The sound of utensils scraping against glass plates pulled her back into reality.
Warm blankets had been piled around her, hints of pine and soap tickling her nose, but the rest of Benning’s queen-size bed was empty. She’d fallen asleep at the edge, pressed right against the snoring six-year-old who’d worked past her defenses and straight into her heart. And the man on the other side? She could still feel the warmth of his hand sliding across hers against the headboard as Olivia slept between them. Minutes had gone by, maybe hours, as they’d drifted off to sleep, their gazes connected with one another in the dark, and she couldn’t remember a time when she’d slept so well.
Her entire body ached, muscles she hadn’t even known existed protesting as she slowly eased her legs over the side of the bed. The wound from the pane of glass in her thigh dulled to a low throb as she settled her toes into the plush rug perfectly centered around the bed. The space—Benning’s room—was simple. Wooden nightstands on either side of the bed, with lamps that looked like they’d come straight from the pile of firewood she could see out the window now. Framed pictures of the twins had been strategically placed so he had to see them first thing in the morning, no matter which side of the bed he rolled out of.
Ana couldn’t help but pick up the one nearest her. Of Owen. He must’ve been two—maybe three—when the photo had been taken. He’d lifted his arms straight up in the air as though he’d made a touchdown from his position in the middle of the kitchen. Then she noticed the full-size carrots set on top of each of the cabinet drawer pulls, and she couldn’t help but laugh. Pain rolled across her chest from the second bullet she’d taken, and she set her hand over the bandage. Blood soaked through the gauze, staining the sleepshirt Olivia had let her borrow. She carefully replaced the frame on the nightstand and used her uninjured leg for balance to stand. “Maldicion.”
“One of these days you’re going to have to translate all the swear words you say when you think nobody is listening.” His voice coiled through her, reaching past the aches and pains, deep into the self-doubt and fear that’d plagued her since she’d taken on this case.
“I got blood on Lilly’s shirt.” She faced him, nearly knocked back by the primal attraction heating her veins as she looked at him. He leaned against the door frame, muscled arms crossed over his chest, and for a split second, she couldn’t remember what she’d been so upset about. He’d changed his clothes, kept his hair damp from his most recent shower and brought her a plate of something that smelled so good her stomach lurched. Infierno, he was a god among mere mortals. And she’d been stupid enough to walk away from him. “I’m sorry. I’ll wash it before Olivia notices.”
“Honestly, she’ll probably love it even more now.” He moved into the room, hints of the scent she’d caught from the sheets intensifying tenfold, and she couldn’t get enough. Of him. Of this place. Of the smiling faces in the picture frames set around the room. It was everything she hadn’t realized she’d wanted until now as he pinned her with that bright blue gaze. He stepped closer, offering the plate. “Thought you might be hungry.”
“Thank you.” Awareness of how very little clothing she’d gone to sleep in warmed her straight through. The T-shirt and pair of his oversize sweats were enough to keep her warm when Olivia had stolen the blankets in the middle of the night but felt like nothing when he studied her from head to toe as he did now. She took the plate from him, her body tingling with the unrequited desire that’d shot down her spine last night before Olivia had caught them kissing. She tried focusing on the plate in her hand and not the fact they were seemingly out of range of his daughter. Eggs, waffles and bacon warmed her palm through the plate. Her favorites. Had that been on purpose? “But I should tell you my team hasn’t been able to link any of Britland Construction’s employees to this case, or the charm they recovered from your property. Whoever has Owen could’ve just taken advantage of an opportunity to hide the skull on that site. Official access be damned. I have my team looking for the rest of it. Hopefully, we can find something that will give us an ID in case the skull is never recovered.”
“They couldn’t match ballistics from the bullet casings they recovered at the safe house, either.” Her gaze snapped to his. Pressure built behind her sternum the longer he invaded her personal space—that rich, addictive scent of his filling her lungs. He cocked his head to one side, a playful smile tugging at one corner of his mouth. A mouth she’d kissed less than twelve hours ago, a mouth she wanted more of now. Her gaze dropped to his lips in memory. No matter what happened at the end of this investigation, she’d remember that kiss. Remember him. “Agent Cantrell stopped by to fill me in this morning while you were still sleeping. I didn’t tell him you’d spent the night in my bed fighting a six-year-old for a corner of the mattress.”
