by Julie Miller
Trip scanned the men and woman at the table right along with Detective Montgomery. Mrs. Mayweather looked to her husband, who looked to his stepson, Kyle, whose gaze fixed on the man with the glasses sitting across the table from him.
Jackson seemed displeased with the silence. “As soon as Charlotte told me she wanted to attend Richard’s funeral service, I realized she’d need a new phone to keep in contact with me.”
The brown-haired man with the wire-framed glasses dabbed his napkin against his lips and cleared his throat. Jeffrey Beecher was here representing the event staff that had worked on the estate and at the cemetery. “You hired our company to make sure everything ran smoothly yesterday. Maintaining communication between your family and our staff at Mt. Washington and here was key to a successful day. So I took the liberty of providing phones for each family member.”
Detective Montgomery made the notation in his notebook. “Who had access to the numbers besides you?”
“The clerk at the phone company. Anyone with access to their database.”
“I’m talking about anyone here at the house—before the funeral.”
Jeffrey returned Kyle’s pointed glare, apparently willing to share information, but not to take blame. “Mr. Austin told me to get five phones that he could hand out before everyone left for the cemetery. I set them on the credenza in the foyer, like you asked.”
Jackson tossed his napkin on the table and faced his stepson. “Kyle, I asked you to get that new number for Charlotte—to help your sister. She trusts the family.”
“I had things to do yesterday, Jackson. Meetings. The hired help was right there, willing to do whatever we needed. I delegated.”
Trip cared less about the family dynamics and more about the obvious lapse in security. “So the phones were sitting there all morning. Anyone in this house could have gotten the number and called her with the threat—family, regular staff, event staff, guests.”
Jackson drummed his fist on the table. “You will not accuse my family of any wrongdoing. We’re the victims here.”
No, Charlotte and Richard Eames were the only victims in this house. “Sir, with all due respect, you asked me here this morning to report everything that happened while I was with your daughter. You wanted someone from the outside with no connection to your family to share his observations. You must have some suspicions.”
“I asked you here because you’re a SWAT cop, as finely trained as any elite military officer.”
Kyle snickered into his coffee cup. “He called you because you’re the only man with a gun and a badge that she’s let close enough to do her any good these past ten years.”
“Kyle,” Laura chided her son.
He swallowed the last drop and set down his cup. “The last man she trusted enough to protect her outside this house was murdered. I can see why he’d rather have this Robocop than an old man around to look after her.”
Trip’s hand fisted around the top rung of the chair. Thank goodness Charlotte wasn’t here to hear that cold bit of compassion. “Well, then—speaking as a representative of Charlotte’s best interests—her stalker is someone who’s been in this house, right under your nose. Now I don’t know if it’s the same guy as the Rich Girl Killer, but I do know she’s not safe here. It’s an illusion you can’t keep letting her live with.”
“My daughter is very fragile.”
“Thank you.” Kyle threw up his hands as if he’d just scored a point. “I’ve been trying to tell you that Char’s eccentricities border on mental instability.”
“You’re not helping, Kyle.”
“I’m the one watching your money, Jackson. She’s the one who’s giving it away like candy.”
“Her charities give her a connection to the outside world. Writing a check isn’t the same as being strong enough to face that world.”
The woman Trip had seen wrestling with the dog, the woman who’d come at him with a sword and a rebel yell, wasn’t fragile. And the woman he’d kissed certainly wasn’t mentally unstable. “Give your daughter some credit, Mayweather. It’s not the way I would have done it, but she was resourceful enough to save herself yesterday, and that night your chauffeur was killed.”
Spencer Montgomery smoothed his tie and stood. “The Rich Girl Killer doesn’t shoot his victims in the middle of traffic jams.”
“Somebody was shooting yesterday.” Trip reminded him, “He worked with gang members last year when he was going after Audrey Kline. Maybe he has another ally this time.”
