Love Inspired Suspense June 2021--Box Set 1 of 2, page 2
For a moment, a well of conflicting emotions seemed to churn in the depths of Poppy’s eyes. Tension rose up his spine as he braced himself for a well-deserved tirade from woman he hadn’t spoken to since he’d broken her heart days before their wedding. Then she blinked hard, and suddenly the look on her face was so professional it was almost as if he was a stranger.
“I’m sorry about that,” Poppy said. “She’s really very gentle.” Tell that to the cabin door he’d have to fix. Poppy ran her hand over the back of the dog’s head. “She’d worked up a pretty big head of steam and probably couldn’t stop in time. Trust me, if she’d actually tried to take you down, you’d feel it.”
Oh, he already felt it plenty. It was like being hit by a small and furry dirt bike. He stumbled to his feet, hesitated and then reached for Poppy’s hand, eyeing Stormy to make sure the K-9 was okay with it. The dog didn’t blink.
“Are you okay?” he said. The welts on her neck were already fading, but his chest still ached to remember how vicious the kidnapping attempt had been. “It looked pretty rough.”
“I’m fine.” Poppy got to her feet without taking his hand. “Trust me, I’ve handled worse.”
He didn’t doubt it. She scooped her attacker’s camo hat up off the ground, waved it under the dog’s nose and told the dog to track it. The wolfhound’s ears perked. She woofed enthusiastically and took off running through the forest in the direction the men had gone. He heard the sound of branches crashing in her wake.
“My colleague will be here any second with an ATV,” she told him. “I’ll take it and go after her. Sometimes, when a K-9’s chasing down a suspect, it’s better to let them have a head start, than slow them down.”
“That’s one powerful animal you have there,” Lex remarked.
“Stormy is a trooper and my partner,” she said. There was something about her tone that almost made him feel reprimanded and he was suddenly reminded of how hard she’d pushed him to apply to become a state trooper himself instead of staying “just” a park ranger. “Irish wolfhounds can run top speed of forty miles an hour, plus she’s more adept at running though terrain like this than most people. She’ll catch those thugs, unless they’ve got a vehicle stashed somewhere. If she finds evidence, she’ll protect it until I arrive.”
He’d seen K-9 troopers let their dogs go in manhunts before, and then follow the sound of a suspect shouting for the dog to let their arm go. Usually they were eager to surrender when the trooper caught up and ordered the dog to release them.
“I didn’t know you were a K-9 officer,” he admitted, “well, at least not until your partner told me you were the Trooper Walsh who’d flown out from Anchorage with him.” After all, she had disappeared pretty thoroughly from his life when he’d called off their engagement.
“Yup.” She ran her hands down her legs, and he couldn’t tell if she was trying to wipe the dirt off her palms, her slacks or both. “Out of Anchorage. We’re a pretty great team.”
“I’m really glad,” he said quietly. “And congrats. I know how much you wanted to work with the K-9 unit. Not that you weren’t incredible at your other job. Honestly, you were the best wildlife trooper I’d ever worked with.”
She shot him a sharp glance and Lex hoped he hadn’t just implied he was relieved that she hadn’t given up a career she was amazing at because of him. That was ridiculous. A woman as driven and determined as Poppy could never have been derailed by a man like him.
“I’m going to go check out the cabin,” she said, then turned and stepped over the remains of the broken door. She scooped her phone up off the floor, dialed a number and put it to her ear. “Will,” she said. “It’s Poppy.”
Lex’s eyes scanned the cabin as he listened to Poppy fill her fellow trooper in. Her update was simple, straightforward and professional. The cabin was vacant except for an empty carton of bullets, cigarette butts and candy wrappers in the second bedroom. Whoever had been hiding out here hadn’t been there long. He spotted her wide-brimmed hat lying on the floor behind the door. He picked it up and then followed her back out. She ended the call, turned to face him, and he felt his breath catch. How could she still have such an impact on him after all these years? Even disheveled and injured, she was even more beautiful, strong and focused than he remembered.
It was unbelievable to think this woman had almost been his wife.
“He’ll be here in seconds by the sound of it,” she said. “Then he’ll search the cabin more thoroughly with his K-9 partner. Scout’s a drug-detecting dog.”
He held up her hat, she reached for it and their fingertips brushed on the brim. They lingered there, their hands barely touching. He swallowed hard.
“I’m sorry, by the way,” he said. “Even if I can’t figure out quite how to say it.”
A question lingered in her eyes. “Sorry for what?”
Did she really need to hear him say it? They both knew full well what Lex had done. He’d left her out on a limb to plan their wedding entirely by herself, failed to show up for every significant appointment, from catering to venue, and then only admitted he was having cold feet a week before the wedding when she called him out on it.
“For everything,” he said.
She paused for a long moment. Her deep green eyes searched his as if looking for something. Then she looked away, tugged the hat from his hands and put it on firmly.