A laugh escaped her chest, and she flinched against the ache, sliding her hand over the wound. She set the plate on the end of the bed to avoid dropping it at her feet. “Don’t make me laugh. It hurts too much.”
“Here.” Benning helped her down onto the bed with his uninjured hand, then disappeared into the bathroom for two breaths before reappearing with a bottle of rubbing alcohol, medical tape and fresh gauze in hand. “We should change your bandage.”
“Already prepared,” she said. “Were you expecting I’d get shot?”
“I live with two sociopaths who don’t learn their lessons about running through the house with sharp objects.” Setting everything across the end of the bed one-handed, he crouched in front of her, his gaze level with her chest. Callused fingers made quick work of pulling the collar of her shirt lower, removing the bandage over her stitches and cleaning both fresh and crusted blood from the area. Every move he made, every swipe of his fingers against her skin, hiked her heart rate into overdrive. All she had to do was reach out and touch him...and she’d have everything she’d ever wanted. “I can’t tell you how many times I had to clean the gash on Owen’s head after he ran into the brick fireplace because he wouldn’t leave the damn thing alone.”
She hissed as the cotton swab he was using pulled at her stitches, and stinging pain slipped past her constant hold on her reactions.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve got to clean it all or it might get infected.”
“It’s fine.” She wanted to turn away, to hide the fact she wasn’t completely under control at that moment from him, but there was nowhere for her to run. She wanted to be the woman who’d stopped at nothing to protect him and his children from harm for him, who’d stared down a killer without blinking, but the numbness and mental distance had started to fade. He’d gotten beneath her skin, lit the darkest parts of herself she’d kept hidden from everyone around her, and she was starting to lose the battle. Physically. Mentally. Emotionally. Locking her teeth together, she released the breath she’d been holding as the stinging dulled and studied his work. “You’re pretty good at this.”
“Well, you’re pretty good at getting yourself shot.” He trailed his hands to the bandage strapped across her upper thigh, igniting a path of heat and goose bumps. “And stabbed. Like I said, I’ve had a lot of practice.”
“Hey, let’s get one thing straight, okay? The window stabbed me, and that was not my fault.” His smile melted the remaining tension down her spine and fisted tight around her heart. Always the giver, always looking out for someone else. That was the kind of man he was. Caring, considerate. She didn’t deserve him. “Would you change any of it? The calls from school, the trips to the emergency room, sweeping cookie crumbs out of sheets on a daily basis.”
“Not a thing.” Peeling back the tape from the wound in her thigh, he changed out the dressing quickly, but his hand didn’t fall away when he was finished. In an instant a rush of sensation fired through her. There was a breath, one moment, where her fear released its hold on her, and she leaned in to finish what they’d started last night.
“Daddy?” Olivia asked from the door.
“Damn it, I really need to put a bell on that girl.” Benning ducked his head, his hand sliding from her thigh, and he turned toward his daughter standing in the door frame. “What is it, baby? Are you still hungry?”
“I miss Owen.” Sunlight streamed through the windows centered over each nightstand beside the bed, highlighting the well of tears in the girl’s eyes, and something inside Ana broke. Something she hadn’t let herself feel since realizing her baby sister wasn’t going to be coming home. No matter how many times Ana and her brothers had searched, they’d had to accept their sister was gone. “Can he come home now, Daddy? Please?”
In three steps Benning had his daughter wrapped in his big arms, her face buried in his shoulder as he stroked her hair. “Everything is going to be okay, Liv. Owen is going to be home soon. I promise. We’re working with Ana’s team to find him, and he’ll be annoying the heck out of you sooner than you think.”
Turning her attention to getting dressed, Ana was aware the moment wasn’t meant for her. No matter how easy it’d been to fall back into old habits, familiarities and jokes, she wasn’t part of this family. And she never would be. The work she did couldn’t be compromised. Not by her past experiences. Not by the six-year-old girl who’d wrapped her arms around Ana as she’d gone to sleep last night, and definitely not by the man determined to take up too much space in her head.
“Will the skull you put in the fireplace help find him faster?” Olivia asked.
Ana twisted around, her heart in her throat. “What’d you say?”
Maneuvering Olivia back at arm’s length, Benning wiped his daughter’s tears with the pads of his thumbs, then gripped both her arms. He lowered his voice. “Olivia Kay Reeves, tell me you aren’t the one who took that skull from the fireplace.”
