Royal didn’t follow right away. He needed to get a grip on himself before he dealt with Franny. In so many different ways.
“Maybe sheshouldget private security,” Beckett muttered, still standing next to Royal.
Royal knew the irritation was with the sheriff, but he didn’t like the suggestion either way. “She trusts me.” She shouldn’t but shedid. So he’d be what she needed him to be, even if he couldn’t change all those past parts of himself.
Beckett made a considering type of noise.
Royal sent him a sidelong glance. “What?” he demanded.
Beckett shrugged. “If you’ve got a personal stake in this, Campbell, it’d set my mind at ease. And my fiancée’s.”
Royal looked back at the door. “I don’t know what that means.”
“Yeah, you do.”
Maybe he did. But he wasn’t about to address it with Beckett. So he moved for the door, but he couldn’tquitehelp himself. “Nothing’s happening to Franny on my watch.”
Chapter Nineteen
Franny sat making small talk with the sheriff’s administrative assistant in between the phone calls she fielded. She watched the sheriff leave at Miranda’s insistence, then waited for Royal and Copeland to follow.
It took them a few minutes, which made her uneasy. But she fixed a smile on her face when they finally came out. Royal looked irritated. Copeland looked a little smug—which she supposed meant he’d been poking at Royal.
“I’m going to work on getting to the bottom of the FBI stuff,” Copeland told her. “Whether they want to tell us or not, we deserve to know. You deserve to know. The sheriff will be diplomatic. I don’t have to be.”
“Well, don’t get fired or anything. You’d drive Audra crazy being around all the time.”
“Ha,” he replied sarcastically. “Let Royal take you back to Hope Town. Keep locked up with the security. Maybe get some work done. Let us handle it.”
Franny nodded. Not because she was going toletanyone do anything, but because arguing with a brick wall was pointless.
So she followed Royal back out to the parking lot. He wasn’t saying anything. He was clearly thinking, or planning. She could tell from the expression on his face he’d put earlier into some kind of box and shoved it deep down underneath what needed to be done.
“I could talk to Lia,” Franny suggested when they were in the car driving back to Hope Town. “Maybe Albennie has told her or she even knows. Maybe she’ll tell me now that Albennie’s safe.”
“Maybe,” Royal agreed, still deep in thought as he drove. “Maybe that’s not a bad backup plan.”
“Backup?”
“Yeah, my plan first. We’re not going back to your apartment just yet.”
“We’re not?” She was more than a little shocked he wasn’t bustling her away.
“We’re going to Simmons’s house.”
“Why?”
He sent her a sidelong look. “Because Simmons and I had a discussion about the woman Lia and I saw poking around Hope Town after the kidnapping. And I took the information to someone who has some…skills at finding out who people are.”
Franny considered that sentence. What he was saying. What he wasn’t. She was pretty sure the only time he’d left Hope Town, or talked to anyone not directly in Hope Town or connected to the police department was when they’d gone to dinner at his sister’s ranch last night.
It was natural to extrapolate from there. “Zeke.”
He frowned, sent her a quick glance. “How did you know that?”
“Well, I didn’tknow. I guessed. You likely could have missed dinner with your sister, but instead you took me with you. So you could talk to him when Brooke was distracted. Besides, there’s something about Zeke that makes it…easy to believe he’d have said skills. It explains last night better than…anything else.”
“I don’t need Brooke to be distracted. He probably told her about it anyway. I invited you because I didn’t like the idea of being that far away if something happened, like I said.”
