His strong, masculine features looked freshly shaved, and Allie was stunned by the sudden desire to run her fingers along the skin of that hard, tanned jawline.
Allie swallowed hard, disconcerted and a little frightened by the unwelcome tug of awareness. She didn’t want to notice this man. She wanted to stay frozen forever in her grief for Jaime.
“Yes?” she said, uncomfortably aware her voice sounded cold, rude. It wasn’t his fault her unruly hormones suddenly decided to wake up after two years of suspended animation.
If her neighbor was surprised by her unwelcome tone, he quickly concealed it. “Hello. I live next door. Gage McKinnon.”
He waited for her to introduce herself and Allie scrambled for a moment to remember what she was supposed to say.
“Lisa Connors.” She finally supplied the alias she had practiced, derivations of both her first name and her maiden name. “I believe you’ve met my daughters. Gabriella and Anna.”
Since she hadn’t been able to figure out a convincing way to persuade the girls they all had to use pretend names for a while, she had made the difficult decision to stick with their real names while they were on the run, risky though it might be.
“Yes. They were in my yard earlier. Actually, that’s why I stopped by.”
“Oh?” she said coolly. If he was going to yell at her daughters, she wasn’t going to make it easy for him.
A muscle flexed in that strong jaw and he met her hostile gaze without a flinch. “I just wanted to give you a friendly warning to be a little more careful with them.”
“Excuse me?” She stared at him.
“Your girls were outside alone in the neighborhood when it was barely daylight and not another soul was around.”
“You were, apparently.”
“Right. I was a complete stranger, but they had no problem striking up a conversation with me and telling me all kinds of details about their life. Their names, their ages, the fact that today is your birthday. That their father is dead. I know practically their life story.”
Oh, no. Allie fought the urge to press a hand to her suddenly queasy stomach. Gaby could talk the bark off a tree. Her sweet, openhearted daughter simply didn’t understand the meaning of discretion and Allie didn’t know how to teach her.
If she didn’t figure out a way, though, Gaby was going to someday let slip too much information to the wrong person, details that would identify her mother as a fugitive.
The girls thought they were simply off on a new adventure. Allie didn’t want to frighten them by telling them this was all so deadly serious.
She turned back to the neighbor to whom Gaby had revealed so much. “All fascinating information, I’m sure.”
He glanced over at the girls, engrossed in Sesame Street, then lowered his voice. “If I were some kind of child predator it would be very fascinating information. Once I had their names, it wouldn’t take me long to completely win their trust. You should have a talk with them. Warn them to be a little more careful. In my opinion, girls that young shouldn’t be wandering the neighborhood by themselves. You should never have let them outside without supervision.”
“I was asleep!” she exclaimed.
“All the more reason to be concerned. Anything could have happened and you would have awakened to find your daughters gone.”
“I can take care of my daughters, Mr. McKinnon.”
“I never said you couldn’t. I’m just bringing it to your attention. A mother who cares about her children’s safety can’t be too careful.”
If you go into insulin shock again, anything could happen to those girls. A fragment of testimony from the custody battle slithered through her mind in a nasty whisper. Look what happened last time. You were behind the wheel and nearly killed them all.
If you love our granddaughters at all, you must see that your condition makes you incapable of caring for them on your own.
Oh, how those words had hurt. Irena and Joaquin had gouged at her mercilessly, again and again until even she had almost been convinced she was an unfit mother.
She had taken it from them in that courtroom—she’d had no choice—but she was not about to listen to the same kind of accusations from a stranger, even one who looked like sin and smelled like heaven.
She lifted her chin. “My children’s safety is my own concern, Mr. McKinnon. I’ll thank you to mind your own business.”
His mouth tightened into a hard line. “This is my business.”
He reached inside his breast pocket and pulled out a flat black leather case. He opened it and thrust it at her and Allie’s anger changed instantly to a terrible, icy dread at the sight of the shimmering gold badge pinned inside.
Please, no. Somehow he had found her and now she would lose everything. She waited for him to break out handcuffs, but he only reached for the doorknob.
“I work for the FBI’s Salt Lake City field office, Mrs. Connors,” he said, his voice distant and cool. “I see hideous things done to children on a daily basis. You have two beautiful little girls. I would hate to see anything happen to them.”
With that, he opened the door and walked out into the summer morning, leaving Allie staring after him with bewildered fear still pulsing through her in steady, unrelenting waves.
Chapter 2
“Mama, I don’t want to go to Mrs. Cochran’s house. I don’t like her.”
Allie paused in the middle of buckling Anna into her booster seat and gazed over at Gaby as unease coursed through her. “What do you mean, you don’t like her? Since when? Last week you said you thought she was nice. She pushed you on the swing and let you have Popsicles and played Chutes and Ladders with you.”
Gaby shrugged. “She’s nice sometimes. Not all the time.”
Oh, she did not need this. Everything had been going so well. Her insulin level was more stable than it had been for a long time. Her job cleaning houses, though a far cry from her work as a triage nurse at a busy innercity emergency room back in Philadelphia, gave her a steady income and more importantly, health insurance.