“I wanted to solve the case.” Olivia’s face fell as another round of tears streaked down her flawless cheeks. “I brought it to my lab.”
“What lab?” Ana took a single step forward.
Benning slid his hands down his daughter’s arms as he turned to face Ana. “She and Owen built a fort in the backyard where they like to pretend to solve cases. The skull must be there.”
“SHE REALLY IS one hell of an agent,” Ana said.
“I wish that made me feel better.” All this time the evidence he’d removed from Britland’s construction site had been right in his own backyard. Well, it’d been in his backyard before, but his daughter wasn’t supposed to be the one who’d found it. His stomach knotted. This was the kind of thing nightmares were made of, and Olivia had... Hell, she’d done what any good investigator would’ve done and preserved the evidence. “Six-year-olds aren’t supposed to hide bones from their parents in a fort in their backyard.”
The forensic techs pulled the evidence from the makeshift fort his kids had built out of extra two-by-fours and subfloor from one of the sites he’d inspected last summer. Owen and Olivia had spent every waking second in their hideout when the weather was good. In fact, he’d had to drag them into the house by their ears for dinner on many occasions. Now it was a crime scene, stained by the very thing he was trying to protect them from.
“We have the skull now. My team will run DNA and dental records, and we’ll figure out time and cause of death.” Ana slipped her hands into her jacket pockets. “If Olivia hadn’t moved it, the killer would’ve gotten ahold of it first and destroyed the evidence, Benning. Getting an ID on this victim is how we get your son back.”
She was right, but at what point would it be okay to say his family had been through enough? How much more blood, fear and near-death experiences did he and his kids have to take before what he’d built cracked beyond repair? Olivia could obsess over becoming an investigator all she wanted, but there was a difference between reading about this kind of stuff in her mystery novels and seeing it firsthand, and he didn’t want any part of it. Not for her. Not for the woman at his side. What kind of life was that? What kind of person wasn’t affected by this kind of work on a deep, scarring level? Benning knew the answer the second the question had crossed his mind, and right then he understood. Understood the deeper reason why Ana had chosen to cut herself off from her family and friends...from him. Understood why she’d kept her emotions out of relationships, and how she was able to step onto scenes like this over and over again with a kind of numbness and detachment. Because without that boundary in place, she risked the people she cared about the most. Nobody—not even she—could handle a lifetime of that kind of guilt if something happened to one of them. “How do you do it? All the pain, the death, the risk of endangering the people you care about. You’ve made a career out of stuff like this, and I can’t even handle it for a few days.”
One breath. Two.
“You know as well as I do it doesn’t come without a cost, but I realized a long time ago giving people another chance to live their life is worth the sacrifice.” Ana limped toward the scene, then paused, turning back toward him. Controlled chaos played out behind her, but the world seemed to disappear in the moment her eyes lifted to his. No crime scene techs, no body parts being collected and bagged in his backyard. It was just the two of them. Hints of red colored the tip of her nose and cheeks, the confidence in her eyes overwhelming. “You’re stronger than you think you are, Benning. The only reason your kids are still here is because you fought to protect them. Remember that the next time you ask yourself if you’re doing enough. You’re everything to them.”
Yet, he’d been the one to put them in danger in the first place.
A car door slammed from the other side of the property, and he turned his attention to the older, white-haired couple headed for the front of the house. Lilly’s parents.
Benning faced the elongated front porch he and his father had built a few years ago, studying Olivia with her notebook and pen in hand as she rocked back and forth in the hanging swing. He used to rock her and Owen to sleep as babies on it. It’d been the three of them, one of them in each arm, and the crickets on that swing when he’d promised to protect them for the rest of their lives. For the first time he could remember, he’d failed.
The brightness in Olivia’s expression gripped his heart in a vise as he climbed the stairs and sat beside her. She was obviously having the time of her life watching real investigators and technicians collect evidence, taking notes on what they did, what they said, how they bagged the evidence. He swiped his uninjured hand down his face. She’d found a human skull in their fireplace and had moved it without hesitation to solve the crime herself. Hell, he had to start watching what kind of stuff she was reading. “Liv, I need you to go spend a couple nights with Grandma and Grandpa while I help the FBI look for your brother. It’ll be safer for you there.”
He and Lilly hadn’t had the greatest relationship. Really, they’d only gotten married to make it easier on the kids as they got older, but he’d always liked and respected her parents, and they loved their grandchildren despite the choices he and Lilly had made. He trusted them to watch over and be there for his daughter in case...he couldn’t. Benning bit the inside of his cheek to counter the sinking sensation in his stomach.
