Harlequin Intrigue May 2021--Box Set 2 of 2

by Carol Ericson

  She’d moved here for him, too. Getting out of San Francisco and to Denver had been the first step. Her parents had gotten their lives together—after letting Lianna’s grandparents raise her—and in the first months after the murder, they, along with her grandparents, had been rocks, standing solidly behind her. They had been everything she needed.

  But now she needed space. She needed to do some things for herself without being afraid of her own shadow. Besides, when she ran an inn, no one cared how often she checked the locks.

  Henry had been able to go to first grade in the same elementary school she’d gone to. He would grow up in the same town, in the same place she had. That was important. It was right.

  She’d been afraid Todd’s cronies at his little spy group would follow her here, forever harassing her for information. Forever so sure she knew more than she’d let on.

  But she knew nothing about Todd, it turned out. She’d have to live with that for the rest of her life.

  Once she’d moved out of Denver, they’d let her be. Thank God. She could relax. Enjoy her life. Far away from the lies and wrongdoings of her late husband.

  Lianna stopped at the edge of the road where the bus would stop and let Henry off. She shaded her eyes against the sun as the bus rumbled around the curve. The door opened and Henry bounded off, already talking a mile a minute.

  “Mom! Mom! Joey is getting a dog! Can we get a dog? Wouldn’t it be great to have a dog?”

  Lianna waved at the bus driver before turning to follow Henry back down to the house. “You’re allergic to dogs.”

  Henry sighed heavily. “That’s so stupid.”

  “I know. Terribly stupid. We could always try getting the shots.”

  Henry pulled a face. “I hate shots.”

  “I know.” She slid her hand over his shoulder, giving her seven-year-old a squeeze. Truth be told, she was secretly relieved there was an excuse not to get a dog. Between Henry and the Bluebird, she didn’t have the time or energy to take care of another living thing.

  Not that it stopped her from feeling guilty over Henry’s lack of pets.

  “Can we get a bird?”

  Lianna had to suppress the shudder that ran through her. “Well, maybe we can look into it.” She might lean into the bluebird part of her bed-and-breakfast’s name, but that didn’t mean she actually wanted a bird in her house. Birds were best kept as artistic decoration.

  “Or a lizard? Or a hamster? Maybe a ferret.”

  “We can talk it over more tonight. We have a guest today.” Never a ferret. Never.

  “It’s not another old lady, is it?”

  “Henry Patrick Kade.”

  “Well! They always smell like a bathroom. And that one pinched my cheek every time she saw me.”

  “The horror,” Lianna replied dryly.

  Henry raced ahead, then back to her, pretending to be an airplane. He made explosion sounds and at one point even somersaulted over the soft grass.

  She should admonish him, since he’d forgotten to zip his backpack and a few papers and pencils fluttered out, as well as his water bottle jostling out of its side pocket. But it was almost summer and her baby was happy.

  How could she scold that?

  She picked up after him as he continued to expend the pent-up energy of a first grader who’d been stuck in school on a sunny day.

  They began to cross the yard. Lianna had almost forgotten about Reece and the churning of...too many feelings at the sight of him. But he was standing on her porch, still as a statue, and she came to an abrupt halt.

  He looked imposing. She felt the brief need to shield Henry from him, but that was silly. She knew how to take care of herself these days. Keep both her and Henry safe from anyone who might wish them harm.

  Which was no one. She’d made it clear she knew nothing about Todd’s death, understood nothing about whatever he’d been secretly involved in. She’d worked with the police and FBI and in the end had moved to a different state. She’d moved home to hunker down into the B and B.

  Henry darted around her, clearly intrigued by the impressive-looking stranger. They didn’t get a lot of guests under the age of seventy. “Hi, mister. Do you like birds?”

  Reece’s blank expression scrunched into something closer to befuddlement. “Uh.”

  “We’re discussing the merits of different pets,” Lianna offered, forcing herself to move forward. To act casually. She and Henry were safe. The police had assured her.

  “Oh, well, I’d prefer a dog, I suppose.”

  “Ugh,” Henry groaned. “Everything is stupid.” He stomped up the stairs and slammed inside.

  Reece gave a puzzled glance at the front door and then back at Lianna. “I’m sorry.”

  She forced a kind smile. “Don’t apologize. He’s having a bit of a crisis over being allergic to dogs.”

  “Ah.”

  Lianna pressed her lips together. Reece still seemed utterly confused. “You don’t have any kids of your own, do you?”

  “No. Can’t say I know much about kids.”

  “Everything being stupid is par for the course. In the next moment, he’ll be happy as a clam thinking about something else.”

  “Well. Good. I just wanted to walk around and take some pictures, if you don’t mind.” He held up his camera.

  “Of course. Be careful in the woods. It’s easy to get turned around and you don’t want to get lost.”

  “I think I’ll be all right. Thanks.” He walked off toward her gardens and snapped a few pictures as she watched.

  There was something...something. But she had homework to oversee and dinner to make, and she didn’t have time for something.

  * * *

  BEING THE LONE guest in an inn run by an attractive woman and her precocious son was... Reece really didn’t know what it was.

