The Black Sheep and the Princess (26 page)

Donovan might be out there chasing monsters, but there was another potential one out there that she had the power to fight.

He hadn't said when he wanted her to call Shelby, but as far as Kate was concerned, the cabin fire had just sped up any timeline Donovan might have had. She dug her phone out and immediately called Shelby's private line. She got his generic voice mail request on the first ring. “Call me,” she said flatly, in a tone that brooked no argument, then clicked the phone shut. Shelby never answered calls directly. He liked the pretense that his calls needed to be screened for importance. Well, if he knew what was good for him and his beloved empire, he'd—the phone buzzed in her palm, startling her. She looked at the screen, then flipped it back open. “We need to talk.”

“Don't harangue me about the meeting. I know you're all caught up in making plans for your little camp, but I'm running an entire corporate complex, and sometimes things come up.”

“Which is why they make cell phones. Or, better yet, lawyers with banks of office phones. Why didn't you call me? Why leave me sitting there, steaming? Was it some kind of power play? What do you want now?” She was trying to keep Donovan's earlier guidelines in mind, but between the fire, her badly shaking hands, and the heavy cost of trying to keep that same shakiness out of her voice, she could only go on instinct. “What more could there be? We had an agreement.”

“And we still do,” Shelby assured her, in a tone that made it clear he was being sorely taxed by her intrusion into his oh-so-busy life. “We merely have to reschedule.”

“This deal is worth everything that matters to you,” she needlessly reminded him.

There was a pause. “What are you implying, Katherine? Is that some kind of veiled threat? Because we both know that I could keep you tied up in court for years and you'd never touch your inheritance.”

“It would also keep you from taking over her empire and running it the way you want to.” She raked her hands through her hair, stared through the window at the thick black smoke, temporarily losing track of the phone conversation as she sought out Donovan and still couldn't spot him. “We've been over this a million times.”

“Precisely why we'll reschedule and dot all our
i
's, cross our
t
's.”

She was silent for another long moment, trying to decide how to frame her next question to best get her stepbrother to tell her the truth.

There was an aggrieved sigh on the other end of the line. “Don't be punitive just because I didn't inform you of my inability to attend.”

“And when were you going to get around to calling me to set this new meeting date up?”

“I may not be the lawful owner of all of our corporate holdings as yet, but I'm still the defacto head in the meantime. It's slightly more involved than setting up camp. Things come up that can't be put off. I really wish you'd grasp this fact.”

“What things could possibly come up that are more important than signing the very documents that will make you the rightful king of all you survey?” Sensing the tension in the air and in her tone of voice, Bagel whimpered and pressed his full weight against her ankle.

There was a significant pause, then, “You're reading too much into what was a simple scheduling issue.”

“Am I? There isn't anything else I should know about? Any last minute concerns you might be having?”

“My dear Katherine,” he said, as unctuous and condescending as he'd ever been, “if I were, don't you think our lawyers would already be hashing them out?”

Not if you didn't want them to know about whatever deal you're working on the side
. “Fine, then. When do we meet?”

That seemed to catch him off guard. “I—I'm at my club at the moment, hardly able to do any actual scheduling. Besides, Laurel handles that for me, you know that.”

Kate decided to go for broke. “You're stalling. What's the real hold-up here, Shelby? What's the real reason you didn't show up?”

He affected another weary sigh, but she wasn't buying it.

“Honestly, Katherine. The drama is unnecessary. I'll have Laurel call you first thing. My dinner has been delivered to my table, and I'd like to get back to it before it cools.”

She tried to think like Donovan would. Shelby normally enjoyed holding court at his table, talking to people, working deals, and taking important phone calls, or at least giving every appearance of it, looking for all the world as if he were in demand in every possible way. And yet, he'd excused himself to call her back. A call he'd returned immediately. Had she pulled him out of his comfort zone, as Donovan had said she might? And if so, what did it mean? She blurted out the first question she thought of. “Who are you dining with?”

“Why on earth would that matter to you? Now, I really must go. We'll talk later in the week when the schedule has been adjusted.” He clicked off before she had a chance to reply or say good-bye. Rude, and seemingly evasive, but typical.

