by Lisa Childs
Wendy was so tired that she didn’t understand what the assistant district attorney was talking about. “What’s lucky for me?”
“That the eyewitness is still alive,” Jocelyn said.
“She might not stay that way if she keeps fighting having a bodyguard,” Hart remarked with a pointed glance at Wendy.
She shivered, but she wasn’t scared for her safety, despite how much Hart and the assistant district attorney seemed to be trying to scare her. She was probably just cold. A thin T-shirt wasn’t enough protection against the chill of the late autumn evening.
And maybe she was a little chilled from the threats, as well. Needing backup, she looked down the conference table at Spencer Dubridge. “Don’t you think this is ridiculous, too?” she asked the detective who had had the pleasure of arresting Luther Mills. “We can protect ourselves.”
He glanced sideways at his female bodyguard and snorted. “I certainly can protect myself better than Bodyguard Barbie can protect me.”
Keeli Abbott glared at him and Wendy suspected Dubridge’s former coworker might be from whom the detective most needed to protect himself.
The conference room door opened and the chief stepped back inside. As if he’d overheard their conversation, he insisted, “Everyone is going to have a bodyguard—” he stared hard at Dubridge “—no matter who they are, until this trial is over and Luther Mills is sentenced to life behind bars.”
Judge Holmes shook his head. “I can’t be party to this conversation.”
“You didn’t need to be here,” the chief told him. “Your daughter is the one being threatened.” Bella Holmes was not a minor; she had to be at least midtwenties.
“And she wouldn’t leave her damn party until her father told her she had to,” Tyce Jackson grumbled through his bushy beard. Even though he didn’t work Vice anymore, he still looked like he had when he’d gone deep undercover.
Hart must have never worked undercover because he’d always been clean-shaved and well-groomed. That was why Wendy had had such a crush on him. He’d always looked so handsome.
Bella Holmes glared at Tyce. “I didn’t know who you were.” Maybe she’d judged him by the way he looked.
Tyce had been one of those vice cops who’d gone so deeply undercover that sometimes it was difficult to return to the life they’d once lived. Wendy suspected that was the case with him.
“If you’d listened to your dad’s message, you wouldn’t have been at that damn party,” Tyce griped.
So Wendy wasn’t the only one who hadn’t played a voice mail that she’d needed to hear. She didn’t feel any better about the situation, though. If she’d listened, she could have spared her dad a surprise and herself having to lie to him again.
“We are not going to stop living our lives just because of these threats,” Wendy reminded the chief. “So how do we explain having bodyguards? How is the rest of the precinct going to feel that you didn’t trust our fellow officers to protect me or Detective Dubridge or even Ms. Gerber?”
“You told your father that I’m your boyfriend,” Hart reminded her. “Maybe we just tell everyone else the same damn thing.”
Heat rushed to her face again, chasing away that chill she’d briefly felt.
Dubridge chuckled. “That’ll work for her. Everybody in the department knows she had a crush on Fisher even back when he was married.”
Wendy gasped in shock that everyone else had known about the crush she’d shared with only a few close coworkers. Maybe Hart was right. She couldn’t trust them.
The detective blithely continued. “But that won’t work for everyone else.”
The judge’s daughter glanced sideways at Tyce and nodded. “I should say not...”
“You’re not my type, either,” Tyce assured her, his voice so deep it was just a rumble.
“And chauvinist pig is certainly not mine,” Keeli Abbott remarked.
The chief groaned. His voice rising with frustration, he yelled, “You’re all supposed to be professionals here. Figure it out!”
“Professional partier maybe,” Tyce Jackson murmured with a glance at Bella Holmes.
She glared at him again.
Wendy didn’t even dare to glance at Hart. What did he think of her? He probably pitied her if he had heard the rumors like Dubridge had. Did he know she’d had a crush on him even when he was married—like some adolescent girl with a crush on a teen idol?
