Formula for Danger (Love Inspired Suspense)

by Camy Tang

  Alex’s tone and attitude told Rachel this was an argument they’d had many times before. “Mama, I know you don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but Papa’s actions spoke what he never said. He failed us. He neglected you.”

  “Alex,” Carmella protested. “Now you’re exaggerating.”

  “What else would you call it when he didn’t attend Edward’s college graduation, or the opening day of his greenhouse business?”

  Rachel swallowed her gasp. No matter how vehemently her father argued with her sister Monica, he’d been so proud to see her get her nursing degree. He’d been equally as proud when Rachel got her Doctorate in Dermatology, and he’d thrown a party on Naomi’s first official day working for him as a massage therapist.

  “You were the one raising us, Mama.”

  “He provided for all of us,” Carmella said. “It wasn’t as if I was a single parent struggling with a single income.”

  “We could tell it hurt you, Mama.”

  Carmella cast an embarrassed glance at Rachel. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this….”

  Rachel didn’t realize until that moment that she had leaned forward in her seat. She was anxious to hear all these things she had never been told even though she’d known Edward and Alex through their years in high school.

  She couldn’t quite interpret Alex’s look in her direction, but he said, “I think Rachel needs to know about Dad, and about how it impacted Edward.”

  Carmella grasped at the topical tangent. “Edward is a good boy,” she said, taking Rachel’s hand. “But I’m sure you know that by now.”

  “Edward has his priorities straight,” Alex said.

  “Yes, Edward would never…” Carmella broke off, embarrassed.

  “Edward would never treat his own family the way our father treated us,” Alex finished frankly.

  The way I treat him.

  A chasm had opened in her stomach. This was why he’d withdrawn from her a few months ago, around the same time she’d ramped up her work hours on the scar-reduction cream.

  He would never become involved with a woman who had the same priorities as his father, so he had stepped back, made their relationship purely professional again.

  She had felt so rejected. They had been getting along so well. She had been free to be herself with him, and when he withdrew, she thought it was because he hadn’t liked the real Rachel.

  Well, he had seen the real Rachel—the one who spent hours at the lab, trying to please her father.

  If his father’s obsession had been money and success, then hers had been her dad’s approval. And they both had pursued their obsessions to the point of shoving aside the other people in their lives.

  Carmella was looking at her with concern, so Rachel tried to wipe her emotions from her face. She gave a brief smile.

  “I’m sorry,” Carmella said. “I shouldn’t have mentioned all this.”

  “No, don’t…”

  Carmella shook her head. “I talk too much. I air too much laundry—”

  “No….”

  “Rachel, let me show you Edward’s arbor.” Alex rose to his feet with a gentle look at his mother and an understanding one at Rachel. “He built it last year for Mama.”

  Rachel bundled up in her bulky winter coat because the air seemed frostier here out in the heart of the Russian River Valley than near the city of Sonoma. Alex led her through the back door. The outside floodlights sprang to life as they stepped off the back porch, and they walked toward a trellised bench in the backyard.

  Rachel sank onto the chilled seat, but it began to warm to her body heat. In her thick coat, she was comfortably cozy, with the cold air pinching her cheeks.

  “Look up,” Alex said.

  She did, and the air expanded in her lungs. The entire Milky Way spread across the sky in a swath of glittering diamonds. The sky looked huge, bigger than she’d ever seen it before.

  “Close to Sonoma, the lights from the city and the vineyards hide the stars,” Alex said. “I like coming to Mama’s farm because it’s far away from any clutter.”

  “I’ve lived in Sonoma all my life,” Rachel breathed, “and I’ve never seen anything like it.” She felt small and yet she was a part of that expansive sky.

  “It reminds me of how big God is,” Alex said. “But at the same time, I feel loved.”

  She drank in the beauty of those stars, that midnight sky. This was the God who had been with her when that man pointed the gun at her. This was the God whose touch to her that night had changed something inside her.

  But was it a good change? She remembered her father’s shocked face this morning…and the tight clasp of his hand on hers.

  “I’m sorry about your father,” she said. “But I’m sure he loved you. Maybe he just didn’t know how to say it.” Like her father.

  But Alex shook his head. “I don’t know, to be honest. After I got out of prison, I went to Papa and told him how I’d become a Christian. But he refused to speak to me because my arrest shamed him.”

  “He wouldn’t even speak to you?”

  “He never spoke to me up to the day he died.”

  She couldn’t imagine that. Even her father would get over himself and speak to her, no matter how upset he got. Her heart ached for Alex. “How can you stand it?” she whispered.

  He surprised her with a smile that shone brighter than the stars above them. “I already had the love of my heavenly Father. I have His love and approval, and I didn’t need my earthly father’s approval.”

  Rachel was dumbfounded.

  “That’s not to say it didn’t hurt,” he said, his face sobering. “And I was angry for a while. But I’ve learned to stand secure in my confidence in Christ’s love. He won’t turn away from me the way Papa did. Ever.” He smiled then at the sky above. “I have peace.”

  And he did. There was that something in his face that showed a sort of emotional freedom, despite the neglect and then rejection from his father.

