Guarding His Witness

by Lisa Childs

  Or on Clint.

  He obviously didn’t feel that way, though, because he murmured, “I didn’t want to have to kill him.”

  “I know,” she said. “You tried to talk him down.”

  “But he was so desperate.”

  Luther had that effect on people, like the kid with the knife in the hospital ER. He’d been so scared.

  “It’s not your fault,” Rosie assured him. “His blood is on Luther’s hands. And so is Javier’s.” She stepped back and grabbed his hands, holding them in hers. “Javier’s death was not your fault either.”

  But he just shook his head, unwilling to accept her absolution. Before she could say anything more, she heard the whine of sirens.

  Someone must have reported the shots. Or maybe they’d heard the earlier arguing and had called in the disturbance. She wasn’t the only one who visited her loved one’s grave. Someone else was usually in the cemetery.

  “We need to get out of here,” Clint said, his voice gruff with urgency.

  “What—why?”

  “Do you think Maynard was the only cop on Luther’s payroll?” he asked.

  She shuddered as she considered the implications of that. They could not trust anyone.

  “They could shoot us and claim it was self-defense,” Clint said, spelling out one of those implications to her. “That was probably what Officer Maynard had intended to claim.”

  Her stomach lurched more than it had at the sight of the young officer’s head wound. “What are we going to do?” she asked.

  He put his arm around her waist, nearly dragging her along with him as he hurried away from Javier’s grave and Officer Maynard’s dead body.

  “We’re going to run,” he told her.

  Her legs were too shaky yet for running, but Clint nearly carried her along with him to the SUV he’d parked on the other side of the cemetery from the parking lot. He must have jumped the fence because there was no gate back here.

  And Rosie, in her long dress, wasn’t certain how she could get over the tall barrier of wrought iron. But then Clint lifted her and boosted her over it. She nearly fell onto the sidewalk on the other side. But then he was there, steadying her before she even hit the concrete.

  He clicked the locks for the SUV and pulled open the passenger door. “We have to hurry,” he told her, his voice full of urgency.

  “But we’re leaving a crime scene.” Of course it wasn’t the first time they’d done that. They’d left her apartment and the shoot-out at the safe house. But those times they’d been in imminent danger.

  They wouldn’t be able to claim that this time.

  “We don’t know for certain that the officers coming here work for Luther,” she said. “He can’t have gotten to everyone.” At least she hoped he hadn’t. But maybe she was being naive.

  Clint must have thought so because he started the SUV and pulled away from the curb. “We can’t take the chance.” He glanced across the console at her. “I won’t take the chance.” There was such intensity in his deep green eyes, such a look of...

  Her breath caught. No. It couldn’t be.

  She had let herself hope before that her refusing to testify would keep her and Clint safe. Now she knew it was safer to hope for nothing.

  Then she wouldn’t be disappointed.

  Or dead.

  * * *

  Clint forced himself to turn away from Rosie and focus on driving. He needed to get her away from the cemetery, away from anyone else who might be on Luther Mills’s payroll. And that could be anyone.

  He doubted that young officer had sought out Luther on his own. Someone must have reached out to him, someone from within the department. So there had to be someone higher up working with Luther, someone high enough up that they’d found out about the Payne Protection Agency and their safe houses.

  He should have tried to get more information out of Maynard. But there had been no time. He’d been too determined to carry out Luther Mills’s order to kill the witness.

  It didn’t matter that Rosie had told him she wouldn’t testify. Luther wouldn’t stop trying to have her killed until she was dead.

  If anything happened to Rosie, it would kill Clint, too. For those few short seconds before she’d screamed, he’d thought the officer might have shot her. And for those few seconds, it had felt as if his heart had stopped beating. As if it had just been beating for her.

  He could not lose her.

  So he pressed harder on the accelerator and sped off. He had no idea where he was going, just that he needed to get her as far from River City and Luther Mills’s ever-expanding crew as he could.

  “Won’t we get in trouble for leaving the scene?” she asked. “This isn’t like the other times when people were shooting at us.”

  “We would have gotten in more trouble if we had stayed,” he pointed out. They could get dead. “People might have started shooting at us then.”

  “But won’t they think you killed a cop?” she asked, and her brown eyes were wide with fear. “What if they don’t know that he was working with Luther?”

  Clint shrugged. He didn’t care. All he cared about was keeping her safe.

  So he could trust no one, not with Rosie’s life. It—she—meant way too much to him. She meant everything to him.

  “We need to go to the police department,” she told him, and she reached across the console to grasp his arm. “We need to talk to the chief.”

  He sighed. “Usually you want me to go to hospital.”

  She tensed and asked, her voice cracking with alarm, “Are you hurt? Did he shoot you before he fell?”

  Clint shook his head. “No, this time I’m fine.” But he wasn’t unscathed. He hadn’t wanted to kill the young man. If only he could have talked him into putting down the gun. But Officer Maynard had been beyond reason. There was no way Clint could have reached him.

  If the rest of Luther’s crew were as desperate to carry out his orders, how the hell was he going to keep her safe?

