Explosive Engagement

by Lisa Childs

“All you need is Ms. Kozminski’s permission. She was his power of attorney and legal representative.”

  Both men turned to her, but Stacy hesitated. She wasn’t certain what Logan hoped to gain by looking over visitor logs for either prisoner.

  “If we’re going to find out who’s after us, we need to get as much information as we can,” Logan said.

  It was true. It was why they were there. She nodded her agreement. “Yes, I’d like to see the logs.”

  Borgess turned back toward his office. “I will personally pull those from my computer and print them out. It will only take a moment.”

  A moment for fifteen years of visits? Was that how few people had visited her father?

  Regret and loss pulled heavily on Stacy, and she dropped back into the chair she’d been sitting in before the warden had stepped out of his office.

  “Are you okay?” Logan asked, his deep voice vibrating with concern.

  “Can I get you anything?” the secretary inquired.

  Her father. That was all she wanted back. But he was gone forever.

  Maybe that was why she had become engaged to Logan, why she’d left her family to be with him. So she wouldn’t feel so alone. But she knew that he wasn’t going to stay her fiancé, let alone ever become her husband. As soon as they were safe again, they would break up.

  *

  WARDEN BORGESS WAS only gone a few minutes. But it felt much longer, and with each second that ticked past, Stacy had grown more pale and shaky. If she hadn’t already thought Logan was an uncaring jerk, she certainly would have after today.

  He never should have brought her back here. Forcing her to do so had been heartless and insensitive. But the warden wouldn’t have handed over the visitor logs, as he was now, without Stacy’s permission.

  “If there’s anything else I can do for you, please let me know,” the warden said, but he spoke to Stacy, his gaze warm with concern and maybe attraction. He was a young warden, and his ring finger was bare.

  But then so was Stacy’s and she was engaged now. He really should have gotten her a ring…

  “We’d also like her father’s personal effects,” Logan added.

  “I already gave those to Ms. Kozminski,” Borgess said. “The day her father died.”

  The day the bomb had been set to blow up her apartment and anyone and anything inside it. The minute they’d stepped through the door, the timer had been tripped so that it had begun counting down the less than a minute they would have had to get out of the place. Was that why it had been set—to destroy whatever Patek Kozminski might have left behind?

  He couldn’t share his suspicions with Stacy in front of the warden, though. He didn’t entirely trust the man. The prisoner who’d killed her father had turned up dead a bit too conveniently and easily for Logan’s peace of mind. Because he didn’t want to reveal any of his theories, he even waited until they’d exited the prison gates and climbed back inside the damaged black SUV before looking at the logs.

  Stacy sat quietly in the passenger’s seat as if the prison visit had physically drained her. But then she hadn’t gotten much rest—because they had been too busy making love to sleep.

  “What do you see?” she asked.

  “A woman who loved her father very much,” he replied honestly as he brushed a strand of hair back from her face and tucked it behind her ear.

  She shivered, but it wasn’t from cold. Maybe his touch had given her chills. She sighed and said, “I meant in the logs.”

  He’d perused them quickly but one name had kept jumping out at him. “I saw that in the log,” he said. “In how many times you visited him.”

  She shrugged. “It wasn’t enough.”

  “Once a week?”

  She uttered another shaky sigh. “That was all that was allowed, but I wish it had been more.”

  “At least you came as often as you could,” he said. “I still feel guilty for all those times I blew off watching a game or going to the restaurant with my old man so that I could hang out with my friends instead.”

  “You were a teenager,” she excused him. “Teenagers think they and everyone around them are immortal.”

  Her visits hadn’t been any less frequent when she’d been younger. She’d always made time for her father. But then she’d already known there was no such thing as immortality or her dad wouldn’t have been in prison for taking a life.

  But had he taken it?

  Maybe Stacy was getting to him, but he was beginning to have his doubts. He was beginning to wonder if she was right. That her father and his hadn’t been alone that night that one of them had died and the other had been arrested for it.

  “Nobody’s immortal,” he murmured as he started the SUV. “That’s why we need to figure out who’s after us. Because eventually we’re not going to survive the bombs or the gunshots.”

  She shuddered.

  “That’s why I brought you here,” he said as he drove out of the prison lot. “I wouldn’t have put you through coming back here for any other reason.”

  “You weren’t just torturing me?”

  “I don’t want to hurt you.” That was why he’d tried to resist her last night; he hadn’t wanted to take advantage of her vulnerability. But she’d wanted him. Last night. Today she would barely even look at him.

  “Not anymore,” she said of his statement.

  “I never wanted to hurt you,” he said. “That’s not why I showed up at your father’s parole hearings. I just wanted justice for my father.” But now he wondered if in that quest for justice a horrible injustice had taken place.

  “Then you should find out who really killed him,” she suggested.

  He nodded in agreement. “I intend to look into it more,” he said. “I want to know the truth.”

  She grasped his arm. “Thank you. Thank you for listening to me.”

  It wasn’t just her certainty that had given him doubts but also what he’d found in the visitor logs. Instead of taking the turn toward the city, he turned toward the rural outskirts. “That’s why we’re going to talk to someone else who was there that night.”