“The RGK is hands-on.” The detective continued to quote his by-the-book profile of the man he was hunting. “His failure with Miss Kline is fueling his pursuit of Charlotte. He likes to terrorize, torture and strangle. He’s methodical and precise—very much an in-your-face kind of killer. I believe he suffers from an obsessive-compulsive disorder and perceives that these wealthy young women have wronged him somehow. He’s exacting punishment. He’s coming. He can’t help himself.”
Laura Austin-Mayweather’s shocked gasp pretty much summed up the growing tension in the room. These people were talking about ongoing cases and estate security, placing blame and deflecting accusations. He was talking about one woman. “He’s already here. If you’re so smart, Montgomery, tell me—how do you plan to identify your killer and catch him before he succeeds in his quest?”
The detective’s light-colored eyes barely blinked. He’d be a tough one to go up against in a poker game. “We were misled by the gang involvement when he went after Miss Kline. But we know how he works now. We set up twenty-four-hour surveillance on Miss Mayweather, tap her phones and the security cameras here. Any time he calls we need to keep him talking as long as possible to help us pinpoint a location, or get some clue to his identity. The next time he delivers a message or tries to approach her, in any disguise, we’ll be ready.”
“That’s your plan? First, she’s too fragile, and now you’re using Charlotte as bait?”
“I hope that we can assemble evidence from enough of these stalking incidents to piece together their source—where he’s getting his inside information on these women. We find the common link and we can zero in on him.”
Trip scrubbed his hand over his jaw, not believing what he was hearing. “So you’re hoping this bastard terrorizes Charlotte long enough before killing her so that you can find your answers?”
“It’s a difficult choice, but I’ll be saving lives in the long run.”
“You’re not saving hers.” Trip turned to Jackson. “And you support this idiotic idea?”
“If we don’t find a way to catch him, my daughter will die—if not by his hand, then by driving her mad. I nearly lost her once—when she came back from those kidnappers, she was broken. I won’t let that happen again.”
Just a few long strides took Trip around the table and put him in Montgomery’s face. “How do you protect Charlotte when your unsub is living or working or regularly visiting in the same house where she lives? She has a fear of strangers. But how does she identify the enemy when all of your suspects are people she knows? How do you? She’ll be dead in her locked-up room before you figure it out.”
The huffing noise of a panting dog made Trip’s heart sink.
He spotted the red glasses and muddy jeans as soon as Charlotte appeared in the archway to the dining room. Max sat beside her, his leash held in a white-knuckled grip. She’d heard every word out of his big, stupid mouth. “Interesting plan. Maybe someone should ask me first.”
“AND YOU WONDER WHY I have trust issues. Now I can’t even mourn in peace.”
Trip stood at the bathroom door watching Charlotte, leaning over the edge of the tub, rinsing the last of the mud and suds from Max’s fur. Her bottom bobbed up and down as she moved, and he rolled his eyes away so he could concentrate on the discussion and not the distraction of all those curves emphasized by her clingy wet clothes. The woman really did have a seriously sweet figure, and a surprisingly sharp tongue for someone the rest of the world co
nsidered an introvert.
“I can’t believe it, all of you eating breakfast, plotting ways to intensify my nightmare or even get me killed.”
“I was the one defending you in there.”
She shut off the water and warned Max to stay put. “Because I’m too incompetent to defend myself?”
“Because you weren’t there.” Trip picked up one of the towels stacked on the toilet lid and handed it to her. She wrapped the towel around Max and rocked back on her heels as the dog climbed out of the tub. “Personally, I think Montgomery’s plan sucks. There has to be more investigating he can do, more suspects he can bring in, more clues he can uncover before resorting to surveilling you and hoping something new breaks on the case.”
Max licked her face while she toweled him dry—the perfect excuse for not making eye contact with him, the perfect barrier for keeping Trip at a distance. “Detective Montgomery told me he’s been investigating the RGK murders for two years now. I suppose he’s getting desperate. He must be if he thinks I can help him.”
“You don’t have to do this, Charlotte. Your father thinks catching the killer is the only way to save your life. But I don’t think he fully realizes the risk he’s taking.”
