Zeph Undercover by Jenny Andersen Page A

letters.
    “They’re her letters. The ones she wrote to him when he had to be away.”
    He riffled through them, opening a few and reading a few paragraphs.
    Disbelief sizzled through her. “What are you doing?” she hissed.
    “Making sure.” He returned them to their place and opened the folder.
    Allie stared at him, shocked by his focus and stunned by his obvious expertise. She’d never thought of him as a hunter. A very good hunter. Of men.
    Zeph’s bark of laughter shocked her out of her daze. “What?” she asked.
    “You. No front teeth. Holding a purple ribbon and a cup half your size.”
    “My first 4-H show.” She leaned close to look at the other newspaper clippings in the folder. The Stone’s Crossing newspaper hadn’t missed a show from that first gap-toothed picture to her as a leggy teen-ager on a cutting horse, to the young woman in front of a wall full of ribbons, to her graduation from U.C. Davis.
    “He’s pretty proud of you, I’d guess,” Zeph murmured, and replaced the folder. “I am, too.” He started to kiss her but she jerked away and he turned back to the drawer.
    “What’s this?” He pulled a crumpled piece of paper from the back of the drawer. After he’d scanned it for a few seconds, his mouth flattened to a grim line. “Holy shit,” he said and whipped a tiny camera out of his pocket to photograph the page.
    Allie went cold with apprehension. “What—what is it?”
    He carefully replaced everything in the drawer and relocked it. “It’s a list of transactions from the Blanton Builders accounts. Allie, I investigated every one of these jobs in the last week before I came here.” He looked down at her, his face like stone, and her blood chilled.
    “That-that doesn’t mean he’s—”
    “Involved? Maybe not, but if he isn’t, why would he have a list like this hidden in his desk?”
    ****
    After a night of imagining Zeph hauling her father to jail, Allie opened the clinic heavy-eyed and unhappy. She didn’t want to see him. She had to make him see reason about her father. She had to stop obsessing about having helped him.
    “He’s innocent,” she told Zeph the minute he walked in, and winced at the heat in her voice. A detective like Zeph didn’t take anyone’s word for innocence, especially not from a family member. And she didn’t have a shred of proof.
    “What happened to ‘good morning’?” Zeph handed her a take-out cup of Betty’s coffee and a raspberry Danish.
    “How did you know?” she asked, diverted for a moment by her favorite pastry.
    “I asked Betty, of course. My detective skills don’t extend to mind reading.”
    She scowled. “It’s a shame they don’t extend to clearing innocent—”
    “They do. Stop feeling guilty about helping me last night.”
    Who said his skills didn’t include mind-reading? She glared at him mutely. “I guess I’m stuck with you.”
    He sighed and took the lid off his own coffee. “Allie, you have no idea how much I hate having you mixed up in this case. I think we’d have enough of a rough road without your father being involved.”
    “Why don’t you just arrest him and forget about me.” She grimaced. That sounded like a petulant twelve year old.
    “Because I don’t know that he’s guilty, for one thing.” He rubbed a hand over his face and looked so miserable her heart bumped.
    “And for another?” she asked.
    “I don’t seem to be able to forget you.”
    Heat streaked through her, lust followed by anger. At herself. What kind of limp idiot could she be to have these feelings for someone who might arrest her father? Even though he couldn’t be guilty. “Why not?”
    “Who knows? We have nothing in common. You don’t have any free time. You’re always surrounded by horses. But I can’t get you out of my mind.”
    “Does masochism run in your family?” she asked.
    “Damn it, Allie, suffering here.”
    He made it sound so believable she had to remind herself that his loyalties lay