She frowned, her eyes radiating pain. “Well, Dad’s not here now. Besides, he was afraid somebody might be after me to get to him. They got him.” Her voice rose slightly. “They don’t need to get me now.”
Troy sighed in frustration. He didn’t know that the danger to her was over. He couldn’t know for sure that the attack she’d suffered in California had been somebody’s attempt to hurt Brandon. “I promised your father that I’d keep you safe,” he said.
“I am safe. I’m in my own home.” She stood abruptly. “You don’t have to worry about me. In fact, I’m going to my room and later I’ll just go to bed.” She moved across the room with a restless energy that was palpable. “It was nice seeing you again, Troy, but your services as a bodyguard are no longer needed.”
With these words she left the room.
BRIANNA OPENED her bedroom door and cocked her head to listen. The muted sound of a television was the only noise. It was after midnight and she assumed one of Troy’s partners was watching the tube or sleeping in front of it.
The phone hadn’t rung throughout the long hours of the night, but the fear inside her had grown to such proportions she could hardly stand it.
Where was her father? Was he still alive? She didn’t know what she’d do if something happened to him. She eased the bedroom door open and took a step into the hallway.
She’d never been the kind of woman to sit passively by and do nothing. Despite the fact that she’d told Troy she intended to go to bed, she had to do something or she’d go mad.
Troy. Even though they’d been at odds for much of their time together, there had been several times during the course of the evening when she’d wanted to launch herself into his strong arms. She’d wanted him to wrap her up in an embrace so tight she could hear his heart beating with hers, smell his cologne that, in the space of such a short time, had become oddly familiar and comforting.
She’d seen his sports car pull away a couple of hours ago. She’d noticed only a pickup was left in the driveway.
Instead of heading toward the grand staircase that led down to the foyer, Brianna went the opposite direction to a back, narrow set of stairs that took her to the kitchen. From there she could leave the house and go to the four-car garage in back. Nobody would know she’d left, and she’d be back before morning.
She held her breath as she walked down the stairs, praying that one didn’t creak loud enough to stir anyone’s interest. If her father had really been taken because of a business deal, then she needed to learn everything she could about that deal. The place to do that was in her father’s downtown office.
Before stepping into the kitchen she paused and listened once again. She sure didn’t want to encounter Lucas helping himself to a late-night snack or getting a drink of water. She didn’t want to have to explain her actions to anyone. She just wanted to do something, anything that made her feel as if she were helping her dad.
There was no indication that anyone was in the kitchen so she stepped into the darkened room and crept to the back door. Four numbers punched into the security panel unarmed the door, and she stepped outside into the warm September air.
A full moon spilled down luminous light as she ran toward the garage. Inside would be the sport-utility vehicle that she always drove when she was home for a visit.
She pulled a set of keys from her jeans pocket, unlocked the garage door and went inside. She was hoping Lucas wouldn’t hear her start her car or pull out. She didn’t want to worry anybody; she just wanted to do what she felt she needed to do.
She didn’t bother turning on the overhead lights. The illumination filtering in the open garage door was enough for her to see her vehicle. She opened the car door and slid inside, then leaned back against the backrest and sighed wearily.
“Where are we going?”
She squealed at the unexpected but familiar deep voice coming from the backseat. She whirled around to see Troy. “What are you doing back there?”
He leaned forward, bringing with him the scent of his cologne that she found so arresting. “I had a feeling you weren’t going to stay put tonight.”
“I thought I might go down to the local club and do a little dancing,” she said with a touch of sarcasm.
“Great, then you don’t mind if I ride along.” He got out of the back and switched to the passenger seat.
“I thought I fired you,” she complained as she started the engine.
He smiled. “You didn’t hire me so you can’t fire me.”
“Then I feel like you’re stalking me.” The truth was she was a little bit happy for his company.
“Get used to it. Until your dad returns home and tells me my services are no longer required, you’re stuck with me. Now, are you going to tell me where we’re really going?”
“To my father’s office.” She backed out of the garage and pushed the button on a remote to lower the garage door. “If this really is about the business deal he’s involved with, then I want to know everything there is to know about that deal.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me that earlier this evening?” His eyes looked almost feral in the light from the dash.
“Because I didn’t think you’d let me go. Because I thought you’d insist I sit still like a good little girl, and I can’t sit another minute longer. I need to do something.” She didn’t want him to give her a hard time about this. She was hanging on by a thread, fighting against the fear for her father that threatened to consume her.
He fastened his seat belt. “Then let’s get it done.”
She flashed him a grateful smile and took off down the street. “How long have you been sitting in the garage?” she asked curiously.
“Since nightfall.”
“Am I that predictable?”
He laughed. It was a low, pleasant rumble that momentarily warmed the chill that had possessed her since learning of her father’s kidnapping. “Actually, you’re that unpredictable. I just had a feeling that you wouldn’t be satisfied sitting around with Heather and her sister all night.”
“I prefer action to hand-wringing,” she replied. Besides, if she sat and wrung her hands for too long she’d start to cry, and there was nothing Brianna hated more than crying.
