Colton P.i. Protector. Regan Black

their voices to a murmur. Too bad Stumps couldn’t share the details with her.

      When Carson was gone, Shane’s judge and jury expression landed on her. “Let’s go.”

      “I can’t leave,” she protested. “It’s my overnight.” She could handle it now that she didn’t have to go out in the yard again.

      “Hayley is already here to fill in for you.”

      Danica rolled her eyes. “That’s silly. I’ll be fine.”

      “She’s here,” he repeated. “You need a hospital. Come on.”

      When had her adult status been revoked? She didn’t want to owe Hayley Patton any favors. The woman was a great dog trainer and a nice person underneath her passion for gossip and her tendency toward the self-absorbed end of the scale.

      Danica scolded herself for being petty. Hayley would be her sister-in-law by now if someone hadn’t murdered Danica’s brother Bo on the night before their wedding. She’d never quite understood what Bo had found so irresistible about Hayley, though they shared a love of animals, working dogs in particular. Maybe they really had fallen in love over the common ground of Bo’s German shepherd breeding business.

      From her chair, she matched Shane’s cool gaze. After all, his half sister Demi Colton was the prime suspect in her brother’s murder. The situation was just one more point of strife in the latest generation of the Colton-Gage feud. The Gages were perpetually certain the Coltons put family ties above the law and yet the Gages had made plenty of mistakes through the years. Shane might be the most glaring of those mistakes.

      Though she personally refused to put too much stock in the circumstantial evidence found to date, the facts weren’t lining up in Demi’s favor. It was a balancing act for Danica, caught between grieving and knowing the investigation needed time to run its course so the right person ended up in jail.

      “Come on,” Shane said.

      She didn’t like the way he watched her as she pushed out of the chair. “I’d rather go home. I’ve already told the paramedics I’m fine.”

      “Great.” Shane extended a hand, urging her forward. “You can tell the doctors, too.”

      She started to shake her head and thought better of it.

      On a grumble, Shane closed the distance and seized her elbow. His grip was firm and gentle and sent a burst of tiny sparks up and down her arm. “Do you know what they injected me with?” she asked.

      “No,” he said. “Stumps didn’t find anything in the yard, so the attacker must have kept the syringe he used.”

      On the way out of the training center, they passed Hayley sitting at the front desk, looking as polished and composed as ever. Even when she dissolved into tears over Bo, Hayley always seemed to be the epitome of beauty and polished grace.

      Though they were both twenty-five, Danica always felt like the awkward younger tomboy around Hayley. It never surprised her that Hayley’s long blond hair, blue eyes, sweet smile and generous curves drew so many admiring glances. Beside her, Danica’s figure would best be described as streamlined and easily overlooked. It didn’t bother her. Much.

      Even now, she caught Shane’s appraisal of Hayley as they walked out. She couldn’t care, having no claim on where his eyes or interest wandered. The cool fresh air and velvet darkness of the South Dakota night refreshed her immensely.

      “Where’s your car?”

      “I walked to work today.”

      “Can you walk down to the police station?” Shane asked. “If not, it looks like the ambulance is still here.”

      A trick question, she decided, following his gaze. The paramedics were leaning against the rig, chatting with another RRPD officer who had responded to Shane’s call. One of them waved to Shane. “If I walk it, will you drive me home rather than take me to the hospital?”

      “No,” he replied.

      She’d rather not continue the conversation, and being outside was helping. For a time there was only the muted sound of the corgi’s toenails on the sidewalk as he trotted beside Shane. Neither her shoes nor his made any noise.

      “You were drugged,” Shane pointed out. “We shouldn’t take any chances.”

      His insistence on helping confused her. “Why do you even care?” She was a Gage. He was a Colton. On top of that, her grandfather, a decorated officer in the RRPD, had railroaded an investigation and sent Shane to prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

      His hand tensed on her arm. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “When I looked over that fence and saw you, I wanted to keep right on going.”

      She appreciated the honesty, though it was hardly comforting. In Red Ridge, Shane was as well-known for his stark candor as he was for surviving the wrongful conviction and carving out a new career with his spunky K9 partner.

      At last they reached his dove-gray SUV parked at the curb in front of the police station. The parking lights flashed as he pressed a button on the key fob and opened the passenger door for her.

      “What were you doing out here anyway?” she asked when he had Stumps settled in the back seat.

      “We were walking off a long drive from the other side of the county,” he said. He took advantage of the complete lack of traffic and pulled a U-turn to go to the hospital. “Stumps likes to walk out this way every chance he gets.”

      “He probably still thinks of the training center as his territory,” she said, thinking out loud. “He wouldn’t be the first.” She couldn’t help wondering about Nico. How had a stranger gotten him out of the training center without incident?

      “Could be,” Shane allowed.

      The street seemed to do a slow spin around her head. She used the headrest as an anchor, distantly thinking a medical evaluation might not be a bad idea. “Whoever took Nico drugged him, too,” she said under her breath, her eyelids growing heavy. “No way he’d let a stranger lead him away.”

      She was thinking about what that might mean for recovering him swiftly as a blanket of blissful black enveloped her once more.

       Chapter 3

      Her voice was so faint Shane leaned as far across the center console as he dared to hear her, hoping Danica was recalling something helpful. “What would they use to drug him?”

      When she didn’t reply, he took his eyes off the road and discovered she was unconscious again. He reached over and gave her shoulder a shake. All that did was cause her head to loll forward, that heavy curtain of red-gold silk falling over her face.

      He swore and, thankful for the complete lack of traffic at this hour, stomped on the gas pedal. Better a speeding ticket than another Gage falling into trouble at the hands of a Colton.

      He didn’t for a moment believe Demi killed Bo, but the Red Ridge rumor mill loved to toss gasoline on the fire of the Colton-Gage feud. As if they couldn’t manage the mutual hatred without outside interference. Until the RRPD identified a better suspect, the going theory of the Groom Killer case was the only theory.

      For the first time in his career, he understood the sense of pervasive helplessness that came with an inability to bring justice to a victim. It wasn’t a comfortable sensation and he refused to dwell on anything that gave him common ground with the decorated Sergeant Gage, the officer who’d inexplicably framed him.

      He pulled up at the emergency room entrance and told Stumps to stay while he went around and lifted Danica from the passenger seat. He carried her inside and gave her name to the nurse at the information desk.

      The nurse’s eyes went wide as she recognized Danica’s name and his face. Shane nearly snapped that