Bad to worse.
That was the way things had gone, and Logan wasn’t happy about it.
He also wasn’t happy about the fact that Harper had left the relative safety of her cabin to give him a ride back to her place. A ride he hadn’t needed or wanted. A man was dead. Someone had killed him. The person was still at large. It seemed to Logan that the safe thing to do, the smart thing, would have been for Harper to stay behind closed and locked doors until the murderer was found.
Obviously Harper had other ideas.
He glanced at her. She had a beautiful face, an austere profile and a will of steel. The last might be a problem when it came to keeping her safe.
She leaned forward, opening the truck’s vents so more warm air poured out. He caught a hint of the outdoors and of something flowery and feminine. That sweet and delicate scent surprised him, because Harper seemed anything but sweet or delicate. She seemed tough and determined, her wiry frame built for running or hiking or lifting buckets of clay and carrying them through the woods.
“You need to warm up,” she murmured, shifting in her seat and grabbing a blanket from the truck’s extended cab. “A person can get hypothermia quickly out here. Even when the temperature is above freezing.”
She tossed the blanket around his shoulders, tugging it into place, her knuckles brushing the underside of his jaw. He felt rough skin and calluses and caught a hint of that scent again.
“I’m fine.” He nudged her hands away, ignoring Stella’s smirk. “But you might not be if the murderer decides to take a shot at us on the way back to your place.”
“I didn’t realize there was a murderer when I decided to come out here,” she said, a hint of discomfort in her voice. Her gaze jumped from Logan to the window beside him, the darkness beyond it, the night sprinkled with glittering snowflakes. He could almost see her mind working, calculating the risk, estimating the possibility of someone lurking in the shadows, ready to strike. “If I had,” she continued, “I probably would have come anyway. I’m a little stubborn like that,” she admitted, and something about the way she said it made him smile.
“Admitting it is the first step in recovery,” he replied, and she laughed, the shaky sound filling the truck cab.
“Recovery would imply I had a problem that needed to be fixed,” she said. “But stubbornness is a strength when you live out in the middle of nowhere.”
“You’re a braver woman than I am,” Stella cut in. “There’s no way that I’d live like you do.”
She spoke casually, but Logan knew she had an agenda. Stella usually did.
“It’s not that scary out here,” Harper said, fiddling with the heating vent again. Opening it. Closing it. Opening it.
He touched her hand, stilling the almost frantic movement.
“Depends on your definition of scary,” Stella said breezily. “Your cabin is nice, but it’s not effective when it comes to staying safe. Too small, for one thing. If someone decided to set it on fire like what happened to that barn, your place would go up in minutes. Then there are the doors and windows. How about we discuss how flimsy they are?”
There it was. Stella’s agenda. She wanted Harper out of the cabin and in a safer location. She could join the club. Logan wanted the same thing.
“How about we don’t?” Harper replied, but Stella was on a roll. She’d assessed the situation, and she’d come up with a plan to deal with it.
“I could easily kick the front door in. One well-placed foot, and the door would be lying on the floor while you stood there struggling to load your shotgun.”
“I have a handgun in my room,” Harper said, her voice stiff and tight.
“Let me guess,” Stella responded. “It’s locked in a box. The clip is locked in a separate box in the office or down in the living room or in one of the kitchen cabinets.”
Harper didn’t say a word.
Obviously, Stella had hit the nail on the head with that one.
“Do you know how to use the handgun?” Logan asked as he put the truck in drive and pulled onto the slushy road.
“Yes,” she muttered. “I know how to use the handgun. I also know how to load the shotgun very quickly. If it’s necessary, I can hit a target at twenty yards.”
“I’d like to see that,” Stella scoffed. She had the least amount of skill with firearms on a team filled with former military and former law enforcement. She was the lone wolf, the only female. She’d earned her right to be there, though. She was a nurse, had trained as a medic in the navy. She knew how to triage patients, how to keep them alive until help arrived. She could hit a moving target if she had to, but there wasn’t a person on the team who didn’t know how much she’d have hated that.
“And I’d like to see you kick my front door in with one well-placed foot,” Harper retorted.
