Amish Christmas Emergency

But Gavin hadn’t talked to his brother since Sam had betrayed him in the worst possible way.

Get it together, Jackson. He’d promised himself after Sam and Lacey’s betrayal that he’d never let himself be humiliated that way again. His parents were concerned that he’d wind up alone. Well, maybe he’d be alone, but at least he’d know that he was living his life on his terms. That no one was taking advantage of him.

So why was he inviting a complete stranger to call him by his first name? He’d always hated his name.

She smiled briefly. It was a very tired smile. “Gavin, then. I’m Alexa.”

He changed his mind. He liked the way his name sounded when she said it. He really needed to focus.

Touching her lightly on the elbow, he pointed to an area away from the others in the room. Alexa seemed to understand. She led him behind the receptionist’s counter. Turning to face him, she raised an eyebrow and waited.

“I know you were worried about Noah Hostetler. I wanted to let you know that he made it to the hospital. He’s going into surgery, but he was conscious and alert. His wife is on the way to join him.”

“Oh!” Her blue-gray eyes glittered with unshed tears. “Thank you so much for letting me know. I was worried about him.”

He reached out and patted her shoulder. It was an awkward movement. Her eyes widened, and she jerked back slightly, flushed. He dropped his arm instantly, feeling like an idiot. What was he thinking? He had never been the touchy-feely type. It just wasn’t his style. He’d blame it on exhaustion. His shift was supposed to have ended two hours ago, but between the accident and now this shooting, he would be on the job for at least two more hours before he could head home and sleep.

“Hey, Alexa, what is this? It looks like you had a delivery,” the receptionist said.

Something flashed in her eyes before she averted them. Was it embarrassment? Fear? Whatever it was, she didn’t look happy to be receiving a delivery. In fact, she looked downright annoyed about it. She looked at the box the receptionist, Megan, pointed to with a scowl. Something was going on here. Although, it really was none of his business. The flowers were probably from an ex. He glanced at her left hand. No rings. Not even an indentation. So she probably wasn’t married or recently divorced.

“When did that get here?”

“I don’t know. I just saw it sitting here.”

“Miss Grant!” A man in a doctor’s coat strode up to them, scowling. “Haven’t I asked you not to get your deliveries here? This is a medical facility!”

“Yes, Dr. Quinton. I’m sorry, but I have no idea who’s sending them.”

Well, that was interesting.

The doctor wasn’t appeased. “Tell the florist to stop making deliveries here then.”

“Yes, Dr. Quinton. I told the florist that. Last week. This is from a different florist. One from out of town.”

The man huffed. “See that it doesn’t happen again.” He turned abruptly and left. Alexa tossed the narrow box on the counter. It bounced, and the lid fell off. A single red rose dropped onto the countertop. A note was in the box. She picked it up. The color drained from Alexa’s face. Concerned, Gavin stepped forward and grabbed the note from her shaking hand.

“It’s your fault he’s dead. You’re mine. Don’t forget it again.”

TWO

Alexa accepted the bottled water that Gavin brought to her with a smile of gratitude. She needed to have something in her hands to keep them from fidgeting. She sat in the conference room at the LaMar Pond Police Department. Sergeant Parker seated himself in a chair on the other side of the table. Gavin stood right inside the door. The rose and the note she’d received had been whisked away into evidence. She didn’t complain. If she never saw another rose again, that would be great. She never would have guessed that her day would have turned out this way.

Unscrewing the cap, she lifted the bottle to her lips and took a long drink. She hadn’t realized how thirsty she was. How long had it been since she had last eaten? Too long. She had not had a chance to grab her lunch, and then things had gotten crazy. She needed something soon if she didn’t want her blood sugar levels to crash. She wasn’t feeling dizzy or confused yet, although she was a bit shaky. That could be from the shock of the morning’s events, though. But what if it wasn’t? She wasn’t fatigued, though, which was a good sign. She had her sugar tablets in her bag, but she should eat something too.

“Do you need anything else? Something to eat?” Gavin inquired.

