Undercover Protection

by Maggie K. Black

  Jay reached for his keys. “Take my truck. It’s in the garage, and I’ve already detached it from my camper.”

  He tried to press them into her hand, but she pulled her fingers away.

  “And just leave you here in danger?” Leia’s voice rose.

  “Listen to me,” he said. “I’ll be fine. You need to go, now.”

  “Again, I’m not leaving you here to die.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “I don’t believe you.” She pushed the door open and stepped out into the rain. “And don’t tell me Dad would want you to defend the house, because

  I don’t care if they burn it down to the studs.”

  Even if it meant destroying any chance of proving a rich and powerful man was the Phantom Killer?

  “Leia, listen!” he said. “I’m an undercover cop!”

  She turned back and her face paled. “You’re what?”

  A red dot of light darted across her face, running up the line of her cheek to her forehead.

  “Leia! Get down!” he shouted as gunfire shattered the night.

  Maggie K. Black is an award-winning journalist and romantic suspense author with an insatiable love of traveling the world. She has lived in the American South, Europe and the Middle East. She now makes her home in Canada with her history-teacher husband, their two beautiful girls and a small but mighty dog. Maggie enjoys connecting with her readers at maggiekblack.com.

  Books by Maggie K. Black

  Love Inspired Suspense

  Undercover Protection

  Alaska K-9 Unit

  Wilderness Defender

  Protected Identities

  Christmas Witness Protection

  Runaway Witness

  Christmas Witness Conspiracy

  True North Heroes

  Undercover Holiday Fiancée

  The Littlest Target

  Rescuing His Secret Child

  Cold Case Secrets

  Amish Witness Protection

  Amish Hideout

  Military K-9 Unit

  Standing Fast

  Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.

  Undercover Protection

  Maggie K. Black

  From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when my heart is overwhelmed: lead me to the rock that is higher than I.

  —Psalms 61:2

  A few weeks ago, one of the most important people in my life passed away.

  He’d want me to tell you that all people are both flawed and made in the image of God, and that we live by grace, through faith, in community with one another.

  Take a load off, Annie.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Dear Reader

  Excerpt from Dangerous Amish Showdown by Mary Alford

  ONE

  As Leia Dukes stepped through the old familiar front door of her family’s darkened farmhouse, she felt a pair of beefy hands grab her roughly from behind. A second figure pulled some sort of fabric over her head to blindfold her before she could even scream. Her purse was yanked from her shoulder, and as she felt herself propelled across the floor of her childhood home, she suspected that whatever was happening to her now, farmhand Jay Brock was somehow behind it. That man had lied to her last summer, broken her heart and whatever trouble he was mixed up in might have also put her life in danger.

  Save me, Lord! Nobody even knows I’m here!

  Prayers for help battled the fear inside her. Why had she just shown up alone like this? Why hadn’t she prepared herself for trouble? She’d already suspected that Jay seemed like the kind of untrustworthy man who’d have enemies. Not that she’d realized that until after she’d been taken in by his good-guy routine a year ago and foolishly fallen for him. He was the reason she’d driven up from Toronto late at night to talk some sense into her sister Sally. The ruggedly handsome yet infuriatingly evasive man had been originally hired by her widower father for a few weeks last year to fix up some stuff around the century-old farm.

  Secretly, she and Jay had also become such close friends that he’d actually convinced Leia he’d fallen in love with her—during a sweet whirlwind summer romance that they’d barely managed to hide from her family—before suddenly calling it off, breaking her heart, changing his phone number and disappearing from her life. Although she’d caught a glimpse of a figure who looked an awful lot like him lurking around her father’s graveside last month.

  Even then, she hadn’t realized she might’ve been taken in by a con man until a colleague at the public defender’s office Leia was working at to save for law school encouraged her to do some digging just in case he was wanted by the police. That’s when she found out there wasn’t a trace of him on social media and none of his former employers claimed to have heard of him.

  Then this morning her sister Sally—who’d been driving to the now vacant farm with her new baby every few days to keep it up the best she could—had called to say that Jay had suddenly offered to get the farm ready to sell in exchange for letting him stay there. Her other sisters, who were all scattered elsewhere around the country, jumped at the proposal.

  But Leia—who was both the eldest sister and the odd one out, as usual—had furiously driven up from Toronto to immediately kick him off the property, only to end up blindfolded and kidnapped.

  If she ever saw Jay again, he had a whole lot to answer for.

  Lord, please help me settle my heart and mind. I can’t let myself get distracted thinking about him now. I need everything inside me focused on getting out of here alive.

  “Where is everybody?” The voice was male, loud and so close to Leia’s face she flinched.

  “There’s nobody here but me,” she said.

