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Chloe knew he wouldn’t drive away just because she’d told him to. He’d wait until she got inside. She supposed it should irritate or frustrate her, but considering her parents hadn’t cared that much about her when she’d been a child , she couldn’t muster up taking offense to Jack’s tendency to overprotect.

Hell, she didn’t just not take offense—she downright loved it. She’d been taking care of herself and everyone else for as long as she could remember. She’d even dedicated her life to a job that protected other people, best she could.

Yeah, she didn’t mind someone out there caring enough to protect her for once.

And that is why you find yourself in a dysfunctional, secret relationship .

So lost in her own thoughts, she nearly stepped on something on her porch, but she pulled her foot back in the nick of time.

A snake. Maybe two. Except not full snakes. Chunks. Mutilated. Chopped into pieces strewn about her pretty porch. She might have been able to convince herself it was the work of an animal except for the fact that the head of one was sticking out from one of her planters of cheerful pansies. That was pointed, and it made her stomach turn over a little bit.

“Call it in.”

She nearly jumped a foot. She’d been caught so off guard by the snake, she hadn’t heard Jack come up to see what had made her stop.

“Jack, it’s a sick prank.”

“Fine. I’ll call it in.”

She looked away from the gruesome sight and scowled at him. “Jack Hudson, you will not waste Sunrise’s resources on something so pointless.”

“Okay. You’ve called it in to me. I’ll take the report. And the pictures.” He patted his pockets, pulled out his phone and started taking pictures of the splattered remains.

“You’re not on duty.”

“I’m the sheriff. I’m always on duty.”

Chloe rolled her eyes, but there was, per usual, no arguing with him. He took the pictures. He noted the time, looked around the house for footprints or tire prints that didn’t belong to him or her cruiser.

Chloe went to the garage to figure out what she could use to clean it all up. Part of her wanted to make Ry do it, because God knew this probably had to do with him, but then he’d be out here with Jack, and she tried to keep them from being in the same orbit as much as she could.

Embarrassed of your own brother. What a great sister you are .

She strode into her garage, pushing away those old thoughts. Because Ry was embarrassing. He made bad choices she didn’t approve of, and while that might not reflect on who she was as a person, while she might not be able to take over and stop him from those bad decisions, they did still affect her, and she got to have feelings about that.

She was a damn good sister, considering what her baby brother had put her through.

She blew out a long breath, attempting to get her rioting feelings under control. How ridiculous that they were more about Jack and her brother than chunks of mutilated snake all over her porch.

Maybe Jack was right, and this was connected to last night. If she removed all feeling from the situation, it was plausible. But there were a lot of plausible explanations. Especially since her brother was staying with her right now and he was a beacon for trouble.

She got a shovel, then trudged back to the front porch. For all the ways she was used to Jack taking over, it still surprised her when he tried to grab the shovel out of her hand.

“I’ve got it.”

“I’ll do it,” he replied. “You just want it buried out back, right?”

There was that forever internal fight. Let someone else handle it versus handle it herself. Jack was the only one in her acquaintance whose stubbornness ever matched her own, and it had made her complacent. She didn’t want to be that.

Except she didn’t want to fight him. She let him take the shovel, scoop up the snake remains—he’d even gotten some gloves from his truck and picked out the one in her flowerpot. Then he buried it all while she stood there...internally arguing with herself.

And still, per usual, she came to no answers. Because Jack was...

A problem .

Once he was finished, he put the shovel away himself, not even asking her where it went. Still, she knew he’d put it in the exact right place. And there was something about the current situation—the potential that his parents had been murdered and buried on her family’s ranch—that made her fully realize just what had made him this way.

She liked to think Oh, that’s just Jack Hudson , but it was more, wasn’t it? Trauma. Through and through. He’d been forced to take care of five siblings and a ranch at eighteen . And instead of faltering, instead of losing himself in drugs or bad behavior as her brother had with all their trauma, Jack Hudson had built himself into this .

It was amazing. But more than that, for the first time, she really just felt sorry for him. The pressure he must have put on himself. The sheer weight he carried on those broad shoulders and probably didn’t even realize it. Probably didn’t even think to share it.

Because he’d always had to do it on his own.

It made a lump form in her throat because she knew all too well what that felt like, and still she knew he’d taken on more.

When he returned to her on the porch, his expression was grim. “I want you to come stay at the ranch.”

Okay, that was a step too far, even with all this emotion swirling around inside her. “Honestly, Jack, what do you think this is besides some bad joke? Either by one of Ry’s friends or some kids whose beer I poured out last week or maybe the guy I arrested for domestic assault last month or—”

“Two skeletal remains were found on property you partially own last night, then it just so happens you get a threatening prank at your cabin today? That’s enough cause. Go on inside and get Ry.”

She blinked, so taken aback by all this that she felt like she’d forgotten how to fight when her whole life had been about the fight. “For what?”

“He’s coming too. I’ll call Mary. We’ll have two rooms ready.”

For a long time she could only stare at him. Ry at the Hudson Ranch? Ry with all the Hudsons. And her. No. “Jack, Ry isn’t...”

“I know what Ry is and what he isn’t,” Jack returned. “You’re both going to be looked after until we get to the bottom of this.”

