GROOM UNDER FIRE Read online

  “I’m not hurt,” she said as she tried to control her breathing. “I just fell.”

  Maybe she’d only been out of breath from running as fast as she’d had to so the car wouldn’t have run her over. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m not hurt,” she repeated. “Because of you…” Then she threw her arms around his neck and clung to him as she had when he’d first arrived at the church. “Thank you!”

  But Cooper couldn’t accept her gratitude—not with the guilt plaguing him. It wasn’t just guilt that had his heart racing, though. It was fear. And probably her closeness. With every breath he took, he breathed her in; she smelled like flowers and grass. And the grass reminded him that she could have been killed. He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her away from him. “What were you thinking to leave the church on your own?”

  She tensed. “I was thinking I wanted to get the hell out of there.”

  Was that his fault for not immediately agreeing to his mother’s suggestion that he marry her? Had he hurt her pride?

  “Then why didn’t you leave with Nikki when she took your sister home?” he asked.

  She uttered a mirthless chuckle. “Do you really think I would have been any safer with my sister?”

  “She wouldn’t have tried to run you over with a car,” he pointed out as he helped her to her feet.

  She stumbled as if her legs were still shaky. But instead of leaning on him again, she steadied herself. “No,” she agreed, “but she might have tried to shove me out of one.”

  He couldn’t argue that, not after the way Rochelle had attacked her in the church.

  “Cooper!” Logan called out to him as he ran between the houses and joined them in the backyard. “I couldn’t catch the car.”

  He had forgotten that his brother had been right behind him when he’d left the church. His order for Logan to stay with their mom had been overruled—by their mother. She’d reminded them that the police officer was still in the parking lot and even if he wasn’t, she could take care of herself. She was armed, and their father had taught her how to shoot very well.

  Logan was huffing and puffing for breath. “I could barely keep up with you.”

  When Cooper had heard Tanya scream, he had taken off running. He reached for his cell phone now. “Did you call the police?”

  “Called ʼem,” Logan said, which was confirmed with sirens whining in the distance. “Did you get a better look at the car than I did?”

  “Long and dark,” Cooper replied. “With the windows too darkly tinted to see inside.”

  “What about the plate?”

  “There wasn’t one.”

  This hadn’t been some drunk driver whose car jumped the curb and veered into a yard. This near-miss hit-and-run had been planned.

  Just to scare her or to kill her?

  *

  TANYA HELD HER breath, pressing down the fear that threatened to choke her. She stared up at the dark windows of her apartment, wishing she could see inside, but she stood on the sidewalk three floors below. Light flashed behind the arched window in the peak of the attic where she lived.

  Was it the beam of a flashlight or the flash of gunfire? She gasped, and the breath she’d held escaped in a rush of fear.

  “You shouldn’t have let him go inside alone,” she admonished his brother. “The driver of that car could be in there, waiting…” For her. And Cooper would step into the trap her stalker might have laid for her.

  She should have had one of the police officers who’d taken the report for the near hit-and-run bring her home. They had offered a ride and protection. But the Payne brothers had assured the officers that they would make sure she stayed safe.

  How? By putting themselves at risk?

  Logan chuckled. “Cooper can handle himself and whoever he might encounter.” His slight grin slipped into a frown that furrowed his brow. “He wouldn’t have survived three deployments in Afghanistan if he couldn’t.”

  But how many soldiers had survived war only to come home and die in an auto accident? Or some other freak crime—like a shooting? She kept her gaze trained on those third-floor windows and saw another flash of light.

  Reaching out, she clutched Logan’s arm. “I see something! Something’s happening up there!”

  Logan’s gaze rose toward the third floor, too. “I don’t see anything…”

  But he must have been concerned, too, because he pulled out his cell phone. He pressed a button for what must have been a two-way feature and then he called out, “Cooper?”

  Not even a crackle of static emanated from his phone, it remained dead.