She sneezed several times as the soot began to waft into the cabin through the stovepipe. She hurried to shut the front grate before it covered everything in the house. She almost tripped over Bagel, who was glued to her heels. “Careful there,” she cautioned, adjusting the grate and checking the flue. She turned and looked down at her dog. “I don't know what to make of it, Bagel. For all I know, he was just being the insensitive asshole he can be, making sure everyone knew how important he was by having to reschedule something so vital.” Or, he could have been sitting down to dine with executives from Timberline right then and there. She wished she'd been able to read him better. He was such a smug, patronizing asshole, it was hard to tell when he was being insincere.

Ignoring Donovan's orders, she walked to the front door and peeked through the window curtains covering the glass panes. If she didn't spot him in five minutes, she was heading out there and to hell with his damn rules. The dog whimpered again.

The rain had stopped, and the smoke was rising more directly upward through the trees now. She finally heard sirens in the distance, but close enough she decided it was safe to go outside. She wondered if Gilby was on the way, too. “It would be about damn time,” she muttered, pulling on her mud-encrusted boots. “Stay here,” she told Bagel, who was already at the door, all but vibrating to be let out. “You don't need to breathe that stuff.” She grabbed a rag off the porch and dampened it, in case she needed it to cover her mouth, then grabbed a second one for Donovan, dampened it, too. She pushed out the screen door, sighing as Bagel started howling behind the cabin door, and started down toward the smoking cabin.

The sirens grew louder by the second. She could hear the powerful engines grinding up the steep incline of the camp road by the time she'd reached the cabin. Her heart tightened even further inside her chest as she surveyed the extent of the damage. Coughing, she lifted the rag to her face, careful to stay back as far as she could, yet still peer through the smoke to try and see just how badly the cabin had burned. Much of the exterior walls looked okay, but when she rounded the back, she saw the roof was half gone, and the windows had all blown out and were scorched. The rain had probably kept the exterior from going up, but from what she could tell, the inside was completely ravaged. Which meant the whole thing would have to come down and be rebuilt.

She didn't even try to mentally calculate what that was going to do to her start-up costs. At the moment, she was too busy getting mad. In fact, the longer she stared at the charred remains, the angrier she got.

“What the hell are you doing out here?”

K
ate spun around, rag still clamped to her face, to find Donovan standing several yards down the slope, soot streaked, and not very happy. The heightened emotions of the past few days, coupled with the rage building inside her at this latest violation of her property, all fused together in that moment to form one huge outburst of fury. “What the hell am I doing out here? I'm surveying the ruins of my goddamn cabin, that's what I'm doing. I'm trying to figure out who the hell wants to do something like this to me and what the hell I ever did to them to deserve it. That's what I'm doing out here. I'm trying to figure out who to hunt down and pin to the nearest tree until they tell me what in God's name this is all about.” She threw her spare rag at him. “That's what I'm doing.”

He caught it in one hand and was in front of her a heartbeat later. It wasn't until he'd pulled her into his arms that she realized there were tears on her cheeks. “I'm sorry,” he said sincerely.

She pushed at him, not wanting his sympathy. At the moment, the anger felt good, energizing, as though she was finally coming out of a long daze and taking action. “I'm pissed, is what I am.”

He let her move back a space, but kept his hands on her arms. “That's good. Just don't let it make you do anything stupid.”

“Thanks. I heard the sirens, so I knew it was only a matter of minutes before the place was swarming with people anyway.”

“More people doesn't lower the chance of something else happening. In some cases, chaos is a good distraction.”

“I wasn't going to stand in the cabin like some helpless idiot and watch.” She slipped from his grasp and turned back to the cabin. “Did you find anything out? Do you have any idea how it was set, or what they used? Any evidence that you can track back?”

“Not yet, I can't get close enough. I don't have the right gear. The fire marshal will collect whatever evidence might be in there. I'm not equipped to do much more than look from a distance.”

“I'm betting the marshal is also from Ralston. Maybe he's like the rest of them and not particularly interested in helping me figure out who is doing this.”

“Maybe,” Donovan agreed, which didn't make her feel better in the least, but was better than building false hope. “I plan on keeping a close eye while they take a look.”

“Well, the cabin didn't just spontaneously combust—” She paused, looked at him, then down at his ankle, remembering the gun he'd had strapped there yesterday. “Did it?”

“No, I didn't have rounds of ammo stockpiled in there, or anything. The most combustible thing I had was a few cans of beer,” he said, but with a dry smile.