And she’d detected absolutely no sign that anyone had followed her.
The only fly in her particular ointment was her next-door neighbor. She had to admit, she’d suffered more than a few bad moments after learning she’d had the bad luck to move in next to an FBI agent.
After much angst, though, she decided she could risk living here for a few more weeks, just until she could pay off the car repair bill to Ruth’s son. She would just do her best to stay out of his way and pray he would have no reason to connect the drab Lisa Connors to Alicia DeBarillas.
Avoiding the man hadn’t been tough at all since he never seemed to be around.
Other than that stress of living next to Gage McKinnon, things had been going so well. She thought she had found the perfect caregiver for the girls while she was working, someone matronly and loving. Ruth Jensen had suggested an older, widowed neighbor of hers who took in children to earn a little extra money. Dora Cochran had come with other glowing recommendations and the arrangement had been working well, or so Allie had thought.
“What does she do that’s not nice?” she asked carefully.
Gaby’s little brow furrowed as she thought it over. “Yesterday she said I talk too much and told me to shut up. And she told Anna to stop acting like a baby on account of she started to cry after Mrs. Thompson turned off Blue’s Clues so she could watch Oprah.”
The woman wasn’t exactly beating them but she didn’t sound particularly loving either. Allie gave a mental groan. What was she supposed to do? She couldn’t dump her children off at a place where they weren’t comfortable, but she had nowhere else to send them. She hated this. Absolutely hated it.
She had to work; she had no choice. Much of her and Jaime’s savings had gone toward her medical bills and legal fees in the last six months. Though she had received life insurance benefits after his accident, it had all been tied up in the custody battle.
Before she left
, Allie had pulled everything liquid out of their accounts, figuring that if she was careful, she and the girls could survive for five or six months on her small nest egg, especially if she could find a job with health insurance to pay for her insulin. But she couldn’t tap into that now. If they had to move on quickly for any reason, she would need that nest egg to fall back on.
She needed her job, but Allie knew she wouldn’t be able to work a moment if she was constantly worrying about her daughters.
“Okay, honey. If you don’t want to go back to Mrs. Cochran’s, you don’t have to. I’ll figure something out.”
Her mind scrambled to come up with some solution. Today she was scheduled to clean four vacation rental properties whose occupants had already checked out. Since they were vacant, she was sure Ruth wouldn’t mind if the girls went along with her, just until she could find someone else to watch them. She would give her a call just to make sure, but she didn’t think the other woman would have a problem with it. She had been more than accommodating so far and had treated her and the girls with a kindness that often brought tears to Allie’s eyes.
“You might be able to come with me today,” she told the girls. “I’ll just need to check with Mrs. Jensen and get some videos and some toys and crayons from inside so you have something to do.”
“Yippee!” Gaby cheered.
“’Ippee!” Anna echoed.
Allie headed back up the steps, then paused and looked over the hedge separating her rental house from its cheerful twin next door. Her neighbor would probably have something to say about a mother who would leave her daughters in the car while she ran back inside her house, even when it was only for a moment.
With a heavy sigh, she jogged back down the steps, opened the car door then unhooked the girls from their boosters. “Come on. You can wait inside while I gather some things.”
She shouldn’t care what some broodingly handsome, interfering FBI agent thought. Besides, the man seemed to have disappeared from the face of the earth. Probably undercover somewhere, she thought, sticking his nose into some other poor woman’s business.
She had seen no signs of him over there since her birthday the week before when he had come knocking at her door, accusing her of being an unfit mother.
He hadn’t really, she reminded herself. She had reacted far out of proportion to what had no doubt been well-intentioned advice. When she’d had time to cool down—and time for her terror to fade—she appreciated his warning and the reminder to be more careful with her daughters.
Later that evening over birthday cake and pizza she had reminded both girls about their family’s safety rules. Don’t ever talk to strangers; don’t ever give your name to a stranger; don’t ever take rides from strangers; report any strangers to an adult. She had to walk the same fine line every parent confronted, between scaring the girls to death and instilling a necessary sense of self-preservation in them.
They seemed to have gotten the message without destroying their natural gregariousness. The night before, Gaby had even started to strike up a conversation with a woman in the grocery line then stopped in midsentence and asked her mother if she knew the other woman or if she was a stranger, and if she was a stranger, could Allie please find out her name so Gaby could finish telling her about the baby kittens she’d seen outside the store?
She supposed she owed Gage McKinnon an apology for reacting so strongly to his advice, even though her own sense of self-preservation warned her she should stay as far away as possible from such a dangerous man.
But how could she apologize to him if he was never home? His late-model SUV hadn’t been parked in the driveway since that morning a week earlier and his windows were tightly closed, even though a warm spell had hit Utah in the last few days. Not only had the windows not been opened but the curtains hadn’t so much as twitched an inch in seven days.
She didn’t want to be curious about his whereabouts but she had to admit she found herself watching out for his tall, muscular frame wherever they went. She didn’t know if that funny flutter in her stomach at the idea of seeing him again stemmed from fear or anticipation.