  As far as she knew. Her other two sisters, Rose and Quinn, lived on opposite ends of the country where they were busy scraping pennies together to throw everything into chasing their own dreams. Since it was almost midnight now, Leia didn’t expect Sally would arrive until six or seven in the morning. As for one of them being the intended target, with Leia’s jet-black hair and violet eyes it was utterly impossible anyone would mistake her for one of her three blonde younger sisters.

  There was the cat, too, but Moses didn’t live there so much as visited when he felt like it.

  “Look, if this is about Jay Brock,” she added, “we haven’t spoken in almost a year. And I don’t know anything about any kind of trouble he’s in.”

  Nobody answered. The texture changed under her feet. She was being walked across the carpet by the man with big hands, and the faint smell of ashes told her she was nearing the fireplace. Her father had made sure that, even back when they were little girls, they knew each room, hidden door and back passage of the sprawling and isolated farmhouse like the backs of their hands. They’d all been homeschooled until high school, and he’d drilled them with games and scavenger hunts until she knew the creak of every board like the veins pumping blood to her heart.

  Her dad had even taught them how to run through the house blindfolded.
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  And as much as she resented it when she was young—considering her father quirky, bordering on paranoid—she prayed God would help her remember what he’d taught her.

  She closed her eyes, calmed her breath and tried to force herself to focus.

  By the sounds of footsteps and objects crashing, she guessed there were three intruders in total. The one with the loudest boots was now tossing the place, as if searching for something, while another with big hands steered her by the shoulders. The fact they’d taken her bag meant they now had her car keys, wallet and cell phone. Were they armed? If so, then with what? Her mind reeled with unanswered questions until they threatened to drown her ability to think.

  “What do you want?” Leia forced out the words over her trembling lips. “If you’re here to rob us, just take what you want and go. I’m telling you we don’t have much.”

  Just debts and a home in desperate need of repairs. If this wasn’t about Jay, then why were they here? If they were thieves, why target a remote farm thirty minutes from the closest town? Yes, the property was large, but they’d never had much. Their dad had never let them buy anything new he could teach them to make or get secondhand. Even now, all four of them were up to their ears in debt and struggling to scrape up enough money to finance their dreams.

  Then came a push on both shoulders at once, so quick and jarring she barely had time to brace her legs as she stumbled backward into a chair. Her body smacked against the wood. Her hands grabbed ahold of the arms, feeling the soft grain beneath her fingertips. She knew exactly where she was now. She was in her father’s favorite chair by the fire, where he used to sit and tell them made-up stories about four brave and strong princesses who would one day fight a terrifying foe.

  Looked like, for her, that day was now.

  Her limbs had started to shake, and she didn’t try to stop them. Better to let her kidnappers believe she was too scared to think, let alone preparing to fight back.

  “Now you’re going to tell me where I can find every single scrap of information in this house that can be traced to Vamana Enterprises,” the one who’d bellowed at her before barked.

  She decided to mentally dub him Loud Voice.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about!” she blurted out, which was true. Yes, she was vaguely aware of the mega-company that owned stadiums, restaurants and various other entertainment complexes across the country, including a mammoth one on Toronto’s waterfront. But she’d never had the money or inclination to set foot in one. She was vaguely aware from office gossip that the billionaire CEO Franklin Vamana had been fighting off a hostile takeover attempt from his younger sister, Esther, who herself ran a makeup empire called Indigo Iris. But the small legal aid law firm Leia worked at never came anywhere close to representing anyone as big or wealthy as either of them.

  “Well, you better start remembering fast,” Loud Voice said, “before things get nasty.”

  Or Leia could just get out of here instead. Faint echoes told her Loud Voice was a few feet in front of her. A creak on the floorboards and a thudding sound indicated that Stompy Boots was now yanking books off the shelf on the other side of the room. But the one who’d propelled her across the floor wasn’t touching her now, which meant there was still one criminal left for her senses to find.

  “Tie her to the chair,” Loud Voice said, “then come help me search.”

  A pair of beefy hands grabbed Leia’s left wrist. A loop of rope wrapped around it, fastening her to the arm of the chair. So that’s where Big Hands was. Leia’s jaw set. All right, time to get out of here.

  Father God, guide me now.

  “You have the wrong place!” she insisted. “There’s nothing like that here. I promise!”

  The rope tightened around her left wrist. Her right hand flew, hammering her fist into the man trying to restrain her before he could even tie the knot. Then she leaped to her feet, even as she heard Big Hands swearing in pain, and grabbed ahold of the chair they’d forced her to sit on and swung it around in front of her like a weapon. The rope fell free. The chair cracked hard against what she hoped was some part of Loud Voice’s body before crashing into what she guessed was Big Hands’s already throbbing head.

  Stunned silence fell, followed by swearing and Loud Voice’s command to “Get her!” But it was too late. Leia had already tossed the chair and started running.

