“Read magazines?” Lauren eyed the suggested items and caught herself half smiling over the idea of her half brother’s mother reading sporting periodicals.
Donna’s look should have frozen Lauren to the lobby floor. From the corner of her eye, she caught Chris’s half smile and was warmed enough to counter Donna’s coldness.
Dangerous. Very dangerous to have so slight a gesture affect her that way.
She couldn’t care for him. Not again. Nothing had changed. In fact, things were worse with Ryan’s arrest and now-fugitive status. She’d always be Richard Delaney’s daughter, despite her name change.
She turned from Chris and Donna to Sheriff Davis, who appeared somewhat more rested. “Where would you like me to work?”
“Same place. I’m sorry it’s not more private, but we’re a little constrained on space.”
“Not a problem. I don’t need privacy.”
She had started her career working in cubicles with only a pretense of privacy coming from six-foot walls on three sides. Early on, she learned to tune out her surroundings and concentrate on only the screen in front of her.
Her eyes felt so scratchy from lack of sleep she wondered if she could do that much. She must. More than saving a dog’s life depended on her convincing these men they were receiving the USB drive. This was the US Marshals’ chance to catch the men who were determined to hurt one of their own either for himself or because he was with Lauren.
That data must be terribly important for the men to risk being caught. Surely they knew that and suspected many would think a dog was expendable.
Not to Lauren. Nor, apparently, to Chris.
She wished she felt safe where she was. She told herself she should, that she was just fine. Those men didn’t know the vehicle Chris, Donna and she had left the store in. They wouldn’t consider the three of them would return to the sheriff’s office. The space was well protected—more or less.
She eyed the wide window in front of her and hoped it was bulletproof glass. Now in daylight, she saw more clearly how vulnerable it was from the street. The door, though it was steel, appeared suddenly too defenseless, the deputy stationed by it too young and flimsy to be of any use against someone trying to break in.
“Lauren?” Chris was beside her, one hand resting on her shoulder. “Are you all right?”
She realized she was gripping the desk with both hands, her knuckles white.
“Breathe,” Chris said. Lauren inhaled to the bottom of her lungs, letting it out slowly.
“Again. Slowly so you don’t hyperventilate.” Chris’s voice was soothing, calming.
She breathed deeply and slowly yet again. Some of the tension in her chest released.
“Will you look at me?”
She raised her gaze to his and a different sort of tightness filled her middle. She could drown in those lake-blue eyes and be happy. She was drowning now, sinking, falling, falling—
She snapped her focus away. “I’m okay now. It’s just that window... Anyone walking past...” She gestured to the expanse of glass.
“I’ll ask Davis if we can lower the shade.”
“Not much protection against bullets,” Lauren said.
“I presume the glass is bulletproof.” Chris removed his hand from her shoulder. “Can you work here?”
“I don’t have much choice, do I?” Lauren managed a smile for him without meeting his eyes again.
She wanted to tell him to go away, move out of her sphere. She might be able to tune out the defenselessness she felt with that window twenty feet away, but she was still too susceptible to his nearness.
Five years of carefully not thinking about him down the drain in less than a day. Proximity, needing one another to stay safe and alive, helping him—
Helping him catch her brother and put him in prison again.
She had to do it. Sadly, this was the right action. Ryan’s behavior was unacceptable. Maybe it wasn’t as unacceptable as their father’s, but it was wrong in the eyes of the law and society. She had to face that. Innocent men didn’t need to run from justice.
Unless they have a really good reason.
That quiet voice niggled at a corner of her mind. What if he had a good reason for running?
She couldn’t think of one.
She didn’t have time to think of one. She needed to get to work. Focus. Focus. Focus.
She set up the computer to protect its contents, then took the USB drive from Chris and began to work. As always when she got before a monitor, her ability to concentrate took over. Sound faded. Sight of everything else disappeared.
Somewhere along the way, someone wrapped her hand around a mug of hot soup. She sipped and typed, sipped and typed. The heat soothed her jumpy stomach. And the mug never seemed to empty, though the contents changed. Hot chocolate, rich and sweet. More soup. Coffee. She drank. She typed. She hacked through passwords too complex to be amateur. She didn’t think about who was taking care of her.
The bang sent her shooting the wheeled chair backward. Her mug crashed to the floor. She would have followed had Chris not appeared beside her and grasped her hand.
“It’s all right. Just a fender bender in the street.”
“You’re sure?” She blinked at him, avoiding his eyes.
“I’m sure.” He released her hand as though it scorched him. “There’s ice out there now that the sun’s gone down.”
“The sun’s gone down?” She stared at the line of darkness around the edge of the shaded window. “How long have I been working?”
“About three hours.”
“Awful way to spend Christmas Eve,” Donna said from inside the break room.
She sat on the sagging sofa with her feet propped on a chair, knitting needles in hand.
She had brought knitting with her? She had fled her house with needles and yarn?
Lauren had fled her house with nothing, and that was exactly what she possessed from her lake house, her true home.
