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Hopefully she hadn’t missed it. She wanted to see Penny get her happily-ever-after. The woman had planned so many for other brides that she deserved the happiest ever-after for herself.
Dane kept pace beside her in the hall. He was so big, so tall and broad and heavily muscled, and the hallway was narrow enough, that his arm brushed against hers. Once their hips even bumped. She felt an arc of awareness sizzle between them, which was ridiculous. As ridiculous as she had been to scream moments ago.
“Don’t you want to know what I found out?” he asked.
She sighed. “It was your friend,” she said. “The other one I saw standing outside with you. He must have been who I saw. He must have been checking the window.” She hadn’t been able to hear every word they’d spoken but enough, with their hand gestures, to get the gist. “I overreacted.”
“After what you’ve been through, that’s understandable,” he said.
She didn’t want his pity, didn’t want him looking at her the way Lars did. She wasn’t fragile or weak. She wasn’t crazy, either. “Penny had said she had a strange feeling.”
Dane cocked his head. “What?”
“You haven’t heard about Penny Payne’s premonitions?” she asked with shock.
He shook his head.
“She always knows when something bad is about to happen.”
“If she has that feeling today, maybe she shouldn’t be getting married.”
“This feeling wasn’t about her,” she said. The look on her boss’s beautiful face had been about Emilia. Emilia knew that.
Her own instinct was already warning her, so it was especially unnerving.
“No wonder you’re a little edgy,” Dane said.
A little was an understatement. She felt as if she might never sleep again, not without hearing that crying.
“It’s an important day,” she said. “I need to make sure everything goes well.” And she’d nearly blown that by screaming down the church.
Dane must have been the only one outside the nursery who’d heard her, otherwise her brother would have been there. Dane looked away from her now, and she saw that his hand was near his tuxedo jacket, as if he were about to reach for his weapon.
“What?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”
“You were right,” he said. “Manny did check the window. But it was when he first got here.”
She tensed now. “And when was that?”
“Over an hour ago.”
“So there was someone there when I thought I saw someone?”
He stared at her as if wondering if he could believe her, if he could believe that she had really seen anything at all. She had as many doubts as he had. But she stopped and turned back toward the nursery.
He caught her arm. “You had things to check on,” he reminded her. “The ceremony...”
She shook her head. “Nothing is more important than my son.” She would never let him down again. She couldn’t risk losing him. “I need to watch over him.” Or get him the hell away from the church.
But were they any safer at home?
Were they safe anywhere?
“Manny is watching him,” Dane assured her. “I told him to stay right outside that window. Nothing will happen to Blue.”
She turned back toward him. “You know my son’s nickname?”
He nodded. “I know that. I don’t know his real name.”
“Lars.”
“Good thing he has a nickname.”
Since she’d always believed he and her brother were such great friends, she glanced at him in surprise at the snarky remark, but then she realized he was kidding. His face was serious, though. He really had the emotionless expression of a soldier. Or a bodyguard...
This job was perfect for him. But she didn’t need a bodyguard. Or did she?
Was everything that was happening just in her head?
She would have to figure out that later. Right now she had a wedding to oversee. She hurried down the hall and up the stairs.
Dane stayed at her side, just like a bodyguard. “It wasn’t that bad a joke, was it?” he asked.
Her lips curved into a slight smile. “Lars wrote about you during boot camp and your deployments...” So much that she felt as if she knew him already—or at least as much as Lars knew him—which by her brother’s own admission wasn’t totally.
Dane’s an enigma, he’d written once. I trust him with my life. But I never know exactly what he’s thinking or feeling. Or if he feels anything at all...
She understood that now.
“I really need to make sure everything’s okay with the wedding.” But when she climbed the stairs to the foyer, she found Nikki Payne looking for her.
“There you are,” the petite brunette said. Her beautiful face was tense with anxiety.
“Is something wrong?” she asked. “Why hasn’t the ceremony started?” She knew Penny Payne hadn’t changed her mind and that her groom would have no second thoughts about marrying such an amazing woman, either.
“We’re not ready,” Nikki said.
Emilia had thought everything was set to go. That she’d had everything in place. The minister. The photographer. The caterer.
