Forever Driven: Forever Bluegrass #4 (5 page)

“What a romantic story,” Matt said dryly. “But this sister will take the kids? Is she a saint?”

“She and her husband can’t have kids. Her husband’s a rodeo star but a particularly bad fall damaged his boys. He has two prosthetic ones now. As soon as she was told what happened, she offered to take the kids. She cried when she heard about them. We’d already vetted her. She’s thirty-one. He’s thirty-six. They’ve been married for eight years. Have a 1500-acre farm where they run cattle. They pay their taxes, are active in their community, and have no evidence of drug or alcohol abuse. It’s probably the best thing to happen to these kids.”

“Good. I hate when children are involved. And the processing plant?” Matt asked.

“We rounded up the night shift and left their cars there. There are ten people who work during the day. We have agents waiting to arrest each worker as they come inside the plant. In a few hours, the whole operation will be shut down.”

“And the Miami guys?”

Tate turned onto the parkway and left Lumpur behind forever. “They aren’t talking. But it’s only been a short time. We’ll see what we can find out when we dig further. For now, you can go home and rest.”

Matt closed his eyes. Rest sounded good. Seeing his friends again. Having a meal at the café. Not worrying about being shot if you say the wrong thing. It would be heaven.

T
he sound
of the radio going off in the car had Matt’s eyes popping open. He’d only been asleep for fifty minutes but already they were out of the Eastern Kentucky mountains and into the rolling hills of Central Kentucky. They would be in Lexington soon.

“Tate, do you have Walz with you?”

Tate picked up the radio and spoke into it. “Yes. We’re ten miles from Lexington. What’s up?”

“There’s a state trooper by the name of Jacob Tandy trying to relay a message to him. Matt’s boss contacted us and told us to pass it along once the operation was over,” dispatch said.

Tate handed the radio to Matt. “This is Walz. What’s the message?”

“He wanted you to know your friend Riley Davies was assaulted in the annex parking lot at two this morning. She has a black eye and some bruises on her side but was otherwise unharmed. Suspect is unknown and on the loose.”

Matt shot up in his seat. The exhaustion was replaced by a myriad of emotions—rage and worry the predominant ones. “Where is she now?”

“Officer Tandy drove her home and left her in the care of her father. He wanted me to relay that she intends to be back at work tomorrow. He has notified the guards on duty, and there will be extra trooper presence in the area. He said to call if you want more information.” Dispatch rattled off a number that Matt had in his phone at home.

Matt snatched Tate’s cell and dialed his friend. When he had left for this undercover job, he had hoped Riley would win. It didn’t matter that they had left on uneasy terms. He wanted someone he knew to be there if she ever needed it. Matt just didn’t think she’d ever need it. Riley was stubborn and independent almost to a fault, but she was smart, too.

The afternoon before Matt left for this undercover job, he found Riley working on the ranch. He couldn’t tell her where he was going or what he would be doing. They had been dancing around each other, and he had wanted to know if he had a chance with the fiery redhead. He’d admired her for many reasons, not including his physical attraction to her. She was smart, kind, confident, and when she allowed it, she was fun.

Matt had first noticed her when he’d driven by the town’s water tower late at night and had seen all the cars parked in the field. He’d thought he was busting up a teenage drinking party but instead had found the Davies cousins and their friends celebrating Sydney and Deacon’s upcoming wedding. Matt had been off duty and had been instantly invited to join the fun.

Riley had a drink in her hand and was standing on the truck bed dancing with Sydney. The former supermodel should have drawn his attention, but it was the long, shapely legs of Riley in her short cutoff jean skirt that had him agreeing to join the party. Riley had worn a jungle green cami that made her slightly curled red hair shine in the headlights of the cars circled around. Her rounded breasts swayed as she danced to the music and Matt thought he’d never seen anything so seductive in his life. He must have been staring because Sydney whispered something to Riley, and Riley turned and looked at him. She sent him a laughing smile and lifted her beer bottle in a silent salute. Matt saluted back with the beer one of her cousins had given him and thought it was going to be the start of something.

But it wasn’t. They flirted, but nothing ever came from it. Riley ran hot and cold, and Matt didn’t know what to do. When he was sure she was interested in him, he would approach her to ask her on a date, and she would suddenly turn uninterested. She would stop talking or limit her responses to “yeah” or “nah,” and Matt would lose his nerve to ask her out. He would be thirty-one this year, and he didn’t know what this woman wanted.

