by Lisa Childs
“That’s my job,” a deep voice murmured.
Hart drew his weapon and pointed his barrel in the direction of the voice. When Spencer Dubridge walked around the front of Hart’s SUV, he didn’t holster his weapon—not right away.
“I didn’t call the police,” Hart said. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Spencer shivered as if Hart’s attitude chilled him. They’d once been friends—when they’d worked Vice together. Well, they’d been friendly rivals. Certainly more friendly than Spencer was with Keeli Abbott, his bodyguard, who followed him around the SUV.
Hart holstered his weapon.
“The truck driver you nearly hit called it in,” Keeli answered for Spencer. “The call came over the radio, and we were close.”
“You’re not a cop anymore,” Spencer told her. He turned back to Hart. “Neither of you are. So this is my case.”
Keeli snorted her disgust. “He hasn’t changed a bit, has he?” she asked Hart. “He’s still stealing cases from everybody else.”
Spencer shook his head. “Solving cases,” he corrected her. “Not stealing. And as I just stated, neither of you is with the force anymore. You’re quitters.”
Keeli recoiled as if he’d slapped her.
Hart couldn’t argue with the detective. He had quit the force. But he’d had a very good reason: Felicity.
He suspected Keeli’s reason for quitting might have been Dubridge and the chauvinism she’d battled from others like him within the River City Police Department.
“You all gave up on catching Mills,” Spencer continued. “I didn’t. The arrest was mine.”
“The arrest belongs to Clint Quarters,” Keeli said. “It was his informant who Luther killed.”
That was why Clint had quit the force. Now he was protecting the informant’s sister, Rosie Mendez, the eyewitness. Hart didn’t envy his friend that assignment. It wasn’t going to be easy for many reasons.
But while Hart hadn’t wanted to protect Wendy, he hadn’t expected the assignment to be this hard, either. He’d been worried that she might fall for him. He hadn’t expected Wendy to affect him like she had.
Like that kiss had...
She finally spoke to the others as she reminded them all, “We have to make certain that Mills does not get away with that poor kid’s murder.” She shuddered as if she was reliving the horror of seeing that all over again.
Since she was the evidence tech, she’d processed the crime scene, which would have included Javier Mendez’s bullet-ridden body.
Hart wanted to pull her into his arms again, as if he could protect her from the past as well as the present. Hell, he knew there was no protection from the past. There were too many things that still haunted him.
“We can’t let Mills get away with trying to kill you, either,” Spencer added. There was something almost like affection on the detective’s face when he looked at her.
Wendy had always been the most requested evidence tech around the station. She did her job very well. She found prints and DNA no one else could find. She was that good.
But Hart wondered if there had ever been anything else between Dubridge and Wendy. Anything personal...
Sure, everybody, including Dubridge, said she’d had a crush on Hart. But that didn’t mean another coworker hadn’t had a crush on her.
“We don’t know yet that it was Luther behind this,” she cautioned the detective. “We need to process the evidence first.”
“Nobody does that better than you do,” Spencer proclaimed, praising her.
Even Keeli’s blue eyes widened with surprise at the detective’s compliment. Hart had listened to her complain for years that Spencer was a total male chauvinist pig. And around her, he had always seemed to be.
“But you can’t process this evidence,” Spencer told Wendy. He stepped closer to her and touched her cheek. “And you should get checked out at the hospital.”
Something curled low in Hart’s stomach, like a snake getting ready to strike. He wanted to slap Dubridge’s hand away from her face. He didn’t have the right to touch her.
But, hell, Spencer might have more of a right than Hart did, though—if there was something actually going on between the detective and the evidence tech.
“Your bodyguard doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job of protecting you.” Dubridge goaded him. “Oh, I forgot...he’s your boyfriend now.”
During the meeting at the Payne Protection Agency, Spencer had been the one who’d brought up Wendy’s crush on Hart. Was he jealous?
Hart stepped closer to Wendy and slid his arm around her shoulders. But she ducked away from him, as if his touch repulsed her. She hadn’t pulled away from his kiss earlier—at least, not right away. But then she hadn’t just pulled away from him; she’d jumped in a car and sped away from him. In a car with no brakes...
No. He couldn’t argue with Dubridge. He hadn’t done a very damn good job of protecting her.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Wendy protested. She gestured at Keeli. “Not any more than she’s your girlfriend.”
Why did she want to make that so clear? Had she replaced her crush on Hart with a crush on Spencer Dubridge? One that he returned?
The detective chuckled as if the thought of his dating Keeli was laughable. And his bodyguard’s face flushed bright red with fury.
Hart didn’t envy Keeli her assignment.
“We’re your personal protection,” Keeli said with a ragged sigh. “Let us do our damn jobs.”
Dubridge shrugged. “If you want to follow me around like a lovesick puppy, that’s up to you.” He dropped to the ground to peer under the wrecked car.
“I am not a quitter,” Keeli murmured between gritted teeth as if repeating a mantra to herself.