Every detail.
Then she noticed the eerie silence but for the slight murmur of whispering voices, and she questioned, “Why hasn’t the music started?” She had helped the musicians set up.
“The singer,” Nikki said. “She hasn’t showed up. We have the guitar players and pianist but no singer.”
A big hand nudged Emilia forward. “Yes, you do. She can sing.” She turned to Dane and shook her head.
It was one thing to sing to a nursery of children screaming their heads off. It was another to sing in front of a crowded church of quiet adults.
“You can sing?” Nikki asked, her brown eyes brightening with hope.
She shook her head again.
“I just heard her,” Dane said. “She’s amazing.”
Her pulse quickened, and her heart warmed with pleasure that he’d thought so. But she shook her head again as nerves fluttered in her stomach. She wasn’t certain if she was nervous about singing. Or about Dane standing so close to her.
Hell, maybe singing was one way to get him to leave her side.
“Would you do it for Mom?” Nikki implored her. “She thinks the world of you. And she deserves this day to be incredibly special.”
“My singing might hurt that,” Emilia warned her. But then she sighed. She already knew she couldn’t say no to Nikki. Lars’s girlfriend was the only one who hadn’t given her up for dead. “What song?”
She had expected a classic befitting Penny Payne. But her daughter named a newer pop song. It was about loving someone like you might lose them. She shivered. Penny had nearly lost her groom before he’d even been able to ask her on their first date. He’d wound up proposing instead. Emilia couldn’t imagine a love like that, one where they had fallen so quickly for each other and had been so confident that it was the real thing.
But then Lars and Nikki had that same kind of love—that soul-deep connection. She glanced back at Dane, and something shifted in her chest. But his handsome face remained expressionless.
Unfeeling.
She doubted she would be lucky enough to find a love like Penny and Woodrow’s or Lars and Nikki’s for herself. No. She wasn’t going to love a man like she was going to lose him. She would love her son like that—because she knew what it felt like—because she had already lost him once.
She couldn’t lose him again.
If not one of the bodyguards, who had been outside the nursery window and why? Was someone trying to take her son? Or her?
* * *
She wasn’t singing to him. She sang instead to the bride and groom. But her surprisingly sexy voice enveloped and overwhelmed Dane. His heart twisted in a tight fist of anxiety. Maybe it was her anxiety that he felt. Since she’d disappeared and Lars had given him that photo, Dane had had an almost eerie connection to her.
Despite what she’d said, he didn’t think she was nervous about singing. Her voice was too clear, too strong—and so compelling that all the guests were riveted, staring up at her in awe. Dane couldn’t take his gaze from her.
And maybe that was why he saw the fear he’d heard when she’d screamed in the nursery. Was it just post-traumatic stress disorder like her brother thought? But that bruise wasn’t PTSD. Something had happened. She’d been hurt again.
Recently.
Heat rushed through him, his temper heating his blood and his skin. He wanted to hurt whoever had hurt her. First he had to find out who that was. Somebody slid into the church pew next to him and bumped his shoulder. Mentally cursing himself for not being aware of the person approaching, he reached for his weapon.
“Hey,” Lars whispered. “You don’t need that.”
He wasn’t so sure. Who the hell had Emilia seen outside the nursery window?
His friend emitted a soft gasp. “I forgot how she sings...”
“...like an angel,” Dane murmured.
Lars glanced at him, his pale blue eyes narrowed.
A bead of sweat trickled down Dane’s back, beneath his tuxedo jacket. The monkey suit was why he was so damn hot—because it wasn’t like he was scared of his best friend. After nearly losing her once, Lars was bound to protect Emilia using whatever means necessary. Even murder...
Dane wouldn’t hurt her. He wanted to make sure she didn’t get hurt. Again.
Dane asked, “What happened to her shoulder?”
His brow furrowing, Lars glanced at him again then back at Emilia, who effortlessly held the last note of the song. Had her brother not noticed the bruise? But then, in a whisper, Lars replied, “She hit it on the doorjamb when Blue’s crying woke her up.”
