The Bribe (Calamity Montana)

“LUCY,” I called, closing the front door of the farmhouse behind me. We were going to have words about her leaving it unlocked while she was home alone.

“Upstairs!”

I kicked off my boots and unholstered my gun, leaving it and my badge in the backpack I’d brought along. Sooner rather than later, either she was going to have to start spending more nights at my place, where I had a gun safe, or I was buying one to leave here.

I jogged up the stairs, turning for the bedroom. It was bright, smelled like laundry soap and . . . empty. “Where are you?”

“I’m in the bathroom.”

I crossed the room and there she was, standing in front of the mirror, wearing rubber gloves with a plastic bottle of black in one hand. She dragged the pointed tip through a sharp part in her hair, squeezing the dye into her roots to cover the blond that had begun to peek through.

“You left the door unlocked.”

“Because I knew you were coming over and my hands are a little busy at the moment to answer the door.”

“I’m having a key made tomorrow.”

“There’s a spare in that wooden bowl in the kitchen. Just take it.”

No hesitation. No serious conversation about exchanging keys and where are we headed.

Because she knew, like I did, that this wasn’t going away.

“Want some help with the back?” I came into the room, bending to drop a kiss on the sliver of skin showing past the thick towel covering her shoulders.

“Sure.” She met my gaze in the mirror and smiled. “That would be great. Want the gloves?”

“Nah. You keep them.” I didn’t want her delicate fingers marred with stain. And if my fingertips were black, it would just be a reminder that she’d let me help.

There was something intimate and trusting about helping her color the blond roots. About lifting sections of her long hair and placing them here and there.

Did she trust me?

I’d been trying not to pressure her into telling me her story. At dinner the other night, she’d had this look of dread, of fear, on her face right before Travis interrupted us, and after that, I just hadn’t pushed. I didn’t want to go into my normal interrogation mode and make her feel like I was grilling her for a confession.

But damn it, it was killing me not knowing what had happened. My thirst for answers had nearly driven me to the internet over the past week, but I’d held back. I’d waited.

“Done.” I handed her back the empty bottle after hitting the last section of hair, following her instructions.

“Thank you.” She put the bottle down and twisted up her hair, pinning it at the crown of her head before stripping off her gloves. She read the back of the dye box and nodded. “Thirty minutes.”

“Do you like the black?”

“It’s different. Not horrible.” She shrugged, meaning she didn’t really like it at all. Lucy would be beautiful with any color hair—blond or black or brown or blue. She hopped up on the counter, her bare legs dangling and feet swaying. “How is Travis?”

“Mad. Confused.” I sighed. “Sixteen.”

After Travis had shown up at my place for dinner and run out like he had, I’d wanted to spend more time with him. So yesterday on my normal Friday off, I met him at the park to practice ball. Then the two of us ran errands around town, doing stupid stuff that didn’t matter, except it did because we were together. We gassed up my truck. Cleaned it at the car wash. Took some cardboard to the recycling drop and stopped by the grocery store to buy his grandma some flowers for her birthday. Then I took him to dinner at the café and we came back to my place to watch a movie.

His attitude through it all had been a roller coaster. Mostly he’d been happy to hang out. He grumbled about summer school and bitched about his Spanish teacher being too hard. Any time the name Jade came up, his mood would plummet. But what worried me the most was that he’d gone quiet and tense as I’d driven him home.

“Something is going on with him but he’s not talking. Maybe it’s his mom. Maybe it’s his grandparents or his friends. I don’t have the first damn clue. So I’m just trying to be there if he decides he does want to talk.”

“You’re a good man, Duke.”

I stepped into Lucy’s space, running my hands up the smooth skin of her thighs. I’d missed her in my bed last night. It was the first we’d spent apart since the bar. “How was your night?”

“Lonely.” She plucked at a button on my shirt. “I was thinking maybe I need to get a cat.”

“You mean a dog.”

I expected a laugh or a smile. Instead, her eyes filled with such sorrow I wanted to say fuck the hair dye and my shirt, then take her into my arms and hold her until that sadness was gone. “What?”

She sagged. “I had a dog. She was killed about two months ago and I miss her a lot.”

“Shit. I’m sorry.” Yet another time I’d shoved my foot down my throat because I didn’t have the faintest clue what the fuck had happened in Lucy’s past.

“It’s okay.” She kept her chin down, staring at her fingers as they toyed in her lap. “Her name was Spot. I know, very original. But she had this perfect brown circle on the bridge of her nose, and I couldn’t not name her Spot.”

“How’d she die?”

Lucy lifted her chin and met my eyes. “Can dogs be murdered?”

What. The. Fuck. “Yes.”

