South Dakota Showdown
Автор
Nicole Helm
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Chapter One
Bonesteel, South Dakota, wasn’t even a dot on most maps, which was precisely why Jamison Wyatt enjoyed being its attached officer. Though he was officially a deputy with the Valiant County Sheriff’s Department, as attached officer his patrol focused on Bonesteel and its small number of residents.
One of six brothers, he wasn’t the only Wyatt who acted as an officer of the law—but he was the only man who’d signed up for the job of protecting Bonesteel.
He’d grown up in the dangerous, unforgiving world of a biker gang run by his father. The Sons of the Badlands were a cutthroat group who’d been wreaking havoc on the small communities of South Dakota—just like this one—for decades.
Luckily, Jamison had spent the first five years of his life on his grandmother’s ranch before his mother had fully given in to Ace Wyatt and moved them into the fold of the nomadic biker gang.
Through tenacity and grit, Jamison had held on to a belief in right and wrong that his grandmother had instilled in him in those early years. When his mother had given birth to son after son on the inside of the Sons, Jamison had known he would get them out—and he had, one by one—and escaped to their grandmother’s ranch situated at the very edge of Valiant County.
It was Jamison’s rough childhood in the gang and the immense responsibility he’d placed on himself to get his brothers away from it that had shaped him into a man who took everything perhaps a shade too seriously. Or so his brothers said.
Jamison had no regrets on that score. Seriousness kept people safe. He was old enough now to enjoy the relative quiet of patrolling a small town like Bonesteel. He had no desire to see lawbreaking. He’d seen enough. But he had a deep, abiding desire to make sure everything was right.
So, it was odd to be faced with a clear B and E at just a quarter past nine at night on the nearly deserted streets. Maybe if it had been the general store or gas station, he might’ve understood. But the figure was trying to break into his small office attached to city hall.
It was bold and ridiculous enough to be moderately amusing. Probably a drunk, he thought. Maybe the...woman—yes, it appeared to be a woman—was drunk and looking to sleep it off.
When he did get calls, they were often alcohol related and mostly harmless, as this appeared to be.
Since Jamison was finishing up his normal last patrol for the night, he was on foot. He walked slowly over, keeping his steps light and his body in the shadows. The streets were quiet, having long since been rolled up for the night.
Still, the woman worked on his doorknob. If she was drunk, she was awfully steady. Either way, she didn’t look to pose much of a threat.
He stepped out of the shadow. “Typically people who break and enter are better at picking a lock.”
The woman stopped what she was doing—but she hadn’t jumped or shrieked or even stumbled. She just stilled. Closer now, he could see long dark hair pulled back into a braid, and an oddly familiar beat-up leather jacket that would hardly ward off the chill of a spring night in South Dakota.
Slowly, the woman stood to her full height, back to him. He rested his hand on the butt of his gun, ready for anything, even though he didn’t feel particularly threatened by the tall, slender brunette.
The set of her shoulders reminded him of... something he couldn’t put his finger on.
Until she turned, slowly, to face him.
He supposed it would have been a shock if he hadn’t known the perpetrator, but this wasn’t a local. It was someone he hadn’t laid eyes on in fifteen years. “Liza.”
She let out the breath she’d been holding and stepped forward as if it had been days since they’d last seen each other, instead of years. “Thank God, Jamison. You don’t know how long I’ve been trying to find you.”
He took her in. Fifteen years should have done more to change her, but she looked so much the same. Tall, scrappy, with dark, expressive eyes that had always gotten her into trouble with her father. And his own...
Then there was her mouth, which was full and could make a grizzled sailor blush with the creative swearing it could utter.
Once upon a time anyway. This was fifteen years later. Maybe it wasn’t half his life, but it was pretty darn close. Liza might want to act like they were old pals, but he wasn’t young and easily fooled anymore.
“I need you to come with me,” she said, stepping forward, placing her hand on his arm as if they were more than old pals as they once had been.
He laughed, not missing how bitter it sounded, and how it made her wince. Undeterred, she scanned the dark around them, fidgety and afraid. When her brown gaze met his, it was with fear.