Stella laughed, pulling out her cell phone and texting someone. Their boss wasn’t happy with the newest development. He’d been expecting trouble, but Logan didn’t think he’d been expecting this much of it.
“You contacting Chance?” he asked, and she snorted.
“Please! The boss has sent me twenty texts asking for updates. I answered one of them.”
Great. Those two were on the outs. Again.
They’d dated for about five seconds a few years back, something that had surprised everyone on the team. Logan suspected that it had surprised Stella, because she’d broken things off pretty quickly.
Fear was a powerful motivator, and there’d been plenty of discussion around the office about just how afraid she was. She’d watched her husband die, and that seemed to affect every relationship she had.
Her business. Logan had asked her about it once and she’d nearly cut him off at the knees.
Not a topic he’d broach again. Not because he was afraid of her, but because he was afraid for her. It was her Achilles’ heel, and there were times when he wondered if it was going to destroy her.
“Chance will be fit to be tied,” he responded, keeping his tone neutral. He didn’t like the games Stella played, but he liked her. He also liked Chance. As long as they were civil to each other, he kept his mouth shut.
“Chance is going to be just fine. Knowing him, he’s already got a few guys lined up to come out here and help us. Plus, I’m filling Jackson in on things. He’ll pass the information to Chance. They’re brothers after all. Nearly attached at the hip.”
“Not even close, and you know it. Jackson is as likely to tell Chance things as you are.”
She shrugged, fluffing her hair as if she couldn’t have cared less.
“Don’t play games, Stella,” he finally said, because he wasn’t going to get in the middle of his boss and his coworker, but he couldn’t let either of them slow down progress on a case.
“No games, Logan,” she said wearily. “I’m just avoiding conflict. Chance and I are like oil and water. We don’t mix well, so it’s best to keep us separate. He knows it, and he’s not going to blow a gasket because I pass information on to Jackson. He’s probably already working on getting backup out here, and he’s probably already in discussion with the local PD and the DC police.”
She glanced at her phone. “Jackson says Chance is sending someone out to escort us back to DC. I told you that Chance would be on top of things.”
Logan didn’t miss the note of admiration in her voice.
She could say what she wanted, act any way she wanted, but there was no doubt that she had a lot of respect for their boss.
He didn’t point it out.
She’d have denied it, and it wasn’t his business or his right to argue with her version of the truth.
“Did Chance say who’s coming?”
“No. Doesn’t matter. Everyone on the team will be an asset.”
“What’s the ETA?” he asked.
“Four hours.” She glanced at her watch. “Should be here a little after midnight.”
“They have a safe house ready?” he asked, and Harper tensed.
“I hope,” she said quietly, “that you’re not thinking I’m going into hiding.”
“What we’re thinking,” he responded, turning onto the gravel road that led to her cabin, “is that you want to stay alive.”
“Most people do,” she retorted.
“You’re not going to do it out here. Not with someone gunning for you. We can protect you from a direct threat—keep intruders out of the house and away from you—but that’s not going to do much good if someone tosses a bomb at the cabin or sets fire to the woods surrounding it.”
“That would be a major effort in this kind of weather,” she said, but the defiance was gone from her voice.
“And it didn’t take a major effort to have someone follow Logan to your place?” Stella asked. “To send them gunning for you? It didn’t take a major effort to send one of them back to finish the job?”
“You’re making a lot of assumptions,” Harper murmured. “It’s possible—”
“Anything is possible,” he cut in. “But that doesn’t make it probable or even reasonable. You’ve been living out here for four years, right?”
“I’m sure that you know I have,” she responded, a twinge of bitterness in her voice. “A company like yours doesn’t just walk into something unprepared.”
“True,” he agreed. “We do our homework. You’ve been living out here for four years without incident. You attend Snowy Vista Community Church every Sunday, and everyone there likes you.”
“What’d you do? Spend time in town and ask people about me?” she demanded.
“I spent the night at Dora’s place. She’s a wealth of information.”
“She’s the church pianist,” Harper said. “And she knows everything she needs to know about everyone in town. Or she thinks she does.”
