Security Measures

by Sara K. Parker

  Hunter reached toward her, but she sidestepped him quickly.

  He paused, his gaze assessing. Then he continued to reach around the door to grab the handle and pull it open for her. Triss’s cheeks warmed as she realized he hadn’t been reaching for her at all.

  Hunter held the door open, stepping behind it as if sensing her inner turmoil. She climbed in and yanked on her seat belt, feeling foolish.

  “Drive safe,” he said. “I’ll be right behind you.” He pressed the door shut.

  It was going to be a long night. She hadn’t even had a few hours to sleep this afternoon, and she hadn’t eaten. Still, despite her tough schedule, she was disciplined enough to make it work. She went to school Mondays through Thursdays, then worked the night shift at Shield Fridays through Sundays. She made it work by getting plenty of sleep during weeknights and managing a few hours of sleep on weekend afternoons. This week had thrown off her schedule. She blinked away the heaviness behind her eyes as the sun disappeared. No one would have blamed her if she’d called off, but it wasn’t in her makeup. Unless she was on death’s door, Triss didn’t take a sick day.

  She’d make up for the lack of sleep tomorrow, she told herself as the client’s residence came into view. Brittany Wellington had a Keurig and always left out plenty of coffee for guests and employees. Triss would need more than a cup or two to get her through the night.

  If nothing else, it was a quiet shift, and she’d have plenty of time to think. There had to be something they were missing. She parked her car at the Wellington estate and got out, waving goodbye to Hunter as she hurried up to the front entrance. She kept thinking about Iris going overboard. It seemed unlikely she had fallen over a railing that nearly came to her chest. But if someone had thrown her overboard, what would the motive be?

  Don’s conversation with Riley came back to her then, and she hit upon an angle they needed to pursue. As she entered the foyer of the large home and waved to her partner, she called Hunter.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  “I had a thought,” she answered. “We need to have Iris check her bank statements for any suspicious activity. And ask if she’s had any help with setting up accounts or anything like that.”

  “Good idea,” Hunter said. “If we can find a motive, we might find the culprit.”

  “Hopefully we’ll find both soon,” Triss said, but as she hung up with Hunter, she couldn’t shake a dark sense of foreboding.

  She pocketed her phone and forced herself into work mode, logging into the tablet to check off the areas as she patrolled throughout the night. She turned toward the kitchen of the eight-thousand-square-foot home. But first, coffee.

  * * *

  When her alarm woke her up at 11:00 a.m., Triss was still exhausted. Granted, after getting home from work at half past six, she’d only managed to get about four hours of sleep, but that wasn’t typically a problem for her. The room was dark, the day overcast with cold rain. She yanked open the blackout curtains, but the dreariness outside didn’t do much to imbue her with energy. Maybe the zoo birthday would be canceled. It certainly wasn’t a good day for it. She checked the forecast and saw that it was going to clear up soon. No messages from Hunter, so the party must still be on.

  She sat on the end of her bed, phone in hand. It was time to be rational. She was one year away from finishing grad school, with a spring internship lined up with the FBI forensics department at the Baltimore headquarters. She’d spent years working toward her career goals, and she knew that her first job out of graduate school would probably mean relocating to another city, at least. Likely, another state.

  There was no room in her plan for a family. She had not even written a family into her goals. She’d known herself well enough at the age of sixteen to realize that she could never handle love and loss again.

  She’d been terrified to discover she was pregnant. Scared and ashamed. She couldn’t bring herself to tell Luke, who had given up everything to raise her and their brother, Cal. When her boyfriend had given her the money for the abortion and driven her to the clinic, she hadn’t known what else to do.

  He’d waited in the truck, smoking his cigarette, the windows closed against the harshly cold early winter day. She’d gone inside the sterile little clinic alone, the cash stuffed deep in the pockets of jeans she could barely button over her growing stomach.