  He usually had no problems pretending to be someone else. He was in no hurry to be himself. But there was something so domestic about eating breakfasts and dinners with her and the kid. Watching Lianna walk Henry to the bus stop and back.

  It was fascinating. He’d never witnessed that level of care or affection.

  Which was not what he was here for.

  He’d found five more listening devices scattered around Bluebird’s common areas. At night, he’d sneaked into the other guest rooms and found one in each of those. He had yet to figure out how to get into Lianna and Henry’s private area of the house without detection. Lianna struck him as the type of woman who’d know if the order of things had been disrupted. Besides, he’d seen a serious-looking security camera bolted above the door to her private quarters.

  That being said, she didn’t appear to be particularly nervous or careful. She was certainly somewhat suspicious of him, but every day he went out and took pictures, sometimes even showing the better ones to Lianna or Henry. Henry liked the pictures of animals he’d found, and Lianna asked him more technical questions about the camera.

  He was never sure if she was interested or if it was a test.

  More guests would be coming tomorrow, and he was no closer to having a clue how to unearth the necessary information than he had been when he’d arrived.

  He took his usual afternoon walk, deep into the woods and away from sight or hearing distance to the house. Once he felt he was far enough away, he set up his computer and phone so he could make the phone call to headquarters.

  He attached everything, connected to the secure server and dialed. Shay didn’t bother with greetings.

  “Anything?” she asked.

  “Not really. I found a listening device in every room—not just the common areas, but all the guest rooms, as well.”

  “What about hers?”

  Reece bit back a sigh. “I haven’t had a chance to get into her private living space yet, but it’s not her.”

&n
bsp; There was a pause. “Have you been trying to get into her rooms?”

  “She’s on the premises all the time. If I’m keeping my cover, I can’t sneak into her room unless there’s zero chance of being caught. She’s clean, Shay.”

  “If you sent off one of the devices, we could run the diagnostics, maybe get a clue where it came from.”

  “Taking one of the devices poses a problem since we don’t know who’s placed them in the first place. If they know someone is on to them, it could escalate something. She and the kid shouldn’t be caught in the cross fire of that.”

  “You have to get into her room and see if she’s got them there, too. It’s the only way to know for sure she’s not involved.”

  Reece sighed. “She really takes care of this place—it’s a family business. These kinds of listening devices in guest rooms would violate all sorts of privacy laws, not to mention they’re way more high-tech than the cameras she has guarding her private quarters. I can’t see her doing it. None of it would add up.”

  “But you don’t know for sure she’s not involved with the people doing it until you check her rooms. I trust your instincts, Reece, but we can’t be too careful. We just don’t know enough, and that’s why I sent you. To find out. Now, I can ask this group hiring us if they’re the ones who put the devices in.”

  Reece could read the hesitation in Shay’s tone. “No, I’d like to figure it out as much as I can on my own. We want to keep the widow and the kid out of it, don’t we? That’s a priority for me. Kids don’t get caught in the cross fire.”

  “That’s a priority for me, too,” Shay returned.

  “Do we have a time limit on this?”

  “They haven’t prescribed one, and I figure as long as nothing pressing is going on, you’ve got the time to earn the widow’s trust.”

  Reece glanced back at the house. Earning Lianna’s confidence was getting complicated. He figured it was the kid. He’d follow orders to complete a mission as long as it didn’t interfere with his one simple moral tenet. Don’t get kids caught in the middle.

  He’d never had a mission—in the military or with North Star—where he’d had to deal with kids. This was a first, and he didn’t like it.

  “Reece?”

  “It seems pretty peaceful here. Maybe it’s the wrong line to tug to get the information.”

  “I might agree with you if you hadn’t found listening devices.”

  Shay was right. The devices could mean Lianna and Henry were in danger and Lianna didn’t have a clue. But despite a few days of being underfoot, Reece still didn’t know how to bring up the subject of the dead husband and who he’d worked for. With no direct threat to her, it felt like bringing unnecessary trouble to her doorstep.

  “Get into her rooms, Reece. Whether she knows what’s going on or not, she might have something in her private quarters to point us in the right direction. We have to explore every possibility until we have more to go on.”

  Reece grimaced. He wasn’t sure how he was going to accomplish that task, let alone how he’d live with the guilt of poking around in her private belongings when he did.

  “All right, I—”

  “Hey, Reece! Whatcha doing way out here?” Reece whirled on Henry, who was bounding through the trees.

  Reece swore inwardly and slapped the phone and laptop shut. “Hey there, Hank,” he said, trying to use his body to block the kid’s view of the equipment.

  Henry laughed like he always did when Reece called him Hank. Something shifted deep inside Reece, but he ignored it and shoved his laptop into his bag. There’d be no way of hiding it completely, but he could pretend it had something to do with the camera.

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to come out this far,” Reece said as Henry came up on his side.

  “I’m not, but I heard your voice.” Henry peered at the bag. “Who you talking to?”

  “Oh, I...got a call from my boss.”

  “Mom said her cell phone doesn’t work all the way out here. Who’s your boss?”