He had gone to see her before he had left for this undercover assignment with the DEA. He was hopeful she would give him a hint as to her feelings. He had found her washing horses at one of the barns. Her headphones were on, and she was dancing and singing, badly, to a country song when he’d pulled up. When she finally heard him, she had turned five shades of red and practically hid behind the horse.

Matt assured her he liked it, and slowly Riley had come out from behind the mare. He’d told her he wanted to talk to her, and she suddenly became very interested in the mare’s neck. He didn’t know what to think, so he just pushed forward and asked her out to dinner that night. She had stammered out a “thanks but no thanks” response. Something about a horse and her sister—Matt didn’t follow it but he got the gist. She wasn’t interested. It had made leaving a lot easier. But it didn’t mean that he had stopped caring. Was he in love with her? No. Was he still interested in her? No. But could he walk away from something that had tantalized him for over a year as if he’d never had feelings for her to begin with? No. And that’s why, after tipping his dark tan cowboy hat at her, he had gotten back in the car and called Tandy and the new guy who would be covering Keeneston to ask them to keep an eye on things for him.

Matt snapped out of his recollection and looked over at the speedometer and finally had to admit to himself he might have lied. He could try to be disinterested, but the truth was Riley meant something to him. Tate was being a good agent and going the speed limit. What agent or police officer ever went the speed limit? Matt leaned forward and flipped on the flashing lights. “It’s time you gunned it.”

Tate pressed on the gas and the powerful engine under the unremarkable sedan body responded. They were going a hundred miles per hour in no time. “Am I taking you straight to this woman’s house?”

Matt thought about it and shook his head. “No. Take me to mine so I can get some clean clothes and my own truck. Just hurry.”

“She must be some woman.”

“She’s something,” Matt said. He just didn’t know what she was to him, because the feeling he got at hearing she had been assaulted signaled that he wasn’t as indifferent about her as he’d thought.

“
D
ad
, stop,” Riley complained as her father put some foul-smelling paste on her eye. She’d lost track of which home remedy this one was. She’s already had the range of cayenne red pepper to pineapple pulp applied to her eye. When it didn’t magically go away in the hour, her dad turned to herbs instead.

“This works wonders for the swelling. I used this when I was in China,” Cy said as he dabbed the thick paste around her eye.

“Dad,” Riley practically whined.

“Sorry, kiddo, but I will not have your mother waking up to find your face a mess.”

Another opportunity to roll her eyes at him missed due to the swelling. “Thanks to Mila, we know all about how you and Mom met. She was kidnapped by a crazy black market dealer with strong ties to terrorism, and you think she’ll pass out from a little bruise?”

“It’s completely different when it’s on your child. And yes, I know how old you are, but you’re still our little girl. Now hold this there for thirty minutes.” Her father pressed the paste to her eye and put some cling wrap over it. Riley sighed but moved to hold it while her dad went to clean up the kitchen. She didn’t know how her mom had slept through the science experiments as her dad made these various concoctions, but she still hadn’t come downstairs.

Instead of hearing the pots in the sink, she heard the clicking of a magazine clip being loaded into a gun. “Dad?”

Her father didn’t look at her as he flipped the safety off on his pistol and headed to the door. “Stay here,” he ordered in a voice that sent chills down her back. “And don’t take off that compress for fifteen more minutes.”

Riley shook her head. How had her dad known she was taking it off in order to grab a gun to back him up? Instead, she made a sound of annoyance and watched as Cy listened at the door. Suddenly he flung open the door with his gun aimed.

“Good evening, Mr. Davies.”

Riley shot up from the couch. She hadn’t heard that voice in months. What was Matt doing here?

“Matt. How was your undercover work with the DEA? What have you done to your hair?” her father asked as he lowered the gun and flipped the safety back into place.

“How did you know I was undercover with the DEA?” Matt’s voice grew closer as he approached the porch stairs. “Wait, don’t tell me—John Wolfe?”

Her father chuckled. “Who else? He has spy skills I could have only dreamt of. I guess you heard about Riley? You didn’t leave your assignment, did you?”

With her one unpasted eye, Riley darted a look around the room for a place to hide. She didn’t know why. She’d known Matt for years now, but one night at the water tower had changed everything. Riley had had boyfriends in college. It wasn’t easy since her father would mysteriously appear via video chat on her boyfriend’s computer in the middle of the night just making sure she wasn’t in bed with him. College boys just didn’t have the balls to handle that. And honestly, after what happened, she wasn’t complaining too much.

