Fugitive Bride

by Paula Graves

  Owen stared at the pistol, trying not to feel queasy. “I have, but—”

  “No buts. You’re trained to use it. Which means you also know when not to use it. Trust your training. And your own good sense.” Heller handed Owen the key. “Quinn sent over a team from your department to set up a computer. You should be able to access the office server through an untraceable remote access program. I’m told you’re the one who created the system, so I’m sure you know how to make it work.”

  Owen managed a weak smile, his gaze wandering back to the open pistol case. “Computers I can do.”

  Heller clapped his hand over Owen’s shoulder. “You can handle all of it. Remember your training. Let it do the work for you.”

  Owen walked Heller to the front door. “Any idea when we can expect to hear something from you or Quinn or whoever?”

  “Soon. I can’t be more specific until Quinn’s finished his investigation.” Heller’s smile carved dimples in his tanned cheeks, making him look a decade younger. “We’re on your side, Stiles. Try to relax. We’ll be in touch.”

  Owen blew out a long breath after he closed the door behind Heller, his heart pounding in his chest. What the hell had he and Tara stumbled into? And how was he supposed to protect her when he was shaking in his boots?

  “There’s a gun on your bed.”

  Tara’s voice made him jump. He turned to look at her. “Heller left it for me, in case we need it.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Do you know how to use it?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked tired and scared, her arms wrapped protectively around herself. Still in the tattered remains of her wedding dress, she looked small and vulnerable, two words he’d never before associated with Tara. The Tara he knew was fierce and invincible. Seeing her so uncertain, so fragile, made his stomach ache.

  “You need a shower and some sleep.” He crossed to where she stood, rubbing his hands lightly up and down her arms. “Come on, let’s see if we can find the bathroom.”

  She flung her arms around him suddenly, pressing her face to his chest. Her arms tightened around his waist, her grip fierce. “Thank you.”

  He wrapped his arms around her, wishing he could ease the tremble he felt in her limbs. “For what?”

  “You came to find me, even when I told you not to worry.” She looked up at him. “You always do.”

  “Always will,” he promised.

  Her gaze seemed to be searching his face for something. He wasn’t sure what. Reassurance? Reliability?

  Tell me what you want, Tara, and I’ll give it to you.

  “You’re right about one thing. I need a shower and about a week of sleep,” Tara said, pulling away from his embrace.

  He needed a shower, too, but he felt suddenly wide awake, as if the reality of their dilemma had flooded his veins with adrenaline. He needed to figure out why Robert had been murdered and how it related to Tara’s kidnapping.

  Tara had disappeared into her room, and the sound of running water coming from behind the closed door meant there must be a bathroom connected to her room. His bedroom didn’t have an en suite bathroom, but the large bathroom just down the hall was more than convenient.

  He took a quick shower, changed into a pair of jeans and a thick sweatshirt, and settled down at the desk nestled in the corner of his bedroom, where one of his colleagues in the computer security section had provided a high-tech setup.

  Everything was up and running, so he connected to the Campbell Cove Security system and quickly found the files on Robert Mallory’s murder. The details were sketchy, but the agent Quinn had assigned to compile information, Steve Bartlett, had pulled together a timeline of the murder, including the details Owen had provided to Quinn over the phone.

  The coroner would narrow down the time of death, but witness testimony suggested that he’d been killed between two thirty, when his father had talked to him briefly as the groom was dressing, and around three thirty, when the best man had stopped in the groom’s dressing room for a last minute pep talk and found his body.

  Tara had been abducted about ten minutes after three, which gave her only a partial alibi for the murder, unless the coroner could nail down a more precise time of death for Robert. Had her abduction been part of the murder plot? But why grab her? Why not just shoot her the way Robert had been shot?

  Owen rubbed his gritty eyes. Adrenaline might be keeping his brain awake, but his body was aching with exhaustion. He needed rest. To give his brain a break so he’d be focused and clearheaded enough to make sense of the tangled threads that might—or might not—connect the abduction and the murder.

  The only thing Owen was sure about was his own involvement. He wouldn’t have been anywhere near Tara and her kidnappers if she hadn’t made that phone call to him. He had been in the church vestibule with the bridesmaids and would have remained there until Tara arrived for the start of the ceremony.

  He had been collateral damage. Tara had been the target.

  But why?

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  His keyed-up nerves jumped at the sound of Tara’s voice behind him. He swiveled his chair to look at her and felt an immediate jolt to his libido.

  Her dark hair, still damp from the shower, fell in tousled waves over her shoulders. She’d found a long-sleeved T-shirt that fit snugly over her curves. It was thin enough for him to see that she wasn’t wearing a bra.

  He forced his gaze down to the slim fit of the gray yoga pants that revealed the rest of her curves, the well-toned thighs and shapely calves. She was always worrying that she was a little too curvy, but he thought she was perfect. Soft and sleek in all the right places.