“Sorry, I was trying to consider all possibilities,” she said, “as someone I know is trying to teach me to do.”

He nodded his approval. “There was no thunder or lightning either, so I think Gilby and the authorities will have to look at this as at least a possible arson, no matter how much they do or don't like you.”

“What if they don't connect it to the vandalism? They could just say the evidence is inconclusive if they wanted to. God, now I sound like a bigger conspiracy theorist than you do.”

Donovan didn't respond to that. Instead, he said, “What I want to know is why torch the place now? Why the sudden surge in action and the escalation of damage and risk from graffiti this morning to this. If it hadn't been for the rain, this could have easily caught and taken out the whole camp.”

“Do you think they knew it wouldn't do more than burn the one building?” She turned back to him. “Or do you think they were trying to burn down the whole place?”

“That they didn't start with your cabin at least indicates it's not you they intend to harm.”

“But it was your cabin. If they've been watching me, then maybe someone saw you move your gear in there last night.” She shuddered, remembering how she'd been nonchalantly wandering about the camp grounds last night, sitting like a big fat duck on the end of that dock. “They had to hear the drilling and hammering when they sprayed the shed. Maybe your gear was the target.”

“I thought of that, too. It's definitely a possibility, but it seems a huge risk just to shut down the security setup. It can still be installed.”

“Yes, but replacing the equipment slows things down.”

Donovan didn't say anything to that and fell silent for a long moment as he appeared to mull things over.

“I agree with you. It just seems a lot to go from spraying words to setting a building on fire,” she said.

“Unless they saw me putting up the cameras and realized that instead of spooking you, all the vandalism did was make you bring someone on board to try and stop them, or possibly catch them.”

“I didn't exactly bring you on board.”

“They don't know that.”

“Whoever the hell ‘they' are.” She took a deep, calming breath, which only made her start coughing. She brought the rag back up to her face and looked at the smoking remains again. She tried to imagine what it had taken to make someone do this. “It still seems like a pretty sudden change in tactics to me. I just don't get it.” Then she remembered the call she'd made. “I talked to Shelby.”

Donovan's eyebrows lifted at the news, but before he could say anything, the trucks rolled in. “We'll talk about that later when we're alone.”

Kate nodded in agreement as doors opened and firemen poured out in full gear, faces set, their attention focused on the smoking cabin. Donovan moved toward them with Kate right beside him. “Follow my lead here, okay?”

“Lead? What are you doing now?”

Kate didn't notice the police SUV that had pulled in behind the trucks until Gilby appeared from behind the second one. Despite the fact that she'd wanted his attention on the matter all along, instead of being relieved, his appearance just unnerved her all the more.

He was somewhere on the far side of sixty, with a military-style flattop that would probably be graying on the sides if not buzzed down to the skin. Of average height and slender, he walked with the swagger of a man sporting a far bigger frame. Even with the overcast skies and late hour of the afternoon, he wore his mirrored sunglasses. It was all Kate could do not to roll her eyes.

“What seems to be the situation here?” he asked. He directed the question at her, but not before giving Donovan a quick once-over. Gilby might appear like a self-important asshole, mostly because he probably was, but he'd been a fixture in Ralston for a very long time. Somehow Kate didn't think he missed much.

“Someone torched one of my cabins,” Kate said flatly. She'd gone to him before and had more or less received a patronizing pat on the head. She wasn't going to pull any punches today. She was angry, and she wanted this to be taken seriously.

“Did you see someone set fire to the building?”

“No, sir. But—”

“Then let's not be hasty about pointing fingers and making accusations.”

Donovan spoke. “The cabin has been empty and unused for several decades. There were no combustible materials stored inside, and although it has been raining, there have been no lightning strikes. The grounds here have been under an almost constant barrage of vandalism, which Ms. Sutherland has duly reported to your office. What would your professional assessment of the situation be?”

Gilby turned to face Donovan. “Are you questioning me, son?”

“I'm merely asking for your view on the situation. What else might we be dealing with here, if not arson?”

Gilby slid his glasses into his front pocket and hitched up his pants. But no amount of adjusting was going to put his stature on the same level as the very imposing Donovan MacLeod. As angry as she was, Kate had to stifle the urge to smile. Gilby might be able to “little lady” her, but she doubted he'd get around Donovan.

“And who might you be, son?”