  “Uh. The person who pays me to take pictures.”

  “That’s cool. I think I want to be a firefighter when I grow up. My friend Joey’s dad is a cop and he said firemen get to play video games all day.”

  “Huh. Well...”

  Henry jumped up and down, trying to grab a tree branch, presumably to hang off, but it was just out of reach. “But Mom says it’s a dangerous job.”

  “That’s...”

  “I could help Mom with the inn, but it gets kinda boring way out here.”

  Reece smiled against his will. “Well, you probably have some time to figure it out.”

  Henry shrugged, giving up his attempt to jump and grab the branch. “Did you see any animals today?”

  “No, not today.”

  “My other friend Avery has a dad who’s in the army. It sounds pretty cool, but sometimes he goes away for a long time.”

  Reece was surprised at the viscerally negative reaction he had to that. Even more surprised when words tumbled out of his mouth. “I was in the military for a little while. It’s not bad, but... Well, I think your mom would miss you. You have to travel a lot. Work and live overseas.” See things you can’t unsee.

  “Have you been to foreign countries?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Which one’s the best?”

  “Too many...to name.”

  “Did you ever get hurt?”

  “A little.”

  Henry hopped again, though this time it seemed to be to some inner rhythm rather than trying to grab the branch. “How? Why? Where?”

  “That’s probably more of a bedtime story,” Reece offered, hoping that would get him off this line of questioning.

  “Will you tell it to me at bedtime, then? Mom usually makes me read.” Henry rolled his eyes. “But sometimes she’ll read to me. Maybe you could tell me the story instead.”

  “Well... I guess that would be up to her.” It’d give Reece a reason to be in Henry’s room. He doubted very much Lianna would leave them alone, but he could get an idea of the layout, maybe a way to sneak in when Lianna was busy with guests this weekend.

  If she’d let him. “We should get you back. Your mom might worry.”

  “Can I carry your camera?”

  “Sure. Sure.” Reece handed it over.

  And felt like slime.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “You know we don’t allow guests in our rooms, Henry,” Lianna said, trying to add groceries to her online cart and give Henry her full attention. But he was going on and on about Reece, and she had dinner to start and groceries to order for the weekend. “It’s a very important rule.”

  Henry’s groan could have been heard in Montana. “He’s my friend.”

  Pain cracked through Lianna’s chest. Friend. A guest couldn’t be a friend. Still, it was no mystery why he was fascinated with Reece. The man was the embodiment of adult male attention that Henry didn’t get. That he’d never gotten, because Todd had not been a good father. He’d considered children the domain of the wife.

  A complication.

  Lianna had gone out of her way to shield Henry from that, but she couldn’t make up for the lack. She knew... She knew what it was like to grow up without parents. No matter how much she’d loved her grandparents, knowing her parents couldn’t take care of her had been... It was a scar. Even having them in her life now didn’t change the fact that they hadn’t been then.

  Now Henry had his own scar and wanted some random stranger to tell him a bedtime story.

  “It isn’t fair,” Henry said, turning a furious shade of red.

  Lianna turned away from the computer. She’d found one person in town who would pick up and deliver for her, and the extra money was worth the time she saved. But Freya could only deliver on Saturday mornings, which
wasn’t convenient.

  Neither was this. She forced a smile for her son. She would never let him know his feelings came at an inconvenient time. He would never ever feel like an inconvenience to her. “I’m sure he can tell you the same story in the common areas.”

  “I hate the common areas and this stupid place. I want to live in town like Joey. I want...”

  He didn’t say it, but she knew what he wanted. A father. She knew because everything in him wilted, the anger fizzling out. He could want a father with everything he was, but it couldn’t make his father alive.

  “I want to show him my map,” Henry said, speaking of the wallpaper on one wall of his room—a map of the whole world. “He’s been to foreign countries,” Henry said loftily. Some of his anger had faded, but he hadn’t given up the fight.

  Lianna’s chest still hurt, but she figured the hardest part of Henry’s outburst was over. She turned her attention back to groceries. “Oh, has he?”

  “Yeah, when he was in the military. He even got hurt.”

  Lianna’s body went cold. Military. Todd hadn’t been military, and neither had the group he’d been involved with, as far as she knew. Still, military was a far cry from unassuming nature photographer.

  Military meant...guns. It meant knowing how to do things. Bad things. Scary things. It meant he wasn’t so unassuming. It meant he wasn’t safe. They weren’t safe.

  “Excuse me, Henry.” She pushed away from the kitchen table and marched through the dining room, panic beating through her chest. She knew she had to control it before she talked to Reece. She had to—

  But he was walking in the front door, carrying that backpack that was abnormally large for a camera. Wasn’t it? Wasn’t everything about him just a shade wrong?

  You’re being paranoid. This is what Dr. Winston warned you about. Being alone. Spiraling out of control.

  “You were in the military.” She blurted it out like an accusation and then winced at how off-balanced she sounded.

  Reece didn’t move a muscle. He simply stood in the entryway, eyebrows raised. “Yes,” he agreed very calmly.