  It came from God. And God had given it to her, too.

  “I’ve been lying to myself,” she said. “How?”

  “It hasn’t just been Dad pushing me in my work. I’ve been perpetuating the lie that he only loved me when I succeeded. I wanted his approval over all else.”

  “You already have God’s approval,” Alex said. “When you believed in His son, Jesus Christ.”

  All those years of being a Christian, but never realizing how much she was loved. By God, and by her father.

  “God has always loved you,” Alex said, as if reading her mind. “And He isn’t like your father. Like my father.”

  No, He wasn’t. She could now see Him in a new light.

  She would still struggle with her priorities. She would still struggle against habit and trying to please her father. But she now knew, deep inside her, that she had been freed from bondage. From a lie.

  “Over here, Edward,” Alex called out.

  Edward’s broad shoulders were silhouetted against the outside floodlights as he strode toward them. “Mama’s frantic. The coffeemaker is broken.”

  “Again? I told her to get a new one.” Alex rose. “Here, I warmed the seat for you.” He headed into the house.

  Edward and Rachel sat in silence for a while, a silence both awkward and comfortable. The knowledge she’d just gained about his father, the realization about God and her own father, the beauty of God’s creation above her and the protectiveness of the man beside her—they bubbled up into words that spilled out of her.

  “Edward, this is the best night of my life.”

  FOURTEEN

  For a moment Edward wondered if she had a fever. “Drinking Mama’s bad coffee, eating turkey sandwiches, shivering out here in the backyard?”

  She laughed on a light breath, a frosty cloud wafting in her face. “I suppose that statement did seem to come out of nowhere.” Her features stilled, and she turned serious eyes to him. “Something happened to me last night,” she said, “when I stared down t
he barrel of that gun.”

  His grip on her hand tightened. He’d never felt so helpless as he had at that moment, watching that man point that gun at her and being held back in his struggles with the other attacker.

  “You know how they say your life flashes before your eyes? Mine didn’t, exactly.” She looked up at the bright sky. “But I suddenly felt like I wasn’t alone.”

  “You’re never alone. God is always with you.” The words were automatic, words he’d read in his Bible and heard at church, but as he said them he knew that he believed them and that they applied directly to her.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever really believed that before yesterday,” she said. “Isn’t that sad? I’ve been a Christian for most of my life.”

  “You never liked talking about your faith with me,” he said.

  “I know. It made me uncomfortable. I didn’t really know God. But then at that moment, all I could think was, ‘Lord, I surrender.’ And then everything was suddenly okay.”

  He remembered the strange peace that had settled on her face when she closed her eyes.

  “Alex told me about how your father treated him after prison.”

  His jaw flexed involuntarily. Despite what his father had done to him, he hated even more what he’d done to Alex.

  “But Alex has such a deep peace in him,” she said. “He made me see that my heavenly Father loves me like no one else can. I don’t need to please my dad because God already thinks the world of me.” She laughed, a sound more freeing than any he’d heard from her in the past few months. “It’s as if my self-esteem got a booster shot.”

  He’d been aware of something different in her, but now he could clearly see it. She had transformed.

  God inside her had transformed her.

  He should have been trusting God more. He had only been trusting in what he could see with his eyes—Rachel’s drive, the circumstances around her. He hadn’t been trusting in God—or, even worse, he hadn’t been praying for her—to see how much deeper her faith could be, to see how her determination to succeed had been motivated by a desire to please her father. He hadn’t trusted, but God had been working in her anyway.

  No thanks to his own witness to her.

  He reached over to hold her hand in both of his own, and the heat warmed his chilled fingertips. He’d been slowly seeing, in the past few weeks, that her workaholic tendencies were different from his father’s. But when he saw her intensity for her lab work, he’d only reacted out of fear rather than what his heart had been telling him about her.

  He touched her face, finding her cheek in the darkness. And then he kissed her.

  Her lips were cold, so he warmed them. And he tried to convey all he was sorry for. He understood her now. He would protect her from this unseen enemy.

  A familiar soft click echoed across the yard. The floodlights coming on. Nothing to be alarmed about.

  Except that the floodlights were already on.

  He looked up. The perimeter lights had activated.

  Movement in the far corner of the field, just on the edge of the light-sensor range.

  He bolted to his feet. “Get in the house,” he said. “Alex!”

  His brother was already pelting down the back porch, two shotguns in his hands. He tossed one to Edward, as he was followed by two of the farmhands who stayed at the house, also armed with shotguns.

  Alex grabbed Rachel’s arm and propelled her into the house. “Lock the door behind you,” he told her, then turned back toward Edward. “Julio is upstairs with Mama. They’ll protect Rachel, too.”

  The four of them raced toward where he’d seen the movement. “They didn’t know the sensors reached that far,” Alex observed as they ran.

  Edward motioned with his arm, and they fanned out in different directions, arcing around a lone stand of apricot trees. There was nowhere else an intruder could hide because of the flatness of the land.

  Edward cocked the shotgun. He’d only loaded the guns with rock salt, but just the sound was menacing. He hoped it would scare the intruder into giving up or bolting.