Kate tensed, but Donovan seemed as relaxed as ever. “Donovan MacLeod.”

If he remembered Donovan from the past, it didn't show on the sheriff's face. “And your relationship to Ms. Sutherland?”

“Concerned friend.”

“I see.”

Kate wondered what was going on behind those flat, brown eyes, but, to his credit, Gilby didn't give much away. “Well, Mr. MacLeod, there can be any number of other possibilities, including, but not restricted to, insurance fraud.”

“Insurance fraud?” Kate spluttered. “But I'm not even the—”

“How long do you think it will take the fire marshal to assess the situation?” Donovan smoothly cut in.

Gilby clearly didn't like Donovan's unruffled demeanor. “Roger will be out here in due time. Now, I need to go talk with some of the fine young gentlemen here who have come to handle this situation. I'll talk with both of you when I'm done.” He didn't wait for their response.

“Do you think he was trying to sound intimidating?” Kate asked.

“I think when Roger gets here we need to dog him like a shadow.”

Kate turned away from the cabin and the firemen swarming around it with hoses and other equipment. “Why do you say that?”

“Just a precaution. If Gilby is intentionally turning a blind eye out here, then we need to figure out whether the fire marshal might be inclined to do the same.”

“Do you think he really didn't recognize you?”

“Hard to say, it's been a lot of years.”

But his tone made it clear that he didn't think Gilby missed much either. She swore under her breath. “God, I'm just so sick of this, all of it. I decide to resurrect some stupid property that no one has wanted in years, and all hell breaks loose.”

Donovan went still.

“What?” Kate asked. “What did I say that I haven't already said a billion times?”

“Just making a possible connection.”

“About?”

“The timing. Maybe there's something completely different going on here, something we didn't even consider.” Donovan raked his hand through his hair, streaking more soot across his forehead and cheek. “Something we didn't even consider because we were distracted by Timberline's interest and Shelby's interference with the will. Maybe those things were coincidental after all.”

“What? Wait a minute…what are you thinking?”

“I don't know yet. I need to—” He stopped and looked past her shoulder. “Gilby.”

Kate smoothed her expression and folded her arms across her chest as she turned to face the sheriff, fully prepared to do battle if Gilby so much as attempted to pat her on the head about this latest run-in, much less accuse her of anything.
Insurance fraud, my ass
. “Have you heard from the fire marshal?” she asked, deciding a preemptive strike might be best. “What is the status of the fire now?” She looked past Gilby and saw that the firemen were already pulling in their gear. The fire had pretty much played out by their arrival, so other than the continued plumes of thick gray smoke rising from the burned shell, there wasn't much left to do, she supposed.

“Fire is out. Damage assessment, along with probable source and cause, will be determined after Roger has a chance to go through it. Until then, we're going to tape it off. That means no entry to you until we say so.”

“So, you do consider it a crime scene, then.” She phrased it more as a fact than a question.

“We don't know what it is. But until we do, it's off limits. To everyone.” He made a point to include Donovan in his line of vision, then after a moment, added, “You're Donny's boy. Didn't recognize you at first.” Kate cut her gaze to Donovan, but there was no visible reaction to the statement.

“Been a long time,” was all he said.

“That it has. Any particular reason you decided to come back now?”

He'd asked it casually enough, but Kate was pretty sure everyone standing there felt the undercurrent of tension. It was palpable. Like watching a potentially dangerous tennis match, she shifted her gaze from Gilby to Donovan.

“Just helping out an old friend.”

“Helping, huh?” Gilby took a step back and shifted his gaze up into the trees. “That your handiwork up there, then?”

Donovan didn't bother to look up at the camera he'd installed earlier that day. “It's my field. New place like this, what with the recent vandalism, makes sense to secure it.”

Gilby didn't react to the slight censure in his tone when he'd mentioned the vandalism. “Your daddy always was good with a piece of mechanical equipment. Guess some of that rubbed off, eh?”

Donovan simply raised a shoulder.

A smile curved Gilby's thin lips for the first time. It wasn't a pleasant sight. “Long as his other habits didn't rub off. One MacLeod spending every weekend in our drunk tank was enough. Seem to recall hauling you in there once myself.”

If he was trying to get a rise out of Donovan, he was apparently going to have to work harder than that. Kate silently prayed he'd end this pointless pissing contest now.