Page 48 of Forbidden Protector

FOURTEEN

MACKENZIE

Maren Sullivan drives like she's late for something even when she isn't.

"You could've called a service out of Great Falls," she says, merging onto I-15 north at a speed that makes the guardrail blur. "Would've saved you an hour of my company."

"I like your company."

"That's because you haven't ridden with me past sixty."

I hold the door handle and don't tell her we're already past sixty.

The counter clerk at the airport barely looks up when I sign for the car. A grey sedan with Montana plates and nothing memorable about it at all, which is the exact point.

No black paint. No bull's skull. No name on the door that means anything to anyone who sees it pull into a gas station.

I sit in the driver's seat for a second before I start it, both hands on the wheel. Nobody in this county knows this car. Nobody's phone lights up when I turn the key.

"Feels good, doesn't it?" Maren asks. She’s leaning against her own truck in the lot. "Having something that's yours."

"It's a rental."

"Still yours while you've got it." She pushes off the truck. "You've been riding around in Holt's truck for a while now. People notice, Agent Tatum. My mother noticed the day you landed."

"I noticed people noticing."

"Good." She almost smiles. "Means you're not as far gone as Knox thinks you are."

"As far gone as what?"

"Don't." Maren pulls her sunglasses down off her head and puts them on slow, like she's got all day to enjoy this. "Knox told me you two got stranded in a line shack. One bed. He didn't have to draw me a picture, Mackenzie, I've got a fully functional imagination."

"There's nothing to answer. It's a professional arrangement."

"Sure." She says it the way you'd agree with a child about the moon being made of cheese. "Professional. That's why that stallion's got a name now. Two years I've heard Holt Blackwater call that horse the black. Just that. Like it was beneath him to bother." She raises an eyebrow at me over the hood. "Sage told Knox, and he tells me everything now, apparently, whether I ask or not. The whole family noticed, Mackenzie."

"It's a horse. Horses have names."

"Not that one. Not from him."

Maren looks at me over the hood, arms crossed, with an expression that has clearly been waiting all week for an opening this good. "Honey, denial. It's not just a river in Egypt."

"That doesn't even work. It's the Nile."

"I know what river it is. I'm making a point." She pulls the driver's door open. "I hear the words you're saying, Mackenzie. Your eyes are telling me a whole different story."

She pauses, hand on the frame. "You stitched him up in that shack yourself, didn't you? We've got more in common than you think. It's impossible to resist those Blackwater boys. All that lean muscle and dark ink on top of it, like somebody built them on purpose to ruin a woman's judgment."

"He put himself between me and a drone at a funeral," I say, before I can stop myself. "That's not professional. That's not anything I've got a file category for."

Maren doesn't even look smug about it. She looks satisfied, like a woman watching weather finally do what she knew it would. "Keep that one. You're going to want it later, when you're trying to remember why you stopped fighting it."

I don't ask what that means.

I pull out of the parking lot, ninety minutes of my own hands on my own wheel.

By the time I turn in through Holt's gate, I've caught myself, twice, wanting to tell him about the drive. Why is it so easy with him now?