“Regardless, your first appointment’s at one-thirty.” Maureen pulled her purse out of her bottom drawer. “You should grab lunch first.”

“How about if I bring lunch back and we have ourselves a picnic on the back patio?”

“I’m in. Not pizza.”

“You’re a hard woman, Maureen. Say, I bet I know something you don’t.”

She gave him a smug, sidelong look. “Prepare to lose.”

“We’ve got a budding Hemingway penning his literary classic in one of the Walker bungalows.”

Maureen flicked her fingers in the air. “As if that’s news to me. College professor from up north, spending a chunk of his summer here for the quiet and inspiration. About your age, I expect. Single since he’s here alone and doesn’t wear a ring.”

“Oh, I met him.” Gretchen shut down her computer, pulled out her own purse. “Mr. Bingley—or I guess it’s Professor Bingley.”

“John Bingley?”

“Ah.” Gretchen paused, brow furrowed as she thought. “No, it was … Blake, Drake, Deke? Something like that. Not John. Why?”

“Not somebody I know then,” Zane said easily. “How’d you meet him?”

“Oh, it was just in passing on the street a few days ago, really. He was looking at the building—like everybody before we had it painted again. I said something, he said something. He wanted to know where he could find a good steak and wine. I told him Grandy’s.”

“Good choice.”

He locked up behind them, considered going down to Grandy’s and poking there. But decided to start with the Blake, Drake, or Deke.

He texted Darby as he walked to his car.

Salt mines are closed. Heading home.

Me, too! I’m right now in line to order pulled pork sans, coleslaw, sweet potato fries. We will feast.

I’ll have a cold beer waiting for you.

Twenty minutes.

Good deal, he thought. Damn good deal.

He drove toward home, top down, looking forward to sharing Brody’s story with Darby—as Brody hadn’t included her in the no-tell. Plus, he wanted her take on it.

Because what was it with a guy driving a Prius who doesn’t use a clearly marked recycle bin? Or an English prof who wouldn’t enjoy talking Steinbeck with a teenage boy?

A puzzle, he thought, a mystery—and one he realized he wanted to get his teeth into. Takes me back, he realized, to working with investigators, to, yeah, puzzling out how to nail down the bad guys.

He turned up his road, wound around a curve. Hit the brakes hard.

The truck sat crosswise, blocking his way. Jed Draper already stood beside it.

And Zane sincerely hoped he wasn’t about to be shot down a quarter of a damn mile from his own home.

He didn’t see a gun as he got out—but it didn’t mean Jed didn’t have one handy.

Still, he had Jed by a couple of inches in height, and while Jed had that tough Draper look about him, Zane figured he could handle himself if Jed stuck with fists.

“You’re blocking the road, Jed.”

“My brother’s in the ground.”

“I know it. I didn’t put him there.”

Jed stepped closer, fists bunched, wiry body at the ready. “My ma thinks you did.”

“I’m sorry your mother lost her son. I don’t think there’s anything harder than that. I didn’t kill him.”

“If you did, they’d cover for you. The whole fucking town would cover for you over a Draper.” He spat in disgust. “So we’re gonna settle it, right here.”

“What’s this going to change? You punch me, I punch you? Clint’s still going to be dead, I still won’t have killed him.”

“He wouldn’t be dead you hadn’t took his wife from him. Whether you threw him in the lake or not, he’d be alive if not for you.”

The hell with it, Zane thought. They weren’t walking away from this without spilled blood and pain. “He’d be alive if he hadn’t come on my land and shot out my doors.”

“Got what you deserved there, less’n you deserved, for putting your nose in our family business. Think you’re better’n him? Better’n me?”

Zane redistributed his weight, because it was coming. “Yeah. I know I am.”

He blocked the first swing by pivoting into it, letting it bounce off his shoulder. Then, shifting his weight again, sent a roundhouse into Jed’s solar plexus. It knocked Jed back, but didn’t stop him. Zane felt the pain of bare knuckles glancing off his chin, used it to fuel his own blows. The fist he connected to Jed’s face slit his lip.

Jed bared bloody teeth, charged like a bull.