That explained it, if Emilia had told her brother the truth. The tension clutching Dane’s guts didn’t ease at all. He suspected Emilia had left something out. Or maybe he was just thinking of all the abused women who claimed walking into doors had caused their bruises.
He needed to find out what was really going on with Emilia. Thinking of that—of sticking close enough to learn the truth and protect her—Dane’s tension increased. This might prove the most dangerous mission he’d ever had.
* * *
Nikki Payne had spent most of her adult life dodging bouquets. This time, while the bride prepared to throw her flowers, Nikki was not hiding in the bathroom. She was out on the dance floor with the other single women. And as the brightly colored bundle of tiger lilies and calla lilies catapulted through the air, Nikki didn’t duck behind any of those shrieking women. Nor did she keep her hands linked behind her back as she had every other time she’d been forced onto the dance floor.
Nobody had coerced her to join the others. Even as the maid of honor, she wouldn’t have had to participate in this tradition. But she wanted to catch these flowers. So she lifted her hands in the air and actually elbowed aside some of those screaming single women to snag this bouquet from the air. Holding the flowers aloft, she let out a squeal of her own—of victory.
The bride, Nikki’s mother, had tossed the bouquet over her shoulder. Now Penny turned fully around, and when she saw who’d caught her flowers, her eyes—the same brown as Nikki’s—widened in shock. She wasn’t the only one staring mutely at Nikki. Her brothers and sisters-in-law all gaped, their eyes and mouths wide.
Only Lars didn’t look shocked. He appeared delighted, his sexy lips curving into a grin while his pale blue eyes sparkled. She loved him—so much. More than she’d thought it possible to love anyone.
She’d fallen for him when he’d been at his worst, desperate and guilt-ridden over the disappearance of his sister. He’d blamed himself for not protecting her even though he’d been deployed in a war zone at the time Emilia had gone missing. His sense of responsibility and honor had impressed her so much that Nikki had been unable to resist him.
And she couldn’t resist him now as he dropped to one knee in the middle of the dance floor in front of her. Before he even opened his mouth, Nikki threw her arms around his neck. On his knees he was nearly her height.
“Yes!” she said. “Yes!”
“I don’t believe it,” a deep voice, belonging to one of her brothers no doubt, murmured. “I thought she’d be running the other way from that bouquet.”
“And she’s so impatient to say yes, she didn’t even wait for him to propose,” another brother chimed in.
Heat rushed to her face and she pulled back. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have presumed—”
Lars pressed his fingers over her lips. “It’s not like I’m down here looking for a missing contact,” he assured her. “I’m on my knees because I thought you were going to make me beg you to marry me.”
“And you were prepared to beg?” she asked in amazement. As well as having an overblown sense of responsibility and honor, he also had a lot of pride. Sometimes too much. But it was just another thing she loved about him.
He nodded. “I would do whatever it takes to convince you to be my wife, Nikki. I want to spend the rest of my life making you happy.”
“You already make me happy,” she assured him.
He tensed for a moment. Maybe he’d forgotten that she’d already said yes and thought she was going back to her earlier anti-marriage stance. She hadn’t ever really been anti-marriage, though. She had been anti–getting hurt.
But just as she loved Lars, she trusted him more than she’d ever thought it possible for her to trust anyone. He wasn’t going to hurt her.
“So you don’t have to do anything to convince me to marry you. I’m ready,” she said. And that was something she’d thought she would never say. She was ready to get married. Ready to be a bride and, more important, a wife.
His pale eyes glittered as if with a sheen of tears. She blinked furiously as tears of her own stung her eyes and tickled her nose. She would not cry, not in front of her brothers. Later, when she laid her head on Lars’s mammoth chest, she would soak his skin with her happy tears. But she was too proud to give in to them now...until Lars popped open the velvet case and revealed the most beautiful ring she had ever seen. Stacy Kozminski-Payne must have made it. Logan’s wife was so damn talented. As Nikki stared at the square diamond and twisted gold band on which it was mounted, a tear spilled over and trailed down her cheek—until Lars brushed it away.
“Oh, sweetheart,” he said, his voice gruff with emotion. “I don’t want to make you cry.”