She wrenched her mind from her dratted neighbor and focused on the girls. “Find a few things to take with us today while I call Ruth, all right?”
She watched them go, Gaby chattering with excitement about all the things she was going to take and Anna trailing dutifully along behind, as usual.
Love for these two sweet children crept up on her and completely took her breath away, as it sometimes did. She would have died if she lost them, literally would have shriveled up and faded away into nothing. They were her heart, her soul, her life. Everything.
She wanted to hate Jaime’s parents for what they had tried to do. At first when she had awakened in the hospital and been served with the paperwork petitioning for custody of the girls because of her condition, she had been both livid and terrified. For a long time her emotions had seesawed between fury and fear as the case had worked its way through the courts.
But now she couldn’t manage to summon much emotion toward them but pity. Joaquin and Irena DeBarillas had failed miserably with their only son, had lost him long before he decided to come to the States to study medicine and had met and married her when he was a resident at the hospital where she worked.
Did they really think they could regain through their granddaughters what they had destroyed with Jaime?
Over her dead body.
She pitied them, knew they were lonely. But she would still be damned before she let them get their hands on her little girls.
Allie dialed Ruth’s office number and waited through eight rings before hanging up. The answering machine must be busted again. She’d learned Ruth had little patience with gadgetry and didn’t check her messages often anyway. She also didn’t carry a cell phone, so now what was Allie supposed to do?
She had to drop by the office on her way to the first property anyway to pick up the master key. If Ruth wasn’t there, she could always leave her a note, she supposed.
She went to prod Gaby and Anna along just as she heard the doorbell. For one crazy instant, she thought it might be her neighbor and her heart began a low, urgent drumming.
It wasn’t Gage McKinnon, she saw as soon as she opened the door, but her employer who stood on the porch, thin and brisk and competent.
“Ruth! I just tried to call you. I’m so glad you stopped by!”
“Oh?”
“Yes.” Suddenly she felt nervy presuming on her employer’s kindness this way. But she also couldn’t bear the thought of sending Anna and Gaby to a place they didn’t feel comfortable, not when their life was in such tumult anyway.
“Um, I’m afraid Dora Cochran is not working out. Would you object if I took the girls with me to the houses I’m cleaning today since they’re all empty? They can be very well behaved and won’t get in my way or slow me down, I promise.”
Ruth looked thoughtful. “I don’t see why not. Actually, that’s one of the reasons I stopped. I wanted to ask if you’re interested in another job, one where you might not need day care for the girls.”
“What kind of job?” she asked warily. She didn’t necessarily enjoy cleaning houses but it paid the rent with a little left over, and Ruth hadn’t asked any questions about her background.
“You told me you’ve had some medical training.”
“Yes.” She would love to find a nursing job but she would have to be licensed to legally work and she didn’t know how to go about that while living under a false name.
“A renter of mine was in an accident last week. He’s coming home from the hospital in a wheelchair the day after tomorrow but won’t be able to get around on his own for a while. He asked me if I knew anybody who could cook and clean for him, run him around to physical therapy, that sort of thing. I thought of you.”
“I’m not a licensed nurse in Utah, Ruth.”
“I know that. A home care nurse will stop by to check on him, so you wou
ld only have to be around to help if he needs it. Pay’s a few dollars more an hour than you get now and you could keep the girls with you.”
Excitement pulsed through her. If she were making a few dollars more an hour and didn’t have to pay for day care, she could add even more to her small security cushion. And it would be so wonderful to spend all day with Gaby and Anna.
She was almost afraid to hope things could work out so well and felt a pang of guilt for benefiting from some other person’s misfortune.
“What happened to the poor man?” she asked.
“Job-related injury. He was hit by a truck. Crushed against a concrete wall, really, by a man he was trying to arrest.”
A terrible suspicion slithered to life, and Allie glanced over the hedge again at the cottage next door. “He’s a police officer?” she asked with sudden dread.
“FBI agent,” Ruth said, confirming her worst fears. “You might have met him, since he just lives next door. Gage McKinnon. Tall, dark, good-looking.”
All her spiraling hopes crashed to the ground like a balloon shot by a BB gun. So she hadn’t solved her child-care dilemma after all. She was right back where she started, without a good place for the girls to stay while she worked.
She wanted to weep from the crushing weight of her disappointment. “I’m sorry, Ruth, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to pass on the job offer, though I truly appreciate you thinking of me. I just don’t think it would work for me after all.”
Her landlady frowned. “Pass? Why, that’s just plain crazy. It’s the perfect situation all the way around. If you wanted, you could even hire a teenager to watch the girls over here at your place and check on them through the day since you’d just be next door. I can give you some names.”
Maybe it would be the perfect situation, if the job involved caring for just an average person. But Gage McKinnon was an FBI agent. She hadn’t worked this hard to keep her children with her—sacrificed everything for them—only to lose them in the end to Jaime’s parents because of an interfering, inquisitive federal agent.
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