  Clint shuddered. “I won’t be fine, though, and neither will you if we don’t get the hell out of River City.”

  “That’s what I intended to do,” she told him, but she sounded regretful. “I came to Javier’s grave to say goodbye. Then I realized how wrong it would be for me to run.”

  “Rosie...” Her instincts had been the right ones.

  “We need to talk to either the chief or Jocelyn Gerber. Which one do you trust?”

  “No one,” he said.

  “Not even me?”

  “You sneaked out on me,” he reminded her. And he shuddered at the thought of what could have happened to her, what nearly had happened to her. “That could have been you back there—” with that horrible head wound “—not Maynard.”

  “I know,” she said quietly, and there was regret in her voice. “I know.”

  He sighed. “Damn it.”

  “What?” She looked behind them. “Are we being followed?”

  “No...” He had cursed because he couldn’t refuse her anything. He would talk to the chief, but on his terms. And only because it would be easier for them to get away—far away—from River City if they weren’t wanted for the murder of a police officer.

  She was right. Clint needed to explain what had happened. And then he had to make sure that it never happened again.

  Woodrow was always happy to come home to his beautiful bride. No matter what was going on with the department, or with their family, she always made him feel better. Just having her at his side, a true partner and soul mate, made his life so much better than he could have ever imagined it would be.

  But when he pulled into the driveway of their farmhouse in the country outside River City, there was a black SUV already parked in the drive. They had company.

  It could have been any one of their children. All the P
ayne Protection Agencies used black SUVs. Hell, it could have even been someone from Woodrow’s FBI past who was visiting. But the plate on the back bumper of the SUV wasn’t a government one. It was a Michigan one.

  Woodrow picked up the bouquet of flowers from the passenger seat and pushed open his door. He loved bringing his wife presents. Not that he often surprised her.

  She had that innate ability of hers where she always seemed to know what he was up to. Maybe it was because they were so connected. Or maybe she was the psychic that most of their family thought she was.

  When he walked inside, he found the house empty. Even though the smell of dinner wafted from the Crock-Pot on the counter, he knew she wasn’t in the house because he didn’t feel the vibrancy of her presence.

  Then the sound of voices drew him toward the back patio. She sat at the glass-topped iron table, pouring ice tea for her guests. And his breath shuddered out in relief when he saw who they were.

  “Thank God,” he murmured. “You’re alive.”

  Rosie Mendez trembled and murmured, “Barely. If Clint hadn’t shown up when he did...”

  Penny reached across the table and squeezed the young woman’s hand. Her heart was so big; he knew she’d probably already taken Rosie and Clint into it as she had so many others over the years.

  “Your officer would have killed her,” Clint told him.

  Woodrow flinched.

  And Penny jumped to his defense. “Woodrow is still cleaning up the department. Our son Nicholas made a good start, but he wasn’t able to get every corrupt officer off the force.”

  “I don’t think Maynard was even on the force when Nick was chief,” Clint said.

  “He wasn’t,” Woodrow admitted. He appreciated his wife’s coming to his defense. But he deserved the blame for this. “I’m the one responsible for hiring him and ultimately the one responsible for his death.”

  “So you know he’s dead?” Clint asked, and then admitted, “I’m the one who pulled the trigger.” And he sounded regretful that he’d had to.

  “You had no choice,” Rosie said, jumping to her bodyguard’s defense just as quickly as Penny had jumped to his.

  Clint Quarters was more than just a bodyguard to Ms. Mendez. And Woodrow didn’t need a recording of the jailhouse visit to guess why she had gone to visit Luther Mills.

  “He was going to kill me,” she said, and her voice cracked with the fear she must have felt. “He would have killed us both. You had no choice, Clint. Don’t you dare blame yourself.” She turned toward the chief. “Please don’t press charges against him. It was self-defense as well as defense of me.”

  Woodrow glanced over at his wife, sharing a significant look with her. Unlike the rest of the Payne family, Penny had never been involved in the bodyguard business. She was a wedding planner with a full-service venue she operated from an old chapel she’d bought years ago.

  She possessed an uncanny ability to predict lasting love. Unfortunately, she had the same ability to predict danger.

  “I’m not here to turn myself in to you,” Clint said. “I have to be the one to protect Rosie. We can’t trust anyone else.”

  “You can trust the Payne Protection Agency,” Woodrow said, as Penny opened her mouth to probably tell him the same thing. “They’re your friends.”

  Clint shrugged. “That’s what I thought, but how the hell does Luther’s crew keep finding our safe houses?”

  “They’ve been used before,” Penny said. She might not work the bodyguard business with her children, but she knew it well. Better than Woodrow did. “There have been previous incidents at them, incidents about which there would have been police reports.”

  She was as brilliant as she was beautiful.

  “So someone could have looked up old police reports regarding the Payne Protection Agency and found out about the safe houses,” Woodrow deduced.

  “Someone within the department,” Clint added.

