Devon sank into the timeworn chair across from the foot of his bed. “So the Feds who aren’t in his pocket want him, they just can’t make anything stick because their witnesses always end up in body bags.” Fucking fantastic. “You turn up anything by way of assistance from your contact at the Remington PD?”
“Isabella Moreno,” Kellan said, his voice shifting slightly enough that if Devon didn’t have noticing every last detail branded into his DNA, he’d have missed it. Kellan cleared his throat, back to business. “The rundown I just gave you is courtesy of her.”
Interesting. Devon filed that little nugget away to pursue when his personal safety wasn’t twisting in the wind. “She have any higher-ups you can trust? I can keep Kylie safe for a while, Walker, but the longer we play cat and mouse, the harder it’s gonna get. We need an end game here.”
“Detective Moreno works in Remington’s Intelligence Unit, and she’s a good cop. But getting jurisdiction is easier said than done. She’s on it, though. Hard.”
Devon had no doubt that Kellan would be a four-foot thorn in the woman’s side until she came up with a solution. “Copy. For now, I’ll keep moving toward your location.”
“Thanks,” Kellan said, pulling in an audible breath over the phone line. “I really owe you, Dev.”
“You owe me nothing, Walker. I’ll check back in at twenty-one-hundred your time. Call me if you get anything from Moreno.”
Devon disconnected the call, scrubbing a hand over his jaw. Although he knew Kellan would have both hands full getting the X’s and O’s into place to get Fagan snatched up, Devon wasn’t concerned about whether or not his buddy would make that happen.
What did worry him was that Kylie had now been in the bathroom for forty-five minutes, and despite the fact that there were no windows in the tiny room and he could hear her moving around, Devon had a bone-deep feeling she was far from all systems go.
He pushed himself out of the creaky bedside chair. While he wasn’t exactly Mr. Congeniality, or even a nice guy for that matter, she’d been through a shit-slide of emotions in the last day. A quick hey-how-are-ya couldn’t hurt.
But before Devon could make it halfway across the carpet, the bathroom door pushed open, and Kylie stepped silently over the threshold.
“Hey. I was just coming to?—”
Devon’s words tripped to a halt in his throat. Kylie stood barely three steps away, wearing a thin white tank top and his borrowed sweatpants that she’d had to roll over her hips twice to even get them close to staying up. But her unconventional apparel wasn’t what had frozen him into place from lips to legs.
“You cut your hair,” he finally managed, and Christ, nobody would ever accuse him of being suave. But come on. She’d gone into the bathroom with a long, hot-pink-and-black ponytail and now she was sporting a head full of chin-length, caramel-colored hair that looked just tousled enough to be hot as fuck.
“Yeah, I…” Kylie broke off, taking a steady breath that outlined the press of her breasts against her tank top. “You were right. The pink was really obvious. I knew hiding it wasn’t going to work in the long run, and anyway, it’s just hair. So, I cut it.”
“It looks…” Do not say wildly sexy, do not say wildly sexy, do not say… “You know. Pretty.”
Kylie’s laugh rode out on a soft puff of humorless breath, and man, she was a fighter. “I don’t know about all that, but I guess it’s not terrible. There were a few pieces in the back I couldn’t reach, though.”
She extended the scissors in her hand just far enough to hammer home her request, and Devon’s chin snapped up in shock.
“You want me to cut the rest of your hair?”
“Well, yeah. It’ll be pretty obvious if I leave it like this, won’t it?” she asked, gesturing to the handful of thick strands still cascading down her back.
Damn, she had a point. Still… “Cutting your hair is a little outside my wheelhouse, is all.”
Okay, so the words were a massive fucking understatement. Devon could dismantle an AR-15 with one hand chained to a radiator, but cutting Kylie’s hair?
Unless she handed over a pair of clippers and asked for a standard issue crew cut, he didn’t have clue one what to do.
But Kylie just served him with a no-nonsense stare. “This whole thing is outside my wheelhouse, Devon. But I trust you with my life. My hair is kind of the least of our worries, don’t you think?”
“You trust me with your life.” The words echoed in Devon’s ears as he repeated them, and her brows tugged downward.
“Of course. I mean, I’m here with you right now, hiding from Fagan.”
“Oh. Yeah, sure.” He took the scissors from her, suddenly needing something to focus on other than her wide-open honesty. Of course, Devon had known she trusted him to a point. Her brother had sent him to keep her safe, and she damn well needed protecting—both truths that Kylie clearly couldn’t ignore. But trusting him because she was in over her head was a whole lot different than trusting him instinctively, and he only needed a glimpse at her bright blue stare to know that she meant what she’d said in spades.
Kylie trusted him without question. Just as her brother had in Afghanistan.
When he shouldn’t have.
Hot, dust-choked air…sweat running down his back beneath his gear…turning to give Kellan the all clear…
