“Truthfully? I don’t either. I’ve told my brother that. He’s not blaming himself anymore. He seems to have his head on a little bit straighter now that Ashley has come into his life.”
Callie smiles. “Well, a good woman can do that for a man.”
I rake my gaze over her beautiful body. “Oh, yes. She can.”
“You have a one-track mind, Donovan Steel.”
“Yes, I do, when it comes to you, Caroline Pike.”
“I promised you a good time. But first… Do you think my hunch has any merit? Or am I just really wanting to blame Pat Lamone for all my troubles?”
“I think it would be easy to blame him for all your troubles. After all, he’s the source of a lot of them. Whether he’s the source of the fire, we may never know. We’d have to put him in the area at the time, and we don’t even know when he got back into town.”
“Yeah.” She rubs her forehead. “And if he went into the woods alone, we can’t prove anything.”
“But…if it will make you feel better, I have the resources. I’m going to be putting a tail on Lamone anyway, so why not check out when he got here and where he’s been?”
“You would do that for me?”
I advance toward her, caress her silky cheek. “Isn’t it clear by now? I’ll do anything for you, Callie.” I bring my lips down on hers in a forceful kiss.
She opens for me instantly, and our tongues tangle in passion. It’s not as raw as it was previously, but still, it’s passionate and euphoric.
To my surprise, though, she breaks the kiss and walks backward.
I lift my eyebrows.
“Sorry. I just… I need to think this through. I want you. I always want you. But I—”
I hold up my hand to stop her from speaking. “You don’t have to explain anything. I get it. Believe me.”
She sits down on the bed. “I just need to know. Rory is beside herself. Someone clearly got into our safe-deposit box, which means they had to have Rory’s ID.”
“I know. The good news is…I happen to have access to all the databases in the state of Colorado. And so do you.”
A smile spreads slowly over her face. “Which means we can find out when a new ID was issued in the name of Aurora Pike. Except…what if it’s a completely fake ID? Then it wouldn’t be in the databases.”
“Good point. However, someone at the bank took the ID. It obviously wasn’t the manager you and Rory saw, or he would have remembered.”
“Would he have?”
“Most likely, if it was recent. We need to question the other managers at the bank who would have access to the safe-deposit boxes.”
“Right. But Donny, what if this happened a long time ago? What if he found out where we buried the key, dug it up back then, and did all of this ten years ago?”
“When you and Rory went to dig up the key, did the land look disturbed?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. Neither one of us gave it much of a thought.”
“Then it probably didn’t look disturbed. You would have taken note if it had.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Still, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t there recently. Anyone worth his salt would know how to make it look like he hadn’t been there.”
“I never thought Pat Lamone was that much of a genius, but perhaps I’ve underestimated him.” She shakes her head.
“It’s best to never underestimate your enemies,” I tell her. “But don’t blame yourself. You thought this was over.”