“With what evidence?” He pushed, but I just shrugged my shoulders again as Weller finished reading me my rights like I’d fallen out of Cedar Bluff and into some weird, alternate reality. “What fucking evidence do you have against her, Weller?” Eli roared, and I couldn’t remember another time I’d seen him so heated over something.
Well, one other time, but that was for his wife’s honor.
“It will all come out in court, Eli. There’s a process, you know that. I’m just doing my job.” Something about the way Chief Weller answered Eli made me feel like there was a level of respect between them he didn’t feel toward me. Was it because I was an outsider who moved to town a few years ago, or because I was a woman?
“Yeah, I fucking know all about the witch hunts you run in this town.” Eli snapped as Weller opened the back seat of his police SUV. The venom in Eli’s voice cut through me, and I couldn’t deny how good it felt to have someone riled up for me. On my side.
“That’s uncalled for.” Weller said, pushing me into the back seat before leaning over to buckle the seatbelt.
“No, it’s not. This is exactly what happened to Frankie years ago! All over again! This fucking town thrives on gossip, and you let it happen! There’s no way Rhea was involved. We’ve been working together trying to figure out who really was! It’s not her!”
“Her lawyer can defend her case, Elliot. That’s not up to me.” Weller said, and I looked past the men arguing to see Thomasstanding to the side, phone to his ear, hand twisted in his hair with nothing short of a grief-stricken look on his face.
I could just make out the words he was saying on the phone before the Chief shut the door, locking me inside.
“Tanner, we’ve got a huge fucking problem.”
Icy rage,like I’d never felt before, burned every inch of my body as I paced the courthouse hallway. This town, the place I picked to open Honey & Hearth, the community I had poured every drop of love and care I had inside of myself into, had betrayed the woman I loved.
Agony washed over me again as I huffed and paced back in the opposite direction. If the floors weren’t ostentatious marble,I would have worn a hole in them for as long as I had been pacing.
Rhea’s first court appearance was happening behind the heavy wooden doors at the end of the hall. She was facing down a judge and a legal team who were trying to convince themselves that she was to blame for everything that had happened in our quiet little town over the last few months.
And she was alone.
Well, not completely alone. She had one of the best lawyers that money could buy sitting at her side. A family friend of Elliot’s, who offered to represent Rhea the moment she heard what was happening. And while that information gave me a small glimmer of hope, I knew that it wouldn’t help in the end.
The judge and the DA could stand up with their hands on their hearts and apologize to Rhea directly, admitting that they had gotten it all wrong, and beg for her forgiveness, but she would still never be the same.
She would never heal the hurt they had inflicted on her.
She had sat in jail overnight, for fuck’s sake, like an actual criminal.
A pained groan of frustration slipped between my lips as I turned and marched back in the other direction again.
My inability to keep my newfound temper under control was why I was outside the courtroom and not inside. Tanner had barred me from entering, knowing I would probably launch myself across the railing at whatever fuckhead dared to open their mouth about Rhea in a negative light first.
Turned out I had a wild, animalistic side deep down inside of me that came out over the people I loved.
And Rhea was one of those people.
“I hate this.” I hissed as the grief in my gut burned brighter, knowing she was in that courtroom, facing all this without knowing how much I loved her.
I didn’t get a chance to tell her before it all hit.
Sorrow was a really fucking painful emotion when I knew I could have changed it, had I just admitted it to her sooner.
“Easy tiger,” Jasper said from the stone bench he was sitting on along the wall. “You’re going to scratch the marble with your claws.”
I glared at him but kept marching up and down the hall. Elliot’s wife, Frankie, sat next to him on the bench, silently watching me. She had shown up shortly after Tanner broke the news to me about what happened and hadn’t left my side since.
Turned out Frankie Hayes knew a thing or two about injustice in this town. And she was choosing to stay by my side, lending me her silent, but very powerful mama bear energy ever since. I just wish Rhea had someone like that with her right now.
“Tanner is with her.” Frankie said, as if she could read my thoughts from down the hallway. “And that man reminds me a whole lot of my Travis, so trust me when I say, he’ll make sure she’s taken care of.”
Her other husband, Travis Hayes, an enormous bear of a man, reminded me of Tanner in many ways. They both had that same quiet, but powerful energy.
But right now, I didn’t want quiet.