A two-seated ATV pulled into the clearing. Trooper Will Stryker had dark hair, broad shoulders and the kind of smile that implied he’d also seen his share of pain. His K-9 partner, a black-and-white shaggy border collie, sat on a blanket in a storage basket on the back. Will raised a hand in greeting as Poppy strode over to him.
“Are you okay?” The trooper’s eyebrow rose. “Looks like you’ve been put through the wringer.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “Mind if I borrow that to go after Stormy?”
“Be my guest.” Will hopped off the ATV and signaled for Scout to follow. He nodded to Lex and despite his amiable grin Lex couldn’t shake the feeling he was being evaluated. “I hear you two used to work together.”
“Actually, we were engaged to be married,” Poppy clarified, with a shrug that hit Lex like a punch in the gut. “Didn’t work out.”
How could she blurt something like that out so casually? Then again, she’d shown practically no emotion when they’d broken up. She hadn’t cried, let alone tried to talk him out of calling off the wedding. This woman had been his entire world. Not a day had gone by since he’d regretted breaking her heart.
Hadn’t he meant anything to her?
* * *
Moments later, Lex and Poppy were driving through the trees, following the bent branches Stormy had left in her wake. Lex hadn’t met her eye since Poppy had told Will that they used to be engaged. Had it bothered him that she’d been so blunt about it? Will was a thorough investigator, as were the rest of her team. If any one of them took a look into Lex it wouldn’t be long before someone stumbled onto the fact they’d once been planning to get married. Or maybe she’d blurted it out to show Lex what a good job she’d done getting over him, despite how rattled her heart had been when she’d opened her eyes to find his strong arms around her and his dark, handsome face hovering above hers.
Lex’s cell phone buzzed. He pulled it out, glanced at the screen and slid it back into his pocket. Then she heard a familiar woof.
“Stormy!” she called.
The dog was standing guard in a clearing over a set of tire tracks. Poppy leaped off the ATV as Lex pulled to a stop. She signaled to her partner and Stormy trotted over.
“Good dog,” she said. Stormy butted her head into Poppy’s hand, and she ran her fingers over the back of the dog’s shaggy head. “It’s okay. We’ll get them next time.”
Lex climbed off the ATV, got out his phone again and took a picture of the tracks.
“I can send these to you for your team,” he offered. “I can tell you right now they’re no different from the usual ATV tracks we see from trespassers around here. Despite how vast and remote this place is, we have a major problem with people trespassing and illegal hunting.” He frowned, deepening the lines between his eyes, and she was reminded of Will’s suspicion that they weren’t getting the full story. Was Lex keeping something from them? “Not like this, though.”
His phone buzzed again; Lex gave it another swift glanced and didn’t answer. Then his phone began to ring and he sent it through to voice mail. Who was so intent on reaching him? And why was he ignoring them?
“You want to tell me what that’s about?” she asked, gesturing to his phone.
“Don’t worry about it,” Lex said. “It’s just something I need to sort out.”
“But is it related to the poachers?” she pressed. “Because if it is and you’re withholding information...”
Her voice trailed off as she watched his jaw set firmly.
“Yes, it might be,” he said. “And I will fill you in fully. But later. Please, just give me some time. I need to talk to someone first.”
Okay, then. She could hardly force him to tell her what she wanted to know any more than she could force any other witness or source on a case. The trooper inside her still wanted to press him for answers. But the woman who’d once loved this man, and expected to spend the rest of her life with him, knew how much Lex hated being pushed into anything and how stubborn it made him when she tried. Usually the only thing that worked to make him open up was to wait until he’d sorted out whatever was going on inside his brain.
Sometimes not even then, she reminded herself. If it hadn’t been for the accidental message he’d left on her answering machine she might’ve never known he had cold feet about marrying her.
But thinking about that is hardly going to help me with this case now, is it?
There was no way Stormy would fit in the storage cage on the back of the ATV like Scout had. So they drove back slowly, while Stormy ran alongside.
“I have a source,” Lex said after what felt like an extremely long silence. “He tipped me off to the fact that the two poachers had turned on a third poacher and murdered him, and that a bear cub had been captured for illegal sale. I promised I’d try to keep his name out of it and solve this without involving him, if I could. But I warned him it might not be possible.”
His phone rang again and once again he declined the call.
“Is that him?” she asked.
Lex didn’t answer. He also didn’t meet her gaze. An unsettled feeling climbed up her spine that reminded her too much of the past. Right, so he was definitely hiding something.
“Will suspects someone here is not being fully honest with us,” she added. “Are you?”
“Hang on,” he said. “I might as well brief you both at once.”
She could see the cabin up ahead now. Will and Scout were outside waiting for them. Lex stopped the ATV, they got off and she filled Will in about the tire tracks. He hadn’t found anything new in the cabins, either.
“Poppy...uh, Trooper Walsh wondered if there were any significant facts that I might not have filled you in on yet,” Lex said, turning to the other man. “As I mentioned to her, I did receive a tip from a local that illegal hunters were poaching bear cubs on one of the glaciers and had killed one of their crew.”
“And where did your source get the tip?” Will interjected.
“Claims he overheard someone talking about it at a local hangout,” Lex said.
