“I’m here. Right here. In your arms.”
He kissed her. “Right where you belong.”
Feeling completely sated, they relaxed and fell asleep in each other’s arms.
Chapter Seven
Jason, deep in paperwork, heard his office door open.
Corey and Shane walked in, seeming anxious and tense. “Something wrong?”
“Yes, there’s something wrong,” Shane blurted. “Our sister has a stalker. What are you doing about it, Sheriff?”
“Calm down, Shane,” Corey said. “Let Jason talk.”
“I’ve been working on this for weeks, guys. I haven’t been sitting still on this one. Besides, it’s my job to protect the citizens of Destiny.” I care about her, so even if I wasn’t sheriff, I would do whatever I could to protect her, no matter what our current status is…
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Corey’s tone was full of frustration and concern.
He couldn’t blame him. This was about Phoebe. “Because your sister made me swear to keep your family out of it unless something turned up. So far, it’s only been calls from the jerk. I don’t have any other leads. With Dylan’s help, I’ve put tracers on every new phone she has, but the fucker hangs up before we can get a lock on his location.”
Shane placed his hands on the desk and leaned forward. “How in the hell did the bastard get your brothers’ numbers when she was with them, Jason?”
His jaw tightened. “What the hell are you talking about? None of us have been with Phoebe since you got sent away. Not Lucas. Not Mitchell. Not me.”
“Not true,” Shane said with a smile. “Lucas spent the night with her after the last stalker call. Mitchell is at her house right now, making sure she stays safe.”
What the hell is going on? Jason knew things between him and Mitchell and Lucas were tense, but that his brothers would keep him in the dark about what was happening with Phoebe angered him. “I don’t think it’s time to talk about whether or not me and my brothers and your sister are going to get back together.”
“I agree. There’s a stalker that is harassing my sister. I want to know all the details you’ve collected on it. I want every fact, every thread, every trail. Anything you’ve found, give it to me. I can—”
“Hold on, Blue. This is my county. Not yours.” He was impressed by Shane’s line of thinking. Had Shane not gone bad, he would’ve made one helluva good lawman. “Yes, she’s you’re sister, but you’re a convicted felon. I don’t want you doing a damn thing on this. Leave it to me. Now, you both better fill me in because apparently I’m out of the loop. What’s happened that I’m not aware of?”
They told him about the three calls that had come from the stalker, starting last night before the O’Learys’ Halloween party.
The first was to Phoebe herself. It had been a couple of weeks since she’d heard from the asshole. She’d been given a new phone. He still had her old phone in his desk drawer.
The second had gone to Lucas, which puzzled and worried him. Was the stalker in Destiny? He’d considered that as a possibility during his investigation, but had dismissed it after one of Dylan’s traces indicated the origination point of one of the calls was Idaho.
The third call had gone to Mitchell, right in front of Corey and Shane at Phong’s Wok.
“It’s very clear to me that whoever this fucker is, he’s got incredible computer skills.” He recalled what Brown had told him this morning. Kip Lunceford has escaped.
“So who tops your lists of suspects, Sheriff?” Corey asked.
He wasn’t going to talk about this in front of Shane. “I’m still compiling names of possibles. As you know, Corey, conducting an investigation takes time, but believe me, I’m dotting every i and crossing every t. There isn’t a stone I’m not turning over.”
Now that Jason and Nicole were on Brown’s new CIA covert team with Dylan, Matt, Sean, and Jena, the release of any information would have to be cleared, even for Corey, though he was a US marshal.
Could Kip be Phoebe’s stalker?
Though Jason wasn’t sure how, he knew Kip, the brilliant psychopath, just might be. Lunceford was capable of many things. He’d just escaped from the transport that was taking him to the new prison. Phoebe had been dealing with her stalker issue for months now, so it didn’t se
em to line up that Lunceford could be the culprit.
But Kip had proven, again and again, he could get past whatever security systems the Feds had. Getting access to make a call to Destiny wouldn’t be a challenge at all for him. According to Easton Black, the man who’d given his life to protect Destiny, Lunceford’s new residence would keep him locked up tighter than a drum. But Kip had fooled them all, avoiding finishing out his life sentence in the highest maximum-security prison in the country.
Shane paced around the room. “What about any guys she might’ve dated since your breakup?”