Watching Over Her. Lisa Childs
toward the lock. She gasped. Hearing the fear in her voice, Blaine reached for his gun and pulled it from the holster.
Then he closed his free hand around Maggie’s shoulder. She tensed and gasped again. Peering around her, he saw what she had—that the door to her apartment stood ajar. Since Maggie had said she lived alone now, someone must have broken in.
A thud emanated from the crack in the door. Whoever had broken in was still there. Waiting for Maggie...
Like a rowboat riding on high waves, Maggie’s stomach pitched as fear and nerves overwhelmed her. It was bad enough that the zombie robbers had tracked her down at the new bank branch where she worked and at the hospital where she’d been treated after the robbery. But had they now found out where she lived?
“Someone’s inside,” she whispered in horror.
But Blaine Campbell had already figured that out since he held his gun, the barrel pointing toward that crack in the door. He stood between her and her apartment. Between her and danger. “Go back to Mr. Simmons’s apartment,” he told her. “And stay there until I come for you.”
She would have asked where he was going. But she knew. He had already walked into one robbery in progress today. So why wouldn’t he walk into another?
Because he could get killed. Her hand automatically reached out with the impulse to hold him back—to protect him. But he was already pushing open the door a little farther and turning sideways as if to squeeze through. He turned back to her, his green gaze intense. “Go back to Mr. Simmons and call the police.”
“Call them now,” she urged him. “Don’t go in there alone.” As he had earlier...
He’d been lucky that the robbers hadn’t killed him. If they hadn’t been intent on getting away, they may have killed him just the way they had killed poor Sarge. If they’d kept shooting at him, they would have hit him where the vest wouldn’t have protected him.
Dismissing her concern, he replied, “I’ll be fine.”
That was probably what Sarge had thought, too, when he showed up for work that morning. That he would be fine. But he hadn’t. And she worried that neither would Agent Campbell.
“I’ll be fine as long as you get out of here,” he continued. “Now.”
She had noticed and admired his commanding presence earlier. Now that it was directed at her, she resented it a bit. And she resented even more that she hurried to obey his command, turning away to head back to Mr. Simmons’s apartment.
The minute the nearly deaf super let her inside, she would call the police. But they wouldn’t arrive in time to help Agent Campbell. He was already stepping inside her apartment, already facing down danger.
Alone.
As Maggie lifted her hand to knock on the super’s door, she heard the scream. It was high-pitched and full of fear.
* * *
THE WOMAN’S SCREAM caught Blaine off guard. He’d expected a masked robber. Or at least an armed threat. Instead he walked inside to find a woman—dressed like Maggie in a dark suit—rifling through the drawers of the dresser in what must have been Maggie’s bedroom. Instead of being a peaceful oasis, it was full of color—oranges and greens and yellows. It was lively and vibrant, like her personality, except for those times when she’d been too scared to speak. It was also messy, but that might have been because of this woman rifling through Maggie’s things.
“Who are you?” he asked, even though the blond-haired woman looked vaguely familiar. Where had he seen her before? The security footage from the hospital?
Could it have been a woman who had tried to abduct Maggie earlier? He doubted that a woman could have hurled the locker room bench with enough force to knock him down, but maybe that was just his ego talking. At the bank there had been one robber smaller than the others. He hadn’t given it any thought then, because it could have been a short man. But it could have been a woman.
She just stared at him—her eyes wide with fear and guilt. She didn’t hold a gun this time, though. Instead she held a velvet jewelry case in her hand.
“Who are you?” he repeated.
“It’s Susan Iverson,” another woman answered for her.
Wearing those damn slippers had made Maggie’s footsteps silent—so silent that she would have been able to get the jump on him had she been one of the robbers. Hell, he had only her word that she wasn’t one of them.
“Susan works at the bank, too. She’s a teller,” Maggie said, explaining how she knew the woman. “What are you doing here?”
“You left your purse at the bank,” Susan replied. “I was bringing it back for you.”
“And going through my stuff?”
Maggie was asking the questions he should have been asking. But her sudden nearness had distracted him—not so much that he had lowered the gun, though. He kept it trained on the obvious intruder.
“You used Ms. Jenkins’s key to let yourself inside her apartment?” he asked now. “That’s still breaking and entering, you know.”
“I used to live with her,” Susan replied. She stared up at Blaine through her lashes, as if trying to flirt with him. “You’re the FBI agent who rescued us this afternoon from those awful robbers.”
“Yes, and you haven’t answered the question.” She hadn’t answered any of the questions—neither had she dropped that little jewelry box.
He’d thought the robbers must have had an inside man. And maybe that thought had been right. Thinking Maggie was their accomplice was what had been wrong.
“You don’t live with me anymore,” Maggie said. “So you had no right to let yourself into my place.” Her voice, usually so soft and sweet, was now sharp with anger and dislike.
“I brought your purse to you,” Susan said again, as if she’d been doing Maggie a favor.
“You could have left it with the super,” Blaine pointed out, “instead of letting yourself inside. What are you doing here, Ms. Iverson?”
At the moment she was trying to flirt with him—as if that could distract him from what she’d done now and what she might have done earlier. He’d never let a pretty face distract him...before Maggie.
The blonde smiled. “I was searching for clues,” she said. “This is the second bank Maggie’s worked at that’s been robbed. Don’t you think that’s suspicious, Agent Campbell?”
A hiss accompanied the quick release of Maggie’s breath—as if she’d been punched in the stomach. Maybe the baby had kicked her. Or maybe this woman casting suspicions her way had shocked her.
He had come up with suspicions about Maggie on his own, but he wasn’t about to admit it to this woman. At the moment she had become the better suspect. “I think your behavior is questionable right now, Ms. Iverson.”
“You caught me—” she fluttered her lashes again “—playing amateur sleuth. I was only trying to help the bank recover the money that was stolen.”
He wasn’t charmed in the least by her coy attitude. “And you think hundreds of thousands of dollars are in that small jewelry case?”
She glanced down at it, as if just realizing it was in her hand. And she shook her head. Blond hair skimmed along her jaw with the movement. “I—I just found it as I was looking for the money.”
Or was that what she’d been looking for? With the hand not holding his gun, he reached for the jewelry case. She held it tightly, but he tugged it from her grasping fingers. He popped open the case and a big square diamond glistened in the dim light of the nearly