So the racetrack was not her favorite place.
But it was important to the Ravens, and to these boys whom she loved—
The thought stopped her in her tracks, so much so that she didn’t immediately notice that the light she’d been sitting at turned green until the car behind her honked its horn.
Glancing into the rearview mirror revealed Sam and Ben playing rock-paper-scissors to determine who got the first turn to push the grocery cart. Awed and amazed, Cora had to acknowledge the truth. She’d spent most of the past nearly five months with these kids . . . and she’d grown to love them. Not just care about them or enjoy them or like them. She loved them as if they were family of her own. The boys had made it so easy that she hadn’t even realized it was happening. But now that she saw it, now that she recognized the feeling for what it was, she couldn’t ignore it. She couldn’t go back.
Cora didn’t just love Slider. She loved his boys, too.
And she thought her belly had been jiggly before. It wasn’t every day you not only started dating a man, but admitted your feelings to him and realized they were deeper than you even knew.
At the grocery store, Cora found the parking lot to be an absolute madness, Friday afternoon not being the ideal time for any sane person to go to the grocery store. She drove in circles looking for a space without success, and finally had to drive down the sketchy side lot of the store off which the loading-dock area backed to an empty-looking industrial park.
The three of them climbed out, the boys chattering away—goofing around one minute, and bickering the next.
Barking. The sound crept through the mental checklist she’d been running through. But there it was again.
Cora peered at the nearby cars, worried that a dog had been left without enough air on the unusually warm October afternoon. But the barking sounded aggressive and agitated, and way too loud to be coming from inside a car. Something about it made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.
Frowning, she debated. “Stay right here guys.”
She walked to the back of the store building and peered around the corner. Nothing. Just a tractor trailer backed to one of the docks. But the barking was louder, and . . . was that a man shouting?
“Cora?” Sam whispered, worry plain in his voice.
She held up a hand. “Stay right there with Ben, please.” Her gut twisting with dread and suspicion, she followed the sound to a fence at the back of the lot. A line of scrubby, overgrown bushes grew haphazardly on the other side, but they weren’t so thick that she couldn’t make out two men standing behind the open covered cab of an older blue pickup truck facing off with a big black-and-tan dog. Her heart was suddenly a bass drum in her chest.
“Shit, we shouldn’t have stopped,” one man said. “I told you we shouldn’t have stopped.”
“You also told me he was out cold, asshole,” the second man bit out. Taller than the first, his tone seemed to indicate that he was in charge. “We couldn’t drive through town with all that barking. Your grasp of the need to keep things on the down low is surprisingly lacking . . .”
Holy shit! She wasn’t sure what she’d stumbled upon, but her gut seemed to have an idea.
“Let’s just go before someone hears all this racket.”
Cora tried to get a closer look at the men, but they stood a good thirty feet away with their backs to her. Both wore baseball hats. And, damnit, it was too risky to chance moving to a part of the fence where the bushes were thinner. She’d learned that dogfighting carried a felony charge, which meant anyone involved in it—if these guys indeed were—wouldn’t want to be found out. And might do all kinds of things to make sure no one did.
Glancing over her shoulder, she found that Sam had come halfway across the wide lot behind the grocery store, a concerned scowl on his face that looked so much like his father. Ben hung back at the corner. She gave Sam a fierce shake of her head, silently pleading for him to stay where he was.
“Fuck it,” the taller man said. “And fuck these goddamn piece-of-shit dogs you’ve been finding me lately.”
For a minute, the dog’s growls and barking were all she heard, and then the men reached some sort of agreement, one of them turning to close up the truck’s rear hatch.
Heart in her throat, Cora scrambled in her purse and found her phone. Her hand was shaking so bad she wasn’t sure how good her pictures were going to be, but she tried to zoom in and take some anyway. Of the men, the truck, its license plate.