Page 12 of Heather's Truth
“How can you tell?”
She shrugged and just shifted deeper into the passenger seat, drawing her coat closer around her. The move blocked his view of the tempting cleavage the dress revealed. He’d been through her closets, and hadn’t noticed anything particularly outstanding on the hangers. When she’d answered the door, he’d expected slacks and a nice top. Frankly he’d been more than a little concerned that she could pull off the right look for tonight’s dinner and had bought her a dress and built time in for her to change at his place.
That probably made him a jerk, but he’d never seen her in anything but jeans and the t-shirts of her various jobs. In Haleswood, he couldn’t imagine a need for much beyond that. That she’d managed to look so feminine and outright pretty, when he’d expected something simple and unsophisticated, irritated him. Irrational but true.
“I’m not the only one who can act,” he said.
“Isn’t acting what you wanted me to do tonight?”
“That smile.” He took his eyes off of the road for a heartbeat, then two. “Yeah, that one right there. It’s fake.”
“How would you know?”
“Because it’s the same smile you use at the Rooster when you’d rather tell people to mind their own business.”
She made a skeptical sound.
“It’s true.” His temper spiked, fueled by the pain of another ninety minutes in this damned car. “I don’t need generations of history to see it. Maybe I can see you better than they do because I wasn’t a founding family of the Haleswood utopia.”
“Wow. Do you hate all small towns or just mine?”
“What?” This wasn’t about him. It was about her and that fake smile.
“I’m guessing you were raised in a place like Haleswood. With all this pent-up hostility,” she waved her left hand and the ring caught the light of a street light, “I’m surprised you aren’t in a city bigger than Columbia.”
“I’m getting there.”
“Just taking the scenic route?” She shook her head and another wave of the soft lemon scent in her hair hit him like a two-by-four. “Not when I checked. Columbia was after your post in D.C.”
He didn’t like the idea of her looking into his past. “That was different. There were other circumstances that brought me to Columbia.”
She laughed, the soft sound worse than the scent of her hair. “You don’t have to believe me,” he insisted.
“Wrong again. You said it earlier, if this is going to work, we have to make every step of this process believable.”
“Stop twisting my words.”
“What twist? ‘Stay in character’ you said. You claim you enjoyed the evening, but it’s the one time tonight I could tell you were lying. I thought you should know. Call it constructive criticism.”
“I wasn’t lying,” he argued. “I was distracted.”
“Whatever.”
Dale wasn’t sure which end was up at this point. She was too young for this, too close to the operation, though she didn’t know it. But he didn’t have an agent in the office he could count on to pull this off.
Heather had the best access to the DNR database. She’d seen hidden patterns no one else had bothered to look for. Her volunteer work with the county animal shelter meant she could mine those records for names, dates, and dogs unfortunate enough to get adopted by people with a nasty addiction or an unbreakable connection to the fighting.
She was an unknown in Columbia and Lester wouldn’t be able to disprove the time or depth of their relationship.
“The right people saw us tonight,” he said at last, not wanting to give her the whole picture just yet. “I was distracted thinking about how they might react.”
“I knew you didn’t really enjoy our time at dinner.”
She said it with enough enthusiasm he thought she’d start a victory dance in her seat. While she had it wrong, he wasn’t going down that rabbit hole again. “Will you tell me now what this,” she flashed the ring again, “was all about?”
He took a deep breath and flexed his hands on the steering wheel. “I screwed up.” Better to just get it out there, no excuses. “When I was going through the information you delivered, I didn’t realize how shallow the DNR pool was.”
“Shallow? What does that mean? We have all sorts of resources.”