“Okay, go on.”
“No obvious men, or women, for that matter, in her life”—my brain momentarily short-circuited. Did Darby think she was gay? Was she a lesbian? No. No way. … Why did I care, anyway?—“and, like I said, no besties or book club pics. By all accounts, Sunny appears to be a dog-loving homebody who likes good wine, which isn’t surprising considering who her dad is.”
“Who’s her dad?”
Darby’s eyes flashed with victory. “Ah, so you don’t knoweverythingabout Sunny Harper. Interesting…”
“Darby,”I growled between my teeth.
“Sunny is the daughter of the one and only Arlo Harper, multi-millionaire real estate mogul born and raised in good ol’ Berry Springs.”
My brows arched. I knew the name. Everyone in the tri-state area knew the name Arlo Harper. The man started his own construction business when he was just nineteen, and in two decades, owned half of the surrounding counties. Years later, he moved to Dallas where he tripled his net worth. There wasn’t a county line you could cross without going onto one of his properties.
Sunny Harper was a rich girl.
Averyrich girl.
I had a thing about rich people. Call it a chip on my shoulder from growing up dirt poor but I never got along with them, their type. Not much set me off more than entitlement. Spoiled brats who had doors open for them simply because of their last names, not because of busting through it with grit and determination. Brats who thought they owned the world and everyone in it. I’d broken my fair share of rich kids’ noses and didn’t regret a single one.
Darby continued, “Appears Arlo’s had some run-ins with the law over the last few years in Dallas.”
“Yeah?”
He handed me a police report with DPD stamped on the letterhead—Dallas Police Department—for a DUI. “There’s another DUI after that one, and one drunk and disorderly.”
Huh.
“Guy got off, of course.”
Of course he did. Money always talked… but not from Sunny’s lips, apparently.
I kicked myself for not connecting the dots, but nothing about this woman screamed heiress to a real estate fortune. I was pretty good at pegging rich girls but the thought hadn’t even popped into my head with Sunny. Not only were her jogging clothes faded and mismatched, they didn’t appear to be designer, either. (You know, like Nike or Adidas). Her right running shoe had a hole at the tip, her nail polish chipped on each finger. No diamond studs in her ears, no jewelry, no perfectly coiffed mane of highlighted hair—quite the contrary, in fact. Her hair was long, wild, a horse’s mane blowing in the wind. Nothing—not a single thing—about her suggested she had money.
Considering her daddy’s obvious business acumen,you’d figure she would have had the wits to demand a lawyer. Or at least throw her daddy’s name around while I was pinning her to the ground. Why hadn’t she mentioned him? Or demanded one of her daddy’s lawyers?
Nothingabout Sunny Harper made sense.
… Until it suddenly did.
16
JAGG
“And then there’s this.” Darby handed me another DPD police report.
I had a slow, gradual reaction as I read the report. First, shock, then a clenching gut, then heat prickling my skin all the way from my toes to the tops of my ears, then finally, a rush of white-hot rage.
Protectiveness.
“She almost died.” His words barely registered through the thudding of my heart.
I held up the single piece of paper. “Is this all you’ve got on it?” My voice was sharp, clipped. No way to hide that.
He nodded. “I spoke with someone at the department. They just sent that over.”
“At Dallas PD? When? Now?”
“Yeah. I got ahold of a fellow rookie working the nightshift. Turns out we both like video games. Anyway, he pulled the full file, which has the medical report and everything. The responding officer to the attack is his mentor. They had discussed the case as a training exercise.”