“Do you really think I’d be here if I weren’t desperate?” she asked in a tremulous whisper.
For a second, a terrible split second, he believed in that fear and was ready to jump in to help. Then he remembered who he was dealing with. “Desperate? Or working for my father?”
She released his arm as if it was a snake that had bitten her. She even managed to look hurt. Quite the touch.
He’d saved her once. Secreted her out of the eagle eye of her father, who was always in league with his own.
After managing to get his brothers out and to Grandma Pauline, it had taken some time to get himself out. In part because he wanted his father to know—to really know, once he was gone, that it was he who had gotten the others out.
He’d been eighteen to her sixteen. They’d been friends, though he’d known she was ready and willing to be more. It had felt wrong, like taking advantage. Still, he hadn’t been able to leave her behind. Not with her father being as bad as his own. Not with all those feelings buried deep inside.
So, it had taken longer to plan, to work out the route and figure out a time when they’d both be out of the careful watch of their fathers’ men.
He’d done it, too. Grandma hadn’t been able to take her in, not with all those wild boys she was raising. But Duke Knight, Grandma’s neighbor, had. He and his wife had only been able to have one child of their own despite wanting more, so they’d fostered girls over the years, even adopted some.
They would have adopted Liza. If she’d stayed.
But she’d run off, back to the biker gang, and to everything his father ruled with an iron fist and, sometimes Jamison was quite convinced, pure evil.
Even now he couldn’t regret it. Maybe Liza had chosen to go back, but he’d given her the chance. Her choosing to throw it away was her deal. Not his.
“I’m not working for your father,” she finally said, vibrating with a loosely controlled anger. The same kind of fury he’d once felt himself.
He’d stopped letting the world make him angry. It had been a hard lesson, but an accomplishment he took great pride in. Or so he had thought, at least before she’d shown up. Instead he could feel that old anger like a geyser getting ready to burst inside him.
But he would control it. He’d built a career and a life on maintaining steady emotions. On being detached enough to get the job done, and engaged enough to care to.
“You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t take anything a biker gang member says at face value,” he managed to utter without too much bitterness tingeing his words. “Not when so many things you said to me once upon a time were lies.” Okay, that sounded a little bitter.
She shook her head, but she didn’t deny it. “You don’t understand.”
“No, I don’t. And I don’t want to. Go home, Liza. Back to the life you chose.”
“You have no idea what I chose.” She cut him off and grabbed his arm again, but this time hard. “Or why I chose it,” she added, looking up at him with an emotion he didn’t understand. “More important, it doesn’t matter. Do you remember Carlee Bright?”
Jamison didn’t like to remember anything about his life in that place. His father’s camps, or the times they’d take over an entire town and drive people out. Because inflicting pain was Ace Wyatt’s currency, and he was a very rich man.
But Jamison remembered the name. “Wasn’t she Cody’s age?” His youngest brother was nine years his junior, but it felt more like a century considering it was those nine years.
“Yes. My dad knocked her up a few years ago.”
“Sounds about right, but I don’t see why that concerns me. Or you, for that matter.”
“Carlee is dead.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. If you’re looking for police help—”
“Police help? Police help? God, Jamison, you never change. A woman is dead, her daughter witnessed it and—”
“How am I supposed to think this isn’t a matter for law enforcement?” he interrupted, frustration getting the better of him.
“What are the police going to do about a woman in that gang who is dead? Nothing. You and I both know it.”
He didn’t respond. He knew the case likely wouldn’t have gotten the same kind of attention as another. Certainly not as much as someone who appeared on the grid with no gang association. But it wouldn’t be ignored.
Liza would never believe that.
“Is there a body?”
“No. There’s a terrified little girl. My half sister. She told me something, Jamison, and now she’s disappeared, too. I need help, and I’m not going to get it from the inside.”
“But you think you’ll get it from me?”
She studied his face for the longest time before she finally smiled, if sadly. “Yeah, I do.”
SOMEHOW JAMISON WYATT was almost exactly how Liza remembered. Age had weathered him some, but since he’d always been good-looking, it settled well on him. Lines in the right places, a wariness that made her nerves hum like she was thirteen years old again, watching him as he kept his brothers safe.
