by Lisa Childs
And that chance was getting slimmer by the second.
“You’re taking the biggest chance here, Payne. If this thing blows up in your face…”
He would have no face or anything else left to worry about. But he was more worried about Stacy and her safety. Maybe he should have let her stay. But he hadn’t seriously thought she would leave. She hadn’t done anything else he’d told her to do.
And maybe she shouldn’t have listened to him this time, either. Maybe this was all a ploy to distract him—to get him to not only let her out of his sight but to actually make her leave him.
“How can I be sure this thing is even real?” Logan asked. If he’d been tricked into letting his protective subject out of his sight, Parker would never let him live it down. And if something happened to Stacy, he wasn’t sure how he would live…without her.
Even when he’d hated her, she’d constantly been in his thoughts, on his mind.
“I’m studying that picture you snapped me,” Captain O’Doyle said, his voice gruff with concern and frustration. “And that thing is not only real but it’s incredibly hard to dismantle.”
Logan’s stomach lurched and he groaned. “Maybe I should just try to evacuate the neighborhood instead.” If he drove through the area and blew the horn on his SUV…
No, Stacy had taken his vehicle. Hopefully she’d taken the SUV and was still driving it far, far away.
“There’s no time,” the captain repeated what Logan had already said. What he already knew.
He drew in a deep breath to steady his nerves and his hands. “Okay, I can do this.” Without exhaling, he drew in another breath, swelling his lungs with air and courage. “I can do this…”
Maybe if he said it enough times, he would convince himself and the captain.
“I need you to be completely focused on my instructions, Payne,” O’Doyle said, “or you’re going to blow yourself up and take most of that neighborhood with you.”
Innocent people would lose their lives. And, if she hadn’t driven far enough outside the danger zone, Stacy would lose her life, too. So he had to focus, like the captain had warned him. Or he wouldn’t be able to protect Stacy or himself.
“Okay,” he said. “Tell me what to do. I’m ready…”
To defuse a bomb. Not to die. He wouldn’t give whoever was trying to kill him the satisfaction of succeeding. And he didn’t want to die before he’d indulged his curiosity—and his inconvenient attraction—to his fake fiancée.
*
STACY’S HEART BEAT fast and furiously. And her hands trembled so badly that she dropped Logan’s keys onto the curb beside the SUV. He wanted her to leave.
He needed her to leave so that he could focus. Knowing that, she picked up the keys and used the fob to unlock the driver’s door. Then she slid behind the wheel and fumbled the keys into the ignition. But she didn’t have the strength to turn the key.
She couldn’t leave Logan to face that kind of danger alone. She would let herself quietly back inside the house; Cujo was so focused on the bomb that he wouldn’t give away her presence. She would be quiet. Logan would never know she was there. But she would be there. For him…
Leaving the keys dangling from the ignition, she opened the driver’s door to step back onto the curb. But before she could close the door behind herself, strong hands wrapped around her arms.
“You can’t make me go,” she said. “I’m not leaving you!”
But those weren’t Logan’s hands on her arms. If they were, her skin would be hot, her pulse racing. Instead, she felt only fear. Fear for him and that bomb he would probably die trying to defuse.
And now she felt fear for herself.
Chapter Ten
Lights flashed—on emergency vehicles and on news crews’ cameras. Logan squinted against the flashes and peered around, but he couldn’t find Stacy. She was gone. He couldn’t really blame her. After all, there had been a bomb about to explode that would have, as he’d suspected, taken out most of the neighborhood. His hands shook slightly now, in reaction, but thankfully they’d been steady when he’d needed them to be. Or no one would have been able to identify what might have been left of his body.
“You should consider joining the ATF,” the bomb squad captain told him. “You have a knack for this.”
“I wouldn’t call it a knack,” he said. “I’d call it really bad luck.”
Clothed all in black with a shaved head, Captain O’Doyle looked like a humorless, no-nonsense kind of man, but he chuckled. “The bad luck would have been if you hadn’t disarmed the bombs.”