“Then she was murdered. By the same person who drove me out of Nashville.”

I took a step back and bent low so we were eye to eye. “Trying not to push, but baby, you gotta tell me what’s going on. I can’t take not knowing. Worrying. I know I’m asking a lot, but you can trust me.”

“I know.” She fitted her palm against my cheek. “Let’s get my hair washed out and then take a walk.”

We waited until the dye had set, then I helped her rinse it out in the sink. She twisted it up in a knot before we went downstairs so I could pull on my boots and she could slide into a pair of flip-flops.

She opted to stroll down the gravel road that led toward the highway. I fell into step beside her, not rushing as we walked under the evening sun.

“It’s truly beautiful here.” She took a long breath of air, holding it in like she was pushing the clean molecules into her cells. Then she blew it out and reached for my hand, lacing her fingers through mine. “This is a long story.”

“I’ve got nothing but time for you.”

She stroked my knuckles with her thumb. “I guess the best place to start is with Scott.”

“Your producer?”

“Yes. I’m surprised you remember.”

“Occupational hazard.” I made sure to remember names and relationships because they were often the key to a crime. Plus when it came to Lucy, I’d memorized every detail.

“The minute Scott got involved, everything in my life changed. I moved to Nashville—Everly came with me—and it was full steam ahead on my first album. My parents . . . they were so excited. They’d call me every day and check in. Mom had Scott’s number in her favorites. They loved that he’d taken me under his wing and was watching out for me. And when they died, he was there. He and Everly pulled me through. That, and my music.”

From the disappointment in her tone, I could tell that I was going to end up hating Scott.

“I threw myself into the music. It was how I coped with my grief, going as fast and hard as I could every single day. I didn’t have time to be sad. Scott said my dedication to the music was unparalleled. Really, I was just desperate to stop feeling so heartbroken.”

“I’m sorry about your parents.” I was thirty-three, and losing my parents would be devastating. She’d only been nineteen.

“Me too.” She gave me a sad smile. “My first album dropped and I went on a whirlwind press tour. Three of my songs landed in the top hundred and the label wanted my face and music everywhere. They hired me a manager, Hank. His real name is Cameron but he changed it because Cameron wasn’t country enough. He’s a douche.”

I chuckled. “Sounds like it.”

“They booked me to open for some major headliners. Lady Antebellum. Keith Urban. Luke Bryan. And in between the big shows, I was playing small gigs in Nashville and doing radio spots. All while the label had me recording a second album. Things were coming at me so fast that I couldn’t keep up. So Scott hired me an assistant too.”

I remembered hearing about her assistant’s death on the radio but didn’t interrupt.

“Meghan Attree was with me from the beginning. The label found her and she handled everything. My schedule. My wardrobe. My bills. When things got crazy enough that we needed more assistants, she managed them too. And through it all, she was there for me. Every day. Meghan was more than my assistant. She was my friend.”

We walked for a few yards without Lucy speaking. Her flip-flops smacked against her heels. My boots ground into the gravel. But she never let go of my hand.

“About eighteen months ago, I started getting death threats.”

My entire body jolted. “What the fuck?”

Lucy tugged my hand so I’d keep walking. “They’d actually been coming for a year before that but Meghan and Scott and Hank and everyone else assigned to me had decided it wasn’t a big deal. They didn’t want me to quit doing performances, so no one told me that once a week Meghan ripped up a letter that arrived in my mailbox.”

This was fucked. Completely fucked. “That’s not okay.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“How’d you find out?”

“Meghan caught a cold and we didn’t want her around me because I had a big show coming up and couldn’t risk having something happen to my voice. She’d arranged for another one of my assistants to get my mail, but Everly was home. We’d always lived together. She took Spot for a walk and grabbed the mail on her way inside.”

Lucy sounded so calm about this, almost robotic. Me? I was seething. How could they have kept something like that from her? For years? If Lucy wasn’t angry, I sure as fuck was on her behalf.

“It all came out after that. I demanded to know all about the letters. Turns out, I had a stalker. A persistent one at that.”

Damn it to hell. So that was why she was here. That was why she was so desperate to stay hidden. She was dealing with a psychopath. I’d thought this new identity had been crafted to escape her record label. To figure out a way to quit. No, she’d been driven out of Nashville by fear.

We kept walking, Lucy’s pace picking up to match the beat of my racing heart. “It was right about the time I learned of the letters that the stalker escalated. First it was two letters a week. I made Meghan bring them to me. Then it was emails. Then it was emails with photos. About six months ago, I started getting texts. No matter how many times I changed my number, I’d get texts.”

“What were they? More threats?”