Still arguing, everyone else filed out of the conference room, leaving Wendy and Hart alone. Even the chief had stepped out, deep in conversation with Jocelyn Gerber. But then the door opened again.
Maybe he had returned.
But it wasn’t the chief who had walked through the door; a tiny little blonde girl barreled into the room. “Daddy!” she squealed. “Mr. Parker said you were back.” She jumped onto Hart’s lap.
He closed his arms around her. “You’re supposed to be sleeping,” he admonished. But the rebuke was gentle, as were his warm brown eyes as he stared lovingly at her.
Hart Fisher had a child?
How had Wendy never heard that?
The little girl noticed Wendy and shyly buried her face in the doll she grasped in her delicate-looking arms. Then she suddenly pulled the doll away from her face and held it up near Wendy’s. Her blue eyes widened with shock as she looked from Wendy to the stuffed doll and then back at Wendy.
“She looks like my dolly, Daddy,” she murmured, her voice soft with awe. “She looks like Annie.”
Wendy felt her face heat all over again with embarrassment. First, she was outed for crushing on her bodyguard like a schoolgirl. Now she was being compared to a rag doll.
Her ego had taken a hell of a beating—far more painful than anything Luther Mills or his crew could have doled out to her.
“My dolly’s name is Annie,” the little girl told her. “What’s your name?”
“Wendy,” she replied. An only child who’d grown up around the teenage football players her father had coached, Wendy wasn’t comfortable around little girls. Despite her mother’s best efforts by forcing pink and frills on her, Wendy had never been a little girl herself. She had always been, and probably still was, a tomboy.
“Winnie,” the little girl repeated—incorrectly.
Wendy didn’t correct her. She just asked, “And what is your name?”
“Felicity...” she said slowly, as if she struggled to pronounce her own name. It was quite the mouthful.
“That’s pretty,” Wendy said.
“You’re pretty,” the little girl said with that slow, shy smile.
Something wrapped around Wendy’s heart, tightly squeezing it. Felicity’s mother was reputedly a former beauty queen. Why in the world would the child think Wendy was pretty?
She was obviously just a very sweet girl.
“You are the pretty one,” Wendy said. Felicity looked like a doll, but the kind made of porcelain and kept behind glass—delicate and beautiful—not one made with burlap and bright red yarn.
The little girl scrambled off her father’s lap and climbed onto Wendy’s. She held out her doll for Wendy to admire. “Grandma made me this doll when I was borned,” she said. “Now Grandma is an angel.”
That grasp on Wendy’s heart tightened even more. “I’m sorry, honey,” she murmured.
“Why?” the little girl asked. She reached out and fingered a lock of Wendy’s curly hair. But her touch was tentative as though she thought it would be hot since it was so red. Wendy smiled reassuringly at her, and the little girl smiled back.
“People say that when they find out you’ve lost someone you love,” Hart explained to his daughter.
Wendy hoped nobody would have cause to say that to her. She could not lose her parents. Luther was just trying to scare her into destroying the evidence. Right? He wouldn’t actually harm them...
But then she remembered how the eyewitness and her bodyguard had looked when they’d joined the meeting earlier. They had gone out a window, too, but not like she and Hart had. No, Rosie and Clint had been forced to jump to avoid being shot to death.
She shivered and the little girl snuggled a little closer to her. Her long black lashes fluttered as her eyelids began to droop. She murmured to her father, “I’m sorry, Daddy...”
He touched his daughter’s cheek, which was uncomfortably close to Wendy’s breast. She tensed and drew in a shaky breath. But he didn’t touch her. He was focused only on his daughter.
“Why are you sorry, baby?” he asked. The love Wendy had seen in his eyes was in his voice now.
“For you, Daddy,” she murmured sleepily. “You’ve lost a lot of people you love.”
Her mother? Had he loved and lost her?