“The bad luck was finding two in one day.”
“That is bad luck,” the captain agreed. “What’s going on with you?”
“I wish I knew…” He’d thought it had been about him—all those shots fired at him. But how could someone have known he would be at his brother’s house tonight?
Only Parker and Candace knew…
And whoever might have been milling around the crime scene at his house. Could someone else have blended in with the techs and officers and eavesdropped on their conversation? Maybe they had even seen Parker toss him his house keys?
“What the— What happened here?” Parker asked as he ran up the street from the blockade at the end of it. “My whole neighborhood’s been evacuated!”
“This is his house,” Logan explained to the captain.
“We have to finish clearing it before we can let your neighbors go back to their homes.”
“There are no other explosives,” Logan said, and he reached down to pet Cujo’s head. The German shepherd leaned heavily against his leg, totally exhausted from his day of saving lives. “This former K-9 cop would have found them. He really has a knack for this.”
Captain O’Doyle narrowed his eyes and studied the dog. “We could use him with ATF. You could bring him with you when you join us.” One of the other agents called out to him and he headed off.
“ATF?” Parker asked.
“I have a job,” Logan reminded him.
“Since you seem to have this whole other calling, I wouldn’t mind stepping in as CEO of Payne Protection,” Parker said. “It would be a sacrifice, of course…”
“Of course.” Logan watched as the bomb squad carried off the undetonated bomb. He held his breath, but it didn’t go off in the container as the one at Stacy’s apartment had. This had been an entirely different kind of bomb. So, as ATF had told him, it was either a different bomber or a bomber with different signatures. Or two brothers who’d each constructed one of the bombs?
He focused on his own brother again. “But it’s a sacrifice you won’t need to make.”
“I will if you get yourself killed,” Parker said. “And right now I’d say my chances of taking over as CEO are pretty good. What’s going on?”
Logan shrugged, but his muscles were tense and he grunted at a flash of pain in his wounded shoulder.
“You’ve been shot at more than once and nearly blown up twice,” Parker said.
That wasn’t why he was tense.
“Where is she?” he asked, his heart pounding even harder than it had when he’d been disarming the bomb. But then he’d needed to be calm. That was why he’d told her to leave, so worrying about her safety wouldn’t distract him. So her closeness wouldn’t have his heart pounding as hard and fast as it always did in her presence. “She took my SUV and left. Where is she?”
Parker didn’t ask who, he just asked, “She took off?”
“I told her to,” Logan explained. “I didn’t want her getting hurt. I gave her my keys…”
And he thought she’d taken his SUV and left. But the bomb squad van, which was really the size of a city bus, backed out of the driveway now and revealed the SUV still at the curb where he’d parked it.
“That’s not mine,” his brother said. “I wasn’t allowed onto my own street—let alone anywhere near my driveway.”
Logan hurried over to the SUV and reached for the driver�
�s door. It was already open, the dome light shining onto the empty front seats and reflecting off the keys dangling from the ignition.
She had intended to follow his order to drive off, but something—or somebody—had stopped her. He shouted her name, “Stacy!”
“She’s not here,” Parker stated the obvious. “But she wouldn’t have left the SUV and walked off. The way you two are acting—” he narrowed his eyes on Logan’s face, as if he questioned if they were only acting “—I doubt she would leave you alone with the bomb. I doubt she’d leave you of her own free will at all.”
Apparently Stacy was a better actress than Logan was…because she definitely would have left him. She hadn’t wanted to be here with him at all. She’d wanted to go home. But then after they’d discovered the bomb, she had protested leaving him—until he’d insisted—and before she’d left, she’d given him that kiss.
She could have meant that kiss as goodbye forever or as incentive for another hello…
Logan had taken it as incentive.
“Talk to the officer at the barricade,” Logan directed his brother. “See if they saw her leaving when they drove up to secure the area.”
