Quinlan: Foster’s Pride – Lion Shapeshifter Romance (Foster's Pride Book 3) Kathi Barton (early reader chapter books TXT) 📖

She was only three days old. I wonder what sort of sins—because what else could it have been about an infant?—would cause them to murder her like they did.”

“People—humans, for the most part—don’t have a lot of logic most of the time. Shifters either, but most of the ones I know usually have other means of taking care of their bad days. I run. Far and fast.” He picked up a stone and bounced it on his hand, front then back. Front then back. “My father was one of the first group. He was a son of a bitch right up until the day he was killed. Tell me the rest, Rogue. I want to help you.”

She could see the crime scene now. Every time she closed her eyes, it was there. It was why she came home today instead of tomorrow, as the police and Feds wanted her to. She needed her nieces and nephews. Needed her sister to hold her and tell her it was going to be all right. But she’d met Quin and Parker instead.

“The little boy was at the bottom of the bed when he was murdered. The father killed him. Took a chainsaw and ran it from the top of his small head to his groin, splitting him in half. He was still lying there when I arrived, like some morbid art project that was still wet. The little girl must have run because one of the parents hit her at the doorway to the closet. She was killed before she was split open the same way.” She thought about what she was going to tell him next. About finding the baby like she had. “The people I work with, they know I don’t do well when there is a child involved. I do the work anyway because I’m good at what I do, but they couldn’t have prepared me for this. No one, not even after being told, would have been ready to see that the baby had been cut into four pieces. Her small body, barely formed, was strewn around the bedroom like they swung her from the fan above.”

She started crying then, hard sobs she’d been holding inside since she’d found the room. Her body ached with the need for justice. Her heart hurt so badly Rogue was sure it would never mend.

Quin picked her up then. Held her in his arms as he moved them across the yard. He never once told her to stop crying. He didn’t make fun of her either, as she had expected. All he did was hold her tightly to his chest and in his arms as he moved them to a place where he could sit down. There, once she was tightly consumed by his compassion, Rogue let go of all the fears, the pain, all of her sickness of the human way of dealing, and cried loud, long and painfully.

At some point, she must have fallen asleep. Waking but not moving, she watched as Quin spoke to someone she couldn’t see. It occurred to her that she was listening in on his conversation when he looked down at her with a grin.

“It’s all right, Mrs. Barclay. She’s awake now. Go ahead and make us some dinner if you don’t mind.” The lady laughed and said she’d do that, and Rogue heard a door behind her slide shut. “How do you feel? I have this terrible crick in my arm, so don’t move. If you do, I’m going to whimper like a kid, and then how will I be able to be all macho and manly with you?”

“Tell me where it hurts, and I can try and ease off it.” He pointed to his shoulder, and she moved her head just enough to see him wince. “I’m sorry. You must think I’m some sort of fruit cake for sobbing like this, then putting you in pain when I just fall asleep like I don’t have a care in the world.”

“I didn’t think that at all. I would say—though I don’t know you well enough just yet to be sure—that you’ve been holding that in for some time.” She nodded and inched her way off his arm more. “I’m not going to ask you why you do it. I completely understand loving a job that makes you ill one moment then will take you to the halls of hell the next. You told me you were good at it. I think you’re better than good at it. You’re the best there is.”

“I don’t know that I’m the best, but I do help close a lot of cases.” She moved off his arm and to the floor of the deck. When he stretched his arm over his head, she heard it pop twice before he smiled at her again. “Your family must think I’m the worst kind of person.”

“No. But I have been talking to Parker. She wants you to talk to her. Parker doesn’t understand what you meant when you said she would go to the press again. I’m not taking sides, mind you, but she is genuinely confused at that.” She told him what had happened. “I don’t think it was her.”

“So much for not taking sides.” He pulled her back to him when she started to rise. “She did it. That’s what I was told at the newspaper. Parker told them I was a flake. That I took other people’s ideas and claimed them as my own. She nearly ruined me when she did that. It took me a long time to even want to face people again. Parker—”

“Was in prison for the last eight years.” Rogue asked him what he’d said. “She had been falsely accused of killing her father and was in prison for the last eight years. She only just got out right before meeting my brother. She’s looking into it now to see who would have pitted the two of you against each other. Did you know her before