  She shuddered as the horrible thought occurred to her that Cooper might have been dead, too. She hadn’t heard any shots, but some guns had silencers. She knew that from watching TV. The person who might have been waiting in her apartment could have had one.

  She tugged on the sleeve of Logan’s wool overcoat. “You need to go upstairs and check on him!”

  “He needs to stay with you,” a deep voice coming out of the darkness corrected her. “Like someone should have stayed with you at the church so you didn’t go running off on your own.”

  She hadn’t started running until the car had jumped the curb to chase her down. But she didn’t bother pointing that out since the sharpness of his voice showed he was already angry with her.

  And Logan was already asking, “Did you clear the apartment, Cooper?”

  “No.”

  Logan snorted derisively. “Why not? It doesn’t look that big.”

  The studio apartment had formerly been a ballroom, so it was bigger than it looked—with a bathroom tucked into a wide dormer. If the attic space didn’t have issues with being too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter, the rent wouldn’t have been affordable enough for her.

  “I cleared it for intruders, but there were other threats,” Cooper explained.

  Logan tensed and held up his phone, his fingers ready to press buttons. “What do we need? Bomb squad?”

  “If it was a bomb, I would have taken care of it,” he assured his brother. “No, it was literally other threats.” He passed his brother the desecrated engagement announcement.

  While Tanya sucked in a breath of indignation that Cooper had gone through her things, his brother released a ragged breath of relief.

  But Cooper wasn’t relaxed. His jaw was clenched so tightly that a muscle twitched in his cheek. He was obviously mad as hell, his dark gaze intense as he stared at Tanya.

  She glared back at him. He was only supposed to make sure her place was safe. The thought of him going through her boxes and drawers and closets reminded her of all the things he might have found, like her weakness for silk and lace underwear.

  “There are more of those,” he told his brother. “Did you know about the threats?”

  “No,” Logan replied.

  “Now you know,” Cooper said. “Get on it. Check out her ex-boyfriends, her cases at work—”

  Logan grinned. “Are you forgetting which one of us is the boss, little brother? I’ve been doing this for a while. I need to talk to the client first to get the names of those ex-boyfriends and difficult cases.”

  Cooper shook his head. “I’ll do that.”

  If she were actually a client, she would rather talk to Logan. She could be more honest with him because she suspected he would be less judgmental. But she wasn’t actually a client and needed to remind the protective Payne brothers of that. “I haven’t hired—”

  Cooper interrupted her as he spoke to his brother. “Tanya and I need to talk.”

  As if Logan, too, had forgotten he was the boss, he nodded his agreement. “I need to touch base with Parker…”

  Probably to see if he had found Stephen. But if he had, he would have called. Even if he’d found him dead, he would have called. She shuddered now, so forcefully that she couldn’t stop trembling.

  “If you completely cleared her place, get her inside,” Logan, as the boss again, ordered. �
�She’s freezing. Or in shock…”

  “Or getting pissed off that she’s being ignored,” Tanya suggested. “Yes,” she continued, ignoring them as they had been ignoring her, “she’s definitely pissed off.”

  Logan patted his brother’s shoulder before heading toward his car parked at the curb. “Good luck. You may be the one needing protection now.”

  As if Tanya could take out a Marine, no matter how angry she was. And she actually wasn’t as angry as she was scared. For Stephen. For herself. For Cooper…

  “I won’t hurt you,” she assured him.

  He uttered one of his brother’s derisive snorts as if he didn’t believe her. “Did you tell Stephen that, too?”

  Her palm itched to slap him as her sister had slapped her. Her cheek throbbed at just the memory of that blow—or maybe because she’d hit it again when she’d done the nosedive running away from the car. Bristling with anger and with guilt over Stephen’s disappearance, she said nothing as they climbed the stairs to her apartment.

  Since he had the keys he’d gotten from her landlord, he unlocked the door and stepped inside first, as if checking again for an intruder. Then he flipped on the lights.

