“Exactly,” Timothy agreed. “Hell is what she has lived in for quite a while. Then the money that paid the bills was suddenly cut off, the house taken, and with it the vehicle she busted her ass for years to buy because she’d been forced to forge Chandler’s name to it to acquire it. She was thrown on the streets and taken in by one of the Texas-based Homeland Security officers there that day. The woman called me immediately. She knew I’d worked the Mackay case here, and that I was still in the area. They were ready to fucking deport her, Dawg, and do just as Chandler warned her, take her children and put them in foster homes. I went after them, had them set up in a safe house until I could verify everything and run DNA tests on the girls.” He wouldn’t give any of them a chance to deny the girls or their mother. “They’re definitely Chandler’s daughters,” he told them. “And considering the fact that I made damn certain the majority of what Chandler had, that I knew of, was very illegally placed in your name and backdated far enough that it couldn’t be taken, I thought perhaps you could help Mercedes and her daughters. Because if you don’t, then she doesn’t have a chance of remaining in the States with those girls.”

The fact that he wasn’t so certain that Dawg would help wasn’t lost on Rowdy.

“You said she worked.” Natches looked as dazed as Timothy had felt as Mercedes told him what her life had been.

“She did, at a restaurant. She worked cleaning homes, or whatever she could do and still take her kids, until Eve was old enough to help with them, allowing her to take on additional house cleaning jobs to provide a little more for her children.”

“She couldn’t have made much,” Rowdy whispered. “Not with four girls to care for.”

“She had to have made friends.” Dawg seemed more in shock than anything.

“Would you have, if it meant your children would be placed in foster care if your so called friends or employers ever learned the truth of your presence in America, or the life you were being forced to live?” Timothy asked.

“Why keep the kids?” Natches questioned. “She had to have hated Chandler.”

“Her daughters are her heart and soul. Never doubt that.” Timothy sighed, wondering whether he had been wrong all these years about the honor and integrity of the three men he was facing.

As he opened his lips to say something more, Rowdy’s gaze jerked to the door.

Timothy felt his stomach drop as the door was pushed open, and the tiny, delicate little bundle of fire, Zoey Mackay, burst into the office.

“They don’t want us, do they?” Pain radiated in her face, her voice.

She could have been Dawg’s daughter, so much did the kid look like his own kid, Laken: delicate and fragile, long black hair falling down her back, celadon eyes filled with tears, her face sculpted into lines of such beauty it made a grown man want to weep.

Timothy rushed to her, bending to one knee as he placed his hands lightly on her fragile shoulders and stared into her eyes.

“Zoey, I told you to stay in the vehicle until I finished,” Timothy reminded her, his tone gentling.

Hell, he couldn’t yell at her; he couldn’t get mad at her. She knew the hell her mother and sisters faced if Dawg turned them away.

Dawg rose slowly to his feet, causing her to flinch as she followed the movement.

“If they wanted us, it wouldn’t take this long,” she accused him, her voice rough, big tears filling her eyes as she turned back to Timothy. “They would have wanted to meet us by now.”

“I was just asking some questions.” Dawg could feel something inside his soul bleeding.

He hadn’t thought Chandler Mackay could do more to make him hate him. That it was possible for the bastard to make him despise him more than he already did.

Until he stared at the girl glaring back at him.

She looked like an older version of his precious Laken.

His baby was only three, and already, her delicate, too fragile body was forced to keep up with the fire that burned in her soul.

“What kind of questions can’t we answer?” Zoey propped her little fists on her hips angrily, demanding that he take her into consideration, that he make a choice and he make it now.

“Zoey, Mr. Mackay and his cousins might have liked a few minutes to process everything,” Timothy chastised her gently as he straightened and stared down at her.

“And what makes you think Momma has time for him to process anything,” she cried out, her voice trembling as the tears that filled her eyes suddenly spilled down her cheeks as fear and anger filled her expression. “He’ll either help us or he won’t. Either way, Momma’s sick again—”

Timothy moved.

Rushing past the little girl, aware Dawg, Rowdy, and Natches were moving quickly to follow behind him, Timothy ran for the Excursion at a run.

Racing to the passenger-side door opposite the office he saw the young Homeland Security agent standing next to Mercedes Mackay, his expression concerned.

“Agent Rickers,” he snapped. “What’s going on?”

“Mr. Cranston.” Agent Rickers straightened quickly and moved back, his young face pale. “She’s weak again, sir. I was trying to make her more comfortable.”

The other girls had moved farther back to the third row of seats, watching their mother fearfully as she breathed heavily, her pale face reddened, perspiration pouring from it.

“Timothy, I’ll be fine,” Mercedes promised weakly. “You know how frightened they get.”

But she wouldn’t be fine, and Timothy knew it. Not if she didn’t get the help she needed.

“My dear, you should have sent one of the girls for me before you became so ill,” he chastised her as he took the damp cloth the other agent had been using to wipe the perspiration from her. It did little to cool her skin. Few things did when such attacks occurred. They came with a suddenness that couldn’t be predicted, and often left just as quickly.

“Timothy, get her in the office; we’ll call for Doc,” Rowdy ordered from the other side of the vehicle.

“Come on, Mercedes.” The gentleness in the leprechaun’s voice shocked not just Rowdy, but his cousins as well, though the young women in the vehicle didn’t seem surprised at all.

Cranston picked her up as though she weighed nothing, and she had to be three inches taller, at least, than the former agent.

Pick her up he did, though, and carried her quickly into the office, all the girls at his heels.

“What’s wrong with her?” Rowdy questioned the older man as he laid her on the office couch, the girls hovering around her.

Cranston sighed heavily. “The doctors aren’t certain, but she’s refused to see the specialists she’s been referred to.”

“Why?”

Cranston’s jaw tightened, a muscle ticking at the side furiously. “No insurance and no money, Rowdy. I told you, once Homeland Security found that Cayman account two years ago, they’ve had to live on what she had saved and the money she made working three jobs. She refused to let the girls work. The girls weren’t even aware Mercedes was no longer receiving the money until DHS showed up at the house and threw them out.”

Rowdy started to say more, but the sight of three concerned women moving quickly across the parking lot had a grimace pulling at his lips before he turned to his cousins. “Shopping trip’s over,” he announced, nodding toward their wives as they moved purposefully for the office.

“Where the hell were they?” Natches rubbed his jaw in confusion.

“My guess, close enough to see why the hell we tried to push them into going shopping this morning.” Rowdy sighed. “We’re getting out of practice, boys.”

“I thought someone was calling a doctor.” The little powerhouse who had interrupted the meeting earlier stood from where she had been kneeling next to her mother.

“Zoey, enough,” Mercedes chastised her. “Where are your manners?”