  “Your father’s old partner? You’re not going to learn the truth from him. For fifteen years, he’s been blaming my father.”

  “Then why has he been visiting him nearly as often as you have?”

  She sucked in a breath. Of shock.

  Logan had felt the same way when he’d seen the name on the visitors logs. Shocked. And confused. He probably would have felt the same way over his mother’s name appearing frequently in the logs—if she hadn’t already admitted to visiting the man. But his mother’s visits made more sense; she was the forgiving sort. Robert Cooper wasn’t.

  “I don’t like the man,” she admitted.

  Neither did Logan. When he had been with the police department, he’d never lost a partner. And since he’d gone into private protection, he had never lost a client. He couldn’t understand how Robert Cooper had lost his partner.

  “But you’re right,” she continued, “that we need to talk to him. He must know more about that night than he admitted—like who else was there.”

  “But why would he have let that person get away with murder?” Robert Cooper might not have been a good cop, but he’d still been a cop. And to let a criminal get away with murder…

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Nothing about that night ever made any sense to me.”

  “But you were fourteen then and convinced that your father was the greatest man in the world.” At seventeen, he hadn’t been much older but he’d believed the same thing about his father. “What if we find out it really was your father who killed mine?” Would she be able to handle her father’s guilt?

  Her face grew pale again and her eyes widened with horror. “It wasn’t my dad. It couldn’t have been…”

  Chapter Fifteen

  But what if it had been?

  Would Stacy be able to deal with her father not being the man she had always believed him to
be? She’d known he was a thief. He had never hidden that from his family.

  But a killer?

  She couldn’t accept that.

  “Are you okay?” Logan asked again.

  She nodded. Even if it was true, she would be okay. But they would never be okay. She wouldn’t be able to be with him again knowing that her father took his father from him. She would never be able to make up for what he’d lost, never be able to give him enough love to make up for the love he’d lost.

  Love?

  Did she love Logan Payne?

  Panic clutched her heart. Damn it. Damn him…

  She had fallen for her fake fiancé. But those feelings would never be reciprocated—probably not even if they learned that someone else had killed his father. If she hadn’t forced herself on him, would he have made love to her?

  She doubted it.

  “How much farther?” she asked. They’d been driving for a while on what had seemed like a rather circuitous route. But then through the trees sunshine glimmered off water. They’d been traveling around lakes.

  “Not much,” he replied. But despite the curvy roads, Logan had had more attention on the rearview mirror than the windshield.

  “Is someone following us again?” she asked. Panic pressed on her lungs, stealing her breath. He’d saved them last night because whoever had been following them hadn’t just wanted to know where they were going, they’d wanted them dead.

  He shrugged. “Maybe…”

  So that meant yes.

  “Did you lose them?” she asked.

  He shrugged again. “Maybe…”

  But when he stopped the SUV, he kept his hand on his holster when he stepped out of it. He leaned back inside. “You can stay here,” he suggested.

  For her protection from whoever had followed them or from whatever his father’s older partner might say about that night?

  “I want to hear this, too,” she said. “I want to know why he visited my dad.” She’d looked at the logs and couldn’t believe that the man who’d arrested her father had visited him more than his own brother had.

  And even more than his sons had.

  But then part of that time, they had been busy serving their own sentences behind bars. Because of her…

  And Aunt Marta had never visited her brother-in-law. Which was odd given that before she’d married Uncle Iwan, she had dated Stacy’s dad. But then he’d fallen for her mother or at least for her beauty. There wasn’t much more to her mom than her looks, which she constantly used to find a richer, more successful man. That was why Stacy’s dad had started stealing—to provide for the woman. But it had never been enough.

  Too bad the woman hadn’t realized that nothing was more valuable than love. True love.

  If only Stacy could find that for herself…with Logan. But he was barely aware of her now, his hand on his weapon and his gaze scanning the trees surrounding the little log cabin where his father’s old partner must have retired. With rough-sawn logs and a wraparound porch, it was rustic but charming.

  Birds chirped, and brush and branches rustled from the feet of scurrying squirrels and chipmunks. She’d been a city girl her whole life, but she could see the appeal of such a remote area. The peace…

  But then shots rang out, shattering the peace.

  *

  “DAMN IT!” LOGAN shouted as he crouched behind the driver’s door he’d left open.

  “Duck down!” he yelled at Stacy. But she’d already lain across the front seat as much as the seat belt she still wore allowed her to move.

  Had they been followed from the prison as he’d suspected? Or were the shots coming from the house? When he looked back at the cabin, he noticed a gun barrel protruding from an open window.

  “It’s me, Cooper!” he yelled. “Don’t shoot!”

  “You’ve gotta be kidding me!” the older man said as he hurried out the front door, the shotgun slung over his shoulder. “I thought you were those damn kids…”

  “Kids?” Logan asked, wondering why the retired cop would have been shooting at kids, either.

  Robert Cooper shoved a shaking hand through gray hair that was standing on end. “They’ve been breaking into the summer cottages around here.”

