by Jodie Bailey
“Where?”
“Coming up the side of the barn to my left. But it could have been—”
“It wasn’t nothing.” His voice was hard. Through the phone, she could hear the truck door open and his feet on the stairs. “Whatever you do, don’t come out of the house. Someone’s right beneath your window.”
EIGHT
Jason shoved his phone into his back pocket, then eased along the edge of the wood line, quickly sighting the shadowed figure at the back of Erin’s house. The man crouched low, wearing what appeared to be the same dark hoodie and ski mask from the hospital. From about three hundred yards away, there was no way to get an idea of build or age, but he was definitely up to no good.
Creeping along the fringes of the trees got Jason only a few feet closer to the house. The distance from his position to the intruder was wide open once he left cover, a good couple hundred yards. If the intruder opened fire, this wouldn’t end well for anyone.
Reaching for his shoulder holster to make sure his Sig was in easy reach, Jason assessed the situation, trying to plot a route forward that wouldn’t leave him wide open.
The way the house sat in the large clearing left him no good way in. There was only rough grass barely covering a former field, no cover. His still-healing leg would have to carry him faster than he thought it would. If his knee didn’t hold...
There was no sense thinking about it. With one last deep prayer, Jason broke into the clearing at a dead run, his focus on the man kneeling at the back of Erin’s house.
The figure didn’t turn. Didn’t break away from the house, didn’t notice Jason’s approach.
Twenty-five yards, fifty... His heart pounded with adrenaline and exertion. His mind raced through every plan to proceed. He should have called Wyatt for help. There hadn’t been time. If the guy had a—
He pitched forward as his foot sank into a hole and jolted his momentum to a halt. He landed on his bad knee with a grunt.
The gray Carolina dirt morphed into desert sand. Gunfire echoed. Fitz screamed over and over in pain, in terror, in an agony Jason could never unhear.
Shoving onto his hands and knees, Jason focused on the dirt beneath him. Gray, not brown. A former field, not a desert. Erin’s property.
Erin.
In as smooth a motion as he could muster with pain ripping through him, Jason rocked back onto one heel and steadied himself with his good knee, then drew his weapon and took aim.
The man at the house had turned, and their gazes locked across the remaining distance. There was a hesitation, a quick darting of the head to the left, to the right. Then the intruder broke into a run, headed for the trees on the other side of the house.
Jason holstered his weapon as he pushed to his feet, but his knee gave way and dropped him again, the pain electric and shooting straight into his head. By the time his vision cleared, the sound of an engine on the road heading away from the house told him he was too late.
He dropped back to sit and pounded the ground with his fist, his hand sinking into the soft dirt at the edge of the old field. He turned his face to the clouds zipping across the sky. Stupid knee. Stupid war. Stupid...everything. He’d let their sole lead get away.
He’d probably blown out his knee doing it.
And Erin had probably witnessed his weakness from her window.
Hopefully, her father hadn’t. He didn’t need Kevin Taylor to know he was on the property. If the man landed in the hospital because of him, then every drop of the pitiful ounce of trust he’d managed to earn from Erin would evaporate and she’d be left without protection, a wide-open target.
His phone vibrated in his pocket and he pulled it free as he shoved to his feet, determined to walk off the pain. You okay?
I’m fine. Stay inside.
She wouldn’t. He had no doubt.
By the time she crept out the back door and down the porch steps, Jason had decided the impact hadn’t torn apart everything it had taken surgeons and physical therapists months to put back together. He fought a slight limp as he paced the perimeter of the house, avoiding the windows, alert to any change in Kevin’s snoring from inside. He’d found a few boot prints in the soft mud at the corner of the house, yet no other clues presented themselves.
But those boot prints... They said more than he wanted to hear.
Erin slipped up next to Jason, who stared at the crawl-space access beneath the house. “You okay?”
Jason flicked her a quick glance, then turned his attention back to the wooden door with the small lock on it. The entry led to the underside of the house. Since the house was built into a hill, the door was about four feet tall at this point, but he’d guess the clearance dwindled to about a foot near the front porch. “Fine. He got away.”
Resting a hand on his shoulder, Erin squeezed. “You’re one man. You can’t do it all.” She pulled away and shoved her hands into her pockets. “I’m sorry I gave you a hard time earlier about staying. You were right.”
In the past, he’d have gloated over such words. Now he wished he was wrong. He aimed a finger at the crawl-space door. “Whatever he was after, it was here, under the house. He didn’t get to it, though. The lock’s still in place.” Wincing against the pain, Jason crouched and ran his fingers around the edges of the door. “Looks like he was trying to pop the hinges. Your dad probably put on the lock, but he should have turned the door so the hinges were on the inside. The only thing a lock does is keep honest people honest.” He rocked back on his heels.
“There were some copper thefts a few years ago. Dad locked up the underside of the house because we have copper pipes.”
“Makes sense.” Jason looked up at her, trying to keep his voice level. “It bugs me how he didn’t go for the doors or the windows for direct access. He was heading underground. There’s not a way into the house from there.”