“No, mostly they were just pictures. Sometimes with a caption or a short text. But it was always a photo of me in public. I’d be at a restaurant and get a text with a picture of me at my table in that exact moment. It was so scary that I stopped going out. Unless I was at a concert or performance, I didn’t leave my house.”

“What about the cops?”

“I brought them in along with private security. For the most part, I felt protected. I asked to stop doing concerts but the label said no. I was at their mercy and they kept telling me how they’ve seen this kind of thing before. How it’s never serious. I mean, I know other artists who would say the same thing. And since I didn’t go anywhere alone, I didn’t push. I had around-the-clock surveillance. Still, there’s something horrifying about knowing someone is watching you and you don’t know who they are or what they want.”

“There were never any demands?”

“Not at first. The detective on my case thought it was a mind game. That the stalker’s goal was to freak me out and ruin my life. To drive me into seclusion. Which worked, at least when I wasn’t performing.”

“But then the demands came.”

“About three months ago.” She nodded. “What does any crazy person want from a rich and famous singer?”

“Money.”

“Send me five hundred thousand dollars and I’ll stop. Send me six hundred thousand and I’ll stop. Every day the number went up until we hit five million dollars. Then it went quiet. Completely quiet for three weeks.”

“Why?”

“Detective Markum thought that it was all an escalation. That since I wasn’t giving in and wouldn’t pay, maybe the stalking would stop. I stayed on alert. I didn’t let up on security. But after months and months of fearing the ding of my phone, when the texts stopped, it was so . . . peaceful. Normal. I changed my number. Nothing new came through and I let down my guard.”

“Spot.”

A sheen of tears filled her eyes. “I let her out the back patio to potty. It was by the pool. I went back inside because I was watching TV with Everly. She was such a good dog. We trained her to bark when she was ready to come inside. And that’s what she’d do. She’d bark once, then sit patiently and wait.”

“She didn’t bark.”

Lucy shook her head. “I thought she was out there playing. I didn’t think a thing of it until it started to get dark and we hadn’t heard her. So I went outside and found her dead in the pool. Her throat was cut and the pool was red.”

I cringed. The hand not linked to hers balled into a tight fist. “Where was Detective Markum at this point? Did he have any leads?”

“He was baffled that no matter how many times I changed my number, it always leaked, so he’d been digging into my staff.”

“Meghan. Meghan was the leak.” It made sense given how full her access would have been to Lucy’s life. But if they were friends . . . “Why?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “She was my friend. I loved her. And I don’t know why she did that to me.”

And she never would, now that Meghan was dead.

The news reports about Lucy’s assistant’s death had come in this summer. I remembered exactly where I’d been when I’d heard the story on the satellite radio. I’d been in my truck, parked outside Melanie’s house at 5:32 in the morning.

I’d made note of the time because I’d calculated the hours it had been since I’d seen Travis the evening before.

Ten. It had taken him exactly ten hours to leave my house after dinner, hook up with his friends and spend the night chasing all over town until I’d gotten a call from dispatch that the night-shift deputy had hauled three kids in for breaking into school property and drinking beer on the football field.

I’d come down to the station fucking pissed and hauled Travis home. Then I’d just gotten angrier because when I’d woken Melanie up, returning her kid, she hadn’t even known he’d been gone.

On my drive home, the story had come on the radio about how Lucy would be postponing the rest of her tour dates. The only reason it had stuck was because she’d been scheduled to come to Bozeman and my sister had gotten us all tickets for the show.

My heart had gone out to her then.

Lucy had been a stranger. A shining star halfway across the country.

Now she was here. She was mine and more than I could have ever imagined. She was real and honest. Grounded. Kind. She didn’t deserve this torment and heartache.

“I found her.” Lucy’s fingers slipped out of mine as she spoke, but not to let go of my hand. Instead, she clutched it. “I fired Meghan. Obviously. It was a mess. I had to change everything. Bank accounts. Passwords. Another phone number. The day she died, I was meeting with Detective Markum to talk about whether I should press charges. I left the police station and went to the Apple store. I bought a new laptop, brought it home, ready to start over, and found Meghan in my bed. She’d slit her wrists in my bed.”

Christ. That particular detail hadn’t made the news.

On a different day, I’d find some pity for the woman. Clearly, Meghan had been troubled. But not today. What a bitch. To screw Lucy over, then kill herself in a way that would haunt Lucy forever? Fuck that.

My molars could turn diamonds to dust with how hard I had them clenched.

“That was six weeks ago,” she said. “Things unraveled so fast. I learned that Scott, my mentor, had known for months that it had been Meghan slipping information to my stalker.”

“Wait. What?” My boots ground to a halt. “He knew?”