That feeling was just the same, which was how she knew, no matter how he blustered or accused her of being associated with his father, he’d help. He’d have to help.
Jamison was the one and only reason she believed in goodness. In the midst of all the bad of their childhoods, when they’d grown up as the direct progeny of some of the worst men in that group, Jamison had still somehow found integrity and honor. By finding it, he’d given it to his brothers and her.
Without him, she never would have seen what the real world looked like outside the Sons of the Badlands. She would have never had hope or love. She never would have known homes could be real and safe, and that stealing and lying and always, always watching your back was not the only way to live.
The last fifteen years back in the Sons had tried to beat that knowledge out of her, but she’d done what Jamison had always done. She’d gone back to protect her own. She’d failed with her sister, but for four years now she’d been determined to find a way to get her half sister out. Just like Jamison had saved his brothers, Liza was going to save Gigi.
Until she did, until Gigi was safe, she’d stay in the Sons. If she didn’t ever get out, she’d always have the satisfaction that she’d worked to help a few other people leave a life that sucked all the good and decent out of them.
She had to find some hope for Gigi and keep it alive. She looked up at the man who still had a good six inches on her, no matter how tall she was for a woman. She didn’t have time for the arguments she’d practiced on her way over, not for reasoning, either. She squeezed his arm. “They’re going to kill Gigi if I can’t find her. If I can’t... She’s just an innocent bystander.”
His jaw worked, his eyes squinting as if trying to hold on to indifference—a familiar move. Years ago she’d run her palm along the hard, chiseled edge of that jaw. She’d been so in awe of him. Too much hero worship and not enough sense.
She couldn’t afford to make those mistakes when a little girl depended on her. She had to be strong on her own—to add her strength with his if she ever hoped to save Gigi. She had to believe that if she had a Wyatt brother on her side, she could do this. Rescue Gigi. It was too late for Carlee, but Gigi was still alive.
I hope.
The wave of dizziness that had been plaguing her today came back in full force. She really needed to eat, to get to a place where she could sleep and take care of herself.
“I can take you to the sheriff’s department,” Jamison said, his voice hard and infused with that cop smugness he’d just been starting to perfect when she’d had to leave the warmth of the Knights’ house. “We can take your statement and—”
“I need you, Jamison. You know the Sons and you know the law. If you’re too busy guarding all this—” she waved a hand to take in the darkened small town, where, at worst, he was taking care of petty crimes “—I’d take the help of one of your brothers. Dev or the twins. They’d know enough. But I need someone who knows Ace and the Sons—enough to be afraid, and how to beat them in spite of that fear.”
Though she didn’t ask herself why she’d come to him first, when she knew that of all the Wyatt brothers with their various law enforcement jobs, Jamison would be the least likely to forgo protocol.
Except he was the one she needed. If there was an Achilles’ heel hidden inside the hard, upstanding man in front of her, it was the desire to save people.
He was silent for far too long. When he spoke, the pain of his words sliced her in two.
“If I could beat Ace, I would have done it already,” he said quietly into the dark. A painful rasp made those words hurt.
She winced again. She’d known this would be thorny, but she’d also known Jamison was truly her only hope. Any other member of the Sons—man or woman—would be too afraid or too uninterested to help. Even a few sympathetic parties could be a liability in the end.
“When was the last time you tried?” she whispered, the hushed words too loud out here in a town that looked most especially lonely at night. Was Jamison just as lonely?
It was his turn to wince, or maybe take the blow she’d just landed.
He opened his mouth, either to answer or tell her to go, when something exploded, loud and close and painful.
For a second, Liza didn’t recognize the sound as that of a gunshot. So much so she was almost surprised when Jamison crashed into her, pushing her underneath him and on to the hardscrabble gravel. His body covered her, warm and heavy.
After a moment—or was it a few moments?—he rolled her on to her back. His hands were on her, she thought, but she couldn’t quite feel them. She could see his lips moving, but his voice was garbled.
It was the concern in his dark eyes that worried her. But she was floating away on a cloud of shock she didn’t understand. Then radiating pain took her completely under.
