A long, slow smile crossed the sheriff’s face. “I’ve walked around the fairgrounds and said hello to everyone, if that’s what you’re asking. Look, my deputy and I are both on the job tonight. You can relax. This isn’t a tourist event. If someone new shows up, every single person here is going to have questions.” Small towns could be a little like that, Cam knew. His own town hadn’t been easy on newcomers, but they tended to take care of their own. “Have you let the gossips in on what’s going on?”

“Small-town boy?”

“Green Line, Arkansas, population three hundred fifty-two.” Rafe looked between the two of them. “What does gossip have to do with anything?”

The sheriff shook his head. “Big city?”

“Miami.” Cam shared a look with the sheriff. “I’m afraid Rafe is pure city. He was born in Miami and moved to DC. Rafe, in a small town, if you want everyone to know something, you usually only need to call one person. If you let the worst gossip in town know something, an hour later everyone knows.”

“Hell, Callie is way better than that. She had everyone in the know in half that time. Trust me, Zane and I keep certain things very, very quiet around our wife. Don’t worry. Everyone knows to watch out for Laura. Logan and I will keep a real close watch on things.” The sheriff tipped his hat and began to walk away. “And you boys mind your manners around Wolf Meyer. I don’t want to have to break up any fights. You don’t need to fight him, you know. There’s two of you and only one of him. That should be enough to take her down.” Rafe turned on Cam as the sheriff walked toward the gathering.

“See, this is why this place irritates me. What the hell did he mean by any of that? It’s like they speak a different language. I don’t get it.

Why would he refer to his wife as ‘our’ wife? Do these people get along so amazingly well that they keep in touch after a divorce and become best friends with the ex-husband?” Cam wasn’t sure about that, either, but there was a much more important problem. “Why does this place bug you so much? We’ve been in way worse places. We’ve been in even smaller towns, and it never upset you.”

Rafe stared at the scene in front of him. Vivacious music floated across the fairgrounds, and Cam could hear the sound of people laughing and talking. The sweet smell of barbecue made his stomach rumble. It was a perfect little world to Cam’s mind, but Rafe was frowning the way he did when they walked into crack houses or slums.

“She’s not going to leave with us,” Rafe said after a long pause.

Cam sighed. It came from deep within his body. He’d known that the moment they walked into town. “No, she isn’t. But the point might be moot. She hasn’t shown a lot of interest in us.” Oh, there had been that moment when he’d locked eyes on her.

Cam would have sworn he’d seen something on her face, some spark that nearly leapt through the window that had separated them. She’d quickly locked it down, and all he’d seen from her since was a mixture of deep sadness and anger.

“I love her,” Rafe said quietly. “I really thought that when we walked in, she would fall into my arms. I guess there was a part of me that really thought she was waiting for us.” Cam leaned against the SUV. He’d had that little dream, too.

Somewhere in the back of his head, he’d imagined she was just waiting for them to find her. “We really should have known better.

She went through a lot. My god, man, she was lying in her hospital bed, and we were fighting over her like dogs fight over a bone.”

“I know. I know we fucked up, but she ran. She walked out and didn’t even let us know she was alive. How could she do it?”

“Come on, man. I know you. You ran from Miami as fast as you could. The same way I ran from Arkansas.” Rafe’s parents had been a bit controlling. After they had divorced, he’d been trapped in the war zone. He’d talked about it extensively over the years. And Cam had taken the first scholarship out of his one-stoplight town and never looked back.

“But I call my mom and my dad. I might not like either of them, but I let them know I’m okay. What does that say about the way she feels about us? I thought a good argument would solve this, but now I have to wonder.”

“I’m staying.” Cam was sure of that. He didn’t have anything to go back to anyway. He had a crappy apartment and no friends beyond Rafe. He had a PI license but not a lot of clientele. “Until de Sade is caught, I’m going to stay right here.” He would find a job, and he would watch over her.

“Are you going to go to her wedding if we’re wrong and she’s really involved with Meyer?”

The whole idea made his chest constrict. God, he couldn’t watch Laura walk toward someone else while she wore a white dress, her face shining with love. It would tear him apart. “Yes. I’ll do it. I owe it to her.”

He owed her everything. Guilt weighed on him, so much stronger now that he could see her again. He couldn’t help but remember that day after they had made love for the first time. He and Rafe had gone out for breakfast to discuss what had happened, and they hadn’t seen her again until the briefing. Laura had looked so fragile as she turned in her first major profile. She’d looked worse than fragile when everyone had turned on her.