Mistake, Zane thought, and simply danced away while his left pumped an uppercut on Jed’s jaw.

“There’s no point in this,” Zane began, holding off as Jed shook his head clear.

And that was his mistake, not following through. As Jed steamed at him, he remembered Dave’s words to a young boy who needed to learn to fight.

Outside the ring, there’s no fair in fight.

Tasting his own blood, Zane waded in.

* * *

Singing along with Gaga—Zod wiggling as they took the road toward home—Darby decided she’d had a pretty perfect day, and looked forward to capping it off with a pretty perfect evening.

Then she hit the brakes, had one moment of sheer shock as Zod yipped in protest.

She leaped out of the truck, already grabbing her phone out of her pocket as she ran around Zane’s car toward where a man with a bloody face swung a fist toward Zane’s.

Zane snarled out, “No cops!” and the fingersnap of distraction had that fist landing.

She all but felt it in her own body. Her fingers tightened on the phone as the dog began to howl over the nasty sound of knuckles striking flesh and bone.

She made herself breathe—in and out—resisted punching nine-one-one only because she could see, for now at least, Zane had the advantage.

He had good form, she told herself, and Jesus, he could take a punch. But if he didn’t end it soon, she would.

Winded, one eye already swelling, Jed circled, feinted. “When I finish you, I’m going to give your bitch a taste.”

Zane heard his little sister screaming, saw his father dragging her by the hair. With that image in his head, he moved in with a cold fury. If he took more blows, he ignored them, just focused on that image, driving Jed back, driving him back.

Now Jed’s swings went wild, went loopy as he staggered. And still, he stumbled forward, flailing out until his knees buckled.

When he went down, part of Zane wanted to leap on him, to pummel and pummel until he emptied himself out. But he wasn’t his father.

He’d never be his father.

So he put a foot on Jed’s chest to keep the man from getting up again.

“Stay down. Stay down, for Christ’s sake, and use what brains you’ve got. I’m better at this than you, and I’m betting you know damn well I’m better at it than Clint was. I wouldn’t have needed a rock to stop him.” He crouched down, looked into those blackened, swollen eyes. “And if I was the type to use one, you’d be as dead as your brother. You know it wasn’t me.”

“Then who?”

“I don’t know, but I’m not going to stop till I do. Whoever it was killed on my land, and I see that as a threat to the woman I love, the woman I want to spend my life with, build a family with. I won’t stop until I know.”

Straightening, he looked down at Jed with a mixture of revulsion and pity. “I didn’t do this, I didn’t cause this. You come at me again, it’ll go worse for you than me. You so much as look at my woman, at any of my family, it’ll go worse for you. You do anything to trouble Traci or her family, it’ll go worse for you. You hearing me?”

“My brother’s dead.”

“That’s a fact. You getting your ass kicked and having it end up behind bars—and I’ll make sure both happen—won’t change that. Now get up, get off my land. Don’t come back here.”

Saying nothing, Darby got back in her truck, pulled it to the side, and got out again to wait until Jed managed to get to his feet.

He didn’t so much as glance toward her as he drove past.

Zane swiped the back of his hand over the blood on his face, tried a smile. “So. How was your day?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Once inside, Darby ordered Zane to sit at the kitchen counter, got him an ice pack and a beer.

“Best girl ever,” Zane decided, winced a little at the first sip of beer.

“I’ll get what we need to clean you up. God, Walker, you’re a mess.”

“Hey, did you see the other guy?”

“I did. We’ll talk. Sit.” She got a beer for herself, and went to get the supplies.

Zane glanced down at the dog currently looking up at him with eyes all but dripping love and concern. “Not that bad, right?”

But when he shifted the ice pack to his left eye, he hissed.

“You forget how much it hurts. Shit, shit. I’ve got court in the morning. Oh, it’s nothing, Your Honor. Just got in a fistfight with the brother of the guy killed on my property. No big deal.”

He thought: Fuck, and took another sip of beer.

“I have court in the morning,” he told Darby when she came back in.

She set down the first aid supplies, walked to the sink to run cold water over a cloth. “Truth or lie?” she wondered.