Page 69 of Beware of Dog (Lean Dogs Legacy #6)

Before she could decide between fight or flight, a voice floated around from the side yard. “Haaalllloooooo!”

Shep’s head whipped around. “Is that…?”

“I sure hope no one’s in a state of undress when I get to the pool!” the voice continued, drawing closer. “That would be embarrassing for all of us.”

Cass ducked around Shep, stepped into her flip-flops, and then left their shady grove and slapped her way down the length of the pool.

She was nearly at the side gate when it swung open and revealed Devin, dressed in a salmon-colored Hawaiian shirt printed with white palm fronts, white shorts, and a matching straw hat.

His smile stretched wide beneath smoked aviators and he spread his arms wide.

“There she is. Ooh, you look tan, love. Key West agrees with you.”

All her spiraling fear nosedived straight into anger. “Dad! What the hell are you doing?”

Devin held his arms up a moment longer, smile frozen, then let them clap to his sides with a dramatic sigh. “That’s a lovely greeting. An old man can’t even get a kiss on the cheek.”

“Devin,” Shep said, drawing up behind her. “The fuck, man?”

“I thought we were about to get home-invaded!” Cass snapped. She could hear the distress in her voice, but wasn’t able to tamp it down. Fuck it: she was distressed. “You couldn’t call in advance?”

Devin shrugged off his facade and took off his glasses. Polished the lenses with the tail of his shirt while he swapped a half-apologetic, half-assessing glance between the two of them. “I tried to, but neither of you answered. I thought I’d drive out and make sure you were okay.”

Cass folded her arms. She was still pissed, because you couldn’t get runaway spooked like she’d been and smooth your ruffled feathers down in a matter of seconds. “You drove out from Tennessee ?”

“Oh no.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder, and the sunglasses into the neck of his shirt by an earpiece. “I was in town, and thought I’d see if you wanted to join me for an early dinner. When you didn’t answer, I picked up groceries instead. Who likes shrimp?”

~*~

They doused the shrimp in spices and grilled them up with the pineapple and tortillas Devin had brought, and ate tacos at the umbrella-covered patio table by the pool. To neither of their surprise, Devin made a mean margarita.

“Not that it’s not, uh, great to see you,” Shep said, finally, licking a stray fleck of salt off his lower lip, “but why are you here?”

Cass was impressed that Shep had held out on asking the obvious for this long, and tickled to the point of hiding a smile in her margarita glass by the uncharacteristic diplomacy with which he asked it.

Devin grinned, quick and sharp, but thankfully didn’t laugh.

Somehow, despite the odds, he’d earned Shep’s respect. Cass didn’t want him to squander it.

“Well.” Composed again, Devin wiped his fingers with a napkin and reached for his glass; he curled his fingers loose around the stem and contemplated the condensation trickling down its sides.

“I don’t suppose you’ve been checking up on the news back in New York the last two weeks? ” He lifted his brows.

“Nah,” Shep said, and that was true.

They hadn’t been checking social media, nor Googling anything relating to the case. In fact, save responding to texts and calls from Raven and her mum, Cass hadn’t touched her phone; she’d only had to charge it once since their arrival.

But just because they left town and hadn’t been keeping up with the goings-on back home, it didn’t mean the gears of gossip had stopped turning.

Considering she’d dropped a massive bomb via her interview, followed up by a doorstep interview from Jamie and her parents, and then holed up in Raven’s flat for two weeks before flying to Key West. Even before they left, Raven had snatched up the remote and changed the channel every time Cass landed on the news.

“No need to watch that!” she’d sing-songed, and put it on cooking, or home reno, or reality housewife trash programming.

Now, Cass shuddered and set down her taco when she thought of what must be flying around the social circles in New York. Worse: at her school.

Devin nodded, and sipped his drink. “I thought not. And that’s good. But.” He lifted a finger off his glass. “It’s time to rejoin the real world, I’m afraid.”

“Damn.” Cass drained the last of her drink and tried unsuccessfully to talk down the juddering of her pulse. “Okay. Right. But you came all the way down here to tell us that?”

His smile was of the I-know-something-you-don’t-know variety that always sent Raven and Walsh into paroxysms. “I came to tell you what to expect in person. And keep you from spiraling on the way back.”

“I’m not going to spiral,” Cass bluffed.

Devin and Shep sent her near-identical looks.

“Don’t gang up on me. I don’t like this at all .”