She nodded. “According to him, it had been a one-time thing. He thought Meghan had just messed up. Done it on accident.”

“No fucking way.”

“It’s a lie.” Her lip curled. “He knew and he didn’t do a damn thing about it because he’d never taken the stalking seriously. Oh, and he was screwing Meghan. He didn’t want to lose his side piece because he knew I’d have fired her had I found out.”

“He was fucking her?”

“Yep. Nice, huh? He tried to explain but it was just a string of excuses.”

“Did he get fired?”

“No.” She sighed and nodded for me to keep walking. Something about it seemed to soothe her, so I unglued my boots and shortened my stride to match hers. “I should have blown the whistle, but it wasn’t like I had proof. The label would have taken his side. And he’s a greedy, selfish asshole. I was more worried about getting out of there than getting revenge.”

So the fucker had thrown Lucy under the bus and gotten away with it.

“He keeps calling Everly,” Lucy said. “He’s trying to track me down. He’s probably wondering when I’ll write my tell-all story. She told him to fuck off.”

“Good.”

“It is tempting to send his wife a note.”

“Say the word. I’ve got a stamp in my wallet.”

She smiled. “That’s it. That’s why I left. I didn’t feel like I had any control and the label was pretending like everything was fine. I was scared every single day. Nothing about my life held appeal. Between Scott and Meghan and the stalker, I didn’t want to be Lucy Ross anymore.”

“I’m sorry, baby.”

“It’s okay.” She took in another long breath, lifting her chin and turning her face to the sky. “This is where I need to be.”

In Montana. With me. Damn, she was strong.

“I think I would have gone crazy in Nashville, hiding in my apartment, just seeing things over and over again in my mind,” she said. “After finding Meghan, all that blood . . . you don’t forget images like that.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I had nightmares for the first week. The same thing happened after Spot. But then there’s just this deep sadness. You remember that life is so fragile. I wish there had been a way to prevent everything. I wish I could ask Meghan why and understand. I wish she hadn’t ended her life.”

I bent and pressed a kiss to her temple.

She leaned into my side and I let go of her hand to wrap an arm around her shoulders and pin her close. “The reason I asked you not to call me Ms. Ross was because Meghan always did. She was in charge of my entire team and she had this rule that everyone had to call me Ms. Ross. Even her. Isn’t that strange?”

“Maybe she was just being respectful.” Or maybe—

“Or maybe she was keeping me at a distance,” Lucy said, plucking the words from my head. She looked up at me, her eyes full of worry. “I feel guilty. So, so guilty. I feel like this was somehow my fault. When I fired her . . . it was bad.”

“What happened?”

“I was cold. I don’t know if I’ve ever been that harsh to another person before. It’s not me.”

No, it wasn’t. Lucy was anything but cold. She was as warm as this evening’s breeze. As gentle as the slope of the hills rolling up to the mountains. She was a treasure. “It’s not on you. Don’t go looking in the mirror if you need someone to blame.”

“Yeah,” she muttered, facing forward. “You’re right. But it’s been bothering me and, well, you’re the only one who knows the truth now. Except Everly and Detective Markum.”

“Talk all you want. I’m here to listen.”

“Thanks.” She slowed her steps and moved out of my hold. “Let’s go back. It’s my turn to cook dinner and we can relax and forget all about this.”

“In a minute.” While we were here, airing it all out, I had some questions. “The stalker. What happened there?”

“It’s done.” She turned and started for the house, leaving me in her literal micro cloud of dust.

“What do you mean, it’s done? Did Markum track the guy down?”

“No. I mean, it’s done because without Meghan, it’s not hard to hide. Lucy Ross is a ghost.”

“Hold up.” I gripped her elbow and spun her to face me. “This changes everything, Lucy. Your stalker is still out there. I thought you were here to hide from the media and quit the label, but this . . .” This was serious shit. I mean, the fucker had killed her dog.

“I know. That’s why I’ve been so careful. Only two people know that Jade Morgan is really Lucy Ross. You and Everly. As long as that doesn’t change, I’m safe here.”

Maybe, but fuck. What happened if someone recognized her? Why the hell had I taken her to the bar? I should have kept her locked up at my house, hidden behind an arsenal of firearms.

“Don’t worry.” She stepped closer and pressed her palm against my heart. “I trust Everly. And I trust you.”

I wrapped my arms around her, pulling her body close. What-if scenarios were spinning through my mind, going from bad to worse to totally fucked. But I shoved it all aside, because no matter what, I’d protect Lucy. I’d be her shield if this clusterfuck came to Calamity.

“You can trust me,” I whispered into her damp hair. “With your life.”