by Lisa Childs
“Who’s there?” Tammy asked.
“I have to go…?.”
“Don’t open that door,” Tammy advised her, “until you make sure it’s safe.”
She and Thad alone in the house damn well weren’t safe, but she wanted to hear whatever he’d learned today. “It’s okay.”
“It’s Thad,” Tammy said with a triumphant giggle. “Have fun!”
Shaking her head at her friend’s hopeless romanticism, Caroline opened the door.
“Did I do something wrong already?” he asked, noting her head shake. “Or is that still?”
“You tell me.” Despite the warning bells ringing inside her head, Caroline stepped back to let him inside and closed the door behind him.
“Where’s the little man?”
“At my friend Tammy’s.”
He tensed. “Is that a good idea?”
“Given how well I watched him at the mall, it’s a great idea,” she said, berating herself. “Tammy’s never lost one of her children.”
In addition to Steven Jr., she had a three-year-old daughter, Bethany. The little girl adored Mark, but he only tolerated her. Now. Tammy swore that someday they would get married.
Thad cupped her shoulders and squeezed them. “Stop beating yourself up about last night,” he admonished. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I never should have taken that call.”
“You wouldn’t have if I’d showed up when I was supposed to,” he said, shouldering the blame himself. “And you really just glanced down for a second. I saw it on the security tape.”
Fear quickened her pulse. “Did you see who grabbed him?”
He shook his head. “It was such a crowd. We couldn’t even find Mark on any of the security footage except by the carousel.”
“We?”
“My brother helped me go through the tapes.” He sighed. “He knows about you and Mark, which means—” he glanced at his wrist watch “—that by now my whole family probably knows.”
“Shouldn’t you have told them yourself?” she asked, hurt that he wouldn’t have chosen to make such an announcement personally.
“I would have,” he said. “But I’m sure Ash didn’t trust me to do it, so he spilled.”
“You should go to them,” she urged, worried about his family’s reaction. The Kendalls weren’t the type to have children out of wedlock. If Thad hadn’t introduced her before because he’d thought his family wouldn’t consider her worthy of a Kendall, they would probably hate her now. “Explain that you didn’t know, that I didn’t tell you…”
“You seem in an awful hurry to get rid of me.” His blue eyes narrowed. “Are you worried about being alone with me?”
She forced a yawn despite the adrenaline coursing through her at his nearness. His hands still cupped her shoulders, kneading her flesh. “I didn’t sleep last night. I was going to head up to bed soon.”
“Don’t let me stop you.” He caught her hand and tugged her toward the stairs.
“Thad, this is a bad idea.” But even she heard how halfhearted her protest was. And she followed him up the stairs to the room he must have instinctively known was hers.
“I just want to hold you,” he said, and now he tugged her toward the queen sleigh bed that was still neatly made because she hadn’t even slept in it. “I’m tired, too. I couldn’t sleep last night and then I spent hours going over that mall footage today, trying to convince myself that our son is safe.”
“He’s safe tonight,” she assured him. She was the one in danger now, of falling for the man who’d already broken her heart.
While he had had no warning and no training, he was proving to be a good dad, patient and loving. And with her, he was attentive and reassuring and protective.
And so damn sexy.
She was tired, though, too tired to fight feelings for him that had never gone away even when he had.
“Let me make sure you’re safe,” he said. “Let me stay with you.”
She shook her head. “Your staying puts me in more danger than your leaving.”
“I’ll just hold you,” Thad said.
Was that really all he wanted? Because she wanted—she needed—more.
He let go of her hands to pull back the comforter and the soft flannel sheets. “I just want to hold you in my arms tonight.”
And that was the problem. Caroline wanted to spend every night in his arms. But Thad would never give her forever.
Whatever he really was—and it wasn’t just a reporter—had a tighter hold on his heart than she and their son ever would. But if whatever he was put Mark in danger, then his heart would get broken, too. He would never forgive himself for causing their son harm.
And neither would Caroline….
Chapter Seven
Just as he’d promised, Thad had held Caroline in his arms all night. She had slept peacefully. But, like the night before, he had been unable to close his eyes. He hadn’t wanted to take his gaze from her beautiful face. And his body had been too tense and achy with desire for him to relax enough to sleep.
He could have seduced her with kisses and caresses. Even though four years had passed, he remembered in vivid detail exactly what drove her crazy. A kiss on the back of her neck. A caress on the side of her breast, his thumb teasing ever closer toward the tight nipple.
And because he had been so tempted to seduce her, he hadn’t. He didn’t want to coerce her into making love with him. She would regret it and resent him.
He had already given her reason enough to resent him. So he’d forced himself to leave her first thing in the morning, before she awakened, before he gave in to temptation. But as he pulled into the nearly full driveway at the Kendall estate, he wished he’d stayed with Caroline instead.
With a groan he shut off his car, stepped out and headed into the three-story mansion. Someone must have been watching for his car because they all met him in the entryway, as if they were throwing him a surprise party. He wasn’t particularly surprised, though. Over the years he had developed the intuition to detect an ambush.