The scribbling on her note pad slowed. “I want to stay with you.”
He moved a piece of long brown hair out of her face and tucked it behind her ear as his insides tore bit by bit. He should’ve gone straight to the police after he’d found the skull instead of coming home because Owen had been sick. Should’ve been strong enough to fight off the bastard who’d taken his kids. Should’ve gone after Ana seven years ago when he’d had the chance so there wasn’t this invisible distance between them now. His life was full of wrong choices, but he’d never forgive himself if something happened to Olivia because of his own selfish need to keep her close. “I know, but think of it this way. Grandma has a whole bunch of mystery novels you haven’t read yet.”
Curiosity pulled her attention from the crime scene, and those beautiful blue eyes widened. “How many?”
“She told me she ordered a ton of new ones for you last week.” He settled one elbow on his knee, leveling his shoulder with hers. Nudging her with his arm, he unbalanced her enough to keep her attention on him. “Thirty. Maybe more.”
“And I get to read them all?” she asked.
“I told Grandma you get to read as many of them as you want.” Threading his hand in hers, he helped her off the swing and nodded toward Lilly’s parents. Within two minutes Olivia, her booster seat and the bag he’d packed for her were loaded into the back of his in-laws’ pickup truck. “I’m going to see you in a couple days, okay?”
“Okay.” She hugged her bag tighter. “Don’t forget to call me tonight when I go to bed.”
“I will, baby. See you soon.” He kissed the top of her head, memorized the way the scent of her shampoo tickled the back of his throat, then shut her inside and stepped back. Slush kicked up behind the pickup’s tires as his daughter centered her face in the rear window and stared back at him with a small wave. He waved back, and something inside him cracked. First, Owen had been taken from him. Now he needed Olivia as far from this case as possible.
“You made the right decision.” Ana stepped into his side, her soft, dark hair lifting into his face as wind ripped through the trees, and a shiver raced down his spine. She’d been there nearly every step of the way, protected his daughter from harm, nearly died to ensure he and Olivia had made it to safety at the cabin, and was working tirelessly to locate his son. Where his heart threatened to shred in his chest as his in-laws turned onto the main road back toward Sevierville, Ana was there trying to hold him together. She’d always been there. Because he hadn’t been able to let her go all this time.
“There was nothing to think about. Every second she’s around me is another chance that bastard can get his hands on her.” Warmth spread down his arm as she curled her fingers around his inner elbow. “I should’ve gotten her out of town when I had the chance, but I couldn’t...”
“Stand the thought of losing her, too? I might know a little something about that.” She did. More than he ever would. She buried her nose beneath the high collar of her jacket, then tucked her hands into her pockets, taking the heat she’d generated with her. “I could tell you it gets easier over time to help you feel better, but it’d be a lie.”
“Has anyone ever told you your bedside manner could use some work?” he asked.
“I don’t think anyone but you would have the guts.” Her laugh pierced through the unsettling haze closing in on his thoughts as the pickup dipped below the horizon, and hell, he loved that sound. Loved the way her smile reached her eyes, how her smile lines perfectly framed her full lips, loved the way that laugh shot heat straight through his system. She nodded back over her shoulder toward the house. “Come on. It’ll be a few hours before forensics has any information on the skull. Until then, we can make up for the sleep your daughter stole from us last night as soon as the tech team is finished. Then we can review the list of Britland Construction employees together. Make sure there’s not someone on that list we need to take a closer look at.”
The gut-wrenching weight of sending Olivia to his in-laws’ farm for a couple days started to lift. How was it possible, in the most terrifying circumstances he’d ever imagined, Ana still kept him grounded, kept him from losing control? If he hadn’t requested her to work this case, would he have been able to keep it together this long? Would the killer have gotten exactly what he’d wanted, and taken Benning and his twins down with him? The answer was already there, already cemented in reality. Without Ana, he would’ve lost everything. “I warned you what would happen if you agreed to a sleepover. You knew the risks going in, Agent Ramirez.”
“Like I said, it’s hard to say no to her,” she said.
Benning slipped his hand into hers as she struggled to retrace her steps through the snow on her injured leg, and in that moment he found himself never wanting to let go. “Wait until she asks you to let her drive your SUV.”