Her gaze fell on the orange backpack shoved beneath the desk. She had a change of clothes, a hairbrush and a toothbrush. She had an impersonal condo in Grand Rapids where she could be near an airport for work. The lake house had been home.
She rubbed her eyes. “It is a terrible way to spend Christmas Eve. I’m sure your mother and sister are missing you, Chris.”
“I’ve talked to them. They’re going to church and a party afterward.”
“But I’m sure they would rather have you there.”
She would have liked to be there, in a house smelling of a pine tree and gingerbread cookies.
She rose. “Let me take a break and then I’ll get back to work so you can get back to your family.”
She went into the ladies’ room to wash her face and pull her hair back into a ponytail. What she’d give for a shower and shampoo. For a bed and about twenty hours of sleep.
For an end to being the quarry in someone’s game of pursuit.
She returned to the computer to find a fresh cup beside the keyboard. More hot chocolate. She went back to work. Type. Sip. Type.
And suddenly she was staring at a screen that was not the gibberish of an encrypted file.
TWELVE
“Chris.”
Lauren’s soft cry throbbed with an emotion he couldn’t interpret. Panic? Excitement? Either way, his name on her lips drew him to her side in a flash.
“What is it? Did you—” The words on the screen stopped him from speaking as fast as a hand across his lips.
Not words, but names. First names, last names, street names. The words came after the names and addresses, a description of what action was intended against each man—elimination.
“I’m presuming elimination is the same as assassination,” Lauren said in a whisper.
“Yes.” Chris studied each name. “I don�
��t recognize a single name though. Do you?”
The look she shot him held disappointment and pain. “Of course I do. I had them all over for tea last week so we could discuss how we would take over the world.” Her tone held the bite of sarcasm.
“I didn’t think they were your friends. I just thought...” Chris pressed the heels of his palms to his aching temples.
He couldn’t say what he thought—that she might recognize the names because these men listed might be friends of her father or her brother. She wouldn’t take well to the accusation. She shouldn’t. It was unfair to her. He had been unfair to her. He wanted to heal the rift between them, and all he managed to do was make matters worse.
“Of course you wouldn’t know these men.” He dropped his hands to his pockets.
“They aren’t on some wanted list?” Lauren asked.
“That’s the FBI’s list, not ours. Are there more, or just these on this screen?”
She scrolled the display. Two dozen more names Chris didn’t recognize went past. By Lauren’s lack of reaction, he guessed she knew none of them...until they reached the bottom. Then she flinched hard enough Chris saw her body jerk.
They both knew the three names at the bottom of the monitor.
Richard Delaney
Ryan Delaney
Lauren Wexler
“My dad. My brother. Someone wants to kill us.”
Chris clasped his hands behind his back to stop himself from drawing her into his arms.
“I’m only on this list because I’m related to these men.” She sounded young, vulnerable, not unlike the day she told him who her father was and that he had been to prison.
My dad is a crook. He says he’s a legitimate businessman now, but I think he’s just got smarter about how he launders money.
She hadn’t looked at him then. She didn’t look at him now. She reached to touch the screen of the monitor above her name, then snatched her hand back as though the glass scorched her.
Chris wanted nothing more than to wrap his arms around her and hold her, protect her with his life, not because he had been ordered to do so, but because he could think of nothing he wanted more than to protect her from the present danger, from her past, from the mistake he had made in letting her go.
He had to be satisfied with drawing a chair up beside her and taking her hands in his. “They won’t harm you. I promise that with my life.”
“I wish you were only speaking figuratively instead of literally.” Her hazel eyes were huge and dark, the pupils dilated. She clutched his fingers hard enough to hurt, a feat considering her hands were half the size of his. “Chris, why?”
“I don’t know. I can only guess they think you know something they need kept quiet.”
“I don’t know anything. I haven’t seen Ryan since months before he was arrested, though I did talk to him briefly when he was out on bail. And as for my father, I haven’t seen him in years.”
“But you’re a computer-security expert. Maybe they think you have helped them from a distance and locked down the information so it can’t be hacked.”
“Whoever they are.” She glanced toward the front window. “I feel vulnerable here. Is there someplace we can go that’s more secure?”
“Is there somewhere we can go that’s more comfortable?” Donna’s heels clacked toward them. “And what about my dog—what’s all that?” She nodded toward the monitor.
Lauren touched a button on the keyboard and the data on the screen vanished. “Nothing to do with you.”
Chris hoped she was right. He hadn’t seen Donna’s name on the list, but they hadn’t scrolled to the next screen. They had stopped on Lauren’s name.
She glanced from him to Donna to the monitor, and he suspected she had the same thought. If Ryan had information these men wanted, they might fear Donna had known it too. That meant the exchange with the dog and USB drive was likely a trap for them, not the other way around as Chris had hoped.
“Let me see what I can do.” He rose and crossed the lobby to knock on Davis’s door. When told to enter, he slipped inside to find the sheriff seated behind his desk, reading a file. “How much crime do you have around here?”
