I held up my hand. “I’m bringing the wine.”
He rolled his eyes before wrapping his arm around my waist. “Suite yourself,” he said before planting another kiss on my lips.
It’d been over a week since he came over to my place during the thunderstorm with dinner. Since then, we’d eaten together almost every night. Either at my home or a restaurant. He gave me almost daily updates on the information he was gathering on the case. Somehow he found out that the reporter who wrote the articles on Amy Cherny hadn’t told the whole story. Micah and his team worked to track down the girl’s foster mother, who’d moved out of town about six months prior. We still didn’t know this missing girl’s connection to my grandfather, but in my heart of hearts, I knew her disappearance was somehow connected to my grandfather’s death.
Speaking of which, I still hadn’t told Micah I’d gone down to the sheriff’s department to request the autopsy report.
“Ready to go.” I smoothed down the edges of the sky blue wrap dress I wore. I paired the dress with brown leather cowboy boots I picked up that day.
Stepping back, Micah allowed me space to lock the door and head out.
“Do you take him everywhere with you?” I asked, looking down at Hound.
Micah nodded as he held the door open for me. “Just about. I suspect Joel likes him more than he likes me.”
I laughed as I got in the passenger seat. He let Hound in the backseat before getting in and starting the ignition.
“Hey, can we stop at the mailbox at the end of the driveway? I forgot to check the mail earlier.”
“Sure.”
A minute later, I climbed out of the truck, opening the black mailbox that sat in front of the driveway. As luck would have it, that would be the moment that the papers I’d been waiting for from the sheriff’s department arrived.
“Anything good?”
I looked over at Micah and parted my lips to begin to tell him what I had, but he interrupted me. “Harlington Sheriff’s Department,” he read the outside of the envelope. “What’s that?”
I lifted my chin. “I went and applied to get a copy of my grandfather’s autopsy report. The report wasn’t finished when I first went.”
He didn’t say anything for a full minute, but I watched as his eyes appeared to darken right before me. “You went to the sheriff’s department instead of coming to me?”
“It wasn’tinstead ofcoming to you. I was going to tell you as soon as the report came. Besides, I’m his family member. I have a right to this information.”
“A right? Yes, but we’ve discussed this, haven’t we? I told you not to—”
“Told me?” I bristled. “Excuse me, but do you not remember the first time I told you I’m a grown ass woman?”
A muscle in his jaw ticked as his eyebrows quirked. “It’s not a matter of how fuckinggrownyou are. It’s an issue of safety.”
I rolled my eyes. “I was at the sheriff’s department. How much safer could I get?”
The line in his forehead deepened as he stared down at me. A range of emotions flashed in his eyes, but all he said was, “We’ll talk about this later.”
I partially wanted to continue arguing with him. To let him know I didn’t plan to sit idle while he went out and did all the work to find out what happened to my grandfather. Sure, technically, that was his job as the private investigator, but my pride wouldn’t let me simply sit at home and do nothing.
In the end, the distress I could feel vibrating off of him caused me to bite my tongue. I’d wait until later to bring it up again. Besides, we were on the way to his father’s, who Micah had told me knew my grandfather. Maybe he could give me some more insight into what my grandfather had going on in his life in the weeks and months before his death.
I wasn’t quite sure what I was expecting when he described his father’s home as a ranch, but this wasn’t the image that’d come to mind. The house dwarfed my grandfather’s home by three times its size and was surrounded by a vast span of land. The backdrop was more rolling hills where I could make out cows grazing in the pastures.
“All of this is owned by your father?”
Micah turned to me. “Yup.” His response was calm enough, but I could still see some of the remaining agitation in his eyes.
“Did you grow up here?”
“We moved here when I turned fifteen. My mother’s side of the family owned part of it first. Joel bought the surrounding land to convert it for his animals.”
“Are those his cows?” I jutted my head to the pastures behind the house that was visible from the edge of the driveway we turned into.