“That was the impression I got.” He’d also gotten the impression that Dora was a certified cat lady. A half dozen kittens had been sitting in a basket in his room, and he’d seen another five or six full-grown cats scurrying for cover every time he walked through the hallway.
He frowned, reaching into his pocket, surprised to feel a warm, furry body still there.
“Does Picasso like cats?” he asked as he pulled up to her porch.
“I have no idea. Why?”
He pulled the kitten from his pocket, set it on her lap. It lifted its head and mewed pitifully. “I found it in the barn.”
To his surprise, Stella reached for the kitten and lifted it. “A boy. And he’s skinny. He also needs a bath. He stinks.”
The kitten mewed again, and she sighed, tucking him under her coat. “We can get him fixed up while we make plans. Inside. You want me to check things out, Logan? Or do you want to?”
“Check what things out?” Harper asked.
“The cabin.” All the lights were on, every room lit. It looked cozy, warm and inviting, but that didn’t mean danger wasn’t lurking inside.
“I’ll check it out,” Logan said. “Shouldn’t take long.”
He got out of the truck, closed the door and headed up the porch stairs.
* * *
Harper should have been the one searching the cabin. She knew every room, every closet, every little hiding spot that someone could fit into.
Not that there were that many of those.
The design was simple and storage space minimal. She’d wanted it that way. No place for all the stuff she’d accumulated before Lydia died. No place to put photographs of the family she no longer had. There was one shelf in her bedroom. She kept a photo of Lydia and Amelia there and a photo of her mother. No photos of Daniel. She didn’t need pictures to remember all the ways she’d failed herself in that relationship.
Yeah. The cabin was streamlined. It wouldn’t be difficult for Logan to search. She doubted he’d find anyone. She’d left Picasso in the living room. The dog wasn’t the best guard around, but he was a good deterrent.
She still thought she should have been the one searching the place. It was her cabin, her life, her responsibility. That was something she took seriously. From the time she was young enough to understand the situation she lived in, Harper had done everything she could to help her mother live up to her obligations. She’d reminded Erica that bills needed to be paid, that food needed to be bought. When she’d gotten a little older, she’d done odd jobs for people, earning money here and there to help pay the bills.
Erica had always appreciated it, and she’d tried to be a good mother.
She really had.
It wasn’t that she hadn’t wanted to live up to her responsibilities. It was more that she couldn’t. She was too caught up in the dramas that she constantly involved herself in. Abusive boyfriends. Cheaters. Liars. There’d been a long string of each throughout the years. In the end, the stress of that had killed her. At least, that was what Harper thought. The official diagnosis had been leukemia.
She frowned. She tried not to think about the past. It was too easy to get caught up in regrets and recriminations. Besides, dwelling in places of unhappiness was the easiest way Harper knew to destroy a life.
“I think I’d better go help Logan,” she said, desperate to get out of the truck and do something that would refocus her thoughts, move her out of the place she found herself in much too often—ruminating on all the things that had gone wrong instead of celebrating the things that had been right.
“I think you’d better stay.” Stella snagged her wrist, her grip firm.
“It’s my house, Stella. My responsibility.”
“And you’re our responsibility.”
“Wrong.”
Stella snorted, lifting the black kitten out from under her coat. “We won’t argue about it. Not in front of the baby.”
She dropped the kitten into Harper’s lap, and it meowed pitifully.
A good distraction, and she thought Stella knew it.
“He’s probably hungry.” She ran her hands over a rough, matted coat. “He’s skinny under all this fur.”
“He’ll fatten up.” Stella seemed distracted, her gaze focused on the cabin, then the tree line, then the gravel road behind them.
“You think someone is going to come out here?” Harper asked, her skin crawling with the thought.
Twice her sanctuary had been breached.
Three times and she didn’t think she’d ever call it a sanctuary again.
“It could go either way,” Stella responded.
“Meaning?”
“If the guy is smart—and he probably is—he’ll stay away for a while, just wait for another opportunity to strike. If he’s nuts, he’ll be here sooner rather than later.”
“I hope he’s smart, then.”
“I hope he’s nuts. I’d rather face him down now, get it all over with, than wait for him to strike again.”
“You’re assuming that if he comes, we’ll be on the winning end.”