“Do you think she’s right? Could we have been wrong while she was right?”

“About de Sade? God, Cam, I’ve thought about that every single day. If I could change one thing in my life, it would be the way we handled that fucking profile, but Edward was so sure.” Rafe’s whole face had aged in a minute. Lines formed on his forehead and around his mouth. This was why they hadn’t seen each other much in the last several years, Cam realized. Neither of them wanted to talk about what had happened. It had been so much easier to concentrate on finding Laura. They had drifted apart because staying close had been painful.

But why had it been that way? Why hadn’t they been able to talk about it? They had managed to spend a lot of time drinking and fighting, but not once had they had an honest conversation about what had happened.

“Even Joe went with Edward’s profile. There wasn’t enough evidence to push the notion that de Sade was law enforcement.” Cam hadn’t wanted to believe it, either. It was too horrifying to think about the possibility that one of their own could do that. He’d grasped on to Edward Lock’s alternative profile. He hadn’t meant to hurt Laura, but he’d truly believed what Edward had said.

“Besides, after what happened with that reporter, can you really still think she was right?” Rafe asked.

Cam couldn’t help the way his fists clenched when he thought of the Washington reporter who had written a story on Laura’s profile.

She had been a friend of Laura’s, a long-term friend, and she’d betrayed her for a headline. The story had hit the next day. Laura had been fired for leaking information, and twelve hours later, she’d been a guest of the Marquis de Sade.

What if Cam had supported her? What if he’d put his career on the line to back her despite his own beliefs? She probably wouldn’t have felt the need to call her friend and commiserate. She wouldn’t have gotten drunk and confided in that vicious bitch. She wouldn’t have had her face plastered across the papers like a road map leading the killer straight to her.

“I’ve read that letter a thousand times.” Cam straightened up. The Marquis de Sade, or someone claiming to be him, had sent a letter to the FBI and the reporter responsible for breaking the story, claiming he was insulted to be called law enforcement. He’d written a long diatribe on how he was smarter than any of them and the woman who insulted him would pay for her crime.

“We’ve all gone over it a thousand times. The fact that de Sade took her because he was insulted she’d said he was in law enforcement fits Edward’s profile,” Rafe argued.

But Cam had finally pulled out Laura’s profile a couple of months before. He’d been obsessing over it. And he’d been questioning the entire case. “Or he fits Laura’s profile and he’s trying to throw us off.”

Rafe’s fist came down. “I’ve thought of that, too. Fuck, this is getting us nowhere. We have to convince her to come home with us.

She isn’t safe here. If she’s right, then she really needs to be protected.”

“I disagree. Not that she doesn’t need protection, but I think taking her back to DC is a mistake. He got to her in DC.” Rafe obviously wasn’t buying it. “And you think he can’t get to her here? Have you looked around this place? The door to her cabin was unlocked. There’s no way she should stay here.”

“I’ll stay with her,” Cam offered. “I can protect her, and the sheriff was right. A stranger will stick out like a sore thumb here.”

“This isn’t about protecting her, is it? This is how you plan to win.”

Cam went toe-to-toe with his old friend. “I’m not trying to win anything. I’m trying to keep her alive. I think what you’re trying to do is have your cake and eat it, too. You want to haul her back to DC and turn her into a sweet little wife. She was never going to be your trophy, Rafe.”

Rafe’s face went red. “She’s not a trophy. I never wanted her to get fired.”

“But you thought it was a dangerous job for her.”

“I was right. It was dangerous.”

“She should have been at home baking cookies?” Cam asked, feeling his blood pressure rise.

“Fuck you, Cam. How are you any better? You’re the one who wanted to get her pregnant. I had to remind you to wear a condom that night. Do you think I don’t know why you wanted to do that? You thought if you tied her to you, she would pick you.” Cam felt his whole body flush. He hadn’t meant to do that, had he? Sure, he’d thought about getting her pregnant, but he had just forgotten in the heat of the moment. Of course, after what had happened with de Sade, that wasn’t a problem anymore. He hated to think about everything that bastard had taken from her. “Well, it didn’t take long for that whole sharing thing to get tossed out, did it, Rafe? If you get her back to DC, we would always have to hide. No one would understand. I’m going to assume since you’re the one with the fancy job that you would be the one to legally marry her.” Rafe shrugged as though it was a forgone conclusion. “It makes sense. I make more than both of you combined. I seriously doubt the FBI will promote me if I’m flaunting the nation’s polygamy laws.”