“Cam’s so goofy in love with Eva, he’s not going to miss that plane for anything.” Vaughn lifted a shoulder. “And I wanted to check some things before we leave.”
“Lark.” Reece didn’t bother making it a question. He knew damn well Vaughn was like a starving pit bull with a bone when he latched on to something. And he’d latched on to Lark Warren’s disappearance with all his teeth, though nobody could figure out why. As far as Reece knew, Vaughn had only met Lark once at their youngest brother Jude’s wedding last fall, but he was bound and determined to find the woman now. Which was proving more difficult than any of them could have guessed since the real Lark Warren was a sixty-eight-year-old who had died of a heart attack three years ago, shortly before Vaughn’s “Lark” appeared in D.C.
Reece returned his attention to his computer, but the numbers on the screen were starting to blur together. Time to lose the contacts and break out the glasses, he decided, and opened the top drawer of his desk, found his contacts case, solution, and glasses. He stood. “You have to let her go, Vaughn. This obsession isn’t good for your health.”
“Jesus. I’m not a fucking fragile china doll.”
“Never said that.” He stopped in front of Vaughn and waited for his brother to step back, out of the doorway, to let him pass.
Vaughn didn’t move. “You didn’t have to say it.”
At six feet tall, Reece wasn’t a small man by any stretch of the imagination, but he was the shortest in the Wilde family and had to look up to meet his younger brother’s gaze. “You were seriously injured less than two months ago. You shouldn’t even be thinking about coming back to work yet, not to mention chasing this woman’s trail across the country.”
“I’m fine.” But even as he said the words, he pushed away from the doorjamb, and his jaw tightened with a suppressed wince.
“Yeah, you look it.” Reece strode past him to the bathroom and started the preparations to remove his contacts at the vanity. Vaughn’s walking cast clomped across the floor, then a chair scraped back and a computer booted up.
“Did you hear about the shit Shelby got into the other night?” Vaughn asked.
He fumbled his contact and it landed somewhere on the floor. “Fuck!”
“What?”
“Nothing. Dropped my contact.” He groped around for his glasses and slid them on, but didn’t bother searching for the lost contact. He returned to the main room where Vaughn was sitting at his desk, typing.
“Should get corrective surgery like Cam did,” Vaughn said without looking up.
He’d considered it several times over the years, but what did it say about him that he hated the idea of losing even a day of work to get his vision fixed? Probably nothing good, so he shoved the idea aside.
“What did you say about Shelby?” Jesus, he hoped he’d managed to keep his voice casual, because his heart was pounding a hole in his ribcage.
Vaughn still didn’t look away from his screen. “Yeah, that girl is a walking disaster. The Bean Gallery burned to the ground during her shift on New Year’s Eve.”
In the faint blue light of the computer screen, he watched Vaughn’s expression closely, trying to decide if he were being baited. But he saw no hint of it. Besides, there was no way Vaughn could know. No. Way. He had to relax before he gave himself away. “Is she all right?”
“Yeah, she’s good. Shaken up, Cam says, but uninjured. They’re calling it arson.”
Arson.
For a second, everything stopped. The sound of Vaughn’s fingers on the keyboard, the hum of the fluorescent overhead lights, Reece’s heart. Everything.
It was arson.
Jesus, he never should have left the scene.
Then something in Vaughn’s tone snapped him back to the here and now and had alarm bells clanging inside his head. “Don’t tell me they think Shelby did it.”
If the authorities believed Shelby started the fire, he’d have to come clean, admit he’d been there with her, and the only fire she’d started was the one in his blood. Which would be uncomfortable for them both, but better than having her accused of a crime.
“No,” Vaughn said. “The evidence is pretty clear that someone threw a Molotov cocktail through the front window. The investigator assigned to the case is a good one, but Cam still wants us to look into it ourselves when we get back from Vegas.”
“All right.”
Vaughn finally gazed up from his computer, his blue eyes narrowed. “That’s it?”
“That’s what?”
“Your only reaction is ‘all right’? No bitching about the expense of taking on a case we won’t get paid for?”
“Eva’s going to be family in two days. By default, that makes Shelby family, too. If it involves her safety, it’s something we need to investigate, expenses be damned.”