At this time of night there were few other cars on the road as they headed to the downtown area. She hoped and prayed that somehow they could find a lead hiding in the paperwork in her dad’s office.
Brandon’s office was on the fifth floor of a ten-story office building. She rang a buzzer and a gray-haired security guard opened the door, his face wreathed in a warm smile.
“Brianna, I didn’t know you were back in town,” he said as he allowed them entry and then locked the door behind them.
“Got in a couple of days ago, Charlie,” she replied.
“Read about your trouble the other night,” Charlie said. “Crazy life you lead, Missy.”
“I know, Charlie. I know,” she replied. “We’re going to be a little while in Dad’s office.”
“No problem. Just holler when you’re ready to leave.” He went back to the front desk and sat while she and Troy walked toward a bank of elevators.
“You’re obviously a familiar sight around here,” Troy observed as they stepped into the elevator.
Her heart squeezed painfully tight. “I grew up spending a lot of time here with Dad, and Charlie has been the night security for as long as I can remember.”
The doors whooshed closed and the elevator carried them to the fifth floor, where they stepped out and walked the short distance to Brandon’s offices.
She used her key to unlock the door and turned on the overhead lights. Directly ahead of them was the receptionist’s desk, and behind that desk was the door leading to Brandon’s inner sanctum.
She went to that door and opened it, then flipped on the light, conscious of Troy following right behind her.
For a moment the scent in the room caused a stabbing pain to pierce her heart. It smelled like he
r dad—a blend of his cologne, the mints he loved to chew and the faint aroma of the cigars he occasionally sneaked.
“Are you okay?” Troy asked softly.
She was vaguely surprised to realize that he was sensitive enough to know that being here might be difficult for her.
Nodding, she moved to the desk. “I’m fine,” she said, but she wasn’t fine. She was scared, more frightened than she’d ever been in her life. “I just want to find something, anything that will make sense of what’s happening.” She pulled open the top drawer but before she could look at the contents Troy grabbed her by the arm.
“Wait.” He moved her to the side and withdrew a large manila envelope from the drawer.
“What’s that?” It was obvious by the way he held it close to his chest that he knew what was inside.
His lips compressed together into a thin line as his gray eyes darkened. “It’s pictures of you. Your father showed them to me the other day when I was here.”
“Pictures of me? Let me see them.”
Reluctantly he pulled the photos out of the envelope and handed them to her. “It’s why he hired me to watch over you,” he explained.
There was no question that the vision of her pictures crossed out with bright red marker was disturbing. She set them on the top of the desk, her fingers trembling slightly. “And Dad thought this somehow had to do with the mall development?”
Troy nodded. “He thought it was a warning that he should shut down his plans for the mall or somebody might try to hurt you.”
Without warning she was filled with an enormous sense of grief coupled with a crushing guilt. She dropped the pictures to the top of the desk as tears half blinded her. Not thinking, functioning only on her need to be held, she walked into Troy’s arms.
Chapter Four
The next to last thing Troy expected was for Bree Waverly to fall into his arms. The very last thing he expected was his swift, visceral reaction to her being there. The feel of her slender curves and her sexy scent made it hard for him to think. She fit perfectly against him, her rounded body against the harder, leaner angles of his own.
But the sound of her tears as she burrowed her face in the front of his shirt focused him away from the immediate physical pleasure and back to the problem at hand.
She cried only a few moments, then backed away from him and quickly swiped at her tears. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to do that,” she said.
She dropped into Brandon’s chair, looking utterly miserable, and Troy leaned against the desk next to her. “I just feel so guilty,” she said.
Troy frowned. “Guilty? Why?”
Leaning her head back, she released a troubled sigh and once again her eyes shone overly bright with a mist of tears. “I’m the one who talked Dad into the mall. I even sold him the land where he’s building. All I thought about was how great it would be for my business.”
“Your business?” He thought her business was to show up at extravagant parties and wild clubs and get her picture in the tabloids.
“Precious Pets Animal Haven. It’s on the property next to where the mall was supposed to be built. I thought the mall would bring in people who would see my place and maybe come in and adopt a pet.”
An animal haven? He tried to wrap his head around this new information. Bree Waverly owned an animal shelter in Kansas City? A tiny crack appeared in the image he’d had of her.
“Brianna, your father is a savvy businessman. He would have never agreed to buy the land and build the mall if he didn’t think it was a sound business venture.”
The animal shelter was probably some kind of tax write-off for her. Lots of Hollywood types had special charities they funded but didn’t have anything to do with.
She eyed the desk. “We need to go through every drawer, every file and see what we can find that might give us a hint as to who’s taken my father.”
For the next two hours that’s exactly what they did. By the time they’d gotten through everything, they had a small pile of papers that pertained to the mall deal. There were several anonymous notes that threatened boycotts and vague disasters. Although they were written in different handwriting, they were all worded the same, which led Troy to believe they were part of a group effort.
