He was a big guy, not as big as Ethan, but young, with a thick neck, and a blond crew cut, extra high.
“You ought not be tangled up with this kind of filth,” Ethan told the driver. “There’s no future for you. A man like this one will get you killed or tossed behind bars. I’ve seen his kind before. Trash.” Then he let Silver go with a shove that sent him staggering backward. He slammed into the driver, who braced him up to keep him from falling on his backside, only to have Silver wrench away from the guy like it was his fault he’d stumbled.
He grabbed the driver and shoved him aside to take the wheel himself.
“Get the hell off my property, Silver,” Ethan said. “Don’t ever come back.”
The driver barely had time to get into the back seat before Silver was laying rubber in reverse, skidding to a stop in the road. The window lowered and he shouted at Ethan from a safe distance, inside his Caddy. “You’re gonna regret this, you son of a bitch!” Then he threw something like crumpled paper. It fell to the pavement and moved with the breeze as the Cadillac lurched away.
Ethan walked out to the road, keeping an eye on the Caddy. It passed a brown car that was sitting on the roadside in the distance, and then it sped around a bend, out of sight.
Ethan crouched to retrieve what Angus Silver had dropped. Looked like a crumpled photograph, and as he smoothed it out, his blood chilled. It was a snapshot of Lily, unlocking the front door of the cabin she and her dad rented at the edge of Quinn.
A clear threat.
An engine started, and he looked up fast, thinking the Caddy had returned, but no. This engine was loud and old, and belonged to that ancient brown Buick that had been parked up the road. As he watched, it executed a three-point turn, then drove away from him, the same way the Caddy had gone, vanishing around a bend.
Ethan ran back inside just long enough to grab his keys off the bar, then locked up on the way out. He dove into his pickup and told its dashboard, “Call Uncle Garrett on speaker.”
As he sped toward Quinn, a solid twenty minutes away, he heard the phone ringing and eventually, his uncle picked up. “Bubba?”
“Lily might be in danger,” he said. “Get somebody out there, ASAP. I’m on my way.”
“So’m I, son.” He rang off, no questions asked.
Ethan pressed harder on the gas and told his phone, “Call Lily.”
It rang and rang.
Hyram was out with Cat Shaw. The two had signed up for square-dancing lessons at the volunteer fire department, and tonight was the first class, so Lily had the house to herself. She’d filled the bathtub as deep as possible, drizzled in some sandalwood essential oil, and was soaking neck deep with cucumber slices over her eyes.
She’d done it up right, deciding she deserved a little self-care, now that she was a b-list internet star. Maybe c-list. Her Bluetooth speaker played Ethan’s debut album. She’d turned off the lights and had three scented candles burning. Vanilla-citrus. The flames cast dancing light over her skin as she lay there, soaking in the steamy water. She arched her back until her nipples breached the surface and pebbled at the touch of the cool air. Grinning at the naughtiness of it, she submerged them again, and sighed, closing her eyes.
And then opened them when she thought she heard her name from a great distance.
“Lily!”
There it was again, but muffled. Then the front door banged open, and footsteps came thundering through the cabin. She started to sit up and reach for a towel when the bathroom door opened.
“Lily!”
“Ethan!” She was upright in the clear water, breasts above the surface. His gaze was caught, too, so she let him look for a long moment before slowly sinking beneath the water again, almost all the way. “What’s the matter with you?”
“This guy came to the cantina,” he blurted, but he was looking everywhere other than at her. His gaze jumped from the medicine cabinet to the sink to the towel rack. “Said he wants to buy it, and when I said no, he threatened you.”
She sat up out of the water again, and not for his ego-feeding reaction to the sight of her boobs this time. “He threatened me?”
His eyes were glued. He said, “Could you—” as he reached for a towel and held it in her direction.
“Yeah, sure, of course,” and then like a dummy, stood right up, and stepped out of the tub. And his eyes were glued again, and not to her breasts this time. He held the towel in midair, having forgotten it was there.
She had to lean closer to snatch it from his hand, and he only blinked again when she’d wrapped it around her. “What did he say, exactly?
“Who?” He blinked twice. “Right. The guy. Angus Silver.” He pulled the photo from his jeans pocket and handed it to her.
He’d rolled it, so it was all curled, and bore the marks of having been crumpled earlier. But it was clearly a shot of her standing at her own front door. She frowned. “This was earlier tonight. Those are the clothes I wore today.”
“Son of a?—”