She smiled at him, relieved. “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble. I was really sick years ago and developed type two diabetes. I’m feeling a little shaky. It’s probably nothing, but I don’t want to take the chance.”

Gavin’s eyes widened with alarm. “You have diabetes? Hang on!” He bolted out the door. She stared at the empty doorway, mouth open. She hadn’t expected him to react like that. A chuckle from Sergeant Parker drew her attention back to the room. He shrugged when she lifted her eyebrows at him. Well, she might as well make use of the time. Opening her purse, she found her testing kit and quickly pricked her finger to test her levels. She grimaced at the number on the small screen. Definitely too low. Hopefully, Gavin would bring her something she could use. A few minutes later, Gavin returned. He had a tray in his hands. “I went to the cafeteria and found some orange juice for you.” He took it off the tray and handed her the carton.

Gratefully, she accepted the juice and opened it. The juice was sweet and cold. Finishing it off, she tossed the empty carton in the garbage can.

Gavin tossed to the remaining items on the tray. “I also got some food for you, seeing as you missed lunch. Eat what you want. Don’t worry about whatever is left.” He noticed her kit and nodded. “Good. I see you’ve already tested.”

She examined the food he’d brought, pleasantly surprised. This was a man who knew diabetes. Salad, some sort of plain lean meat—turkey or chicken, she couldn’t tell which—and a small cup of applesauce. Her nutritionist had told her to limit her carbs, but make sure her meals were centered around protein and veggies. Interesting. Judging by his reaction, he’d dealt with someone with type two diabetes before.

“Do you need anything else?” He hovered near her. If she said she did need something else, he’d probably run out the door again to get it. She quickly tried to put him at ease.

“No, thank you, Gavin. I’m good.” She flashed a smile his way before picking up a bite of the meat. Chicken. She was being fanciful, but she could practically feel her blood sugar level stabilizing again as she chewed.

Nodding, Gavin proceeded to close the door. It was time to get down to business.

Sergeant Parker threw Gavin a look that could only be described as surprised. Why? Because she addressed the other cop by his first name? Was that wrong? He told her to. She decided that whatever it was, it wasn’t important.

A laugh trickled out of her. It was a laugh filled with stress and nerves and very little humor. “I feel like I’m in trouble here.”

“Nah.” Gavin shrugged. “We just need to figure out what we’re dealing with to keep you and everyone involved safe.”

Peeking up under her lashes, she watched as Gavin stalked around the table to sit across from her. He was not a man who liked to sit; she could see that immediately. Even though his pose was casual—leaning back against the chair, long legs stretched out under the table so that his feet popped out next to hers—she could see the tension that danced across his broad shoulders. He had a careful smile on his face, but his jaw was rigid.

No, Gavin Jackson was a man who liked to move.

Not that she could blame him. She’d prefer to be almost anywhere than sitting in a police station right now, no matter how gorgeous the sergeants were.

Heat crept up her face at the thought. Great. Did they notice? Sergeant Parker was writing something on a tablet. Good. And Gavin...was staring right at her, head tilted, a half grin on his face. Wonderful. Well, she certainly wasn’t going to tell him she’d been thinking about him. Hopefully, he wouldn’t ask.

He shrugged and sat up a bit straighter, pulling his legs back to his side of the table.

“One thing about all this that might be to our advantage is that our sniper obviously thinks Mr. Hostetler is dead.”

“That’s a good thing?” she blurted.

“Absolutely,” Parker answered. “If he thinks his target is dead, then Hostetler is easier to protect.”

She nodded slowly. She could see that. If her admirer—she shuddered—thought that Noah was dead, he wouldn’t go after him again.

“Alexa.” She raised her gaze to Gavin’s face. The smile was gone. “How long have you been getting flowers from someone?”

How long had it been? She bit her lip as she considered. “I moved here in August. So I guess they started late October. Not frequently. The first time I received a rose, I thought Megan had brought it in to spruce up the receptionist’s counter. There wasn’t a note or anything. It sat there for a day before she asked if I wanted my flower. They’ve been coming every two weeks. At first I thought the whole secret admirer thing was really corny.” She took a sip of water, giving herself time to organize her thoughts.