Hart had quit a few things—like the police force and his farce of a marriage. But he was not quitting this job. He was damn well not going to let anything happen to Wendy or to her family. It wasn’t because he cared about her or anything. Like she’d said, he wasn’t her boyfriend. He was just her bodyguard—with a difficult job to do.
* * *
A week had passed since Woodrow Lynch had called that meeting at Payne Protection. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, uttering a weary sigh. It had been an eventful week. So many attempts had been made on the life of the eyewitness.
Hopefully, Rosie Mendez was safe now.
But with her stashed where she couldn’t be found, Luther Mills would turn his attention to the other people involved in his prosecution.
A knock at his door compelled the chief to open his eyes. He didn’t need his wife’s notorious sixth sense to know that the person standing outside his door was now the one in the most danger.
He gestured for Wendy Thompson to come inside.
She opened and closed the door behind her. “I’m glad you finally found the time to meet with me,” she said.
A grin tugged at his lips. He had been avoiding her. He hadn’t needed to meet with her to know what she wanted—what the witness had wanted, what every damn individual he’d hired personal protection for wanted: to lose his or her bodyguard. But more than anyone else, the evidence tech needed the extra security.
Especially now.
“Why have you wanted to see me?” he asked.
“I don’t need a bodyguard following me everywhere,” she said and, as she said it, glanced over her shoulder as if worried he had followed her inside the chief’s office. She stiffened as she caught sight of Hart Fisher standing on the other side of the big window that looked over the rows of desks for the detectives.
That grin tugged harder at Woodrow’s mouth, but he refrained from letting it slip.
A little groan slipped through Wendy’s lips, though. “It’s ridiculous,” she said. “I’m perfectly safe.”
“The brak
e line on your car was cut,” the chief reminded her.
“My mother’s car,” she corrected him. “Luther is threatening my parents so I’ll destroy the evidence for him. I can’t do that if I’m dead, so I can’t imagine that he really wants to kill me.”
For someone who had worked with the police department as long as she had, processing gruesome crime scenes no less, she was still a bit naive. While it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing that the job hadn’t got to her yet, it wasn’t necessarily good that she was still so trusting—especially with as much danger as she was in.
“I’m not so sure you’re right about that,” he cautioned her.
“But what does killing me accomplish?” she asked. “It doesn’t destroy the evidence.”
“No. But it would allow someone else to get to it who would,” he pointed out.
She tensed. “Are you suggesting another evidence tech might be working for Luther?”
It would make sense as to why so many other cases against Mills had fallen apart before even making it to the grand jury.
“I’m not suggesting anything,” he said. “But I’m allowing for the possibility.”
Wendy shook her head. “No. Nobody from my department could be working for him. Nobody in the police department could. The leak must be in the district attorney’s office.”
“I admire your loyalty to your coworkers,” he said. “But you must not have heard the news.”
“News?” She tensed and stared at him. “What? What happened?” She glanced through the window at Hart, as if to make sure he was okay.
Maybe she had another reason for wanting to get rid of her bodyguard. Maybe she was getting too attached.
“There was just another attempt on the eyewitness’s life.”
“Is she okay?” Wendy asked.
Woodrow nodded. “Her bodyguard saved her life and killed the shooter.”
“I’m sure that the police would have—had they been protecting her,” she asserted.
He shook his head, that weariness making his neck and shoulders ache with tension. “It was a police officer who tried to kill her.”
She released a shuddery breath. “Then that’s it. It’s over. The leak in the department is dead.”
He shook his head again. “He couldn’t have been acting alone.”
“Why not?”
“For one, the information Luther got hold of...”
Mills had a bigger connection than some rookie cop—someone who’d been around the department for a while. Certainly longer than Woodrow had been.
He’d only recently taken over as chief. But he’d thought the department had been cleaned up. One of his former FBI agents had spent years working on flushing out the corrupt officers. He obviously hadn’t found them all.
“And for another,” he continued, “how did someone so easily get past that police car I had stationed on your parents’ house?”
She grimaced slightly and said, “Hart is good at what he does. That’s how he got past them.”
“I’m not talking about Hart,” he said. “I’m talking about whoever sliced that brake line. How did they walk right past that patrol car?”
She shivered as his words and the severity of her situation must have finally sunk in. She needed to be aware, though—to stay alive.
“You can’t trust anyone, Ms. Thompson,” he cautioned her.
“Then I can’t trust Hart Fisher, either,” she stubbornly maintained.
He studied the former vice cop through the glass of the window in the wall of his office. Hart Fisher’s record as a police officer and detective had been exemplary. It was unfortunate for Woodrow and River City PD that they had lost him.
“I trust Parker Payne,” he said. “I trust that he chose his team wisely. Clint Quarters saved Rosie Mendez and she’s accepted that he’s going to keep her safe until the trial. You need to do the same with Hart Fisher, especially now.”
Her green eyes widened in surprise. “Why especially now?”
“Because, with the eyewitness out of his reach, Luther’s going to come after you hard,” he warned her, “with everything he’s got.”
The infamous drug lord had already proved that he had a lot of gun power and manpower. Now Woodrow worried that Hart Fisher and the Payne Protection Agency, as good as they were, might not be enough to keep Wendy Thompson alive.