Their responding smiles matched.

“Piss off, both of you,” she said, but couldn’t hold back her own smile.

~*~

Devin had brought a packet—an actual physical, printed-out packet of papers—as if she was an agent he was prepping for an op.

It contained news stories, headlines, official police statements, and more social media chatter than she wanted to see, but which she pored over like she was studying for a test.

The police made it clear that the Blackmons had been entangled with the Tres Diablos gang, and all the forensic evidence found at the scene, including prints, powder burns, ballistics, and phone and bank records pointed to an alliance gone wrong.

A Diablo had been picked up trying to flee the city, and he’d confessed that the gang had been hired both to intimidate the Simpson family, and to kill Cassandra.

Cassandra herself and the Lean Dogs were not considered suspects in any capacity.

Once she read that, she had to stop and put her head down on the table a moment, relief shaking through her like an earthquake.

“Yeah,” Devin said, and patted her hand. “Take a beat. Everything’s fine. Everything important is fine, love.”

That was very true.

Next came the social media pages, and those were less definitive.

In the way of all scandalous happenings, the trial-that-would-never-happen and the fate of the Blackmons had reached far beyond those directly related to the involved parties.

Opinions were split. About half the keyboard warriors expressed dismay at the Blackmons’ actions, and some even said they were glad they were “out of the picture.” The other half painted Cass and Jamie as lying villains trying to frame an innocent boy for rape.

Some of those claimed Cass had been the one to hire the Diablos.

All of that was useless sideline opinion-throwing by people with cartoon avatars.

But then she got to the accounts of her fellow students at NYU. There were a few defenders, but mostly it was hate. Vicious, vitriolic, blame-laying hate.

She only read a handful of Tweets before she stacked the papers back up, tapped them together on the table, and set them aside. Dry-eyed, she turned to her dad, and said, “So.”

“So.” He nodded. “Your sister, of course, wants you to pull out of school.”

Her brows lifted. “‘Of course?’ Raven’s been more insistent than anyone that I get my degree.”

“That was before she thought half your graduating class wanted you dead,” Devin said, bluntly.

“Thanks,” she drawled.

“It’s your decision if you continue, obviously.”

“ Obviously .”

To her left, Shep rested his elbows on the table and said, “People can audit classes, right? I could go with you.” And he absolutely meant it. It was all too easy to imagine him shadowing her, surly and scary and thoroughly out of place in all of her classes.

She grinned at the idea, but shook her head.

“Yes, but no. You’re not going to terrorize my professors.

” She glanced between the two of them, not allowing herself to be swayed by Shep’s kicked-puppy frown.

“I’m going to finish my degree, and I’m going to do it in person.

When we get back to New York, I’m going to make an appointment with the dean and explain in no uncertain terms that I will not tolerate any threats or harassment from other students or faculty, no matter how well-liked Sig was. ”

Devin chuckled. “You sound like your sister.”

“ Good . It’s far past time I do.”

Later, lying in the sprawling canopied bed in the seashell-themed master bedroom for the last time, Cass said, “I’ve been thinking about something.”

When Shep hummed in inquiry, the sound vibrated through his shoulder, and into her face, where her cheek rested against him; through her hand, where it lay on his chest, above the steady beat of his heart.

He sounded as awake as she felt; the dream had come to an end, and neither of them was ready, though they both knew it was time to go home.

“I don’t think it’s going to be possible to go back to the way things were. People will know who I am, now, and they’ll have opinions about it.”

“Fuck ‘em,” Shep said, with feeling. “They don’t know you, they don’t get to have an opinion.”

She snorted, and scratched at his chest with her nails. “That’s very sweet, but you can’t stop opinions.”

He grumbled a sound that meant he wanted to try.

“I’ve been thinking about my connections,” she said, and she had been, these past two lazy, sun-drenched weeks. “If you hadn’t come to get me that night at the party, if I hadn’t been able to call you…Sig would have gotten me back inside, and he would have…”

His hand tightened on her waist, a spasm that conveyed a wealth of feeling and hypothetical fury at the idea.

“And,” she continued, “if I’d gone to the police, the Blackmons would have tried to scare me like they tried to scare Jamie.

But without the Lean Dogs, I wouldn’t have been able to keep myself safe.

I would have had to close my mouth, and drop the accusation, and he would have gotten away with it.

My connections saved me. They saved Jamie. ”

He took an unsteady breath. “They got you shot.”