Parker nodded and hurried back down the street to where the officers and several reporters and other onlookers stood by the barricade. Bulbs flashed and people shouted to him—wanting answers about the evacuation and the presence of the bomb squad. Parker couldn’t give anyone answers; he didn’t have any himself.
Neither did Logan. Who had set the bomb inside the house? It had been very real, but maybe the person who’d set it hadn’t considered it foolproof. And so he’d waited outside to finish off whoever might have escaped the explosion.
Stacy had escaped the bomb, but she hadn’t escaped whoever had taken her right from his vehicle. Had they dragged her off to theirs or was she somewhere in the area?
“Track her,” he ordered Cujo. The dog cocked his head as if trying to understand. “Your mistress. Track her.” Stacy’s scent—her sweet, flowery scent—should be easy for the dog to pick up, Logan figured. He could still smell it—he could smell her—on his clothes and on his skin. The German shepherd lowered his head and sniffed around Logan’s truck, and the black-and-tan fur rose and bristled on his neck and back. He hadn’t picked up just Stacy’s scent; he’d picked up the scent of a stranger, too. The dog followed his nose along the curb and stopped and growled.
Stacy and the stranger’s short trail had disappeared—undoubtedly into the back of another vehicle. Logan had been so careful to make certain that nobody had followed them from his house. But then the bomb proved that someone had beaten him there. They must have parked along the street, waiting to make sure the bomb left no survivors.
But Stacy had survived. The bomb.
But was she alive now?
*
WAS HE ALIVE?
Had he survived the bomb?
Stacy trembled with fear and rage. She leaned forward from the backseat to slam her hand into her brother’s shoulder. The car swerved off the winding drive. “How dare you kidnap me!”
“Don’t do that!” Garek protested. “Aunt Marta will kill me if I put ruts in her lawn.”
Not that Aunt Marta had ever done her own landscaping. She had a grounds crew for that and a house crew to clean the three-story brick mansion to which Garek was driving up.
“And we didn’t kidnap you,” Milek said, adding his two cents from the shotgun seat.
“You grabbed me off the street like a couple thugs!” she reminded them.
“You were going to run back into a house that you told us had a bomb in it,” Milek argued. And they actually hadn’t pushed her into their backseat until she’d told them about the bomb. “We couldn’t let you risk your life.”
“What about Logan?” she asked.
“We don’t care about his life,” Garek replied. “And for the past fifteen years, neither did you.”
“I care,” she said. It was no longer a lie. “Take me back there.”
Garek shook his head as he turned off the car. “Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t,” he said. “The police were evacuating the neighborhood as we were leaving.”
“Why were you there?” she asked. She would have asked them earlier, but she’d been too furious with them, too furious that they were taking her away from Logan and leaving him alone to face peril.
“We were there to protect you,” Milek said.
“Logan is protecting me,” she said. Hopefully doing so hadn’t cost him his life. Her stomach pitched at the thought—the horror—of Logan dying. Part of that horror was guilt that she had once wished him dead aloud when his statement to the parole board had kept her father in prison.
“He’s not doing a very good job of protecting you,” Garek complained as he opened the back door for her. He’d locked it earlier so that she hadn’t been able to escape the car and run back to Logan and the bomb. “He brought you back to his place which got all shot up. You could’ve been killed.”
“You were there?” she asked.
Had they done the shooting? She hadn’t thought they would put her life in danger—not even to take Logan’s. That was why she’d proposed to the man she’d always considered an enemy—to keep her brothers from doing something they would regret. Or that she, at least, would regret.
Garek narrowed his eyes and stared at her disapprovingly, like the overprotective big brother he’d always been. “We followed you from your place to his.”
Logan had told them where he was bringing her. Had they doubted him? Did they doubt their engagement?
“And then you followed us to his brother’s?” She hoped they’d followed and not gone ahead to set that bomb. But these were her brothers. They wouldn’t risk her life. Would they?
