Page 55 of Claimed By the Cowboy
Her chin tilts. “So you can do the real work?”
“Jesus Christ, I can’t say anything right with you,” Daniel mutters, dragging a hand down his face.
“Hey.” Kitty’s voice cuts through their standoff, weak but amused. “Could you two have your sexual tension crisis somewhere else? I’m trying to recover from being poisoned here.”
Both Daniel and Delaney whip around to stare at her, faces flushing red.
“Sexual tension?” Daniel sputters. “There’s no?—”
“We are not—” Delaney starts simultaneously.
“Right,” Kitty says dryly. “And I just have areallybad hangover.”
Delaney glances at her sister with immediate concern. “You’re right. This isn’t the time or place.” She blows out a shaky breath, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I’m sorry, Daniel. I shouldn’t be snapping at you. The last twenty-four hours have been… difficult, and I don’t know what to do with all the emotions.”
Daniel’s expression eases. “You don’t have to apologize for caring, Laney.”
Laney?My eyebrows rise at the nickname.Since when does anyone call her Laney?
Her eyes flick up to his, and something unspoken passes between them before she looks away quickly. “Still. I shouldn’t take it out on you.”
Kitty watches from the bed, a knowing little smile tugging at her lips. “Well, isn’t this cozy? Next thing you know, you two will be holding hands over my IV pole.”
Delaney mutters under her breath and turns away to hide the flush creeping up her neck.
Daniel huffs, though the corner of his mouth betrays the faintest twitch of a smile.
I stand and shrug into my coat. “Daniel, you’re with me and my brothers. We’re going to have a conversation with the men who poisoned my wife.” My hands clench into fists. “An educational conversation.”
“Ethan and Gabriel are waiting in the truck. Saidthey weren’t letting their cousins go into this without them,” Daniel says.
Grim satisfaction sparks in my chest. “Good. All the Suttons together. That’s how we end this.”
I lean down to kiss Kitty softly, breathing in her familiar scent. “I’ll be back soon, darlin’.”
“Be careful. And make sure they don’t hurt anyone else,” she whispers against my lips.
“Count on it.”
The drive to the contamination site takes twenty minutes through winding mountain roads. I sit in the passenger seat as Daniel drives, with Ethan and Gabriel in the back. The ranch truck is parked beside the creek when we arrive, telling me that Angus and Henry are already here.
The setup is exactly what I expected—heavy machinery positioned to dump industrial runoff directly into the water supply, three men in work clothes standing aroundlooking guilty as hell. The kind of operation that requires willful ignorance about what you’re actually doing.
My brothers and cousins converge as I climb out of my truck, their faces grim with purpose.
“Situation?” I ask.
“Three locals,” Henry reports. “All been out of work since the lumber mill closed. Getting paid cash to run equipment and not ask questions.”
“Who’s paying them?”
“They claim they don’t know,” Angus says. “Cash payments, instructions left at a drop site. But the equipment rental traces back to a shell company.”
Ethan steps up beside me, steady as bedrock. “Shell companies don’t pay in cash unless they’ve got something ugly to hide.”
Gabriel lingers behind him, restless energy humming off him, jaw clenched tight. The black sheep of the Sutton cousins—quick to flare, quicker to act—but loyal to the bone when it comes to family. “Doesn’t matter,” he mutters. “They’re done here today.”
I study the three men clustered beside their machinery. They look nervous, which is smart. They should be nervous.