“Thanks a lot,” he told Ash, who grinned unrepentantly.
Natalie smacked Thad’s shoulder. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell us you have a son.”
“Someone didn’t give me the chance.” He glared at his older brother.
“You’re not really great about using your chances to disclose information,” Gray remarked with a sideways glance at his fiancée.
Thad needed to talk to Natalie—she deserved to know the truth about her parentage. But he understood it would hurt her, and she’d already been hurt enough.
“Well, I’ve been a little busy finding out that I’m a father,” he said in an effort to excuse himself.
“Are you sure?” Uncle Craig asked as he led the group back to the family room with its cathedral ceiling and French doors that opened onto the brick patio. Sometime over the past four years, or maybe just the past four months since it was revealed that his brother’s killer was still out there, Craig Kendall had aged. His hair was completely silver now. “Did you have a DNA test done yet?”
Thad reached for his wallet and the picture Caroline had given him after Mark’s brief disappearance. But before he could pull it out, Ash produced a printout of the surveillance photo.
Probably dressed for church, in a brightly patterned, stylish suit, Aunt Angela hurried after him, her heels clicking against the wood floor. She grabbed for the grainy picture but then took Thad’s proffered colored snapshot, too. “Oh, my…”
Tears glittered in her warm brown eyes as she focused on Mark’s little face. Thad grinned at her emotional reaction. “So, what do you think, Auntie, do I need a DNA test?”
Aunt Angela lifted her gaze from the pictures to Thad. “He looks just like you when you were that age.” She smiled. “Now I know why you took the old photo albums out of the library.”
Natalie leaned over their petite aunt’s shoulder to see the pictures. “Oh, he’s
so cute. I don’t remember Thad ever being that cute.”
“Hey!” he protested.
“What’s his name?” Rachel asked as Aunt Angela passed the pictures to her. She sat in the chair Ash had helped her into given her swollen belly.
“Mark.”
“His mother must be beautiful,” Natalie said, “for him to be so cute.”
“She is,” Thad said. So beautiful that he ached for her.
Devin wound his arm around Jolie’s waist. “You’ll make beautiful babies then, my love.”
Aunt Angela patted Rachel’s belly. “Our family is growing,” she said with a mother’s pride. And, truth be told, she’d been much more maternal to them than their biological mother had ever been.
“When do we get to meet your son?” Uncle Craig asked. His blue eyes held some skepticism yet. Despite how much Mark looked like him, his uncle wasn’t entirely convinced of his paternity.
“He’s at St. Luke’s church right now with his mother.” That was the church that Aunt Angela had occasionally convinced them all to attend.
“You should have gone along,” Ash teased him. “You could use some saving.”
If he only knew….
There was no saving him from what he had to do now. “Hey, Nat, I need a few minutes alone with you.”
Her forehead creased, but she nodded her agreement.
As they left the family room, he overheard Devin asking Aunt Angela to add the owner of Turner Connections to the Christmas guest list. But their generous aunt, who lived by the motto of the more the merrier, declined, “It should be just family.”
“This’ll be his first Christmas without his wife,” Devin pointed out.
“You’re not doing business on the holidays,” she scolded. “Family only.”
Would Natalie feel as if she was still family once he revealed her true paternity?
She followed him up the stairs that led to the wing with their bedrooms. He had his own suite for his use whenever he was in town, which hadn’t been often over the past several years.
“I was in your room last time because you were crying out,” she mused. “Why do I think I’m going to be the one crying now?”
Because she was damn smart; she always had been.
“This isn’t easy to tell you….”
“And everyone else already knows,” she surmised. “They’ve all been calling and checking on me, waiting for you to break whatever news you must have decided you needed to be the one to break to me.” She chuckled at her own joke. “But I guess that’s kind of your area though, breaking news.”
He just hoped it wouldn’t break her, but then he reminded himself she wasn’t that fragile little girl anymore who’d discovered their parents’ dead bodies. “This isn’t going to change anything.”
She groaned. “God, this is bad.”
“Nat—”
“When someone says this isn’t going to change anything, you know it’s going to change everything.” She grabbed his hands and held on tight. “Just tell me, Thad. I can handle it.”
All her life, he and his brothers had tried to protect her because they’d never forgiven themselves that she’d been the one to find their murdered parents. But when he’d come back just in time to shoot her stalker, he’d finally realized that his little sister had grown into one tough young woman.
He dragged in a breath of air and then told her, “That guy I shot—”
“You found out who he was?” she asked hopefully.
He shook his head. “Well, we don’t know his name.”
“I thought it was Wade…something…”
“We don’t know his last name yet.” Or if his first name was even really Wade.
“But you do know something about him,” she surmised. Damn smart…
He nodded. “He’s your brother.”
She laughed. “Yeah, right. Like I don’t have enough big brothers…”
“He’s your half brother, Natalie. Something about him looked familiar to me—”
“You thought he looked like me!” She shuddered.
