Page 10 of Tormented Hearts

When he entered, every person in the room looked up at him.

His gaze collided with Sinead’s first. She sat in a relaxed pose, pushed a bit away from the table, her leg crossed beneath. Her long walnut-brown hair looked smooth, as if she hadn’t been dodging bullets on Timberline Ridge or shooting snakes.

No, Sinead Winthrop looked like she’d just breezed in for a corporate meeting and found herself surrounded by old friends.

Carson, the eldest Malone brother, nodded toward the open chair at the foot of the table. “Pull up a seat, Hawk.”

His body might not be filled with venom, but his ass was still tender from fangs that bruised. The thought of sitting made him shake his head. “Think I’ll stand.”

A laugh—totally at his expense—circled the room. He bit down on a groan and positioned himself near the door, back to the wall.

Carson turned his attention to Sinead. “Ms. Winthrop was just telling us about her safari in Kenya.”

A rough noise vibrated Hawk’s chest. Again with the Kenya story? It seemed too out there, too farfetched. He’d spent enough time down at the many bars in Willowbrook listening to similar tales from the old-timers.

He didn’t believe a word of her tale. Shooting a snake was one thing, but driving her guide out of the bush after a lion attack was completely unbelievable.

She gave a little toss of her head, sending her dark hair rippling in a silken sheet down her straight back. “We were nearing the end of the story anyway.”

“What happened after you reached the hospital with your guide?”

“I ran inside, calling for help. Doctors and nurses flooded out to get Njorage out of the Jeep.”

Hawk studied her face. He had to hand it to her. He’d played cards with the best, and Sinead seemed to have a damn good poker face—she didn’t have a single tell that she was lying through her perfect, straight white teeth.

Colt Malone toyed with the brim of his Stetson set in front of him on the table. “What happened to the lion?”

“Oh. I’ll show you.” Sinead pulled out her phone. Even the way she ran her thumb across the screen had an air of calm that most liars couldn’t pull off.

She held up the screen, and everyone reacted to what they were seeing.

Hawk remained rooted in place. He didn’t need to see whatever was on that screen. He already knew it was fake.

“Holy…” Colt issued a whistle and accepted Sinead’s phone to inspect the image closer.

“Scroll through the album if you’d like. The first photos are just shots I took before the incident.”

Colt let out noises of awe, shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. And he even held the phone closer to his face to inspect a photo.

By the time her phone made it halfway around the table, Hawk caught himself leaning forward with interest and pressed his shoulder blades against the wall again, folding his arms.

Willow moved to lean over Dutch as he perused the photos, and she didn’t bother holding back excited gasps at what she saw.

She looked up at Hawk. “Did you see these yet?”

“No. But I heard the short version of the story.”

“You have to see.”

He liked Willow. He liked all the Malones. And he was part of the team. He supposed he was involved because he was also Sinead’s bodyguard. That was the only reason he walked over to take a look—not because he was interested.

He expected to see a picture of a lion at the zoo, carefully cropped to look like it was in the wilds of Kenya. What he saw was Sinead with her arms around its shoulders, the enormous body stretched in front of her.

Feeling her stare on him, he looked up. “Nice kill.”

“I never wanted to kill anything when I was over there. I only went to take photos and for the experience. But I couldn’t just let Njorage be killed.”

He thumbed through a few more photos. The lion again—very much not in a zoo—stretched on the ground with two grown men lying in front of it to provide scale.