Chapter 6
Hart couldn’t see her face, except for those few times she’d glanced at him, but he knew, from the stiffening of her back and shoulders, that the chief wasn’t saying anything she wanted to hear. He had a pretty good idea what she’d wanted to hear—that she no longer needed a bodyguard.
But Parker had just called and brought him up to speed on the latest development with the eyewitness and Clint Quarters. Sometime during that call Wendy had slipped out of the evidence lab and sneaked away from him.
She hadn’t got far before he’d found her, though. Unfortunately, this was not the first time this week she’d tried giving him the slip. When she drove to crime scenes, she drove the evidence van like she’d driven her mother’s car—as if it had no brakes.
She hadn’t lost him that day, though, so she hadn’t lost him those times, either. He’d made certain she’d stayed safe. But that had been easy since there hadn’t been any more attempts on her life.
Hell, she didn’t even think the cut brake line had been an attempt on her life but on her mother’s, as a warning to Wendy to destroy the evidence.
Maybe it had been. But the thing was, Luther didn’t make empty threats. If he was after her parents, wouldn’t he have tried again?
But nothing had happened at their house, either.
Maybe Luther had just had all his energy and his crew focused on taking out the eyewitness then. But Rosie Mendez hadn’t been as easy to kill, as he must have counted on her being. Of course, she had the Payne Protection Agency and Clint Quarters guarding her.
“Aren’t you taking this thing a little far?” Dubridge asked from his desk.
Hart glanced over at the dark-haired detective. “What thing?”
Spencer lowered his voice so the other detectives in the bull pen wouldn’t overhear. “Acting like her boyfriend...”
Hart gestured at Keeli, who was sprawled in the chair next to Spencer’s desk. “You have a girlfriend,” he said. “Maybe we’ll have to double-date sometime.”
Both Keeli and Spencer glared at him.
He grinned. “Just kidding.”
“You do seem pretty convincing,” Keeli remarked.
Just because he didn’t hate the person he was protecting, like she did, didn’t mean that Hart had feelings for Wendy. He just wanted to keep her safe—especially now—because he knew what the news Parker had given him meant.
He shrugged. “It’s not like Luther hasn’t figured out yet that the chief hired Payne Protection.” He glanced around the detective bull pen. And it was pretty damn obvious that everybody in the police department had figured it out, too.
He didn’t care about his cover being blown, though. He only cared about keeping Wendy safe.
Since Luther hadn’t been able to get rid of the eyewitness, he definitely had to destroy the evidence. And Wendy stood between him and that evidence.
Mills wasn’t just going to threaten her now. He had to make good on those threats. He would, undoubtedly, focus all of his time and energy, and whatever members of his crew had survived the attempts on Rosie Mendez’s life, to take out Wendy.
Fear curled low in Hart’s gut, making him feel sick with worry for her. She had to stop fighting his protection. She needed him.
But why did he feel as if he needed her?
Probably just because, for so many years, he’d tried to take down Luther Mills and it was finally now possible—but only with Wendy’s evidence. The eyewitness wasn’t
as credible a source as DNA and fingerprints and ballistics reports. While Luther’s high-powered attorney could discredit the witness, there was no discrediting Wendy. She was too good. She knew what she was doing when it came to evidence.
When it came to protecting herself, she was too trusting. She thought she could rely on her fellow officers. But that wasn’t the case. And if the chief had told her who had tried to kill the witness, she had to know that she couldn’t trust anyone but him.
Yet when she stepped out of the chief’s office, she looked anywhere but at Hart—as if trying to pretend she hadn’t even seen him. But he’d caught those furtive glances she’d been sending his way through the chief’s office window. She was well aware that he was there.
So her acting like she wasn’t aware irritated him—especially since she’d just tried ditching him when she’d slipped out of the lab while he was on the phone. To irritate her, he called out, “There’s my girl!”
Detectives glanced up from their desks and watched as Hart headed straight for her. He tugged her up against him and planted a kiss on her lips.
He hadn’t kissed her since that morning in her driveway. For the past week, he’d been careful to stay out of her parents’ sight. He’d even lain as low as he possibly could around the police department. But officers must have noticed his presence because there had not been another threat or attempt on her life.
That was before Clint had whisked the eyewitness away to an undisclosed location. Nobody would find her. So Luther Mills was bound to turn all his attention to Wendy.
And so would Hart.
While she stood frozen in his embrace, he moved his mouth across hers, deepening the kiss. Something happened every time his lips touched hers. Something jolted him into feeling desire again. Lust...
He’d thought he was beyond all that—after what he’d been through. He knew now that he’d never loved Felicity’s mother. Hell, he hadn’t even known Monica—until it was too late. By the time he’d learned how selfish and unfaithful she was, she was pregnant. He’d tried to make it work. But he’d been the only one trying.
Lust had brought him so much pain that he’d vowed never to succumb to it again. But he felt it now, coursing through his body, heating his skin, making his pulse pound. He would have gone on kissing Wendy if not for the catcalls that reminded him they were not alone.