“Not much. A few break-ins of summer homes, speeders, some shoplifting.” Davis set the folder aside. “What can I do for you?”
“Do you know of a motel that might have rooms?”
“Not near here. Your ladies need a nap?”
“We need someplace secure.”
Davis rubbed his chin, whiskers rasping. “There’s my place.”
“But your family...”
Chris wasn’t dragging anyone else into this debacle.
“No family there.” Davis stood. “I have a lot of family around here, but I live alone in the woods. I have a fence to keep the deer out of my garden, and there’s a back road out. You all can shower and sleep.” He glanced toward the front desk, where Lauren sat with her face buried in her folded arms, sleeping or crying. Chris hoped it was the former and feared the latter. Donna perched on the corner of the desk, swinging one long, booted leg as though she were sixteen, not sixty. “What about fetching the dog?”
“I’ll take care of that.”
“Alone?”
Chris shrugged.
“You’re sure it’s not a trap? I mean, I love dogs. Had one of my own until a month ago, and plan to get another soon. But it’s a risk.”
“It’s a trap. I can only hope to spring it on them instead.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“It’s not your jurisdiction.”
Davis waved his hand, dismissing that notion. “I’ll have two of my men watch the ladies and go with you.”
“On Christmas Eve?”
Davis shrugged. “I’ll take you all out to my house, make an appearance at the family Christmas party, then join you. That work?”
“It works for me.”
Chris wasn’t sure it worked for his office, but what they didn’t know wouldn’t harm anyone.
That thought gave him pause. If he was acting without permission, something was wrong with his job. This work had been his life for five years. He had made no moves without being given orders, except for trying to dig into files to discover more about his father’s murder. That was a far cry from taking action without informing his supervisor.
They had said to keep the ladies safe, and that was what he was doing. The dog was something different. The service wasn’t going to waste resources on rescuing a dog.
But Davis intended to, and Chris would because he wanted the opportunity to catch these men and stop them—before they harmed the lady he had once loved enough to want to spend the rest of his life with, a lady he had discovered this past day he still cared about.
Maybe too much for his own good.
Davis glanced at the clock. “The next crew will be coming in half an hour.”
“I’ll tell the ladies.” Chris turned from the doorway, took a step toward Lauren and froze.
He really needed sleep if he was hearing things. No way had he just heard a dog bark. Yet it sounded again. Quick. Urgent.
And then Donna slammed to her feet and ran toward the rear door of the office—the parking lot side—her heels clattering like hoofbeats on a sound stage, her cry of “Saber” ringing through the rooms.
“Wait.” Chris sprinted after her and blocked her path to the door. “Wait.”
“But it’s my dog. I know her bark.” Donna’s face glowed with joy.
“I believe you. I also think it could be a way to lure us into the open.”
A way to ensure they were at the sheriff’s office, a message to say, “We know where you are. You can’t hide.”
“Let Davis get her.” Chris stepped aside to allow Davis and a deputy, service weapons in hand, to move past him and Donna and reac
h for the door.
“Camera only shows the dog,” Davis said. “But someone could be hiding in the trees.”
Or planting another bomb in Chris’s Jeep. Or, worse, planning an assault from the front.
“Lauren.” Chris called her name and raced down the corridor to find her with her head still down on the desk. He touched her shoulder, and she startled. Her head shot up to show eyes blurred with sleep.
“Get up. Quick.” Chris tucked his hands beneath her elbows and lifted her from the seat.
“What? What’s wrong? What happened?” Her voice was rough from her nap and she stumbled against him.
He wrapped his arms around her and spun her away from exposure to the windows, then released her except for her hand and pulled her into the windowless break room. “Sorry for the manhandling. It seems Saber has been dropped off, and I was afraid they might be distracting us in the back to attack from the front.”
“They tried that trick in the store and it didn’t work.” She rubbed her eyes. “But it means they know where we are.”
“It does.”
“How can we get anywhere else? They’ll follow us.”
“I have an idea about that. If Davis is willing—”
The click of dog toenails on tile racing toward them interrupted Chris. Seconds later, a sixty-plus-pound black Labrador flung herself into Chris’s arms. He laughed for the first time in days, then dropped to his knees to pet the dog into calmness.
Donna appeared around the corner, and Saber raced to fling herself against her person’s legs.
“Saber, sit,” Donna commanded in a quiet, firm voice.
Saber obeyed, gazing at Donna with devotion, her mouth agape in a canine grin.
“She’s adorable,” Lauren murmured.
With the softness of her face, Chris thought Lauren was adorable, beautiful.
Lovable.
And he knew in that moment he was in trouble. Five years away from her had made no difference in how he felt about Lauren Wexler. He still loved her. He had not for one moment stopped loving her. He wouldn’t stop loving her in a lifetime.
And none of the circumstances that had driven them apart had changed. If anything, they were worse.
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