Read Online Cowboy Behind the Badge by Delores Fossen - Free Book Online Page B

she’d been headed until she was actually on the road.
    â€œSend me the photo of the woman,” Tucker insisted.
    It took several moments for the photo to load on the screen, and Laine got up to have a better look. It was the woman, all right, and just like that, the sickening memories of the shooting returned. The sound of the shots. The blood. The sheer violence of it all.
    But she wasn’t the only one who had a reaction.
    Tucker groaned softly.
    â€œYou know her?” Laine asked.
    Tucker nodded. “Yeah. Her name’s Dawn Cowen.” A muscle flickered in his jaw. “And I’m the reason she’s dead.”
    Â 

Chapter Seven
    Tucker stood in the shower of one of the ranch’s guest bathrooms and let the scalding water slam against him. It didn’t help. Nothing would. It was his fault that a woman was dead, and no amount of hot water was going to fix that.
    The images of Dawn Cowen slammed against him, too. Yeah, she’d been mixed up at times, but all in all she was a good criminal informant, and she’d trusted him.
    A big mistake on her part.
    Because Tucker had been the one to ask her to assist with the baby farms investigation. And she had. Dawn had managed to get some information that had helped the FBI and Rangers find one of the farms. She had probably saved a life or two.
    But not her own.
    Someone was going to pay for that, but Tucker figured no one was going to pay as hard as he was. How the heck was he supposed to live with this? A woman was not only dead, but those two babies were now motherless because of him.
    Cursing himself and this god-awful situation, he stepped from the shower, dried off and pulled on his jeans. He was in midzip when he went back into his bedroom...and quickly realized he wasn’t alone.
    Laine was sitting on his bed. “Before you say anything, consider just how uncomfortable I must have been to choose coming up here to your bedroom over being downstairs with the others.”
    Tucker smiled, not out of amusement, but because he was relieved that she wasn’t there to dump more bad news on him. “Where are the babies?”
    She hitched her thumb toward the hallway outside his open door. “Sleeping in their bassinet in the kitchen. Rosalie offered to help watch them again. She’s, uh, nice.”
    â€œYeah.” It’d been hard to find fault with that particular sister. Unlike Rayanne, she didn’t have a constant surly attitude. “Rosalie’s own baby was kidnapped a while back. From what she’s said, she loves kids.”
    Good thing, too, because it’d required a lot of help to take care of the babies. Neither Laine nor he had slept more than an hour’s stretch at a time, and it’d taken all of them—Mary, Rosalie, Laine and him—just to get through the night.
    Tucker wasn’t sure how parents managed it. The babies might be cute and little, but they sure cried a lot. When they weren’t doing that, they drank formula, soiled their diapers and slept, but not for any length of time.
    He’d become an overnight expert in diapering a baby boy. It required a lot more quickness and dexterity than he’d ever figured.
    Laine stood, her gaze starting at his face and going to his zipper. Forgetting that he was still partially dressed, he zipped up and located a shirt he’d had brought over from his house.
    Best not to stand around half-naked with Laine.
    His nerves were raw. He was bone-tired. And for just a moment he allowed himself to think of how good and distracting it would feel to put his mouth on hers.
    Good, yes. Distracting? That, too. But he’d end up paying a high price for that kind of kiss. Heck, he’d end up paying just for thinking about kissing her.
    And for the way she snagged his attention.
    No jeans for Laine today. She was wearing a pale green dress that skimmed her body and showed plenty of leg. No doubt an outfit that Reed had picked up