Sighing, I went out the back door, and like the storm was actually mocking me, it seemed to increase as I made my way to the vet clinic. I pulled out my phone to call Arabella, but she didn’t answer, and as I got closer to her clinic building, I realized the lights weren’t on there, either. Fucking Rook. Typical.
I trudged back to my car, my hands and face already tingling with cold. When I threw myself into the warmer, dry interior, I tried calling her again. Nothing. She might be on a house call, but something prickled at the base of my head. A tingle of suspicion. She was alright, wasn’t she? She would have called me if something was wrong.
A flash of light to my right caught my attention, and I recognized the four-wheeler’s lights. I turned on the car, put it inreverse, and then swerved around to follow the icy road to where the four-wheeler had headed. If she was actually out and doing shit in this weather, I was going to sit on her again. I didn’t care if she was mad at me. She could stew under me.
The four-wheeler stopped next to one of the smaller outbuildings, which I recognized as one of the storage sheds where they kept supplies and tools. She really was doing chore-like stuff in this weather. From what Arabella had told me about her past encounter during a storm, she was usually paralyzed by fear in weather like this. What was she thinking?
I stopped next to the four-wheeler, trying to contain my irritation so I didn’t cause her more distress than I already had, and keeping the car running, I hopped out and slammed the door. Jay poked his head out of the shed, half his face covered by a scarf, and he had a headband-type thing over his ears and ballcap.
I sighed in relief. Well, at least it wasn’t Arabella out and about, but I was willing to bet Jay knew where she was. I jogged to the shed and hoisted myself up inside the simple structure that had been built a foot off the ground. Jay pulled his face covering down, his eyes flickering around me. “Hey.”
He never said my name, which was interesting. “Hey, Jay. Do you know where Arabella went?”
Jay scratched under his hat, not meeting my eyes. He was replacing a snow shovel on a hook against the wall and turned his attention to that. “Not sure.” The shed mostly housed tools mounted to the low walls on the right, and there were random toolboxes and shelves of supplies to my left.
“Is she making house calls? Or here on the property?” I tried again.
Jay scowled, uncharacteristically sullen. “She said something about a hoof after the lawyers left.”
“Lawyers?” The snow was blowing into the shed, so I shut the door halfway, trying to block some of the frigid squalls.
Jay looked me in the eyes, another unusual move for him. He looked furious, his brows drawn tight and his chest rising and falling a little too fast. “Yeah, lawyers. You two don’t know when to quit, you know that? Did you send them? With their fancy drones and thermal something-or-other?”
I hadn’t, but Jay’s reaction to it was stabbing at my intuition, which hadn’t stopped prickling since I’d arrived here. “They used drones, huh?” Jay didn’t say anything, but the finger tapping on his leg grew more pronounced. My suspicion tightened to worry. “What did they find, Jay?”
“Everything was fine until you got here,” he shouted suddenly. “Everything was fine until you brought lawyers and drones and shit we didn’t need. She would have been fine. I would have made sure of it.”
My brain whirled, trying to piece together what Jay was saying, and more importantly, what he wasn’t saying. “Arabella would have been fine if what?”
Jay moved restlessly, grabbed a pair of pointed shears, and then he positioned himself with his back to the door. “It wouldn’t have mattered, the water. She’s smart. She’s a doctor. She’d have been okay if the ranch closed down. I would have made sure of it. She has me.” Jay looked like a mixture of furious, terrified, and confused. Like he wasn’t sure which of his emotions to focus on first.
“What did they find with the drone? It’s clearly upset you.” I held up my hands because Jay was looking properly unhinged and holding a weapon, now. I still had my phone in my hand, and the screen lit up, drawing his attention. It was a picture of Arabella with a glass of wine in her hand, head thrown back and laughing. I’d taken it on Christmas.
Jay’s emotions seemed to settle on furious. “They found thedam, you stupid fuck. With the thermal images. They found the whole thing, and you both ruined it. You made her life harder, you know that?” he seethed. “She didn’t need to know about the fucking water. I had it. I had things handled.”
“You had the water crisis handled… because you knew where it was going the whole time.” I knew this fucker had been up to something.
“Yes, dammit.” He pointed the shears at me, and I took a step back. I could neutralize him, but I wanted to hear what the hell he was talking about. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this. We had a plan.”
I decided to move this along with an educated guess. “‘We?’ You and the Scotts had a plan for the water?”
“That’s what I said.” His voice cracked, a lot like his composure at the moment. Jay wasn’t thinking straight. He was crumbling under the pressure of something, and I’d just walked into the nuclear meltdown. “She didn’t need the water. Not for fucking—” he gestured behind him, refusing to look at me again, “—those things. Injured things. Not like Waylond needs it. For money. And food.”
I lowered my hands. “So, what, you helped Scott? What did he do? Pay you?”
“Obviously,” he sneered, meeting my eyes again with a curl of his lip. “But it was a lot. Enough to help Bella when she closed the ranch doors. It would have been fine.”
What a stupid, sad little shit. “You know she’s married, right?”
“It’s not real,” Jay snarled. He looked me up and down like he’d never seen anything more abhorrent in his short life. “And now you’ve ruined it all, anyway.”
“Getting caught committing a federal offense will do that,” I drawled. “Put down the shears and take a breath, Jay. Theyfigured it out and the jig is up. You might as well face what you did, apologize to Arabella, and hope for a lenient fine.”
“I’m not doing that,” Jay panicked, his grip tightening on the shears. “I can fix it.”
“How?” I asked with weary irritation. “You going to scare me off the ranch with your gardening tools and sweep Arabella off her feet?”
His eyes danced back and forth wildly as he seemed to think. Which, I should have realized was dangerous because Jay clearly wasn’t the savviest schemer. Half-assed ideas or not, he was desperate. He caught me off guard with the lunacy of his desperation, launching the shears at me like a fucking javelin. I dodged, and as I tilted to the right, he snatched my phone from my hand.