  A banker’s box had been knocked over, the contents spilled across the library table that also served as her dining table and desk. She gasped. “Someone was in here?”

  He shook his head. “Not that I could tell.”

  “You did this?” He must have gone through her things in a hurry. Maybe he hadn’t had time to look through her closet and drawers. She glanced around, but it appeared nothing else had been disturbed. So she focused again on the contents of the box. All those threats…

  She had packed them away—hoping to forget them but not foolish enough to throw them all out.

  “You haven’t exactly been forthcoming with information,” he bitterly reminded her. “If we’re going to find Stephen, we need to know everything.”

  If…

  She wasn’t naive. She knew it was very likely that they would never find Stephen…either alive or dead. But she wasn’t ready to face that possibility. She would have preferred Cooper offer assurances and promises. But she knew him better than that. He would never give her what she wanted from him—at least he hadn’t when they were teenagers.

  “There isn’t much to tell you,” she said, especially when it came to exes. “I haven’t really dated much.” Because of the threats. And maybe because of him, but she didn’t want him to suspect that she’d hung on to an old crush. “I’ve been too busy with work.”

  “How long have you been a social worker?” he asked. “Since you graduated college? You must have handled a lot of cases.”

  She sighed as faces jumbled in her mind. “A lot,” she agreed, “but none recently. At least not personally. I became a supervisor four years ago. I delegate now.” Which meant giving too much work to too few employees.

  “Now,” he said. “But four years ago there must have been cases you handled that hadn’t gone well.”

  She flinched, remembering the losses. The people she hadn’t been able to help. If she had Grandfather’s money, she could do so much more than she was able to do now. “Of course there were cases that went badly. Children I had to remove from neglectful or abusive parents.” She shuddered at the painful memories. “But that was years ago…”

  “Some people have a hard time forgiving the person they perceive tore their family apart,” he said with a glance out toward the street. “Mom says Logan has never missed a parole hearing for the man who shot my father. He’s determined to make sure that the guy never gets out of prison—at least not alive.”

  “What about you?” she asked. He had never talked about his father’s death before, but back then it had been too recent and probably too painful for a teenage boy to process let alone express.

  “What about me?” he asked as if his feelings didn’t matter. “I haven’t been here for any of the parole hearings.” And maybe that was why he thought his feelings didn’t matter—because he had been gone so long. He had left his family.

  And her. But they’d only just been friends, high school friends who often drifted apart after graduation. She hadn’t really meant anything to him. But she knew that his family had meant everything to him.

  “If you had been here, would you have gone to those hearings?”

  He shrugged. “I think it’s best to leave the past in the past.”

  She and Stephen were his past.

  “But most people don’t feel that way,” he continued. He passed her a legal pad and a pen. “Write down the names of the guys you’ve dated. And write down any cases you remember where someone might be holding a grudge against you.”

  “I really can’t,” she protested. “There are privacy laws I have to obey.”

  “What about Stephen?”

  He was her best friend. And he was missing. If there was any chance of getting him back, her pride and her job could be damned. So she wrote down some names.

  “He knew,” she said, finally defending herself from his earlier comment. “Stephen knew about the threats.”

  Cooper sucked in a breath. “And he wanted to marry you anyway? He must love you a lot.”

  As a friend. But if she told Cooper that, he would think the same thing her sister did—that she was just using Stephen to get her inheritance.

  “I love him a lot, too,” she said. But only as a friend.

  Cooper’s jaw went rigid again, as if he was clenching it. He nodded. “Stephen’s a good man. And a lawyer. Your grandfather would have approved.”

  Probably, but only until she’d given away all his ruthlessly earned money.

  “We have to find him,” she said. And she couldn’t rely on an overworked police department. “I really can’t afford Payne Protection—not until I get my inheritance. But I want to hire your family.” They specialized in security, working mainly as bodyguards, but Logan and Parker were both former police officers. And Cooper was…Cooper. The kind of man who stopped a speeding car from barreling over a woman.