  She pelted across the living room floor, still thwarted by the blindfold, and guided herself by the smell of the kitchen ahead, the feel of the floorboards beneath her and the sound of the summer rain striking the windows. Her fingers flitted along the books on the shelves until she felt the narrow gap between the third and fourth sets of shelves. She gasped a breath and slid through, pushing her body into the narrow space. A hand reached for her, yanking the fabric of her jacket. She pulled free from the grasp and squeezed into the even smaller space behind the row of shelves. Silent prayers of thanksgiving poured from her lips as she felt for the secret hatch in the wall, crawled through and tumbled into the pitch-black hidden passage behind it. The smell of old dust and fresh soap filled her senses. She shoved the panel closed again, pushing the padlock in place as she did, so no one could follow.

  Only then did she stop long enough to finally untie the blindfold and yank it from her face.

  A faint light flickered behind her as a warm hand touched her shoulder.

  “Hey, Leia.”

  * * *

  As an undercover officer of the Ontario Provincial Police’s cold-case homicide division, Jay should’ve known that Leia’s immediate reaction would be to rear around and try to punch anyone who snuck up behind her like that. Or so he thought as he barely managed to duck out of the way of her approaching fist.

  She pulled her punch, just before her hand struck the wall in the exact spot his nose had been seconds before. Impressive. Instinctively he grabbed her hand before she could draw it back. But instead of pulling away, she grabbed his wrist in return and their hands locked in the grasp like two soldiers, with one trying to haul the other up to safety.

  “Nice punch,” he said.

  Her violet eyes flashed in the dim light of the cell phone that he’d sat in his breast pocket.

  “I also just escaped three intruders while blindfolded and partially tied to a chair,” she said. Her voice barely rose above a whisper, not that he expected whoever was trashing things on the other side of the wall could hear them.

  She hadn’t added the words no thanks to you, but they seemed to be implied.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t get here faster,” he said. “I was in my camper behind the barn, noticed a light was on and came over. What’s going on?”

  “You expect me to believe you have no idea what’s happening?” Leia demanded. “I don’t know what kind of trouble you’re messed up in, but there’s no other reason I can think of why my family home would be under attack.”

  What could he possibly say to that? Like everything else he’d said to Leia since he’d first bumped into her in the barn last summer and felt his heart stop, what he’d just told her was entirely true, while leaving out almost everything that he actually wanted to tell her. Now, after over a year of carefully constructed conversations designed to keep from really telling her everything, even as he’d developed very inconvenient feelings for the fiery would-be lawyer, where would he even begin?

  It had started with the corpse of a cold-case John Doe that was discovered encased in the cement of a building foundation in downtown Toronto. It had been complete except for a single missing leg bone. The story had of course hit the news and reignited rumors of the “Phantom Killer,” who’d been responsible for the disappearance of almost a dozen people over thirty-five years ago. Then came a phone call to the tip line claiming Doe was a waiter who’d been murdered by billionaire CEO Franklin Vamana. The source turned out to be an elderly farmer, Walter Dukes. Walter claimed
his late best friend had secretly witnessed the crime and there were more bodies to be found. Franklin had also apparently threatened this best friend that if she ever told anyone he was the Phantom Killer he’d murder both her and her family.

  But this friend had taken all the evidence needed to prove Franklin was the killer and hidden it somewhere in Walter’s farmhouse. No one in the department had been inclined to take Walter seriously. Who would, really? The Phantom Killer’s existence might’ve never been proven, but that hadn’t stopped a wealth of urban legend stories and myths from leaping up around it.

  But something about Jay’s first conversation with Walter had convinced him that, despite how age had addled his memories, Walter was telling the truth. Walter’s tip that this friend had anonymously reported the murder to Toronto police at the time had in fact panned out. An anonymous woman had indeed called the police tip line and left an extended message claiming Franklin was the Phantom Killer. But any investigation into it had been buried through lack of evidence and probably also corruption.

  So, Jay had agreed to Walter’s suggestion that he move onto the property undercover as a farmhand, while he helped Walter sort through both his muddled memories and belongings for anything this friend had hidden, as well as helping to keep the family safe.

  Maybe he’d just wanted to believe Walter’s story.

  Jay’s own mother had gone to her grave insisting that the Phantom Killer had murdered Jay’s father, instead of agreeing with the police department’s assessment that the recovering alcoholic had just relapsed again and run out on his wife and child. His supervisors hadn’t even considered it a serious enough possibility to keep Jay from taking this case.

  Developing deep and extremely unauthorized feelings for Leia had been just one of the nails in the coffin of the investigation that his supervisors had considered a wild-goose chase. Even though he’d successfully nipped those emotions in the bud before they’d cost him his career. If Walter had remembered this friend’s name, he wasn’t about to tell Jay, and nothing even remotely connected to Vamana was ever found. When Walter had died, the operation was called off. Then last week another cold-case John Doe corpse had been found encased in cement, again with one bone missing.