But that night at the water tower, when she had been dancing with Sydney and looked at Matt, she knew he was interested in her. She could see it in his eyes, and she freaked out. Her father ran away any man she liked. Yes, she was a strong woman who stood up to her father on a regular basis, but that didn’t mean she didn’t suddenly get dumped, too. “What did my dad do now?” was her standard question as the men went running for the hills.

Sometimes it was nothing more than showing her boyfriend his weapons room. Sometimes it was knowing incredibly private things, like what the last picture he took on his cell phone was or—her dad’s favorite—the STD results of the guy’s latest blood tests. It was one thing if the guys were in Lipston or Lexington. Riley wouldn’t run into them all the time. And they had been fun, but she hadn’t experienced that
feeling
her mother had told her she would feel when she met the one. Until she had seen the way Matt had looked at her. And when he had taken her in his arms for a dance, she knew that feeling her mother had described. Then she’d thought about her past and all the ways her father would screw up any relationship she had with Matt. She was sick with the feeling of loss before she even had someone to lose.

So instead of going for it with Matt, she had hidden from him. Sometimes Riley had forgotten to hide her feelings and they flirted, danced, and talked. The
feeling
was so strong it scared her. If those feelings grew, would she be able to handle the inevitable loss? She didn’t think she could handle the rejection, so Riley had decided it was not better to have loved and lost and had opted with not knowing love at all. But here Matt was, on her father’s doorstep within hours of hearing about her attack. He had been somewhere working undercover for the DEA, and he’d left that to see her.

The good eye teared up. Riley swiped at it and decided hiding as much of her face as possible with the paste was the way to go. She sat ramrod straight and steeled her heart as her father opened the door wider.

“No, sir,” Matt said casually as if it were normal to be talking to her father at five-thirty in the morning. “I completed the bust a couple hours ago. I’m home now. Tandy got a message to me through DEA dispatch. Since I was just getting home, I thought to check in on Riley. Is she okay?”

Riley pushed back the emotions clogging her thoughts. It was better to never know love than to lose it, she kept reminding herself as Matt walked into the room. He was about an inch taller than her father, standing close to six feet two inches of broad muscle and . . . lean? Matt wasn’t lean. He was athletic. But as Riley squinted, she took in long, black hair instead of his normal short, dark blond scruff that was an hour away from being a beard and malnourishment. Matt had dropped at least twenty pounds and seemed lanky now. The only thing that looked the same were his deep blue eyes that were so deep she’d call them navy. And they were tired. And haunted.

“See for yourself,” her father said as he gestured to where she sat in the softly lit room.

Riley saw his eyes harden before softening and filling with concern. She also saw him sniff the air. “Is that pineapple?”

“Yes,” her father nodded. “It’s good for . . .”

“Black eyes. Helps with the swelling. The vitamins and enzymes in the fruit aid the healing process,” Matt mumbled as he moved toward her.

Her father sent her an I-told-you-so look, but all Riley saw was Matt kneeling on the rug at her feet. “How bad is it?” he asked softly.

Riley removed the paste and heard Matt suck in air. “Are you in a lot of pain?”

Riley shook her head. She wanted to throw her arms around him and cry into his shoulder but then her father would learn the truth and ruin it. “Are you okay? You don’t look too well,” she said instead.

Matt’s face fell as he let out a long breath. He looked like he was about to fall over with exhaustion. “I’m better now that I’m home.”

“What were you doing?”

“I’m sorry, Riley. I can’t tell you that.”

Riley nodded and choked down the emotion making her throat feel as if it were being squeezed shut.

“He was posing as a meth user to bust the largest crystal meth ring in the state for the past six months. It all went down tonight. He’s just arrived back home. Life of a druggie isn’t easy,” Cy told her as he took a seat in the nearby chair. “And put that paste back on.”

Riley slapped the paste back on her eyes, and Matt shook his head.

“What?” her father asked. “You said you couldn’t tell her. That didn’t mean I couldn’t tell her. Besides, John would have said something tomorrow, and it feels good to finally beat him.”

Matt moved from where he was kneeling before her to sit beside her on the couch. “Do you have any idea what this was about?”

Riley nodded as she moved her leg to make sure their knees didn’t touch. If they did and she felt his warmth, there would be nothing stopping her from throwing herself into his lap and her father shooting him. “They said it was about the budget vote. I needed to fall in line and vote in favor of the highway coming through Keeneston. And it’s gotten worse. They’re going to destroy even more of Main Street—all the way to the bank for a giant retaining wall. Not only will our farm, Uncle Pierce’s, Will’s, and Mo’s farms be cut in half, but quite a bit of downtown will be destroyed.”