  She’d signed in and sat in the waiting room, and her hands had involuntarily settled on the barely noticeable curve of her belly. She was nearly sixteen weeks. She’d put off the appointment for as long as she could, but knew she wouldn’t be able to hide the truth much longer. She’d told only her boyfriend, and she had never felt more alone. What she hadn’t told him was that late at night, she’d been waking up to this strange fluttery feeling in her stomach. She knew it was early still, and she’d tried to convince herself the feeling could not possibly be the baby moving.

  But as she sat in the room waiting to be called to terminate her pregnancy, she felt it again, stronger this time, the flutter vibrating against the palms of her hands. She wasn’t ignorant. She’d looked up the stages of a fetus, knew that her baby had every baby part and a heartbeat. The only thing keeping this little one from survival would be her.

  Someone called her name, and she stood, woodenly, following the nurse into the hallway, but as she walked, the fluttering continued, and her heartache grew.

  “Can I use the restroom?” she’d asked suddenly, and the nurse paused, her gaze observant. She pointed to a nearby hallway.

  “On the left.”

  Triss walked down the hall, but she didn’t look for the bathroom. Her eyes were trained on the exit sign at the end of the hallway.

  She picked up her pace.

  “You just missed it, hon,” the nurse called out.

  Triss ran.

  She burst through the back door and into soft snow flurries in the tiny parking lot. It was empty, save for a giant dumpster. She wondered what might be in that dumpster. For a split second, she thought about running to the front of the building to tell her soon-to-be ex, Pete, that she couldn’t do it. She’d ask him to take her home, and then confess to Luke.

  Instead, she’d kept running. She wasn’t far from the train station, after all, and she had a decent wad of money.

  Several months later, she’d returned home. Luke had accepted her back, few questions asked. And she made a vow to herself never to love that deeply again. The kind of love she had felt for her tiny baby was unlike anything she’d ever experienced. And handing her over to her adoptive parents had nearly undone her.

  The only thing that had kept Triss from taking her own life in the weeks after was the knowledge that Luke would eventually find out. And he would be devastated. She couldn’t do that to him.

  She stared at her phone, an image of Josie and Levi coming to mind, particularly the day they’d shared at their home making a royal mess out of a cake-baking attempt. She’d offered to help him because he’d been in a bind. She couldn’t have known how much she would love his kids. Then she thought about the uncertain but hopeful look in Josie’s eyes when she’d walked into Harmony the other day and seen Triss for the first time in months.

  She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t open the door to that kind of love. If she did, she would be all in. And she’d have to tell Hunter about her daughter. And, if she told Hunter, she’d have to tell Luke. The two worked together a lot, and if Hunter ever slipped and Luke heard it from him... Triss sighed. She didn’t want her brother to know. He would be crushed. He would ask why she hadn’t told him. Worse, he would tell her what she knew now with six years of growing up behind her: he would have helped her raise her little girl.

  She didn’t want to hear that, even though she knew it was true. She didn’t want to think about the mistake she had made, or wonder if her daughter was well loved. She didn’t want to own up to a six-yea
r secret that was tied up in a whole bundle of lies. And the truth was? She didn’t deserve the chance to be a mom. She’d had it once, and she’d turned her back.

  Her eyes swam with tears, her throat clogging up. Even if she decided to come clean and tell Hunter and Luke, and then tried to give a relationship with Hunter a chance...she couldn’t live with the daily reminders of what she’d missed out on. The zoo birthday was one event on a never-ending list of reminders she’d face if she said yes to Hunter Knox. And he and his kids didn’t deserve to contend with her haywire emotions on their special days and during their important milestones.

  Resolutely, she started punching out a text to Hunter—she would bow out of the birthday party. It was better for everyone, herself included, if she maintained her distance.

  She sent the text and forced herself to get up, tucking the covers quickly over her bed and heading to her closet. She was itching to go on a run, convinced that missing so many workouts this week was contributing to her mood. It was nearly lunch, though, and she wanted to go have a chat with Iris. She’d start running again the next morning.