Not that Wendy cared. She didn’t care about anything but keeping her family safe. But she didn’t want Hart’s family to be in danger, either. She tightened her arm around the little girl and leaned close enough that her chin brushed the soft blond hair, asking him, “So is this Bring Your Daughter to Work day?”
His face flushed with a bit of color. “A babysitter should be showing up soon.”
“It’s a weeknight,” she said.
He nodded. “Yes, and she’s just turned four. She’s not in school yet.”
“But why do you have her now?” she asked.
His brow furrowed for a moment then cleared. “You think I’m just a weekend father?” He shook his head. “I have full custody.”
While she had no personal experience with it, Wendy had several divorced friends and acquaintances, especially since law enforcement was so hard on relationships.
The long hours officers worked...
The things they saw...
They all took their toll.
And usually because of those long hours, they weren’t granted much more than weekend visitations. But maybe that was why Hart had resigned from the police department. For his daughter...
Then why had he taken another dangerous job with long hours?
She wasn’t going to be responsible for taking him away from his child. Over the little girl’s head, she met Hart’s gaze and told him, “You can’t be my bodyguard.”
* * *
“I don’t want to be your bodyguard,” Hart admitted. He hadn’t been certain if his coworkers had been telling the truth or just teasing him about that crush, but he hadn’t wanted to take the chance that it was the truth and Wendy got her feelings hurt.
And she would get hurt if she made the mistake of falling for him. His ability to trust and love were gone.
Long gone...
He had nothing left to give anyone but Felicity.
Wendy expelled a shaky breath that stirred Felicity’s hair. But the little girl didn’t move. She’d fallen fast asleep in the arms of a stranger.
Hart couldn’t believe how his daughter had taken to Wendy Thompson. Felicity was always so shy, but never more so than around women. Her mother hadn’t ever been very patient with her. Monica never would have allowed Felicity to touch her hair. She would have been afraid the child would mess it up or make it sticky.
But Wendy hadn’t cared. As if she’d sensed the child’s fear, she had smiled reassuringly at her. And Hart had felt a strange twinge in his chest—one that he felt again just staring at the two of them.
“Good,” she said. “Tell Parker that you can’t.”
“Already did,” he informed her. “But he refused. Said he had no one else to give the assignment to.” All the other team members had already been assigned someone to protect. Hart suspected Parker, like everyone else in the RCPD, had heard the rumors about Wendy’s crush. Now that crush could be used to explain his presence in her life; they could claim he was her boyfriend—just as she had already told her father.
She shook her head. “I don’t need a bodyguard,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”
“Didn’t you hear what the assistant DA said?” he asked. Frustration with her stubbornness had him raising his voice. But when Felicity stirred against her, he lowered it when he continued. “For Luther to get off, the eyewitness isn’t the only one he needs to take out.”
Wendy tightened her arm around his daughter and lowered her voice to a whisper. “He doesn’t need to take me out. Just the evidence.”
Hart nodded. “That’s true. I’m sure he could get to anyone else in your department to get it thrown out.” He would either pay them or threaten them.
Neither of those options would work on someone like Wendy, though. On someone so stubborn.
Her face flushed with indignation, turning nearly as red as her hair. “He can’t get to anyone else in my department,” she protested. “He does not have an evidence tech on his payroll.”
Hart snorted at her naivete. “Then how have all his previous cases got thrown out?” Luther damn well did have someone working for him. Hell, he had a lot of someones working for him.
So nobody could be trusted.
“I don’t know about the evidence in his previous cases,” Wendy said, “but I know nobody’s getting to this evidence but me.”
He narrowed his eyes as he studied her face. “You’ve hidden it somewhere?”
“That prior evidence disappeared from the evidence room,” she said.
“So this evidence is not there?” he asked.
She shook her head. “It’s somewhere safe that won’t compromise the chain of evidence.”
Maybe she wasn’t as naive as he’d thought. “Obviously you don’t trust your coworkers as much as you claim you do.”