Chloe felt like she couldn’t breathe. Looked after . It was one thing in secret. It was another thing if he was looking after things in front of his family. Another thing if Ry was involved.

“Jack, we can’t...”

“I understand your reticence, Chloe, I do,” he said, his voice low and less cop-Jack and more the Jack he only ever was when they were alone together. “But this is concerning. I can’t just ignore it, and I can’t just let you handle it on your own when you’ve got Ry and a job to contend with and this could be... We don’t have the first clue what happened here or with my parents. Until we do, we have to act with all the caution in the world so no one else gets hurt.”

He tried to hide it, but she could easily see all that grief he’d talked about up at the overlook there in his dark eyes, and she didn’t know how to argue with that. So she went inside to tell her brother they were going to stay at the Hudson Ranch.

J ACK LET C HLOE drive Ry and Tiger over to the ranch in her personal car, though it pained him. They both had a shift tomorrow, so he could drive her to her cabin on the way into Sunrise headquarters and pick up her patrol car.

Maybe this whole thing was an overreaction. He could admit that he did that sometimes when it came to people’s safety. But the saying Better safe than sorry was his own personal mantra. Maybe it was someone who was ticked off Chloe had arrested them, and she was as trained and capable of handling it as anyone, but it could just as easily be a threat that pertained to last night’s discovery. And that made everything more tenuous.

Either way, someone had laid a threat at her door. The real shock was, she hadn’t really fought him on it. She’d gone inside, collected her things and her brother—maintaining a clear barrier between him and Ry.

Jack wasn’t sure which one of them she didn’t trust, truth be told. He was pretty sure she had a clear head when it came to her brother, but Jack also understood—even though his siblings tended to stay on the right side of the law—how easily someone you felt responsible for could blind you to the reality of a situation.

Jack pulled up to the main house, Chloe parking her car next to his truck. It was dark now, but the external house lights were on, along with a few internal.

Ry looked up at the house with wide eyes as he got out of Chloe’s car. Jack understood the mind of an addict a little too well. He was likely adding up how many hits he could get for the different things he saw. Jack hoped for Chloe’s sake that Ry could keep it together for this.

Ry didn’t say anything. Chloe seemed pretty determined to keep him and Jack from speaking at all, and Jack had no problem with that. He led them inside to where Mary was pacing the living room, Walker looking on disapprovingly from one of the armchairs.

“What happened?” Mary demanded. Not of Jack but of Chloe.

“Your brother overreacting?” She crouched and let Tiger go. The cat went all of three steps to lean against his leg.

“A mutilated snake was very purposefully strewn all over Chloe’s porch sometime this evening,” Jack said, trying to keep any and all inflection out of his voice.

Mary’s expression pinched. “Then I have to agree with Jack about you guys coming here. That timing... When you’ve never had anything like that happen—and then all of the sudden, bones and snakes. I don’t like it.”

“Well, you’ve got us in your clutches now. The magical Hudson Ranch, where nothing bad happens,” Chloe said, irreverently, of course.

Jack’s scowl deepened, but he didn’t have to defend his position. Mary did it for him, and Jack was well aware Mary’s very pregnant belly helped soften the message, and Chloe’s belligerence.

“We have an extensive security system. You won’t even get one of those doorbell cameras at your cabin.”

Chloe wrinkled her nose. “Those can’t protect you. All they can do is potentially identify whoever might be engaging in criminal behavior in their view.”

Jack narrowly resisted rolling his eyes.

“Well, we’ve got some rooms made up. Follow me and I’ll show you where to put your things. Are you hungry? We’ll get you all set up.” Mary was ushering them out of the room and up the stairs before anyone had a chance to answer any of her questions.

Walker was standing now, frowning at the stairs after his wife. “I tried to tell her to relax and let someone else handle it.”

“Yeah, how’d that work out for you?”

Walker grinned. “Yeah, well, I know she’s exhausted, because she let me help make the beds.”

“Are you sure you shouldn’t take her to a hospital right now?”

“That’s not funny. I tried.”

Jack chuckled. If there was anything that gave him some level of comfort, it was the fact that his siblings had all ended up with people who tried to take care of them and ran into the same roadblocks he always did.

“This whole snake thing seems pretty personal. Meant to make her scared,” Walker said, growing serious.

Jack nodded because he agreed with the assessment, but he didn’t say anything else because he could also tell Walker was fishing.

“The thing is, stuff like that only scares you if you know why you’re being threatened.”

Jack tried not to tense. Failed. “First of all, she wasn’t scared. Not nearly scared enough for the situation. Second, I’ve known Chloe a long time. She’s one of my best deputies. She doesn’t know anything, or she would have said.”

“What about the brother?”

Jack’s mouth firmed. He wasn’t any fan of defending Ry Brink. The guy had given Chloe a lot of grief over the years, and Jack figured he’d earned all the negative talk aimed his way. But... “I’m not saying Ry couldn’t be involved in something , but those bones were buried on the Brink property a long, long time ago. Chloe and Ry would have been kids when it happened.”

“Kids know things, too, Jack.”

Unfortunately, Jack couldn’t argue with that.