“I don’t ever assume,” Stella replied, her voice cold and a little hard. “That would be a surefire way to get myself or someone else killed.”
“Sorry. I wasn’t trying to imply—”
“You don’t need to apologize. You didn’t say anything offensive. I’m just clearing things up for you, because you’ve got one of the best teams in the world working to keep you safe. You need to know that, and then you need to do exactly what we’re asking you to do.”
“We’re back to me leaving the cabin and heading off to some unknown place for an indeterminate amount of time,” Harper muttered.
“If it keeps you alive, I don’t see what the problem is.”
“I have work to do. I’ve been commissioned—”
“It won’t matter if you’re dead.” Stella cut her off, her gaze focused on the tree line again.
She was right, so Harper didn’t respond.
There wasn’t anything she could say.
She had a choice to make, and despite what Stella seemed to think—it was hers to make. She could stay at the cabin, keep the shotgun loaded, the handgun at the ready. She could probably count on Picasso to be an alarm system, or she could pay to have an alarm system put in. She could shore up the windows and the doors, make her quiet retreat a fortress.
Would it be enough?
That was the question she couldn’t answer, because she had no idea who was after her or why.
Her cell phone buzzed, and she dragged it from her pocket, glancing at the caller ID.
Gabe. She didn’t have his contact information in her phone, but she recognized the number. It was the same one he’d had four years ago.
She answered quickly, knowing he was impatient enough to hang up after the second or third ring. “Hello?”
“Harper? This is Gabe. How are you, kid?”
“I’ve been better. How about you?”
“Busy. I guess you probably heard that I’m getting married again.”
Her stomach dropped, her heart pounding frantically. Married again? It seemed like just yesterday that she’d stood as an attendant at his wedding to Lydia. “No. I didn’t.”
“I am. You’re invited, of course.” He cleared his throat, the sound of discomfort surprising. Gabe was always confident, always absolutely sure of himself. “She’s a great lady, Harper. I think you’ll be happy with my choice.”
“I don’t see why that would matter. We haven’t spoken in four years, Gabe. My opinion is no different than any stranger’s would be to you.”
“You’re wrong,” he responded, a hint of sharpness in his tone. “I always liked you, and your blessing matters to me.”
Harper didn’t know what to say, so she kept silent, waiting for him to continue.
“I think Lydia would approve,” he finally said.
“She’s dead. She’s not going to have anything to say about it one way or another,” she pointed out, and he sighed.
“It’s been four years. Should I have mourned forever?”
“You didn’t even mourn for a day.”
“You’re wrong, Harper. I loved your sister. I thought we’d have a lifetime together.”
There were a dozen things she could have said to that, a few dozen arguments she’d overheard that she could have mentioned, at least two women she could have pointed to, and then there was Lydia’s comment about Gabe wanting a divorce. But he was right—Lydia and Amelia had been gone for years. Picking a fight with Gabe wasn’t going to change that.
“You went to a lot of effort to find me, Gabe. What do you need?”
“You already know. You mentioned it in the message you left for me. Someone sent me a package. There was a photo of a girl in it. She looked to be about Amelia’s age.”
“Do you think it’s Amelia?” she said, her mouth was dry, her heart thudding.
“I don’t know, but I’ll do whatever it takes to find out.” His voice was cold, more Gabe-like. He’d always been logical to a fault, always handled his fights with Lydia with a detachment that had made his wife seem overly emotional and dramatic in comparison.
“Is there any proof it’s her?”
“No, but...” He paused, and she could picture him—chestnut hair cropped close, dark eyes focused. “She looks like a miniature version of Lydia. Same blond hair. Same green eyes. Same dimple in her left cheek.”
Amelia had had a dimple.
It’d peeked out only when she was really happy and really relaxed. Which had been rare. There’d been too much tension in the house, and Amelia had been a sensitive kid.
“Lots of people have blond hair and green eyes. Lots of them have dimples. That doesn’t mean—”
“Look.” He cut her off, his voice sharp. “I’m not stupid, Harper. I know what the chances are. I spent three days telling myself there was no way the kid in the picture was my daughter. I almost tossed the entire package in the trash and forgot about it. This isn’t a good time in my life to be dredging up the past, and I’m not holding out any hope that the little girl is actually my daughter.”