“And you do?”
“You do, too.” She was the only person in this house who’d been the victim of a violent crime. She knew better than any one of her well-meaning family the emotional and potentially deadly price they were asking of her. “Tell them no.”
Charlotte’s cheeks paled at the grim reminder. But her only response was to let the dog loose. The dog took two steps and shook himself from nose to tail, spraying water all over the bathroom—and Trip’s uniform. Point made. Discussion over. Shut up, already.
Or not. After letting out the stopper in the tub, Charlotte picked up a second towel and crawled around the bathroom, wiping splatters of water off the cabinets, walls and fixtures. “You said I could change things. That I didn’t have to be afraid the rest of my life.”
“I didn’t mean this.” Trip stepped aside to let the dog trot into the sitting room to find a warm spot on the rug to take a nap.
“How then?” Charlotte shifted her attention to the floor, mopping up the trail Max had made across the tiles. “One thing I agree with Detective Montgomery on is that this sicko will come after me again. He’ll leave a note or make a call—I haven’t revisited everything that happened during my kidnapping yet, and he’s enjoying the game too much. It’s like he was there. But those men are all in prison. How can he know so much about those weeks I was a hostage? Why is he doing this to me?”
“Charlotte.” Trip knelt down and pulled the towel from her hand.
She snatched the towel right back and kept working. “If I’m the one he’ll make contact with, then maybe I should help capture him. That’s being strong, isn’t it? I’d be taking control of my life, instead of the life outside these doors controlling me. Right?”
“It’s a crapshoot. I wasn’t talking about risking your life yesterday.”
Her hands stilled for a moment and she looked straight at him. “But catching him would make him stop, right?”
Oh, God. Those had better not be tears glinting in her eyes. Now Trip was the one rocking back on his heels as her pain, her bravery, her desperation twisted something deep inside him. But this was a woman he couldn’t lie to. “I think the threats will only escalate until we arrest him or—”
“—he kills me.”
“I don’t like that option.”
Trip’s husky whisper held her attention for one hushed, intimate moment in time.
And then she reached beneath her glasses to wipe the moisture from her eyes and resumed her work on the floor. “That’s why Dad is paying you to be my bodyguard, isn’t it?”
“I work for KCPD, not your father.”
After a brief hesitation, she ran the towel over the toes of his boots, drying the water droplets off them as well. “So I’m just a plain ol’ citizen of K.C. that you’ve sworn to protect and serve. Just like anyone else.”
He finally realized that all her cleaning was busywork, avoidance of him. And he very much wanted her attention. He needed to touch her and have her be okay with it. He took the towel away and tossed it on top of the hamper. Then, with a hand beneath each elbow, he rose, pulling her to her feet in front of him. “Honey, there’s nothing plain or old or like anyone else about you. I’m here because you’re in danger. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I let you get hurt.”
“There are plenty of guards around here. Dad hires the best.”
Her hands hovered in the space between them before finally, cautiously, coming to rest at the placket of his black uniform shirt. He liked that, feeling the gentle heat of her fingers seeping through the crisp material to warm his skin.
He dared to pull her closer, to turn her cheek into the pillow of his chest and wrap his arms around her. He rested his chin at the crown of her wild silky curls and savored the small victory of feeling her lean against him. The smells of wet dog and shampoo didn’t matter. Damp clothes soaking into his didn’t matter. Holding Charlotte mattered. Feeling her softness—under his chin, against his body, in his arms—mattered.
Trip felt stronger, yet oddly more vulnerable when Charlotte snuggled against him like this. Purely masculine instincts were stirring behind his zipper at the decadent sensations of heavy breasts and generous hips fitting up against his harder frame. Yet something scarier and completely unexpected was waking deeper inside him at the fragile trust she was showing by simply letting him hold her.
