who’s ‘she’?”
Before anyone had a chance to speculate, another voice piped in behind us. “Me.”
We spun in unison to see that Amber had joined us, her arrival unnoticed.
“It’s me,” she repeated, a distinct tremor in her voice. “It’s from Micha, and he means me.”
CHAPTER 13
Reeve’s eyes hit me the minute I walked in Amber’s room, knocking the wind out of my lungs. I pretended I was just out of breath from running up the stairs to get there, but the truth was I’d taken my time.
While Amber had been fairly composed when she’d first arrived at the scene of the dead dog, it didn’t take long before she’d worked herself up to hysterics. Both Reeve and Joe had tried to calm her, to no avail. Eventually, after summoning for Jeb to meet him in her room, Reeve had swept Amber in his arms and carried her inside.
Joe had followed without a glance in my direction, essentially confirming my suspicion that he was avoiding me.
I’d lingered behind, feigning interest in the guard’s investigation as they took pictures and looked for more clues around the shed. Mostly I hadn’t wanted to be with Reeve as he attended to Amber. I hadn’t thought I could stand it if he ignored me while caring for her.
I hadn’t realized that his attention would be just as unbearable.
Amber didn’t seem to notice my appearance with her face buried in Reeve’s chest. She lifted her head. “He said he would find me if I ever left. He says that to all the women.”
It was the same thing she’d said outside. She’d been repeating variations of it for the better part of the last hour, and every new rendition gutted me.
Reeve sat with her on the bed, his arm wrapped around her shoulder, but he kept his gaze locked on me. “He’s not going to get you here.”
His intense stare made my focus shift so that he was front and center in my vision, and everything else around him blurred and lost context. Yet, even though I refused to see his hand drawing soothing strokes up and down her arm, I could feel it. As sure as if it were my body he was caressing. Except that, instead of making it buzz with butterflies, my stomach curled. And instead of wishing it would last forever, I prayed that it would just end.
Jeb, who’d been at the dresser filling a syringe, turned toward the bed now. “Amber, can you give me your arm?”
Though she seemed barely aware of anything but the man holding her, she turned up her forearm, exposing it toward Jeb.
“This will make you rest a while,” Jeb said as he emptied the medicine into Amber’s arm. “So you can relax.”
She nodded obligingly. Then she sat up with an anxious start. “He marked me, Reeve. He thinks I’m his! He’s coming after me! He’s warning me!”
“He’s warning me.” Finally Reeve moved his eyes to her, and my entire body sagged as though I’d been relieved of a heavy weight. “And I don’t take warnings lightly.”