“You didn’t ask us if we saw who shot at you at his house,” Milek mused. “Why? Did Logan Payne convince you it was us?”
She couldn’t deny that he’d tried, but she shook her head. “Did you see anything? At Logan’s house? Or at Parker’s? Did you see anything suspicious?”
“After we followed you back to Logan’s, we left for a while,” Milek said with a glance toward the house and the woman who stood in the open doorway.
Following his gaze, she gasped in shock that it wasn’t Aunt Marta who stood in the doorway but Mrs. Payne. Aunt Marta and Uncle Iwan stood behind her. Marta looked ready to throw her out while Uncle Iwan just looked as confused as Stacy was.
“I thought you brought me here for an intervention,” Stacy said.
Garek laughed. “That would have been a better idea. You must be on something if you’re really considering marrying Logan Payne. We should’ve brought you to rehab instead of bringing you here.”
“Why did you bring me here?” she asked…if it hadn’t been to talk her out of marrying Logan Payne. But her stomach pitched again as she realized they might not need to talk her out of anything. She might have already lost her fake fiancé—not to the truth but to a bomb.
Garek gritted his teeth so hard that his words were barely audible as he replied, “We brought you here to plan your wedding.”
“Not because we think you should marry this creep,” Milek said, his voice low so only she and their brother could hear. “We don’t think you should. We don’t think you actually will.”
“We think you’re teaching us a lesson,” Garek said. “Or maybe you’re teaching him a lesson. Or maybe you’re just messing with everyone’s heads. But you’re not marrying him.” He shook his head as if he was trying to convince her—or himself.
“Then why bring me here to plan my wedding?” she asked. Here, of all places. She’d hated living with her aunt and uncle so much that she would have accepted the woman’s offer to send her off to boarding school if it wouldn’t have been too hard for Stacy to visit her brothers and father in jail.
With a sigh of resignation, Milek replied, “Because she asked us to.”
Not Aunt Marta. She would want even less to do with he
r niece’s wedding than Milek and Garek did. Mrs. Payne had asked them, and because Mrs. Payne had asked them, they had obliged her.
Mrs. Payne must not have known about the bomb, or she would have been at Parker’s house despite the evacuation order. She would have been there making sure she wouldn’t have to plan a funeral rather than a wedding.
Stacy dragged her feet as she approached that open doorway. She didn’t want to be the one to tell his mother about the bomb. She didn’t want to break a heart that had already been shattered when the woman had lost her husband. But then tires squealed as another car pulled through the gates of the estate, and she turned back toward the black SUV.
Before the vehicle came to a complete stop, Logan threw open the door and jumped out. He was alive! Relief flooded her, weakening her knees as she trembled from the surge.
Garek cursed. “How did he know where to find us?”
The bigger question was how had he survived a bomb? According to him, Cooper had only given him a crash course in improvised explosive devices and he’d gotten lucky last time.
“I told Logan where to meet us, of course,” Mrs. Payne said as she joined them on the front steps. Maybe Aunt Marta had thrown her out of her house. “He needs to help plan his wedding.”
He wanted nothing to do with a wedding—at least not with a wedding to her. He was going to expose her for the liar that she was. But Stacy didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything except that he was alive.
*
STRUCK WITH SUCH FORCE, Logan stumbled back. It was nothing in comparison to what the blast of the bomb might have been had the bomb gone off. But Stacy had nearly exploded off the front steps of her uncle’s house as she’d vaulted into his arms. He caught her, his arms closing around her as if they knew she belonged in them. With him…
God, Mom was getting to him with all her brainwashing romance nonsense. Over Stacy’s head, he glared at his mother. Why had she come here of all places? And had Garek and Milek bring Stacy here, as well?
One of these people was a killer. Heck, maybe all of these people were killers. Or they would be if one of the bullets had struck, if one of the bombs had exploded.