  He shook his head. “Not anymore. With the Freedom of Information Act, anyone can request copies of police reports. Hell, Luther Mills could have gotten the copies himself.” And Woodrow wouldn’t have put it past him. The drug dealer was smart, or he wouldn’t have been in business as long as he had.

  Rosie shuddered. And Woodrow silently berated himself. He hadn’t wanted to scare her any more than she already was.

  “I’m not going to arrest you,” Woodrow assured Clint and Rosie. “And the district attorney’s office already ruled it self-defense. We’d just discovered that Maynard was complicit in the attempt on your life at your apartment.”

  “Can you prove it was Luther?” Clint asked. “I can testify to what he told us.”

  But a good defense lawyer would tear it apart as hearsay, and Luther Mills had hired the best.

  “I will testify, too,” Rosie said. “About today and about my brother’s murder.”

  “You changed your mind?” Clint asked in surprise.

  And was it disappointment or fear that crossed his face? Woodrow couldn’t tell, but he would ask Penny later. She would know.

  “You changed my mind,” Rosie told Clint. “Like you said, Javier deserves justice.”

  “We’ll get justice for your brother,” Woodrow assured her. “And we’ll keep you safe.”

  Clint grimaced. He clearly didn’t believe him.

  Woodrow was just happy that the bodyguard had trusted him enough to come to him. In his shoes, he wasn’t certain he would have trusted him—not if Penny’s life had been the one in jeopardy.

  “I have a place you two can go,” he said. “A place nobody knows about.”

  Penny looked at him. “You do?”

  “It was going to be a surprise.” Along with the yellow roses, he’d intended to tell her about the cottage he’d bought for them, a place where they could go and unwind from their busy lives.

  She smiled. “You spoil me.”

  “You deserve it,” he said. She’d worked so hard for so many years to support her family after her first husband’s death. Woodrow wanted to take care of her now.

  “We can’t use your place,” Rosie said. “It’s too special.”

  Penny squeezed the younger woman’s hand. “It will be even more special to us now because it will be a place where you will be safe.”

  Rosie blinked furiously, as if fighting back tears. The young woman was so tough, but Penny had touched her—as she did everyone she met.

  Woodrow pulled a key from his pocket and handed it over to Clint as he gave him the address and directions to the cottage. “Use it. You’ll be safe there. I won’t even tell anyone else where you are.”

  “I just went grocery shopping,” Penny said as she rose from the patio table. “I filled the refrigerator and the freezer, so I can stock you up so you won’t need to stop anywhere for supplies.”

  “I already stocked the cottage,” Woodrow said, and smiled at his bride, who always thought like he did. “You two will be set until the trial.”

  “Thank you,” Rosie said.

  But Clint didn’t seem as grateful. Had he had other plans about how to protect the witness?

  “It’s safe,” Woodrow assured him again. “Nobody will find you two there.”

  He wasn’t sure that Clint trusted him enough to believe that the cottage was safe.

  And Woodrow wasn’t sure that he trusted Clint now to actually take her to the cottage. From personal experience, he knew a man would do anything to protect the woman he loved. He’d taken a bullet for Penny before they’d ever gone on their first date.

  Hell, he’d proposed before that first date as well. He hadn’t had to date Penny to know she was an incredible woman. And maybe she’d worn off on him, because he was starting to become a hopeless romantic like her.

  He hoped Rosie Mendez would someday wear Clint’s ring like Penny wore his.
/>   But first they had to survive until Luther Mills was put away for life.

  Chapter 25

  Rosie chuckled as she helped Clint unload the car. “Do you think she packed enough stuff for us?”

  Despite the chief’s saying he’d stocked the cottage already, his wife had insisted on loading them up with extra food. They’d also traded vehicles with them, so no one would spot the signature Payne Protection black SUV.

  Penny Payne-Lynch had given them the keys to her station wagon and Woodrow had given them the keys to the love nest he’d bought for his new bride.

  “I didn’t think people like them existed,” she said. “They’re so generous and loving.”

  Especially with each other. She’d never witnessed a love like theirs before, even in the ER when people brought in their loved ones to be treated.

  Clint nodded. He had been tense and quiet even after they’d left the chief’s house.

  “He absolved you of any blame in the shooting,” she reminded Clint.

  But that didn’t mean that he wasn’t still blaming himself—like he had over Javier’s death. She closed the back door of the station wagon as he carried in the last box of food.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  The little yellow cottage was beautiful, with a wall of windows that looked out onto a nearly private lake. Only a few other houses had frontage on it, and they seemed far away and deserted on the other side of the big body of water. Nobody would find them here. She expelled a ragged breath; finally she felt safe.

  From death.

  But not from heartbreak.

  She wasn’t so certain that still would not happen. What if Clint didn’t return her feelings? What if she’d only imagined that look she’d seen in his eyes back at the cemetery?

  “Why?” he asked.

  Apparently, he still hadn’t forgiven her for changing her mind about testifying even after she’d changed it back.

  Now was not the time to worry about her pride. She’d almost lost the chance to tell him how she felt about him. Even if he didn’t return those feelings, she wanted him to know.

  “I did it for you,” she said.