A snort escaped Molly at his sloppy attempt to regain the moral high ground—not that he’d ever had it in the first place. She quickly sobered, however. The mystery of why Barney had helped Jane still hadn’t been solved. “What’d she use for collateral then?”

His slow, snakelike smile caused a shiver to zip along Molly’s spine, and she instinctively stiffened, knowing that whatever was going to come out of Barney’s mouth next would be very, very bad. Flipping through the pages in the folder, he pulled something out and slowly extended it toward her. Despite the trembling deep in her gut, her hand was steady as she accepted it.

As she glanced down at the heavy paper, comprehension struck with the force of a sledgehammer. She held the title to her house. The place where she and her sisters lived, the one that had been a breath away from foreclosure when Molly had taken over the mortgage payments at the age of eighteen, the mortgage that she and her sisters had managed to pay off just four months and three weeks ago. It was the house that Molly—that all of them except Jane—had almost killed themselves to save, working long hours chasing down every skip who had an arrest warrant out, no matter how dangerous or how small the bounty was.

“That isn’t hers,” she managed to say with numb lips as she clutched the precious paper with both hands. “The house is ours. Not hers.”

“Her name’s on it.” With a shrug, he reached over and plucked the title from her hands as easily and effortlessly as their mother had stolen the house out from under them.

“She refused to sign the paperwork to transfer the title.” Molly watched, unable to look away as he tucked the title for her house back into the folder with a smug neatness that belied the mess of his office. How had her mom even gotten hold of the title? Molly kept it in a document safe in her room, and she’d never told Jane the combination.

Barney made a tsk sound. “That’s too bad. Not my fault that you don’t have your ducks in a row, though, is it?” Patting the closed folder, he widened his smile. “It’s a great piece of property, worth twice the amount I’ll have to pay when Jane forfeits her bail, even if the house is a wreck. There are only two other houses in Langston with national forest access, and they’d never sell. What should I do with it? Tear down that dump you live in and build fresh? Sell it to the hunting resort next door? I’ve heard that they’ve been trying to buy your place for years. So many options… It’s a good problem to have.”

Molly wasn’t sure what emotions she was showing, but whatever they were, they seemed to make Barney very happy—giddy even. “If you ask very nicely, I might even consider keeping the place intact for a few months and rent it to you. I’m sure we could come to some sort of amicable agreement.”