  Had she even thanked him? She couldn’t remember now; it had all been such a blur of terror and disbelief and then relief.

  His brow furrowed with confusion. “We’re already on the job. Why do you think I showed up at the church in the first place?”

  She had been so upset over finding the blood in the empty groom’s quarters that she hadn’t given it much thought then. “I don’t know…maybe you had changed your mind about being Stephen’s best man.”

  But that wasn’t the case. She already knew that from when she’d eavesdropped outside the bride’s room. He had been pretty clear that he’d wanted no part of his mother’s manipulations. Why had the wedding planner been so intent on getting Cooper to attend the ceremony? It wasn’t as if he would have stood up and protested their union—at least not to claim her as his bride. Definitely not to claim her as his bride…

  “I wish I had agreed to be his best man,” Cooper admitted. “Then I would have been there…”

  Her heart lurched. “And you could have been hurt, too.” Or worse…

  Just as his brother had said while they’d waited for him to make sure her apartment was safe, he reminded her, “I can take care of myself.”

  Cooper wouldn’t have gone anywhere willingly. Not that Stephen had. Poor Stephen…

  “And I can take care of you, too,” he said. “I’ll keep you safe.”

  He had already proven that—when he’d stopped a speeding car.

  “That’s why I showed up at the church,” he said. He scooped up some of the shriveled petals that had fallen from the black roses. “Mom took the delivery of these and knew something was wrong.”

  “I’m sorry I brought your mother into this,” she said, suspecting that could have been the reason for some of his anger earlier. “I thought those threats were empty. I didn’t believe anyone would actually act on them.” Or she would have never agreed to marry her best friend. “I’ve been get
ting them for years…”

  “How many years?” he asked.

  She sighed and replied, “Ten years.”

  “Around the time your grandfather died?”

  Cooper remembered when Grandfather had died? He had been deployed at the time; he must have had greater concerns on his mind than her loss—such as it had been. Benedict Bradford had never been a very warm or loving man.

  “Yes,” she replied. “I didn’t get them all that often—only when I started seriously seeing someone.”

  “Someone sure didn’t want you collecting your inheritance,” he mused, staring down at the box of threats.

  She sighed again. “They got what they wanted.” And they’d gotten Stephen, too. Would they give him back…without the money?

  Her stomach churned with dread and worry that they wouldn’t, that she might never see her dear friend again. And the tears she’d been fighting back for so long rushed up with such force that they burst out. She couldn’t hold back the sobs while tears streamed from her eyes.

  Strong arms wrapped around her, pulling her close. And a big hand gently patted her hair. “No, they haven’t gotten what they wanted.”

  She shook her head, and his fingers slipped through her hair and skimmed down her neck. A rush of heat stemmed her tears. “There’re only a few days before my thirtieth birthday. I hope we find Stephen before then.” She doubted that they would, though. “But even if we do, I can’t put him at risk again. I can’t marry Stephen.”

  “You’re not going to marry Stephen,” he agreed.

  Because her groom was missing…

  What if he was already dead? Her heart beat heavily with anguish. And more tears trickled out, sliding down her cheeks.

  Cooper wiped them away with his thumbs. “You’re going to marry me.”

  Her heart rate quickened to a frantic pace. She gazed up at him in disbelief. “What? You didn’t agree to that.”

  “I changed my mind,” he said. “I’m going to be your groom. You’re still getting married tomorrow.”

  Maybe Rochelle’s slaps had hit her hard enough to addle her brain. She couldn’t understand what he was saying. What he meant…

  Maybe it was because he was too close, his arms around her—his heart pounding hard against hers. And he was leaning down, his head so close that she could see tiny black flecks in the bright blue of his eyes. She could see the shadow of his lashes on his cheeks and the stubble that was already darkening his jaw.