“If you feel that way, why did you pay someone to find me?”
“Because my fiancée wouldn’t let it go. Even she could see the resemblance. Not just with Lydia but with the photos I have of Amelia.”
“Your fiancée looked at the photos?” That wasn’t the way Harper had imagined things going. She’d thought for sure that Gabe had packed up every photo of Lydia and their daughter, put them all in a box and stored them somewhere so that he wouldn’t have to see them and be reminded of his failures.
“I have photos all over my house,” he snapped. “I’m not the ogre your sister painted me to be. I loved her. I made mistakes, sure, but I was trying to fix them.”
“By sleeping with other women?” The question slipped out, and she regretted it immediately. Gabe didn’t enjoy being backed into corners, and he’d be as likely to hang up and never contact her again as he would be to tell her off.
“I never cheated on your sister.”
“The night Lydia died, you were with—”
“A friend. Just like I told the police. I wasn’t sleeping with Maggie,” he bit out. “We were friends long before I met Lydia. Lydia knew that. She said it didn’t bother her that one of my best friends was a woman. It did. That was her problem. Not mine.”
He sounded sincere, and maybe he was telling the truth.
Harper didn’t know. It wasn’t her business to care. Not anymore.
“I apologize. It’s all in the past, and I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“You don’t believe me,” he said quietly. “And that’s fine, but believe this—Maggie was there for me after your sister died and Amelia...died.” He choked the word out. “She helped me through one of the darkest times in my life. A year ago, I realized just how much she meant to me, and—”
“Now you two are going to get married?” she cut in. She didn’t want to hear any more about his relationship. She didn’t care enough to know. All she wanted was more information on the little girl with the green eyes and Lydia’s dimple.
“Yes,” he bit out. “Maggie thinks that the girl in the picture could be Amelia. She knew her, and she knew your sister. She pushed me to go to the police with the package, and I did. They sent the photo to the FBI, who ran facial recognition programs on it.”
“And?”
“It takes time, and it’s only been a week.”
“How much longer do they think it will take?”
“Could be a few days or a couple of weeks. It just depends on their workload and how easy it is to run the comparison. There’s a big difference between a four-year-old and an eight-year-old. Faces can change a lot in those years.”
“I guess they can,” she said quietly, because her throat was clogged with emotions she didn’t want to feel—anxiety, fear, anticipation. Hope.
That was the big one.
The one she didn’t want to hang her hat on.
“I didn’t do this to upset you, Harper. I didn’t do it to bring up a lot of hard feelings and ugliness. I did it because I didn’t think it was fair to keep you in the dark. You loved Amelia, and if she’s alive—”
“I want to know it. Do you have a copy of the photo you can send me?”
“I’ll text it to you. Take a little time to look it over. Think about what you want to do. When you’re ready, call me again.”
He hung up.
Just like that.
Gabe had never been one to waste time.
He’d accomplished his goal. That was all he’d ever really cared about, and maybe that, more than anything, had been the problem between him and Lydia. She’d wanted everything from him—money, jewelry, attention, affection. He’d just wanted to keep living his life, doing his thing with a wife who supported him and made a pretty picture beside him.
Lydia had been a very pretty picture. A beautiful one, actually. But she’d also been needy, clingy and a little desperate.
In the end, they’d never quite worked together. There’d been no team. Just each of them doing what they wanted while the other one complained or fumed. Maybe it hadn’t really been either of their faults. Or maybe it had been both of theirs.
Her phone buzzed.
Gabe had already sent the photo.
Her fingers shook as she opened the text, looked at the photo, stared into a face that was so much like Lydia’s that her heart nearly broke from looking at it.
“Everything okay?” Stella asked quietly, and Harper nodded, because there was nothing else she could do.
Things weren’t okay.
They hadn’t been okay in a long time.
She’d done a good job of pretending, she’d created a convincing facade, but her life had fallen apart four years ago. All the plans she’d accomplished since then, all the success she’d had, hadn’t done a thing to help her put it back together.