  The man bolted.

  There were two of them. One surprised Alex and shoved him to the ground.

  The other raced across the field toward the country road at the back of the property. Edward took aim and fired, but he knew the man was already too far away. One of the two farmhands, who was on the far side of the stand of trees, raced after him, while the second headed toward Alex.

  The other intruder stumbled after his partner, but he twisted around to aim a handgun at Alex and he fired.

  “Alex!” Abandoning his pursuit, Edward slid to the ground next to his brother.

  There was a dark blotch on Alex’s shirtsleeve.

  “I’m fine,” Alex said through gritted teeth. “The bullet winged me.”

  Edward ripped open the sleeve and sopped up the blood around the wound. Alex grunted.

  He was right. There was a bloody score across his upper arm, but it wasn’t deep. “You might need stitches.”

  “I’ve had worse injuries, working on the farm.”

  It was true. As boys, they’d been crazy to play as they had around the large farm equipment, and even as men working the farm, Alex still had a slightly reckless streak.

  The two farmhands came back, breathing heavily. “They got away in a car parked on that access road.”

  “Thanks, guys,” Edward said.

  The two men nodded, then headed toward the house.

  “Help me up,” Alex said, and Edward pulled him to his feet.

  “Mama’s going to fuss,” Edward warned him.

  Alex grinned. “She’ll give me an extra slice of her chocolate cake.” Then he sobered. “What about Rachel?”

  Edward sighed, looking back at the farmhouse, lit up with the porch lights and the outside floodlights. “She isn’t safe here. I thought she would be.”

  “Not your fault.” Alex headed toward the house slowly, on shaky feet.

  Edward resisted helping him.

  “You tried to make sure you weren’t followed,” Alex commented.

  “How about Uncle Albert? Think he can help us?” Edward asked.

  Albert wasn’t really their uncle, but a private investigator friend of Alex’s. Not a bad idea. “I’ll see him tomorrow,” Alex stated.

  “No. I’ll go. You’ll get that looked at.” Edward gestured toward Alex’s arm. “And then you’ll stay here. Protect Rachel.”

  Alex nodded. “With my life.”

  Edward hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

  Rachel hadn’t had time alone to talk with Edward since last night, and she wasn’t sure if she wanted to talk to him or wanted to avoid him.

  She had kissed him in the parking lot. Last night he had kissed her under the stars.

  She dwelled on the memory for a sweet moment before reluctantly pushing it aside. The first kiss had been relief she was alive. The second had been moved by the romantic setting. She shouldn’t read too much into them both. And in the cold light of day, the danger to her took precedence.

  Rachel flipped through a few screens on her computer, worried because she had forgotten to take off the data she’d been working on from Alex’s computer. After Alex had been shot, Edward had whisked her and his mother away to the Grants’ home, since the men after her now obviously knew she was at the farm. She had been so frightened, so worried for Alex and Edward, that she hadn’t remembered the flash drive. She had a copy of the data here at the spa, but she didn’t like leaving it at the farm, where it could be stolen.

  She started a statistics program to filter through the results. It would take several minutes, so she got up and exited the card-key secured area to peek into Naomi’s office.

  Aunt Becca sat opposite Naomi’s desk, just clicking off her cell phone. “Oh, good. I was just about to call you. That was Horatio.”

  “Did the police find anything when they went out to the Villas’ farm?”

  “They only just fini
shed.”

  Rachel glanced at Naomi’s wall clock. “So late? It’s already noon.”

  “After leaving our house last night, they apparently got lost trying to find the farm and only started collecting evidence early this morning.”

  “Rach, I don’t know how those men found you if even the local police got lost in the dark,” Naomi said.

  Rachel had wondered the same thing. “I thought of that. I checked my purse, my shoes, my clothes, everything, but I don’t think I’ve been bugged. Not that I know what I was looking for. I’ll have Alex look through my clothes when he’s feeling better.”

  “Horatio asked if Alex was okay,” Aunt Becca said, “but I told him I haven’t seen Alex since he and Monica left for the emergency room last night, after he spoke to you all.”

  “Alex needed stitches, like Monica said he would,” Rachel replied. “Alex called me earlier from the hospital. He was meeting Edward at their uncle Albert’s office in San Francisco.”

  “Edward should have taken you with him rather than leaving you here at the spa,” Naomi said. “He must be exhausted after staying up all night guarding our house, and now to drive to the city? You could have shared some of the driving time, at least.”

  Rachel privately agreed, but Edward had been adamant about leaving her under the protection of the security guards, the outside surveillance video and the card-key locks of the spa…except she’d left her office just now. She glanced guiltily out Naomi’s office door at the empty hallway.

  Naomi’s phone rang. “Hello…? Oh, hi, Edward.”

  Rachel perked up. “Where is he?”

  “Okay, I’ll tell her.” Naomi hung up. “He’s on his way here—he’s only a few minutes out. He asks for you to be ready to leave.”

  “Why didn’t he call me?”

  Naomi glanced at Rachel’s empty lab-coat pocket. “Got your cell phone?”

  Her neck set on fire. “Oh. Well, did he say where we’re going?”