“No, but there’s something else.” Erin sagged against the house, her shoulder resting on the white siding, her face cast in blue by the near darkness of evening. “The house is heated by a gas pack and has a gas water heater. The lines run under the house.”
“Okay.” Jason stood and brushed off his knees.
“So far, everything’s been made to seem like an accident, a drug deal gone bad or a medical condition. If I really am a target and your bad guys want to keep it random, he could nick a gas line, let it leak into the house. Or...” She jerked as though something hit her in the head, then looked at him. “If it were me, I’d tamper with the furnace and let carbon monoxide do the rest.”
The thought weakened Jason’s knees. Bullets and bombs were visible things. Gas leaks and carbon monoxide? There was no fight there.
He leaned back against the house and crossed his arms, staring across the field to where his truck hid in the tree line. If he’d not been where he was this afternoon, watching... “I guess you answered my next question.”
“What’s the question?”
“Why he waited until you were home. The house has been empty for two days while your dad’s been in the hospital. Ripe for planting a bomb. Filling the house with carbon monoxide while you’re inside makes the most sense.”
Jason glanced at Erin, but she was staring at something in the distance. She was doing that thing she did so well, where she distanced herself from the situation, shoved it outside of herself so she wouldn’t have to deal with it. Normally, it worried him. Right now, keeping her emotions out of the equation might save her life.
The problem was, thanks to what he’d found at the side of the house, his emotions were squarely in play.
There weren’t a lot of people Jason could trust right now. And as of a few minutes ago when he’d stumbled on those boot prints, the number had dropped even lower.
To two. Erin and Wyatt.
Praying he was making the right call, Jason opted for full disclosure. It was
her life in jeopardy and she needed to know what he knew, even if it scared her. She’d take the threat more seriously, maybe let him stay close. “Somebody has inside access, and I don’t know how deep their access goes. They now know I’m watching, because I tipped my hand today.”
“You’re hiding something, Jase.” Erin stepped in front of Jason and held his gaze. “Your whole life, you’ve had a tell. Wyatt says it’s how he always knew on the football field which way you were going to fake. Right now? You’re telling hard.”
“I have a tell?” Great. The last thing he needed was for the world to be able to read him. Check that. The last thing he needed was for Erin to still be able to read him. “What is it?”
Erin backed away, almost as though she thought she’d said too much. “I clue you in and you’ll stop doing it. The rest of us lose the advantage. Now, tell me the truth. All of the truth.”
Fine. Jason headed for the side of the house, motioning for her to follow. Beneath the kitchen window, he pointed at two impressions in the damp dirt. “Boot prints.”
Erin knelt and studied them, probably noticing the tread and the size.
But she wouldn’t see the thing Jason feared the most.
“Hiking boots?” She looked up over her shoulder at Jason. “Lots of people wear those.”
“They’re not hiking boots.” Jason knelt beside her and aimed a finger at the tread, pointing to a double eagle logo in the heel. “It’s worse. When we were overseas, companies would give us products to test, sunglasses, socks...boots. One company passed our team a specific design, one they wanted us to test. Even customized the tread so we’d be more likely to buy from them when it came time to make our next purchase.”
“Jason. No.” She understood what he didn’t want to say.
Jason couldn’t take his eyes off the logo, wished he could bury what it meant. He had no choice but to confirm her suspicion. “Whoever he is, he’s one of us.”
NINE
“Wyatt’s still out there, isn’t he?” Erin didn’t know why she’d asked. Wyatt had followed her over the mountain into town, but he’d never step foot into Jenna Clark’s paint-your-own-canvas shop. His presence was the reason she’d taken refuge here, because it was the one place where he’d keep his distance and right now she needed a break. She was trying to play this whole thing like she did accident scenes, holding the horror away from herself, standing outside.
It was getting harder as the threat grew closer.
Worse, the sight of multiple colors of paint had her fingers itching to pick up a brush, an urge she hadn’t felt in years.
Jenna paused filling a tray with blue paint and leaned back to look out the window, her deep purple hair swinging. “He’s eyeing the front of my store like he thinks I’m smuggling stolen art.”
“Stop it.” For whatever reason, her cousin and her best friend had never been civil to one another. “He’s here because of me.”
Capping the bottle of paint, Jenna set it into line with its cousins and planted her palms on the bar. “It’s creepy the way he’s following you, even though I know the reason.”
“The reason makes it creepier.”
“True.” Jenna grabbed the paint tray and carried it to a family painting mountain scenes on their canvases. Tourists had packed the space, driven inside by the damp, cloudy day. The air was warm and carried the scent of the wood fireplace across the room. It was homey, comfortable.
Usually.
Almost an hour earlier, Erin had walked into Jenna’s shop, hoping to grab a cup of coffee and some distraction before heading into work. Sleep had avoided her all night, and she was struggling to tamp her emotions out of the way. She wanted to talk about anything other than her unwelcome “bodyguards” or the way her own home was no longer safe.
A shudder shook her. She was here for a break from those thoughts. Typically, the bold yellow and orange walls made Erin’s mood sunnier than a summer morning.