  * * *

  “Stay in your room, Josie!” Hunter called, shoving open the door with his hip as he brought the large ladybug-shaped sheet cake into the house, several bags looped on his arms.

  “I’m guarding the door,” Samantha said from the hall, her voice cheerful, as per usual. “Levi’s in there, too.”

  “Good call,” Hunter said, reminded once again of how fortunate he was to have found Samantha. He didn’t know what he’d do when she inevitably left her nanny job for a teaching position next fall. She’d become almost like an older sister to the kids, and they had created a comfortable foursome in the house.

  He set down the cake on the counter and the bags on the floor. He didn’t have much time to wrap the gifts or make the goody bags. Thankfully, Samantha could keep the kids busy while he took care of those jobs. He found a shelf in the fridge for the cake, and then transported the gifts to his bedroom. Shutting the door behind him, he locked it and let Samantha know the kids could be freed.

  He made quick work of all the goody bags, then set his attention to gift-wrapping. As he stacked the final box on top of the other wrapped gifts, he found himself fighting that too-familiar feeling of emptiness.

  He looked at the stack of gifts on the floor, the basket of goody bags nearby, the pile of balloons hanging on the doorknob. Funny how the moments he should be happiest ended up being the moments he felt the most alone. It was during the birthdays, the first days of school, the tooth-fairy nights and the Christmas cookie baking when he felt the heaviness of single parenthood, and the deep loss of not having someone to share the special moments with.

  He checked his watch. Almost time to get going. He grabbed his phone to let Triss know they would be heading her way in a few minutes, but she’d already texted him. He frowned when he read her message, but he didn’t have a right to be disappointed. Triss was exhausted. She’d had a rough week, and she’d be back on the night shift at Shield tonight. He couldn’t expect her to spend a couple of hours out in the cold at the zoo with a bunch of six-year-olds, especially when she had been trying to make it clear that whatever was between them couldn’t work. He suspected that minor detail had more to do with her canceling than her physical exhaustion. Triss had more energy and drive than anyone he’d ever met.

  Hopefully, Josie wouldn’t be too upset. She was probably so excited about her birthday and her friends that she wouldn’t miss Triss. After all, they’d barely seen each other since August.

  He pulled two balloons out of the bunch—a purple sparkly one and a blue one with a light inside—then opened his door.

  “Who’s ready for a birthday party?” he called.

  The kids came running, squealing. He looped the balloons on their wrists and told them to help bring the presents to the kitchen. They’d meet their friends at the zoo and then come to the house for presents and cake later.

  “What’s in dis one, Dad? What’s in dis one?” Levi asked, hanging on to the wrapped Easy-Bake Oven that Hunter knew he would regret purchasing.

  “I know what these are!” Josie announced, holding a stack of three books he’d wrapped without a box to disguise them. She was an insatiable reader, and he couldn’t keep up. Normally, he checked out stacks at the library for her, but for the past couple of birthdays and Christmases, he’d bought her a set of three new books and she’d been thrilled to receive them, often reading her favorites again and again when she’d gone through her library stacks.

  “Time to go!” Hunter said, and Samantha gave the kids hugs.

  “Sorry I can’t come,” she told Josie, “but I left you a special gift.”

  “That’s okay, Samantha. Thank you.”

  Samantha was a live-in nanny, but Hunter tried to give her the weekends off when he could. As much as she loved Josie, she also had a boyfriend she didn’t get to spend a lot of time with, and Hunter figured that a date night was more appealing to the college-aged girl than an afternoon with her charges and a bunch of giggly friends.

  Minutes later, he was securing Levi into his car seat as Josie began buckling herself in. He knew she wouldn’t forget about Triss, so he decided he may as well tell her now.

