Bodyguard Daddy. Lisa Childs
better now.
Or maybe that was just what she wanted to see. He didn’t seem as depressed or angry. He just seemed edgy; something was still bothering him. But she dared not push him. He’d only just begun to talk to her again.
“What’s wrong?” Logan asked. And he turned her in his arms, holding her closely. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
She wanted to say nothing. She wanted to be completely happy. But that happiness brought her guilt—that she could be happy when Milek was still miserable—when her best friend was dead. But she was happy. She wrapped her arms around his neck. “I’m not making this bear for Garek and Candace.”
She wouldn’t dare presume. She and Candace had only recently forged a friendship and Stacy didn’t want to risk losing another friend.
Logan arched a dark brow over one of his sparkling blue eyes. “Then who...?”
She let the happiness out then with a smile. “We are.”
Logan let out a whoop. Lifting her in his arms, he swung her around the workshop he’d converted from a spare bedroom in their house. With another baby on the way, they might need to convert it back or buy a bigger house.
She wouldn’t worry about that yet. She didn’t even have to worry about coming up with a name. They had already agreed what the name would be for their next child. It had been too soon when their little Penny was born, her grief too fresh. But Stacy was ready now.
If they had another girl, they would name her Amber. And if the baby was a boy, Michael...
* * *
“Mommy, I’m not sick,” Mason protested from the backseat of the minivan that belonged to Heather Ames.
Stopped at a light, she turned back toward him with a weak smile as she drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. The light needed to turn green. Now. “I know, honey.”
“Then why did you get me from school so early?”
He had been in class only a couple of hours when she came for him.
“Because we need to leave...” she murmured as she turned back to study the long red light.
“School?”
The light changed—finally—so she pressed hard on the accelerator. What if someone had followed her from the house to the school? What if someone was following her now?
The photos proved she’d been under surveillance. Someone had been watching her—them. She doubted he’d stopped now. So she kept glancing into the rearview mirror.
But she didn’t know how to detect and lose a tail—like FBI Agent Rus—like Milek and Garek. Their father was a jewel thief; he’d taught his sons not only how to steal but how to elude arrest. Eventually he’d been caught, though, and imprisoned. Milek and Garek had done time, as well.
She almost understood now what they’d gone through and what she had put many criminals through. For the past year she had felt imprisoned—trapped in a life and even in a body where she hadn’t wanted to be.
“We’re leaving town,” she told her son.
He clapped his hands together. “We’re going home!”
“No...” That was the last place they could go.
“But I wanna go home.” She glanced back and confirmed his bottom lip was jutted out in a pout. “I wanna see Aunt Stacy...”
So did Amber. She had never needed her best friend more. But Stacy was related to Agent Rus now. Would she believe he had betrayed her? Would she forgive Amber for not coming to her a year ago?
She couldn’t risk going back to River City. That was where the attempt had been made on their lives—where Gregory had been murdered. She and Michael would be in more danger there. Not that they weren’t in danger now.
I know who you really are...
And all those photos. Somebody had been watching them—for weeks. She glanced in the rearview mirror again. Was he watching her right this minute?
She shuddered.
“We can’t go see Aunt Stacy yet,” she said.
“You always say that...” The disappointment and irritation in his little voice broke her heart.
She had turned his world upside down a year ago. And now she had to do it again.
“We have to leave now,” she said. “I packed up all our stuff.” At least, everything she’d thought they would need and had been able to pack in less than an hour.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
She had no idea.
He turned in his seat and peered into the cargo area behind him. “Where’s Jewel?”
Stacy had lovingly made the bear for her nephew. She probably thought it had burned up in the crash with them—since Amber hadn’t been able to leave it behind in their house.
She was sure she’d packed it; it had been on top of the last box she’d brought out to the van. “It’s back there—in the open box.”
She’d been in such a hurry she hadn’t had time to tape any of them shut. But the last one she hadn’t even bothered to fold in the flaps.
Michael leaned around his seat to face the back. She heard a sob slip out. “Jewel’s not here!”
She had been juggling that last box as she tried to pull the door shut behind her. But the wind had caught the door and pulled it from her grasp, and she’d nearly dropped the box, as well. She might have lost the bear then.
Michael had already given up so much. His family. His friends. She couldn’t ask him to give up his favorite toy—his one connection to his past.
When she pulled over to check inside and around all the boxes in the back, she didn’t find the bear. With Michael sobbing brokenheartedly now, she had no choice. She had to return to the house where those pictures had been sent. Where one of them had been taken...
Where the killer might be waiting for them...
* * *
“This is a mistake,” Agent Rus remarked, holding tightly to the armrest as Milek steered around a sharp curve. “We could be leading the shooter right to her.”
Milek glanced in the rearview mirror and shook his head. “Nobody’s following me.” Nobody could. Garek had trained him too well in how to tail someone—so well that he hadn’t even noticed Milek tailing him a few times. But he’d taught him even better in how to lose a tail.
Drive it like you stole it...
He would have smiled, as he always did when he heard his brother’s advice inside his head. But his head was already pounding—with his madly beating pulse. “Or we could be too late...”
His greatest fear was that the shooter had already beaten them to her. She wasn’t very far away—just a few hours north of River City near the Lake Michigan shore.
“Nobody but me knows where she is,” Rus maintained. “Until now...”
He’d told Milek. But someone else must have figured it out. Or why else would their graves have been dug up?
“You should have stashed her farther away,” Milek said. “Maybe someone recognized her.” And then dug up the caskets to confirm they were empty.
“I wanted her to be close enough,” Rus said, “in case she needed me.”
Milek understood the FBI agent’s logic, and now that he was nearly to the town where Rus had moved her, he could even appreciate her not being any farther away. Rus had made wise choices. But Milek wished he was the man she had turned to—as she once had. Her passion had equaled his; she’d wanted him as badly and as often as