“And is that credible?” Will pressed.
“I believed him.” His arms crossed. “Anyway, a colleague and I did an aerial search and spotted a tranquilized mother bear, which we believed to be a black bear. Farther along, we spotted a man’s body in the water who turned out to be a known poacher with a long criminal record for illegal hunting and several warrants out in his name. He’d been shot at point-blank range.”
This much they’d already known when the team had been called in to investigate from Anchorage, Poppy thought. The fact Lex had a secret source was new, though.
“By the time we returned by boat and retrieved the body, the bear was long gone,” Lex continued. “But there was evidence there’d been a second bear cub hiding in a tree nearby. This matched the tip I’d gotten that had said the poachers were after two bear cubs—one of which it seems has now been captured alive to be sold and the other which the poachers are still after.”
“Any idea why the poachers turned on each other and killed one of their own?” Poppy asked.
“Money apparently,” Lex said. “Greed. Nothing more complicated than one guy just deciding he wanted a bigger piece of the pie.”
Poppy thought of the two men who’d attacked her and wondered if that meant one of them would eventually kill the other to keep all the money from the illegal sale for himself.
Will frowned. “No honor among thieves.”
Lex ran his hand along the back of his neck.
“There’s one more thing,” Lex added, “and I’d like you to keep it confidential within your team, please. My source tells me the cub they captured was a blue bear.”
Poppy gasped, but her colleague just blinked.
“What’s a blue bear?” Will asked.
“Blue bears are also known as glacier bears,” Poppy explained. “They’re pretty rare and have a silvery gray fur that can look bluish in some lights. They can only be found in Alaska, and people come from all over the world to our national parks in the hopes of seeing one.”
She glanced at Lex, wondering if he wanted to add anything; instead, he just nodded as if telling her to keep going. An unfamiliar warmth filled her core. He had always respected her, even when they’d been at their worst.
“They do look a lot like black bears,” she added. “Some are only silvery on their underbelly and paws, and there are cases of black bears having blue cubs or vice versa, due to crossbreeding. So, it is completely possible for park wardens to think they’d seen a black mother bear that was tranquilized but that her cubs were blue.”
“Right,” Lex said. “I hope you can understand why we’d want to keep this news under wraps for now. The news of blue bear cubs would definitely be a huge draw to the national park. But, according to my source, the poachers were as surprised as we are by this and started fighting among themselves when they realized they could get thousands more than they’d expected. They haven’t found a buyer yet and want to capture the second cub and sell them together.” A muscle ticked in his jaw. “What we don’t want to do is put the cubs in further danger or help the poachers jack up the price or attract a wider pool of buyers by publicizing things.”
Lex’s phone buzzed again. This time he held up a finger and took the call.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve got to take this.” He took three steps away and held the phone to his ear. “Hey, Mom. What’s up?... Uh-huh... Yup... Okay, I’m on my way. Tell him Daddy will be there soon.”
Daddy? The single word seemed to knock the air from Poppy’s lungs. The man who wouldn’t start a family with her was now a father?
Lex turned back; his face had paled, and although he glanced at both her and Will, something made her feel like his words were directed to her alone.
“I’ve got to go,” Lex said. “I have a son. His name is Danny. He’s two and my mom thinks she saw someone watching him over the back fence.”
THREE
Poppy felt her lips part but no words come out. She’d longed to have a child back when they were engaged and had spent hours agonizing over the fact she desperately wanted to start a family and Lex didn’t. Finally, she’d made peace with marrying him, anyway, praying that one day God would change his heart and he’d be ready.
Instead, he’d started a family with someone else.
“Do you think there’s a connection between someone spying on your son and the poaching case?” Will asked. Gratitude flooded over her that her colleague was focusing on what mattered even while she was left reeling.
“I expect so,” Lex said, and started walking back toward his truck. His voice was grave. “It’s too much of a coincidence to be otherwise.”
Poppy forced herself to pray for focus. This was about so much more than her own broken heart or the shattered dreams of her past. Stormy’s head butted against her leg. She reached down and ran her hand through her partner’s soft fur.
“One of us should go with you,” Will said.
“It should be me,” Poppy announced, heading for the truck. “Stormy is trained in tracking people. If whoever was watching Lex’s son left anything behind, Stormy and I can track them.”
Lex hesitated a moment and then he nodded. “Yeah, you’re right.”
He opened the back door of his truck for Stormy to climb inside. It was only then that Poppy noticed the car seat strapped in the back. Stormy curled up into a ball on the seat beside it. Poppy told Will she’d check in with him later and got in the passenger side, and then they were off.
For a long moment, Lex didn’t say anything. Neither did she. Instead, she turned her eyes toward the window and watched the trees as they drove past. What could she even say? Lex had known he’d been the only man in the entire world she’d wanted to have a family with when he’d rejected her and called off their wedding. And their past didn’t even rank up there in the top three things she had to worry about right now. They drove through the main gates of Glacier Bay National Park and started toward the tiny town of Gustavus.