  “We’re going to head straight to the zoo to meet your friends instead of picking up Triss, Josie. She couldn’t make it after all, but said she—”

  “What?” Josie stilled, her seat belt not yet clicked into place. “She said she was coming.”

  “I know, but sometimes people’s plans change,” Hunter said, realizing worriedly that Josie’s cheeks were ruddy, her nose suddenly pink. “She wanted to come, but—”

  “And I wanted her to come,” Josie said in a small voice, and the tears started.

  Hunter finished strapping Levi into his seat and then walked around to the other side of the truck, fighting sadness for his daughter and a surprising trickle of anger toward Triss. That wasn’t fair. How was she to know how upset Josie would be?

  He crouched next to her and kissed her forehead and cheek, wiping her tears with his palm. “I’m sorry, sweetie,” he said gently. “I hate to see you sad on your birthday. But all your friends are going to be there, and there are so many animals we’re going to see. Also, I planned a little surprise. Want me to tell you about it?”

  She sniffled and nodded.

  “You and your friends are going to get to help give a baby elephant a bath!”

  Josie laughed through her tears. “Really?”

  He smiled, relieved that she was reaching for happiness again. “Now, are you ready to get this show on the road?”

  She nodded emphatically and wiped away her tears. Hunter kissed her cheek, then double-checked her seat belt before he shut her door and walked around to the driver’s seat.

  But as he pulled away from the house, his attention caught on the rearview mirror, which revealed an expression on Josie’s face that yanked at his heart. He’d known better than to get involved with Triss. He had two little kids to protect from loss and disappointment. They had enough to contend with in life without a mom. He’d do well to keep that at the forefront of his mind.

  NINE

  Triss was crazy. And Hunter was furious. He’d been on his way to Harmony for his shift when Bryan called to let him know that Triss had gone on a run.

  Hunter sped down the road, hands tight on the wheel. What was she thinking? Bryan said she’d insisted it was her routine and she’d refused to let fear change her routine. Well, fear didn’t have to change her routine, but common sense did.

  Up ahead, the stadium came into view, and he slowed, turning the corner into the parking lot. He pulled up next to Bryan’s car and got out.

  Bryan unrolled his window.

  “Where is she?”

  Bryan pointed to the bleachers, and Hunter turned to look, confuse
d for a minute until he spotted a shadow of a figure jogging up the bleachers, a spot of a flashlight along with her.

  “Seriously?”

  “She has her Mace, her gun and her flashlight, and she didn’t like being followed.”

  Hunter shook his head. “I’ll take it from here.”

  “All right. Don’t freeze. See you tonight.”

  Bryan closed the window and pulled away from the empty lot, and Hunter headed toward the bleachers, tamping down his anger and trying to decide the best course of action. If she was going to insist on predawn runs, she’d need to agree to protection.

  He strode around the chain-link fence to an opening, walking through just in time to see Triss reach the bottom of the bleachers and head up again. He leaned against the railing, the feel of cold metal seeping through his jacket as he readied his argument for when she turned and headed to the bottom. Only, he was sidetracked by one thought: she was phenomenal. Wearing dark black running tights and a long-sleeve hoodie, she charged up the high bleachers without a break in stride, the echo of her footsteps pounding on metal in a quick rhythm. She’d wrapped her thick hair into a tight bun, a wide headband covering her ears, and white puffs of breath were visible as she reached the top of the bleachers. Then she turned, barely slowing, and made quick work of the descent, a mini flashlight focused at her feet.

  She didn’t realize Hunter was there until she was near the bottom, and she finally slowed, her face cast in shadows.

  “You don’t have to freeze out here with me,” she said. “I’ve got two more sets, and I’m done.”

  With that, she turned on her heel and started up again. Well, they were already at the stadium, so Hunter figured he’d let her finish her workout. Then, he’d make it perfectly clear why she would have to adjust her workout routine for a while.

  She finished her workout within minutes and finally stepped off the bleachers. “I told you you didn’t have to stay out here with me.”