Theirs to Keep (Tangled Hearts Trilogy #1)(44)

Cade shook his head in confusion. “Back up. You said bullets?”

Elle nodded as Dallas put his stethoscope to her chest and asked her to breathe deeply. He was eyeing Merrick with concern even as he examined her.

“Someone fired bullets into the office. I dove under the desk, and that’s when they torched the place. I saw the bottles hit the floor and explode with flames.”

“Son of a bitch,” Merrick swore. “She could have been killed!”

“Why would someone do this?” she asked, her eyes wide.

“Could be any number of people,” Cade said. “Not like we don’t have enemies.”

Elle had gone pale, and she shook visibly. “You don’t think it has anything to do with me, do you? Do you think…he…found me? Or that he knows I’m not dead?”

Dallas shot Cade and Merrick a look, quirking up his eyebrow as if to ask them if there was any credence to Elle’s fear.

Cade pushed closer to Elle’s bedside and rubbed his hand up and down her back. Merrick stifled a deep cough and went to Elle’s other side. She reached for him blindly, tangling her hand with his.

“It probably has more to do with the ass**le we caught trying to steal a car from Bo’s dealership last night,” Merrick said. “He was spouting threats. Most of the time, it’s just talk, but it’s worth looking into.”

“Is he not still in jail?” Elle asked.

Cade shrugged. “I don’t know. We don’t typically follow up. Could be out on bail. But even if he’s still locked up, he could have had others torch the office in retaliation. It probably has nothing to do with you one way or another, honey. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“So it was you and Merrick they were targeting then,” she said, an unhappy twist to her mouth. “They were trying to kill you.”

“We don’t know that, baby,” Merrick soothed. “It could have been a random act of violence.”

Even as he said it, they all knew how unlikely it was. Their office wasn’t in a residential section, and it wasn’t in a part of town where drive-by shootings were a common occurrence.

It was personal.

“You should both get looked at,” Dallas said to Cade and Merrick. “I need to do some blood work on Elle and put her on oxygen for a while. She needs to stay here so I can monitor her condition.”

“I’m okay,” Elle said softly. “See to them. I wasn’t in there for too long.”

Dallas put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “You were exposed to the fire and smoke longer than they were. I need to make sure you don’t have any injuries that were overlooked in the excitement of the moment.”

She reluctantly nodded her agreement.

Dallas called in his nurse practitioner and sent Cade and Merrick to the next room to be checked out.

Cade was reluctant to leave Elle but knew she was in good hands with Dallas. He went into the next room and waited impatiently as the nurse practitioner did a thorough examination of both him and Merrick.

When she left the two men alone in the room, Merrick turned to Cade.

“She could have been killed. We can’t leave her alone like that again even if it’s just for a few minutes. Hell, we sent your dad to go stay with her. What if he’d been there when all this went down? We could have lost them both.”

“I know,” Cade said in a low voice. “What do you think? Retaliation? It’s not like our information isn’t all over the place at Bo’s or any other place we do security for. Our advertisement of security monitoring and the warnings are posted around the perimeter.”

“I think it’s our best bet right now,” Merrick said. “Doesn’t make sense why we’d be targeted as some random business to torch. And I don’t buy that whoever tried to kill Elle has figured out where she is and is trying to finish the job. Maybe that’s naïve of me, but my gut tells me that whatever son of a bitch worked her over thought the job was done, and he’s not even looking for whether her body ever turns up or not. If he dumped her in the river, he’s probably betting on her never turning up.”

“Yeah, I agree,” Cade said. “I don’t think this has anything to do with Elle. But the fact that she was caught in the crossfire because of some ass**le wanting revenge on us pisses me off.”

“I’ll make some phone calls. Find out if our boy is still in jail and if the cops have any leads on what happened today.”

Cade nodded. “I need to call Dad. He’ll be worried about us and Elle, and I need to find out what’s going on with the fire.”

Dallas stuck his head in the door and both men stood.

“How is Elle?” Merrick demanded.

Dallas came in and shut the door behind him. “I think she’ll be fine. I’m waiting on the results of her blood gasses. I didn’t find any serious injuries. Just a few cuts from the glass, and she had scrapes on her hands and knees from being on the floor. I just want to keep her here for a few hours before I let you take her home. I have her on oxygen, and I gave her something to help her relax.”

“Thanks, man, we appreciate this,” Cade said.

Dallas hesitated as if he was going to say something but thought better of it.

Then he sighed. “You know you can’t keep on in denial of Elle’s situation. And I’m saying this as your friend. I know she’s afraid, and I know she’s put her past out of her mind, but it’s situations like today that make it all the more important that she at least has an identity. Hell, even if you had to create one for her. If something serious happens to her, you can’t keep her out of the hospital because it means someone finds out that she has no idea who she is or where she came from. Have you tried running her prints yet? You guys know enough people in the police department that you could get it done on the sly.”