“If anyone else knew where it was, they would be threatened, too,” she said, “and I don’t want to put anybody else in danger.”
Now he understood why she’d said what she had. “That’s why you don’t want me as your bodyguard. You don’t want me in danger.”
Her face reddened even more. “Don’t think it’s because of some nonexistent crush I supposedly have on you,” she said, sputtering. She lowered her green-eyed gaze from his and stared down at his daughter. “It’s because of her.”
That twinge struck Hart’s chest again.
“She needs you,” Wendy said. “I don’t.”
He flinched. But he couldn’t argue with her about Felicity. His daughter did need him. She really had no one else. Not now. Not since Hart’s mother had passed away a couple of years ago. She had been the only maternal figure his little girl had ever known when her own mother had failed to ever show any interest in her. After she’d had her, Monica had admitted to only getting pregnant so Hart wouldn’t divorce her. Abandoned as a child, she’d been determined that nobody else leave her; she was always the one who left. Unfortunately, she hadn’t left just him but their daughter, as well.
“Felicity’s not going to lose me,” Hart said. He hoped his daughter knew that. “I’m not leaving her. I’m just doing my job. And I’m damn good at my job.” He’d been a good vice cop and then a detective, so being a bodyguard had come very naturally to him. “Nothing’s going to happen to me.”
But he wondered if he was really telling the truth. He wasn’t worried about being physically hurt, though. He was worried about becoming too entangled with Wendy Thompson—like he had in her bed when he’d first sneaked through her window and had tried to keep her quiet. He was also worried about Wendy Thompson becoming too entangled with him and his daughter.
No. Felicity couldn’t lose anyone else. So his little girl could not get attached to Wendy—because Hart was only going to pretend to be the evidence tech’s boyfriend. He had no intention of ever being involved with anyone ever again.
All that type of involvement led to was betrayal and emotional pain. And that was the kind of pain he wasn’t going to risk experiencing ever again
. He’d much rather risk his life than his heart.
* * *
Even though he was in jail, there was no escaping Luther Mills. Once he got hold of someone, he didn’t let go and he didn’t let up. One could not say no to Luther—not and live.
Wendy Thompson was so young and naive that she had not yet realized that.
But she would. Soon.
The person crawled under the vehicle parked in the driveway of Thompson’s parents’ house. Hands, in leather gloves, located the brake line. Then a knife cut neatly through the line, spilling fluid onto the asphalt.
By morning all the fluid would have leaked out. Maybe then Wendy would finally get the message all those threats had tried to deliver to her.
The evidence needed to disappear or, just as the messages had warned, everything and everyone Wendy Thompson held dear would disappear instead.
Chapter 4
Her heart pounding fast and hard, Wendy closed the front door of her parents’ house behind her. She leaned back against the solid wood for a moment to catch a breath of fresh air. She felt as if she’d just run the gauntlet, trying to escape the shots fired at her. Those shots hadn’t been bullets, though—just questions her parents had asked her this morning.
They had had so many of them.
“How long have you and Hart been dating?”
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
“How serious are you?”
“What was so important that he had to see you in the middle of the night?”
Their lives. That was what was so important. In addition to the police car stationed in the area, the Payne Protection Agency had assigned bodyguards to them, as well. But they would not see the bodyguards.
Wendy couldn’t see them, either, when she looked around the house and street as she walked to the car parked on the driveway. Where were they?
The bodyguards weren’t from Parker’s team but one of his brother’s. She’d asked if one of them could protect her instead of Hart. But just as Hart had warned her, Parker had refused to assign her a different bodyguard. And Chief Lynch had backed him up.
Of course everyone thought Hart should protect her. They’d known about her crush on him and, because of that, they’d believed everyone would buy that he was her boyfriend. Heat rushed to her face with humiliation that her attraction to the former detective was such common knowledge. But Hart had never showed any interest in her. That had to be common knowledge, as well.