One of the letters was signed by a James Stafford. The name rang a bell in Troy’s head but he couldn’t place it. Besides, he was tired and he knew Brianna was, too. Her pale complexion coupled with droopy eyelids let him know just how exhausted she was.
“We’ve done enough for tonight,” he said. “We’re both exhausted and there’s nothing more that we can do here.”
She nodded and stood, her shoulders slightly slumped forward as if the weight of her own body was too much to bear.
“Brianna, go with me to the safe house,” he said. “I’d feel better if you were there until we know what we’re up against. It’s what your father wanted. It’s why he hired me.”
“But what if a call comes in at the house or something else happens?”
“Lucas or Micah will call me if anything happens.” He reached out and took her hand in his. “Please, don’t fight me anymore on this.”
“Okay,” she agreed. “I’m too tired to argue with you.”
He smiled. “I know when to press my advantage. We’ll pick up some of your things at the house tomorrow. I can provide you with a clean T-shirt to sleep in for tonight and a new toothbrush to use in the morning.”
It was just after three when Troy pulled up in front of the farmhouse owned by Recovery Inc. “It’s nothing special, but it’s bigger than the cabin I tried to keep you in before.”
She gave him a weary smile. “As long as there’s a bed, I’ll be fine. I just need a couple hours of sleep and then I want to go back through that paperwork again.”
Troy picked up the file folder of papers, and together they headed inside the three-bedroom ranch house.
He showed her to one of the bedrooms and retrieved a clean T-shirt from the master bedroom closet. “Try to get some sleep,” he said as he gave her the shirt.
“First thing in the morning, I’d like to go to the job site and look around,” she said.
“We’ll see what tomorrow brings.”
Her eyes darkened and he knew what she was thinking, that she hoped tomorrow didn’t bring news that her father had been killed.
Despite his exhaustion, sleep didn’t come easily. The events of the day replayed in Troy’s mind. What would anyone hope to gain by kidnapping Brandon? That’s what didn’t make sense to him. Sure, his disappearance might slow down the mall project, but even his death wouldn’t necessarily stop it altogether.
He finally fell asleep and awakened with the dawn light filtering through his window. Despite the early hour he grabbed his cell phone from the nightstand and punched in Lucas’s number. His partner answered on the first ring. “Anything to report?”
“Nothing,” Lucas replied. “Heather and her sister are still in Heather’s room, no suspicious phone calls came in and Brianna went to her room early last night and I haven’t seen her since.”
“She’s with me,” Troy said. “We’re at the safe house. I want either you or Micah to do me a favor and see what you can dig up on a James Stafford. He wrote a nasty letter to Brandon and his name sounds familiar but I can’t place it.”
“Done,” Lucas replied. “I’ll call you back as soon as I have some information. And Troy, I really think we should consider calling Kincaid.”
“I know,” he agreed, thinking of the chief of police. He’d spent the last minutes before falling asleep recognizing that he should have overridden Heather’s hysterics and called the authorities immediately.
Troy ended the call and sat on the edge of the bed for several long minutes, contemplating whether to contact Chief Wendall Kincaid.
He was still considering the issue when Brianna joined him in the kitchen just after eight. “Good morning,” she said as she beelined for the coffeemaker.
“Ho
w did you sleep?” He tried not to notice the subtle sway of her hips as she moved, the way her breasts pressed against the fabric of her T-shirt.
“Surprisingly well,” she admitted. She poured herself a cup of coffee, then slid into the seat next to him at the round oak table.
She looked out the window where the view was of farmland, then looked back at him. “Why does your company need a safe house?” she asked.
“We bought this place when we first started our business. We weren’t sure exactly what kind of situations we might find ourselves in and envisioned a time when one of us or our clients might need a place to hole up.”
She took a sip of her coffee, eyeing him over the rim of the cup. “You three, you do more than repo cars, don’t you?”
“For the most part what we do has nothing to do with the blue-collar guy down the street who is a couple of months behind on his car payment. We go after the bigger fish who have bigger toys, and we have contacts that sometimes give us jobs that have nothing to do with the repo business.”
“You mean like covert secret mission kind of things?”
He grinned. “I’d love to tell you about it, but then I’d have to kill you.”
She laughed, but the laughter was short-lived. “No word from the house?”
“Nothing, and I think we need to call Chief Kincaid.” Fear danced into her eyes at his words and he hurriedly continued. “Brianna, Kincaid won’t do anything to put your dad at risk, but he has resources we don’t have.”
She held his gaze, her expression troubled. “I’m so afraid of doing the wrong thing. Let’s go check out the job site, then I’ll make a decision about contacting the cops.”
They left the house at nine. Troy drove Brianna’s sport-utility vehicle as she played navigator from the passenger seat. “Turn left at the next intersection,” she said as they reached the north edge of the city.
They traveled on a two-lane highway for some distance before she had him turn off again, this time onto a country road. Troy might have enjoyed the pastoral scenery if he wasn’t so acutely aware of Brianna’s nearness.
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