“I’ll do anything to protect my family,” he said, “and to me, Bryce, you are family.”
Chapter Forty-Six
Marjorie
Ruby and I sat with Jade on the deck after we’d shared a quick dinner of sandwiches. Talon was with the boys in the yard, playing with the dogs.
“He’s like a little kid himself with them,” Jade said. “Those boys have been so good for him.”
“He’s been good for them too,” I said. “Having a father with that level of understanding…” I didn’t need to finish. None of us wanted to say the words, but we all knew how special it was that Talon was now father to the two boys.
“It’s so great to see Dale come out of his shell more,” Ruby agreed.
Jade smiled and patted her belly, which now showed the tiniest baby bump. “I think they’ll be good big brothers.”
“Are you and Tal going to find out the sex?” I asked.
“I don’t know. We haven’t really talked about it. For a while, we were just hoping the pregnancy would continue. Now, with everything else that’s going on, we haven’t discussed it.”
“Are you hoping for one or the other?” Ruby asked.
“I suppose it would be nice to add a girl to the mix,” Jade replied, “but it doesn’t really matter. I just want a healthy, happy baby.”
My phone buzzed. I smiled. “It’s Bryce. Hey,” I said into the phone.
“Where are you?”
“Home. We just had a small dinner, and Jade, Ruby and I are chatting. Where are you?”
“On my way to you. Stay there. I have news.”
“So the rock belongs to Alex Booker,” Ruby said. “Cade Booker is trying to implicate everyone he has an issue with.”
I grabbed Bryce’s arm. “Have you checked in on Henry?”
He nodded. “He’s safe. I’ve got someone keeping watch.”
“Good.” I was eternally glad Bryce had someone keeping tabs on his son. If anything happened… God, I couldn’t go there.
“Why would he have an issue with Colin?” Jade asked.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Bryce said. “Believe it or not, I think it was jealousy.”
“Jealousy?” Talon said. “That’s nuts.”
“To us, yeah. But to Cade? Cade was the first person my father liked enough to pay money for. As far as we know, he didn’t pay money for anyone again until Colin.”
Ruby nodded. “Booker is finally beginning to make psychopathic sense.”
I said nothing. It made an eerie sort of sense to me as well, something I wasn’t altogether comfortable with.
“But Colin escaped from Tom,” Talon said.
“That doesn’t mean Cade didn’t know about him,” Ruby said.
Bryce had already given us the theory that he thought Tom had taken Cade as a sort of protégé.
“You think Cade thought he was being replaced?” I said.