At least, he hoped it was trust. He prayed it was the beginnings of trust—and not some fear of what he might do if she resisted that allowed him to hold and inhale and feel and touch. That notion alone kept him from tightening his arms around her the way every sensitized cell in his skin yearned to. The idea that Charlotte wasn’t completely sure that his attraction to her was genuine kept his hands securely in the middle of her back instead of sliding up to test the weight of a luscious breast or dipping down to that sweet bottom to pull her more firmly into his masculine heat.
Instead, he rubbed his cheek against the caress of her hair and whispered into her ear. “You need someone from the outside looking after you. Because the threat is right here, in this house. We just can’t see it. I want to look after you.”
He didn’t mind when she curled her fingers more tightly into his shirt, pinching a bit of skin underneath. She was holding on, moving closer. “Don’t take away the one place I feel secure, Trip. I need my things, my work, my routine.”
“That doesn’t have to change. I won’t ask you to go to a safe house.” It would be a hell of a lot safer and easier to defend than leaving her to serve as the bait in her gilded mousetrap. But he hadn’t had any luck convincing Detective Montgomery or Jackson Mayweather. He doubted he’d have any more success making Charlotte see reason. So that left plan B. “But I will ask you to let me be a part of that routine.”
“You’ve already barged your way in to my rooms and my life. It’s not like I can stop you.”
He reluctantly leaned back, leaving his hands at the curve of her waist. She tipped her head up, tilting her gaze at him over the top of her glasses. Her eyes were storm-cloud gray, turbulent with questions and wary suspicion.
Yeah, that was the look he needed to get off his conscience and out of his head.
“Oh yes, you can.” A little frown appeared between her golden brows, telling him that his response confused her. But he wasn’t going to explain what he barely understood himself. Trip pushed her glasses up onto the bridge of her nose, masking her eyes before releasing her. “I’m asking you to let me stay. Let me be a part of your life until we get this guy. I promise I’ll keep you safe. Or I’ll die trying.”
She crossed her arms and drifted back a step. “I thought the whole idea behind a SWAT cop was to keep people from dying.”
He didn’t laugh. “Let me stay. Trust me, Charlotte. Please.”
Guilty conscience? A very real fear that no one else fully perceived the danger she was in? Those big gray eyes that haunted his waking thoughts and dreams? “Let’s just say, you’d be doing me a favor.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m not sure I do, either. But I don’t think I could stand it if you got hurt and I could have done something to stop it.”
“I said you didn’t have to prove anything—”
Screw patience. Trip caught her face between his hands and pulled her up onto her toes, covering her mouth with his—silencing the excuses she used to push him away, silencing the frustrated need simmering inside him, silencing his own fears that he was growing way too attached to a woman he was completely wrong for.
He pressed his thumb to the swell of her bottom lip, coaxing her to part her lips for him, taking advantage of her warmth and sweetness when she did. Charlotte’s fingers crept up around his wrists, holding on as he plunged his tongue inside her mouth to introduce himself to hers. She answered back, her tongue chasing his as he learned each taste and curve. A husky moan, deep in her throat, quickened his pulse as surely as the graze of her curious lips across the jut of his chin. His blood hammered in his veins and pooled in all sorts of achy places when her fingers moved up higher, settling against his jaw and guiding his mouth back to hers as she sampled one lip, then two, then pushed them apart to touch her tongue to the softer skin inside.
Trip wound his arms around her, temptation taking his fingers down to the delicious curve of her bottom and lifting her into the full tutelage of his kiss. She opened for him, welcomed him, taught him a thing or two about the benefits of curiosity and enthusiasm when it came to assuaging and fueling needs like this. He slid a supporting arm around her waist and dropped one hand lower, cupping a buttock that perfectly fit the size of his hand.
It was only when he felt two pert nipples brushing against his chest and the need to take her down to the floor right here in the john surged through him that Trip remembered that business and safety had to come before pleasure. Scaring her off with his baser needs was one risk he could avoid, so with a reluctantly determined gasp for saner air, he summoned the strength to pull her fingers from his neck and lift his mouth from her full, pinkened lips. “Whoa. Whoa, honey. We need to slow down.”