  “So you were going to shoot them?” Logan asked. Had the retired cop lost it? He was older than Logan’s dad would have been; Robert had been the senior officer of their doomed partnership.

  “I was shooting up in the air, so I wouldn’t hit anyone. I just wanted to scare ’em,” Robert said.

  “Mission accomplished.” Logan glanced at Stacy, who was still crouched below the dash. “It’s okay,” he assured her. But he wasn’t certain of that—if the old man had lost it…

  “I wouldn’t have fired if I’d realized it was you,” Cooper said. “But you’ve never been here before—not like your brothers have.”

  His brothers were more forgiving than he was; Stacy could vouch to that.

  “They’ve come up to fish on the lake with me,” Robert continued. “Have you come up to fish, Logan?”

  He had, but for information instead of actual fish. He replied, “I’m not the sportsmen my brothers are.” He walked around the car and opened the passenger’s door for Stacy.

  “You didn’t come alone?” Robert asked.

  Stacy stepped out, and the older man uttered a loud gasp. “Is that the Kozminski girl?”

  “Yes,” she answered for herself.

  The older man chuckled gruffly, awkwardly. “I never thought I would see the two of you together. Since you were kids, you’ve been sniping at each other.”

  But they weren’t sniping at each other anymore. “Someone else is sniping at us,” Logan said. “With guns—”

  “I wouldn’t have shot if I’d known it was you,” the older man said again.

  “I’m not talking about today,” Logan explained. “We’ve been getting shot at the past couple of days and someone even set a bomb in Stacy’s apartment.”

  The retired cop turned to her. “But you’re all right? It didn’t go off?”

  She shook her head. “Logan defused it.”

  “He was with you then, too?”

  “We’re together now,” Logan said. “We’re actually engaged.” Whether the engagement was real or not didn’t matter…because the feelings between them—the complicated, messy feelings—were real.

  The older man gasped again and pushed his knuckles against his chest, as if the news had shocked him so much he was having chest pains.

  Logan started toward him. “Are you all right?”

  He nodded. “I—I just can’t believe you two could ever overcome your differences.”

  Logan wasn’t certain how that had happened, either—except that he had finally stopped blaming Stacy for supporting her father and had begun to admire her fierce loyalty. “I’m not sure we’re all that different,” he admitted. “We both love our families. Our fathers…”

  She turned toward him, her gray eyes showing her surprise and appreciation.

  But the retired cop expressed his surprise with a coarse curse before adding, “Her father killed yours. I didn’t think that was something you’d ever get over, Logan.”

  “My father didn’t pull the trigger,” she said.

  “He told you that?” Robert asked. “He told you that he didn’t do it?”

  She shook her head. “He would never talk to me about that night. But I know he didn’t do it—that he couldn’t take another man’s life.”

  “What did he tell you?” Logan asked the former officer.

  The older man glared in annoyance. “You know what he told me. You read the report. You were in court for my testimony. Your father caught him stealing and they struggled over the gun.”

  “I’m not talking about what he told you that night,” Logan clarified. “I’m talking about what he told you all the times you visited him in prison.”

  The retired cop’s already ruddy face flushed deep red. “What are you talking abou
t?”

  Stacy held up the visitor logs that the warden had printed out for her. “It’s on here—all your visits to my father.”

  “Several over the years,” Logan said. “Almost regular visits. If you knew everything you needed to about the night my father died, why did you keep going back to talk to his killer—unless you knew that he wasn’t the killer.”

  His face flushed an even deeper shade of red until he was nearly purple. But his voice was gruff with disappointment when he replied, “You let her get to you, Logan.”

  “She’s convinced that her father didn’t pull the trigger,” Logan said, “that someone else was there that night.”

  “There was,” Stacy insisted.

  Logan stepped closer to the porch, careful to stay between the loaded shotgun and Stacy. The ex-cop might not have been as forgiving as Logan had found himself to be regarding the daughter of the man convicted of killing his father.

  “Did you see someone else?” Logan asked Robert. “Is that why you kept going to see Kozminski? To find out who was with him that night?”

  The older man sighed. “There could have been someone else…”

  “Why didn’t that get into your report?” Logan asked. “Or your testimony?”

  “There may have been someone else,” he said. “But there was definitely Kozminski. He was there robbing the place. I wasn’t going to let him get away with murder because of reasonable doubt.”

  Logan had it now. Reasonable doubt. And Robert Cooper must have, too, because he’d kept visiting Kozminski.

  “Who was it?” Stacy asked. “Who did you see?”

  The older man shook his head. “Just a shadow fleeing the building. I would have given chase, but I wanted to make sure my partner was all right. I’d already fallen too far behind him during pursuit, and he wasn’t answering his radio call.”

  Logan shuddered as he realized why: because his father had been lying dead on the jewelry store floor with Patek Kozminski standing over him. That was the image he’d always had in his head—the image Robert Cooper had put there with his report and his testimony. And that was why Logan had stayed so angry at Stacy’s father.

  “So you just decided to pin a murder on my father that he didn’t commit?” Stacy asked, her voice rising with anger.