  “I couldn’t sleep, either.” He had a lot of practice suppressing his desire for her. He put it to use now, ignoring the stirring sensation in his jeans and concentrating on the fleeting expressions crossing Tara’s face.

  She had never been one to wear her feelings on her sleeve, and over the years she’d gotten pretty good at hiding her thoughts, even from him. He wasn’t sure now if he could read her emotions, but she couldn’t hide the sadness shadowing her green eyes.

  He crossed to where she stood and waited. If she wanted his comfort, she’d take it.

  She caught one of his hands in hers, a fleeting brush of her fingers across his. Then she dropped her hand back to her side. “I wonder if the story has made the local news,” she murmured, wandering toward the hallway.

  He followed her into the front room, where she sat on the sofa, picked up the remote on the coffee table and turned on the TV. He settled beside her as she started flipping channels, looking for a local news station.

  He hated to tell her the story might already have made the national cable news channels by now. It was sensational enough to draw the attention of news directors looking for stories to fill their twenty-four-hour formats.

  He was right. She settled on one of the cable news stations, her attention arrested by a photograph of her own face filling the screen. “Fugitive Bride” was the graphic that filled the bottom of the screen in big, blocky letters.

  “Oh, lovely,” she muttered.

  Unfortunately, the cable station didn’t have any extra information about Robert Mallory’s murder, though there was plenty of innuendo about the bride’s untimely disappearance. The newsreader skirted the edge of libel. Barely.

  As the news host moved on to a different story, Tara turned off the TV and lowered her head to her hands. “Robert’s parents must be distraught.”

  “I’m sure they are.”

  “They must believe I killed him. It’s what everyone believes, right?”

  “No, of course not. No one who knows you believes that.”

  “Not that many people know me. Do they?”

  He wanted to contradict her, but what she sai
d was true. Tara had never made it easy for people to get to know her. Even Owen, who’d been her closest friend since childhood, knew there were pieces of herself she didn’t share with him and probably never would.

  She was good at her job as an analyst for a global security think tank based in Brody, Virginia, just across the state line. But how many of her colleagues there really knew her? They knew her qualifications, her educational background, her experience in security analysis gained working for a defense contractor for several years right out of college.

  But did they know what she liked to do when she was home alone? Did they know she was a sucker for kittens, dark chocolate and flannel pajamas? Did they know that she made lists she wouldn’t throw away until she’d marked off everything written there?

  Did they know there was no way in hell she’d ever have killed Robert Mallory?

  “Why would someone kill Robert and kidnap you?” he asked aloud.

  “I don’t know.”

  “It seems weird, doesn’t it? Kidnapping you might have made sense if they were looking for ransom. I know you said Robert wasn’t rich enough for kidnapping for ransom to make sense, but his parents are. So I could see the kidnappers pressuring Robert to pay up for your release, if they knew he could ask his parents for money.”

  “But instead, Robert was murdered. By the same people?”

  “Obviously not the same people as our kidnappers, but maybe someone they were working with?”

  “But why?” Tara asked. “If kidnapping me was to collect a ransom, why on earth did they kill Robert?”

  “I don’t know,” Owen admitted, turning to face her. He took her hands in his, squeezing them firmly. “But I promise you this—we’re going to figure this out. And we’re going to make sure nothing like this happens to you again.”

  She gave him a look somewhere between love and pity before she released his hands and rose from the sofa. She crossed to the window and gazed out at the sun-bleached lawn that stretched from the side of the house to the sheltering oaks encroaching on the farm yard.

  She looked terribly, tragically alone. And not for the first time in his life, Owen wondered if she’d ever really let anyone inside her circle of one.

  * * *

  THE WARRANT IN HAND gave Archer Trask and his team the right to search Tara Jane Bentley’s small bungalow for any firearm she might own. As she was already a person of interest in a murder, he did not have to announce his presence before forcing entry, since doing so might give her time to flee if she was inside the home. But when he opened the front door, all optimistic notions of finding Tara Bentley hiding out at home went out the window.

  The place had been trashed, top to bottom, and from the faintly sour smell in the kitchen, where the refrigerator contents lay in a spilled or broken mess across the tile floor, it hadn’t happened in the past few hours.

  Next to him, one of the deputies uttered a succinct profanity.

  Trask got on his radio and ordered a crime scene unit to meet him at Tara Bentley’s house. He didn’t know if this destruction had anything to do with what had happened to Robert Mallory, but someone had tossed this place, clearly looking for something.

  But what? What secrets was Ms. Bentley keeping? And did those secrets have anything to do with Mallory’s death?

  He stepped gingerly back through the living room at the front of the house, pausing as a framed photograph lying on the floor caught his eye. The glass was cracked, but the photo remained intact. Dark-haired Tara Bentley, grinning at the camera, leaning head-to-head with a dark-haired man with sharp blue eyes. His smile was a little less exuberant than hers, but he was clearly happy to be with her.

  “Owen Stiles,” Trask murmured.

  “Sir?” a passing deputy asked.

  “Stiles,” he repeated, showing the man the photograph. “Bentley’s partner in crime.”

