She sighed with immediate exasperation. “Brogan, I’m fine.”
“You got grabbed by a man twice your size, thrown into furniture, and nearly dragged through a firefight.” I stood before she could decide the conversation was open for debate. “Reaper checks you, then you can tell me you were right as many times as you want.”
“I’ve already told you at least six times.” She threw both hands into the air with an outraged huff. “You checked me, Wraith checked me, a deputy asked me twenty questions, and I know my own body.”
“I know it too.” I wrapped one arm around her waist and lifted her off the couch. “Still taking you to a doctor when somebody tries to break it.”
“I am not one of your motorcycles.”
“Wouldn’t let Trent touch one of those either.”
Her mouth fell open before laughter broke through the lingering fear, warm against the side of my neck. “You are impossible.”
Twenty minutes later, Jacqueline sat on the exam table inside the compound clinic with her arms folded and enough sweet satisfaction gathering in her expression to guarantee I would hear about this for days.
Reaper had fully examined her and asked questions while trying to keep his attention on medicine rather than the tension crackling between us.
When he declared that there was nothing wrong except some bruising and soreness, Jacqueline turned her head toward me slowly, the expression in her blue eyes so smug that Reaper abandoned any real effort to hide his smile. “I believe that’s what I told you.”
“Yep.”
“Yet we’re here.”
“Yep.” I crossed the small room and settled both hands around her waist, lifting her off the table. “You were right, but I needed to make sure it wasn’t adrenaline running your mouth.”
Her brows climbed. “That may be the worst apology I’ve ever received.”
“Wasn’t an apology,” I stated with a shrug.
Reaper coughed into one fist, but the bastard’s shoulders moved. I ignored him and lowered my mouth to hers and kissed the smug little smile away before setting her on her feet.
By the time we drove back through the ranch gate, fresh posts already stood where the side fence had been destroyed, rails secured across the opening and a couple of brothers had resumed patrol along the repaired line. No one complained about rebuilding the damage as anything outside the ordinary work of protecting one of our own.
The next afternoon, I’d claimed the spare bedroom across from ours to turn into a home office. I brought in a desk from the clubhouse storage building and set up enough monitors and secure communications equipment to handle Black Castle or club business without leaving the ranch every time someone needed a decision. I was reviewing security footage from the rear road when Jacqueline walked in carrying Otis’s notebook against her chest.
She stopped beside my chair and opened the journal to a page she’d marked with a scrap of paper. Excitement brightened her blue eyes enough to push the lingering strain from the past several days out of her face. “I’ve been reading the entries again, and I think I know what C-seven means. Grandpa hid game cameras inside weathered nesting boxes so trespassers wouldn’t notice them. The C probably meant camera, and I remember a number seven near the old oak above the rear road.”
I closed one hand around her waist and pulled her sideways onto my lap before taking the notebook, because she’d been leaning close enough to distract me and there wasn’t any reason to pretend I preferred space between us. Jacqueline settled against my chest without hesitation, one arm circling my shoulders while I studied the entry and tried not to think about how easily I could slide my hand beneath her shirt and turn the investigation into something far less productive. “Otis hid surveillance equipment in birdhouses?”
“Nesting boxes,” she corrected, her lips twitching as she looked up at me. “He would’ve been offended by birdhouses. According to Grandpa, nesting boxes were useful ranch equipment, while birdhouses were decorative nonsense for people who enjoyed cleaning up seed.”
“That sounds like him.” I pressed my mouth to her temple before setting her on her feet and standing. “Show me.”
The path to the old oak followed the rear pasture before climbing toward the ridge Wade’s crew had used, and the summer heat still clung to the dry grass. Jacqueline walked beside me, the fingers of one hand laced with mine. When she pointed toward a battered wooden box fixed high against the oak’s trunk, I saw nothing that resembled surveillance until I moved closer and caught the dark circle of a lens concealed behind a knot in the weathered face.
“I think there’s a latch along the bottom,” she explained, tilting her head back to study the box.
“There is.” I reached high over her head, opened the hidden panel and removed an old trail camera wrapped in dust and spiderwebs.
Jacqueline muttered something about my height being unfair as I pulled out the memory card. And a smile touched my lips as I caught her around the waist before she could step over a washed-out section of ground, lifting her across it because I could and because the feel of her small body against mine never stopped being worth having her close.
Back in the office, I inserted the card into the reader while Jacqueline perched on the edge of my desk beside the monitor. Most of the files showed deer, coyotes, ranch trucks, and Otis checking the fence, but the date from his log produced a grainy nighttime recording of a Kessler Hauling truck pulling a trailer along the rear road. The company name was visible across the door when the vehicle passed beneath the camera, and the trailer carried a compact excavator with a distinctive white boom and damaged left panel.
Jacqueline leaned closer, one hand braced against my shoulder as the time stamp appeared beneath the image. “That’s the date Grandpa wrote beside C-seven.”
“It is.” I enlarged the clearest frame, caught enough of the trailer plate to narrow the vehicle, and sent the footage to Cipherbefore calling him. He answered on the second ring, complained once about being interrupted during whatever the fuck he considered a Sunday afternoon, then went quiet when I told him what we’d found.
Within twenty minutes, Cipher confirmed that a mini excavator matching the one in the footage had been reported stolen from a grading contractor the same night. The owner’s report described the damaged panel, and the partial plate on Otis’s recording belonged to a trailer registered directly to Kessler Hauling rather than one of Wade’s disposable subcontractors. The footage didn’t show the machine entering Otis’s barn or prove Wade himself had been behind the wheel, but it connected his company’s truck to specific stolen equipment hours after the theft.
