Page 10 of The Secrets She Keeps

She tended not to speak to him much when they were alone. And he hadn’t pushed. He didn’t really know how to interact with Lieutenant Heather Coleson yet. He just didn’t.

But he had wanted to.

Something about her had gotten beneath his skin from day one. No denying that.

As he watched, one of her sisters held up a blanket. Heather did something. The baby’s feet switched sides. It took him a moment, but it sank in eventually.

Heather was nursing the baby now. That was what she was doing. Nursing her baby. Something about that struck him hard. So damned hard.

He’d spent weeks trying to figure that woman out.

There were little kids sleeping in the waiting room, wherever someone could put them. The sister from Oklahoma had arrived, panic on her face, and her own youngest in her arms, two teenagers and a boy trailing after them. Her husband stoodover her now, arms crossed across his massive chest, glaring at everyone.

Guarding.

Heather’s name had been paired with more than a dozen men in the TSP in the month and a half she’d worked there. Including Miguel Rodriguez’s. Miguel had been shot by Heather’s ex. Steve Wilson. There had been rumors.

She was gossiped about more than any other woman in the post had ever been. Daniel still wasn’t certain why.

Or what about it felt sooff.

Of course, she was also the most beautiful woman to cross the threshold into the TSP post in Daniel’s fifteen years with the TSP. That had always stood out to him.

Steve Wilson had thought he owned Heather.

Sol Kimball had said that’s where they would find the answers.

Steve Wilson. Find those connections. Daniel was going to do that.

Heather looked up. There was a blankness in her gaze he hated to see. To know men like him had put it there.

Heather looked away. Or maybe Daniel did first. He didn’t know.

It hurt to look at Heather Coleson right now.

It seemed like the Coleson family—even those not Colesons by name—had had more than their fair share of bad luck around Finley Creek.

Tonight, he had almost lost Haldyn. The one woman he had ever come close to loving. He was so damned tired of the vulnerable and the defenseless paying the cost of other men’s sins.

When was it all going to end?

Heather stood abruptly. She stepped over the young girls sleeping in front of her. The rest of her family rose to their feet. Crowded behind her.

“Dr. Macomber? My daughter?” Bonnie asked from right at Heather’s left. “My Hope? How is she?”

“She’s in recovery now.” But the doctor didn’t have a relieved look on his face. Daniel tensed. The entire room was holding their breath. He could feel it. “But it was close. She did have a mild heart attack on the table.”

He listened as the doctor explained how a surgery she’d had when she was younger didn’t appear to have been effective. That the strain from her injury tonight had caused a rapid decline. And he heard the other man say that Hope should be okay. Eventually. Daniel breathed a sigh of relief.

Hope was going to pull through. Haldyn was going to be okay.

Now he had to head over to County Gen. Be there when they found out about Brett Naylor.

Sometimes he hated this damned job. More than words could ever say.

The TSP—it just always cost so much.

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