  “You think the bride killed the groom and ran off with the best man?”

  “Not the best man. The man of honor. He was standing up for the bride, not the groom.” Trask put the photograph back on the floor where he’d found it and walked out the front door, motioning for the other deputies to follow him. They crossed back to their vehicles to wait for the crime scene unit to arrive.

  Leaning against the front panel of his unmarked sedan, Trask pulled out his phone and dialed a number. A deep-voiced man with a distinctive drawl answered on the second ring. “Heller.”

  “Mr. Heller, it’s Archer Trask. We met back in December when I was looking into the threats against Charlie Winters.”

  Heller’s voice was wary. “I remember.”

  “I need to talk to you about one of your employees, Owen Stiles. I can be there later today, if you can see me?”

  There was a brief pause. “Of course. Three o’clock?”

  “I’ll be there.” He pocketed his phone and looked around the neat property, trying to picture Tara Bentley there. The place was small but well maintained. He suspected the house would have been the same if someone hadn’t trashed it.

  “What were they looking for, Tara?” he murmured aloud.

  And where are you now?

  Chapter Five

  The blank notepad on the desk in front of her seemed to be taunting her. With a grimace, Tara picked up her pen and wrote a single word across the top of the pad: Why?

  Why had those two men kidnapped her? Why had someone killed Robert? Were the two events connected?

  Surely they had to be. It would be too much of a coincidence if they weren’t.

  She wrote those two questions beneath the header. Below that, she wrote another word: What?

  What had the kidnappers wanted from her? What had they been planning to do with her? Ask for a ransom? Trade her for someone else, like a hostage exchange? If so, for whom?

  A quiet knock on the bedroom door set her nerves rattling. “Come in,” she called, turning to watch Owen enter her bedroom.

  “I thought you were going to take a nap,” he said.

  “I tried,” she lied. She hadn’t tried, because the questions swirling through her head wouldn’t let her rest.

  The look Owen sent her way suggested he knew she was lying, but he didn’t call her on it. Instead, he sat on the edge of the bed and leaned toward the desk beside it. “Making lists?”

  “It’s what I do.”

  His lips curved in a half smile, carving distinguished lines in his handsome face. He really had no idea how beautiful a man he was, but she knew. He’d been something of a late bloomer, growing into his lanky frame and thin, serious face. By the time adulthood had fulfilled the nascent promise of good looks that had only occasionally flashed into view during his awkward adolescence, his quiet nature and tendency toward shyness had already left an indelible mark on his personality.

  He was brilliant at his work as a computer wizard, possibly because of his tendency to hide behind the computer screen, where he was the king of his own little world. His circle of close friends was even smaller than Tara’s, and hers wasn’t exactly expansive. In fact, Robert Mallory had been the first person she’d let get close to her in years. And now that he was gone, she was feeling a crushing amount of guilt at having led him on when she was beginning to admit to herself that she’d never really loved him the way she’d claimed to.

  Owen picked up the notepad. “You think your kidnapping and Robert’s murder are connected?”

  “Do you think it’s likely they’re not?”

  He thought for a moment before replying. “No. But damned if I can figure out what the connection might be.”

  Tara rubbed her gritty eyes. “That’s where I am. I have no idea why anyone would have abducted me. Ransom is the usual reason, but if that was the motive, why on earth would someone kill the only person with the potential to supply the money?�
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  Owen’s gaze narrowed. “These are the thoughts keeping you from sleep?”

  She frowned. “You think that’s strange?”

  “I think you’re avoiding what’s really driving your unease.”

  Here we go, she thought. Owen was going to psychoanalyze her again. As usual. She leaned back in her chair and folded her arms across her chest. “I suppose you’re going to tell me what I’m avoiding?”

  His lips pressed into a thin line of annoyance, as she’d known they would. But his irritation didn’t deter him. “Your fiancé was murdered today. You were kidnapped, rather roughly, if those bruises on your arms are any indication. But rather than deal with the fear and grief you must be feeling, you’re making lists.” He picked up the notepad and flipped it onto the bed beside him. “This is what you always do.”

  “And this is what you always do,” she snapped, snatching the notepad from the bed and putting it back on the desk in front of her. “You think you know what I’m feeling and when I tell you you’re wrong, you tell me I’m sublimating my emotions or something.”

  “Because you are.”

  “Says you.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Infuriating man! She turned back to the desk and picked up her pen, determined to shut out him and his unsolicited opinions.

  “I’m sorry,” he said a moment later, after she’d struggled without any luck to come up with another entry for her list. “I’ve known you so long, I tend to think I know everything you’re thinking or feeling, but obviously, I don’t. So why don’t you tell me about your list?”

  Even though she suspected his apology was just a backdoor attempt to get back to his psychoanalysis of her emotional state, she hated when she and Owen were at odds, so she handed him the list she’d made. “Like I said, I think my kidnapping and Robert’s murder have to be connected. But I don’t know how.”