Page 68 of Deputy Brand Gets Her Man
“Well, Drew did. Sort of.”
He lowered his head with a heavy sigh. “Those two need a family intervention or something.”
“Think they’re freaking Holmes and Watson.”
“Benson and Stabler,” Baxter put in. And he sent her a grin.
“Mulder and Scully,” she returned.
“Steele and Holt,” he said, and when she frowned he added, “Remington Steele, Laura Holt.”
“This game is no fun with you; you watch ancient television.”
Her cousin winked at her, but it didn’t ease the dread in her heart. She sighed and sank onto the bench feeling guilty as hell as she accessed her email on her phone and hovered over the one from Orrin.
“He said it looked like a page from Vincent de Lorean’s journal.”
“Illegal as hell,” she muttered, shaking her head. “What would Ethan think?”
“You don’t have to look at it,” Baxter said.
“How can I not look at it?” She clicked Orrin’s email attachment. It was a photo of a handwritten page crammed with text.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll have to read this somewhere else. It’s too busy here and I’ve got too much going on.”
“Or you could decide not to and just delete it,” Baxter said.
She met his eyes. “The Gringo’s been lyin’ to me,” she said.
“The Gringo saved Uncle Garrett’s life when he carried him outta that fire at Two Lilies. We owe him for that.”
She squared her shoulders. “I have a right to be upset with him. You’re gonna have to trust me on this.”
“I do trust you,” he said, pacing away. “And if he wronged you, cuz, I’ll kick his ass myself. But if he didn’t…this might not be the best way to…handle things.”
He was quite possibly the most civilized of her cousins, so that passionate promise of ass-kicking surprised her. “I love you for offerin’.” She chose to ignore the rest of his statement, though.
She got up off the bench and hugged his neck, the big handsome genius. “Now I need you to give me the respect and the autonomy to take care of this myself. Okay, Baxter?”
He took a deep breath, then nodded. “I’m fixin’ to hang around up home today, in case you need me.”
When any of them said up home, no matter where they currently lived, they generally meant the Texas Brand.
She sighed and shook her head. “I appreciate it. And do me a favor? Try not to let me and Jeremiah be the main topic on the soon-to-be-created Everybody-but-Willow text loop.”
He averted his eyes so fast it made her suspect such a loop already existed. They’d probably created it right after her accident.
Yeah, see? I’m not such a bad cop.
Chapter Twelve
Her SUV had been waiting in her parking spot when she’d arrived at the station, just like always. She drove it to a secluded spot where teenagers liked to go parking. Or they had when she’d been in high school. She had a breakfast burrito, a cup of piping hot coffee, and her laptop, and she set to work on all three, perching the laptop on the console, safe from crumbs.
The background check she’d ordered on Juanita Lopez back when she was still dumb enough to think helping Jeremiah was a great idea, was awaiting her, and so was the image of the page from de Lorean’s diary. Of the two, the diary interested her more, so that was what she looked at first.
She adjusted the image big enough to see but still small enough to prevent blur, and read while chewing a big bite of her burrito.
Everything bad happened to me in that godawful dustbowl of a town, at the hands of that phony-ass Brand clan. But one good thing, too. One good thing remains in Quinn, and nobody but me will ever know. A treasure, for sure. Eight pounds and three ounces of solid gold.