He squeezed her hands back as she held his yet. “So I had his DNA run. They put it against what we had of yours from the hospital. And Ash and Devin and I gave samples of ours.”
She gulped in a breath, as if fighting down hysteria. But her voice was steady when she said, “So he’s just my brother. Not yours or Ash or Devin’s.”
“Yes.”
She nodded. Despite how tough she was acting, tears began to streak down her face as she put it all together. “So Daddy wasn’t really my dad.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “So sorry…and if I’d known he was your brother…”
“You still would have had to kill him,” she said, “or he would have killed me and Gray. You did the right thing.”
“If there’s anything I can do…”
The door creaked open behind him, as if someone had been listening outside it. Gray walked in and crossed the room to his fiancée, pulling her into his arms. “I’ve got this,” he assured Thad.
She clung to him as if using his strength to shore up her own. As separate people they were strong, as a couple they were invincible. Thad, who had vowed to always remain single, envied the strength of their union.
As he backed toward the door to give them privacy, Natalie lifted her head from Gray’s shoulder. “You can do something for me,” she told him. “Anything, Nat.”
“Find out who my father was.” From the grim look on her beautiful face, she wasn’t looking for a tearful reunion.
Like Thad, she was looking for a killer.
CAROLINE SLIPPED INTO the back row of church. She was late. She must not have set her alarm before she’d fallen asleep in Thad’s arms. Wanting him as she did, she didn’t know how she’d managed to sleep. Just sleep.
Thad Kendall had kept his word. He had only held her, his strong arms wrapped tight around her the entire night. She’d enforced her no-sex rule so that she wouldn’t fall for him again. But because he’d abided by that rule when they both knew he could have seduced her at any time, she was in even more danger of falling for him than if they’d made love all night.
God, she was such a fool. She and Mark attended church every Sunday, and usually she prayed for peace and food for starving children. Today she intended to pray for wisdom. She needed it to remind her of all the reasons she shouldn’t be in love with Thad Kendall.
But then her son wriggled out from between Tammy and Steve Stehouwer and ran down the aisle toward her. And she remembered the most important reason she loved Thad—he had given her their son. No matter how much he’d hurt her when he’d left last time and how much he would hurt her when he left again, he had given her the greatest treasure of her life.
“Mommy!” Mark squealed as he squeezed into the row next to her.
Caroline lifted him in her arms and hugged him close. “Shh…”
But instead of looking at them with disapproval, the people around them were chuckling or smiling. Her son always won the heart of everyone with whom he came in contact; he was that sweet and lovable.
She pressed a kiss to his forehead and then his cheek and then his chin. He giggled and wriggled down to stand beside her.
His hand slid into hers. “I missed you, Mommy.”
“I missed you, too.” The words brought back those horrible moments that he’d disappeared at the mall. What if he’d been gone longer? Or worse yet, what if he’d never been found?
Panic clutched her heart in a tight grip. And she forgot all about praying for wisdom. She prayed for her son to stay safe. As she prayed, goose bumps lifted on her skin. Someone had opened the door and let in a blast of winter air.
But the cold wasn’t what caused the goose bumps; it was that eerie sense of foreboding that had chills chasing up and down her spine.
She’d had the same sensation at the mall. Like she had then, she looked around for someone watching her. Several people were still smiling at Mark and her.
She smiled back despite the tension gnawing at her. But she kept looking around until she encountered an unsmiling face.
The older man’s mouth was drawn tight, almost into a frown of disapproval, as he stared at her. She didn’t know his name, but with his silver hair and intense gaze, he looked familiar to her.
Had she seen him in church before? Or had she seen him that night at the mall?
She leaned down to whisper to Mark. “Honey, do you remember—”
“Shh, Mommy, you gotta be quiet in church,” he remembered. Now.
“But this is important, honey,” she continued. “I need to know if you—”
But when she looked up, the man was gone. Had he taken off because she’d seen him and he was worried that Mark might have identified him as the man who’d grabbed him at the mall?
And if he was the same man, then Mark had not been grabbed by accident.
Someone was after her son.
MAYBE ED SHOULD HAVE taken down the dated wallpaper in the kitchen, but Emily had put it up when they’d gotten married. This was the first house they had ever lived in as man and wife. They hadn’t lived there long, but sweet, sentimental Emily had never let him sell the house when they’d moved into a bigger and nicer one.
He had rented out the little bungalow over the years with the stipulation that no one touch the wallpaper.
The last person who’d lived there had respected that, but he was gone now. So Ed was using the house again. And he had finally papered over Emily’s teapot wallpaper—with pictures of Thad Kendall.
The man was young, only thirty-one, but he had been all over the world—more than once. There were photos of him in every country as long as it was the scene of civil unrest or all-out war.
The photojournalist thrived on danger. He’d come out of some of the most dangerous places in the world alive. So killing him wouldn’t have been easy. Or even all that satisfying….