“Oooh. Cop voice,” she purred. “Are you trying not to say anything personal? Like how hard you had to work to get every inch of that huge—”

His dick was engorged and throbbing. “I’ll see you soon.” It was a threat, and she knew it.

“Looking forward to it, big guy. Gotta go. Spence just took a header into a trash can. Bye!”

He hung up. “What can I do for you, Turk?”

“Heard about you and Remi Ford.”

Brick looked up, ready to meet the challenge. “Oh, yeah?”

Carlos broke out into a grin. “Good for you, man. She’s just what you need.” He rapped his knuckles on Brick’s desk. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks?”

With a frown, he watched the corporal walk away.

Congratulations? She was just what he needed?

Why was everyone so happy for him? For them?

He’d been prepared to fight the island over her. Prepared for their derision, not blessings. Whispered truths that he wasn’t good enough for her. Hints that maybe this attraction got its start before it should have. Hell, at the very least, he’d been sure there’d be barbs about fucking the chief’s daughter.

These congratulations baffled him. But he had bigger problems on his hands.

Namely Remi’s immediate safety.

He took his reports and tucked the printouts into a folder. He’d done a standard run on both Mr. and Mrs. Vorhees. Both had come up clean. But where Camille Vorhees had a few typical brushes with traffic citations in her younger years, Warren was spotless.

Spotless didn’t mean clean. It just meant they were better at hiding the dirt.

A man didn’t go from zero to abusive asshole to attempted murder overnight. There would be a pattern. Other incidents. Other victims. He’d find them and build his case. Whatever it took to get him out of Remi’s life permanently.

But money and power brought with it special privileges. The kind his own father thought could be stolen, rather than earned or born into.

While he dug into the man’s past, Brick needed eyes on the man in the present. It wouldn’t be too difficult to keep tabs on him in Washington with such public work. But Chicago wasn’t that far from Mackinac.

He couldn’t afford to let him anywhere near Remi.

He debated for a solid hour before picking up the phone.

There weren’t exactly a lot of options for a part-time island cop when it came to unofficially investigating a bad guy a few hundred miles away.

But he had one.

“Dad,” Brick said.

“Will! Is it really you?” William Eugene Callan II sounded delighted.

“Yeah,” Brick said gruffly, chafing at the name. “Are you still doing the investigative thing?”

“I sure am. Got my license and everything,” William announced proudly.

A few years back, his father had decided to make good use of all his underworld connections and hung up a shingle as an investigator. Brick hadn’t paid much attention to his father’s latest vocation, but Spencer insisted on keeping him up to date. And while Brick had expected it to turn into yet another scam, his father had stuck with it.