Page 16 of Operation Protector
She was smiling now, liking the idea. Not just of helping Grace, but helping her father. She glanced at him. He was shaking his head, as if in wonder.
“Why would you do that? Why are you doing any of this? You don’t even know me.”
“Yes, I do. From everything Grace has told me about you. From that picture she showed me, of you pushing her in a wheelbarrow.”
“She has that? And showed you?”
“She’s saved it from her mother’s purge. And yes, she showed me. And she’s told me stories.”
He let out a compressed breath. “I’m sure she has. My girl’s a storyteller. She writes them all down. I think she’ll be a writer someday. She—” He stopped abruptly, paling a little.
“What?” she asked, aware that both Quinn and Hayley were listening to them.
“I…that’s how I first knew how bad it was. The last time I was in that house, when I got there before Liz, Grace let me in before the housekeeper could stop her. I saw a story she’d written back before the divorce. About a little girl who lived with a monster and had to hide all day until her daddy came home and she was safe.”
Ali gasped aloud. Hayley reacted visibly, and Quinn’s gaze narrowed into a stare Ali thought would intimidate anyone.
It took Colby a moment to go on. “That story showed me I’d never had the happy family I thought I did. And it made me worry about Grace. About her safety. Enough to fight for custody even though I knew I’d lose.” He let out a long, weary sigh. “Enough to risk breaking that window today to get to her.”
“What were you going to do?” Hayley asked, sounding merely curious.
“I’m not sure.” Colby gave her a wry, almost embarrassed look. “I wasn’t exactly thinking straight just then.”
“Who would be?” Ali said quickly.
“Then we’d better get rolling,” Quinn said.
And from across the room Cutter gave a short bark that sounded oddly like “About time.”
Chapter 8
“Colby Kendrick, meet Juvenile Detective Carly Devon.”
Colby shook hands with the tall, obviously fit woman with the cropped, tousled blond hair. Despite the chill, she was wearing a short jacket that he belatedly realized was so she could easily get to the weapon on her hip.
He’d been a little nervous about them calling in law enforcement, and a bit more afraid that a female juvenile officer would lean toward Liz’s side. But Quinn had insisted she was a straight arrow, and it didn’t matter who she had to stand against, she’d proven she’d stand for the right.
And if he went by the way the dog, Cutter, greeted her, he’d have to believe it.
He cast a glance toward the kitchen, where Ali and Hayley were planning out her approach to Liz. He had the feeling he was going to be thankful Ali couldn’t hear them, given the questions he was likely about to be asked.
“I heard you built the new veterans’ meeting hall out at Douglas Rockford’s place,” she said after petting the dog.
That unexpected observation startled him as much as that steady, assessing, bright blue gaze unsettled him. Together they made him feel as if he were being tested somehow.
“Where’d you hear that?”
“My husband. Parker Ward.”
Colby blinked. He remembered the man on Drew Kiley’s team, and the stories of how he’d nearly destroyed his lifeby turning whistleblower on his evilly corrupt boss. “You’re Parker’s wife?”
“Yes.” She smiled. “I kept the old name because it was too big a pain to change all the legal and badge-related stuff, and Parker didn’t care.”
“He’s had…bigger things to worry about,” Colby said.
It was coming back to him in a rush now, how Foxworth had helped Parker, too, in the end hooking him up with Drew’s company. Had this woman helped in that?
“Indeed he has,” she agreed, and pride echoed in her voice. The kind of pride he’d never heard in Liz’s voice, talking about him. “But he told me how much all of Drew’s crew liked working with you. And that you’d volunteered for the veterans’ hall project.”
