Sarah heard the pride in his voice, and he had every right to feel that way. One step closer to taking down these men was exactly what they needed right now, even if it meant he was going to be at the police station all night.
“You going to be okay?” he asked her gently.
“I’m going to be fine,” she promised him. “Everyone else is back and safe. I’m just anxious to see you. All that talk of missing women was just…surprising and unsettling.”
“I understand. It’s unsettling for all of us,” he replied. “You just need to stay there and get some rest. Hopefully, this will all be over soon.”
“I can tell how tired you are, Lawson. Are you sure you can’t come back soon?” She hated the needy tinge in her voice but she still felt off and she was concerned about him.
“No,” he said, sounding regretful. “I have a lot to deal with here at the police station. I don’t want to leave until I know we have everything under control. Let the others know what’s going on, okay?”
“Sure, I’ll tell them,” she agreed. “Just…don’t push yourself too hard, okay? You take care of yourself.”
“I will,” he promised her softly. He lingered on the line for a moment, as though there was more he wanted to say. She knew how he felt.
All the stress from what had happened earlier in the night was still rushing around her head, and she knew she wasn’t in a good state to be blurting out anything that might cross the line this early on in their budding relationship.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” he told her finally, and she bid him farewell, listening until he hung up the phone.
She stood there, phone pressed to her ear, recalling Lawson’s voice, and holding it in her memory. She couldn’t wait until she could see him again, give him a hug. To know for certain that he was as good as he claimed.
Sarah was ready for all of this to be over, to be able to move forward and figure out where they stood with each other. To be happy.
Together.
“What’s going on?” Xavier asked her, snapping her back to reality.
“He’s got a couple of the guys in lockup,” she explained as she tucked her phone back into her pocket. “He said they got enough evidence from their vehicle to keep them locked up for a while. So that’s good news, right?”
“That’s great news,” Xavier replied, breathing a sigh of relief. “I was worried that we were going to get them and they wouldn’t have anything incriminating on them.”
“You didn’t have a plan in place?” Bailey asked, her eyes widening. She was a cop, so, of course, she was stressed at the thought of them not having something ready to go, but Sarah put a hand on her arm, trying to calm her down.
“It’s okay,” she reminded her. “They’re in custody. That’s all that matters.”
“We had a plan,” Cade offered. “We just had no way of knowing if whoever we caught would have anything illegal on them to keep them in jail.”
“Come on, you guys need to get some rest,” Aaron interrupted whatever else Bailey might have said, grabbing her hand. She glanced over at him, obviously still a little doubtful about the approach the guys had taken, but what mattered was that they had gotten the result they wanted.
Even if the guys should have been more careful in the way they went about it, two of Granger’s men were in jail right now, and they would be able to get information out of them.
Or, at least, that was what she hoped.
Sarah headed back toward her cabin, counting out her footsteps, the stars still glittering in the night sky above. She knew she was going to have a hard time getting to sleep without Lawson back on the property, but she had to trust he knew what he was doing.
He was good at his job. Always had been. He could handle this.
Even if there was something nagging at the back of her mind, telling her that this Granger person and his organization were worse than the men they had taken on before. And she hoped she never had to find just how right she might be.
Chapter Fourteen
Lawson lifted his head from the pillow with a groan. It felt like there was a drill going off behind his eyes, as his head was pounding painfully. He wasn’t a young man anymore, and he couldn’t get away with pulling all-nighters, like he had last night.
Well, he’d gotten an hour or two of sleep. By the time he had finished up at the police station for the night, leaving the sheriff and his deputies to get the two guys locked up and ready for interrogation, his head had been reeling from the chaos of the day behind him, and he hadn’t been able to get any rest.
He needed to figure out how he could get the information out of the thugs about Granger and his operation. He had hoped they might have been Granger’s sons, but no such luck. They were just a couple of lackeys, Jim Adams and Paul Donner, and they each had a rap sheet about half a mile long.
The sheriff’s men had dug through their car and found enough drugs and unregistered guns to keep them locked up for a while longer, and the sheriff had promised Lawson that they weren’t going to see sunlight unless it was to go to court.