Today, the bright colors gave her a headache. She leaned heavily against the wooden bar. A holdover from the time when the building had housed Ridgerunners, a local watering hole, the polished bar top was cut crosswise from a single tree. Jenna hadn’t had the heart to rip it out and now used it as the divider between the employee prep area and the customer tables.
Jenna rounded the counter. “Another guy’s out there now, somebody I haven’t seen before.” One eyebrow arched. “The new guy’s in uniform and...” She let out a low whistle. “Is that the ex?”
Erin couldn’t see the window, but she had no doubt it was Jason. He could elicit a response quite easily in civilian clothes. She could imagine him in uniform.
Still, she didn’t answer. Jenna and she had been friends for two years before she’d confessed her failed marriage and how no one in town knew about it. The story had intrigued Jenna, but she hadn’t asked questions. Her silence was one of the reasons Erin loved her, because Jenna knew how to let secrets stay secret. It was the same reason she’d confided why she was being shadowed, because if she didn’t talk to somebody, she was going to blow.
She’d also counted on her friend to find the humor in a horrible situation. Without it, Erin would go insane.
Propping her elbows on the counter, Jenna shot Erin a look sparking with mischief. “Girl, if a guy like that wanted to follow me around, I’d hand him a detailed itinerary and then I’d walk real slow so he could keep up.” She wrinkled her nose and grinned.
The teasing worked, coaxing a smile from Erin, but it died quickly. “Yeah, well, there’s more to life than appearance.”
“What made you two split? It can’t be he’s mean and nasty, because no mean and nasty guy gives up vacay to make sure his ex doesn’t die. So what? He’s all gorgeous and no brains? He’s a terrible kisser?”
“None of the above.” Too late, Erin realized the implications of her answer. Her cheeks burned.
Jenna’s eyes widened, and she straightened. “Wait. So he’s nice enough to protect you, he’s like all the best parts of a young and buff Clint Eastwood and he kissed you breathless? I don’t see the problem.”
“It didn’t work out.”
Forehead creased, Jenna studied Erin with knowing green eyes. “This has something to do with your father.”
No way was she acknowledging Jenna’s speculation.
Turning toward the back of the room, Jenna untied the smock around her waist and tossed it to the counter. “Liza?” When her part-timer turned from helping a young girl choose a canvas to paint, Jenna aimed a finger at the back office. “Can you handle things if I take a break?” When Liza nodded, Jenna started walking. “Let’s go, E.”
There was no sense in arguing when Jenna got like this. Erin walked into the small square office packed with a bookcase and a huge desk. Painted plates hung over every inch of the walls, an even noisier riot of color than the main room.
Jenna shut the door and perched on the edge of her desk. “There’s something I’ve needed to say to you for a long time, and the way you’re acting, I think you might finally listen.”
Erin’s head jerked backward. She’d never seen her carefree friend so intense, had never heard her speak with so much authority. They were talking whether she wanted to or not.
“Your father made you divorce your husband.”
“My father never knew.”
“Wait.” Jenna’s gaze drifted as though she were putting together puzzle pieces in her mind. “When you said nobody knew you were married, you literally meant nobody?”
“Just Wyatt.”
Jenna crossed her arms and stared at the space over Erin’s head. “You got married without telling your dad?”
“That wasn’t the plan.”
“Keep talking.”
She didn’t want to. Rehashing events she’d long buried wasn’t going to make anything better, but Jenna’s expressio
n brooked no argument. “Jason emancipated from his parents because they abandoned him when he was fifteen.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah.” Dropping onto the only chair, she plunged into the story she’d never told anyone before. “Wyatt and he were friends, so I was his friend by default, and then it was more than friends and then we graduated from high school and... And we’d always talked about getting married, so...”
“You eloped.”
“We did.” She sketched out the story with as few words as possible, from the wreck to her father’s stroke and their decision to wait until he’d healed to confess the truth. “Weeks became months became two years. Then Jason joined the army without discussing it with me. Said he wanted to get away, to live together the way a husband and wife should. But Dad needed me and...” Erin shook her head and swallowed a sudden lump in her throat. It shouldn’t hurt. The past was long dead. “Jason left, so I filed the papers.”
“You do realize your father’s stroke wasn’t your fault.”
“It was. And if he had another one because he found out what really—”
“Then it still wouldn’t be your fault.”
Erin shook her head, but Jenna didn’t let her speak. She straightened and aimed a finger in the general direction of Erin’s house. “Your father is a self-centered, selfish, horrible man who couldn’t care less about you other than to have you tied to his side, controlling you until the day he dies.” Jenna spit the words out like venom, the anger coating the air with an almost palpable heat.
Erin was on her feet, pulse pounding. “That’s not true. He needs me.”
“According to everything I hear around town, the man wore your mother down to a shell of who she was when she met him and he’s doing the same thing to you.”
“Jenna...” The word held every veiled threat she could muster. “Stop it.”
“Tell me something.” Jenna slid off the desk and closed the space between them. “When he blew a blood vessel in his head, was he upset because you were hurt or because his precious car was totaled?”