Single Mum's Bodyguard. Lisa Childs
Dane said.
A little was an understatement. She felt as if she might never sleep again, not without hearing that crying.
“It’s an important day,” she said. “I need to make sure everything goes well.” And she’d nearly blown that by screaming down the church.
Dane must have been the only one outside the nursery who’d heard her, otherwise her brother would have been there. Dane looked away from her now, and she saw that his hand was near his tuxedo jacket, as if he were about to reach for his weapon.
“What?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”
“You were right,” he said. “Manny did check the window. But it was when he first got here.”
She tensed now. “And when was that?”
“Over an hour ago.”
“So there was someone there when I thought I saw someone?”
He stared at her as if wondering if he could believe her, if he could believe that she had really seen anything at all. She had as many doubts as he had. But she stopped and turned back toward the nursery.
He caught her arm. “You had things to check on,” he reminded her. “The ceremony...”
She shook her head. “Nothing is more important than my son.” She would never let him down again. She couldn’t risk losing him. “I need to watch over him.” Or get him the hell away from the church.
But were they any safer at home?
Were they safe anywhere?
“Manny is watching him,” Dane assured her. “I told him to stay right outside that window. Nothing will happen to Blue.”
She turned back toward him. “You know my son’s nickname?”
He nodded. “I know that. I don’t know his real name.”
“Lars.”
“Good thing he has a nickname.”
Since she’d always believed he and her brother were such great friends, she glanced at him in surprise at the snarky remark, but then she realized he was kidding. His face was serious, though. He really had the emotionless expression of a soldier. Or a bodyguard...
This job was perfect for him. But she didn’t need a bodyguard. Or did she?
Was everything that was happening just in her head?
She would have to figure out that later. Right now she had a wedding to oversee. She hurried down the hall and up the stairs.
Dane stayed at her side, just like a bodyguard. “It wasn’t that bad a joke, was it?” he asked.
Her lips curved into a slight smile. “Lars wrote about you during boot camp and your deployments...” So much that she felt as if she knew him already—or at least as much as Lars knew him—which by her brother’s own admission wasn’t totally.
Dane’s an enigma, he’d written once. I trust him with my life. But I never know exactly what he’s thinking or feeling. Or if he feels anything at all...
She understood that now.
“I really need to make sure everything’s okay with the wedding.” But when she climbed the stairs to the foyer, she found Nikki Payne looking for her.
“There you are,” the petite brunette said. Her beautiful face was tense with anxiety.
“Is something wrong?” she asked. “Why hasn’t the ceremony started?” She knew Penny Payne hadn’t changed her mind and that her groom would have no second thoughts about marrying such an amazing woman, either.
“We’re not ready,” Nikki said.
Emilia had thought everything was set to go. That she’d had everything in place. The minister. The photographer. The caterer.
Every detail.
Then she noticed the eerie silence but for the slight murmur of whispering voices, and she questioned, “Why hasn’t the music started?” She had helped the musicians set up.
“The singer,” Nikki said. “She hasn’t showed up. We have the guitar players and pianist but no singer.”
A big hand nudged Emilia forward. “Yes, you do. She can sing.” She turned to Dane and shook her head.
It was one thing to sing to a nursery of children screaming their heads off. It was another to sing in front of a crowded church of quiet adults.
“You can sing?” Nikki asked, her brown eyes brightening with hope.
She shook her head again.
“I just heard her,” Dane said. “She’s amazing.”
Her pulse quickened, and her heart warmed with pleasure that he’d thought so. But she shook her head again as nerves fluttered in her stomach. She wasn’t certain if she was nervous about singing. Or about Dane standing so close to her.
Hell, maybe singing was one way to get him to leave her side.
“Would you do it for Mom?” Nikki implored her. “She thinks the world of you. And she deserves this day to be incredibly special.”
“My singing might hurt that,” Emilia warned her. But then she sighed. She already knew she couldn’t say no to Nikki. Lars’s girlfriend was the only one who hadn’t given her up for dead. “What song?”
She had expected a classic befitting Penny Payne. But her daughter named a newer pop song. It was about loving someone like you might lose them. She shivered. Penny had nearly lost her groom before he’d even been able to ask her on their first date. He’d wound up proposing instead. Emilia couldn’t imagine a love like that, one where they had fallen so quickly for each other and had been so confident that it was the real thing.
But then Lars and Nikki had that same kind of love—that soul-deep connection. She glanced back at Dane, and something shifted in her chest. But his handsome face remained expressionless.
Unfeeling.
She doubted she would be lucky enough to find a love like Penny and Woodrow’s or Lars and Nikki’s for herself. No. She wasn’t going to love a man like she was going to lose him. She would love her son like that—because she knew what it felt like—because she had already lost him once.
She couldn’t lose him again.
If not one of the bodyguards, who had been outside the nursery window and why? Was someone trying to take her son? Or her?
* * *
She wasn’t singing to him. She sang instead to the bride and groom. But her surprisingly sexy voice enveloped and overwhelmed Dane. His heart twisted in a tight fist of anxiety. Maybe it was her anxiety that he felt. Since she’d disappeared and Lars had given him that photo, Dane had had an almost eerie connection to her.
Despite what she’d said, he didn’t think she was nervous about singing. Her voice was too clear, too strong—and so compelling that all the guests were riveted, staring up at her in awe. Dane couldn’t take his gaze from her.
And maybe that was why he saw the fear he’d heard when she’d screamed in the nursery. Was it just post-traumatic stress disorder like her brother thought? But that bruise wasn’t PTSD. Something had happened. She’d been hurt again.
Recently.
Heat rushed through him, his temper heating his blood and his skin. He wanted to hurt whoever had hurt her. First he had to find out who that was. Somebody slid into the church pew next to him and bumped his shoulder. Mentally cursing himself for not being aware of the person approaching, he reached for his weapon.
“Hey,” Lars whispered. “You don’t need that.”
He wasn’t so sure. Who the hell had Emilia seen outside the nursery