Gavin shifted in his seat. “You looked irritated when the delivery came. Was there something about the flowers that made you uncomfortable or nervous?”

“Nervous? Yeah. I was afraid my boss would fire me. He’d been okay the first time. But as they kept coming, he grew angrier with each delivery. I don’t know why it bothered him so much, but I called the florist that had been used for the last delivery and told them not to accept any more for that address.”

“Were all the flowers from florists?”

Shaking her head, she answered, “No. It was about half and half. I’m not sure how the others were delivered. I would come to work and find them.”

Sergeant Parker was typing on a laptop. She couldn’t tell if he was paying attention or not.

A moment later, she got her answer. “Well, this last one wasn’t from a florist, either,” he said.

“The name on the box,” she began.

Gavin looked over at the laptop. “That name on the box is for a florist in Chicago. No way the flower was from there.”

She cocked her head at him. “Why not? I’ve received flowers from there several times. Plus I used to live near Chicago. When my fiancé died fifteen months ago, I remember seeing flowers from Bressler’s at the funeral home.”

She definitely did not like the look on Gavin’s face.

Shaking his head, Gavin turned the laptop so it was facing her. The image on the screen was a building that had been decimated by a fire. A hollow sensation blossomed in the pit of her stomach. The headline read, Bressler Family Florist Destroyed by Arson.

“The place was never rebuilt,” Gavin informed her.

It felt as if the air had been sucked from the room. “When?” she managed to gasp out. “Does the article say when the shop burned down?” She ignored the sympathy on his face. She didn’t need sympathy. She needed answers.

“Yeah,” he answered after scouring the article again. “It burned down three years ago. The arsonist was never caught. The owners had an apartment right above the store. It was destroyed also. Three bodies were found when the fire was investigated. The owners and their son had apparently all perished in their sleep.”

She slumped. The flowers she’d received had been after the florist shop was long gone. She’d never checked. Another thought struck. “What does it mean that there were flowers from that place at Brett’s funeral?”

“It means you might have a stalker. It also means that your stalker may have been the same person who burned down the building. At the very least, we know he had access to the building.”

Setting the bottled water on the table, she covered her face with her hands. Suddenly, she was so tired. Lethargy seeped into her skin and worked its way down her body. A shiver caught her by surprise. It was difficult to tell if she was shivering because it was cold or if it was a delayed reaction to the horrific events of the past few hours.

“Hey, Alexa.” Gavin’s voice brought her back to the present. “We will find whoever this nutcase is. You know that, right? We will do everything we can to protect you.”

She nodded, more to make him feel better than because she believed him. After all, how would they find someone if they had no idea who the person could be? Or why the person was fixated on her.

Sergeant Parker closed his laptop. “Do you have any thoughts about who could be stalking you?”

She racked her brain to come up with possible suspects, but no one came to mind. “No, sorry. I can’t think of anyone. I want to go home.”

All she wanted to do was to go home, lock the doors and the windows, and snuggle with her cat on the couch. Maybe she’d even call her brother, Allen. Although he’d no doubt ask her what was bothering her, as she never called him when something wasn’t wrong. Her brother loved her, but he was so much older than her and lived so far away that he didn’t give her too much thought. She received a Christmas card every year from his wife and a phone call on her birthday. He’d never even seen her apartment. No. She’d be better off dealing with this alone.

“Soon,” Gavin promised. “Let’s finish here, then I’ll let you go.”

She nodded. If it would help catch whoever hurt Noah, she’d do whatever the police said.

Gavin hesitated. “Alexa, we need to know what happened to Brett. How did your fiancé die?”

She’d known it was coming. And she’d thought she was prepared for the question. But the way the question came at her, forcing her to put the two situations together, chilled her blood. Were they connected?

The sudden conviction that they were connected caused her to blurt out, “I think he was murdered.”

Gavin and Parker exchanged a glance. “You think he was murdered?” Gavin asked.

A grimace twisted her face. Then it smoothed into resignation. “I do now. At the time it never occurred to me. It wasn’t something we were looking at. And, honestly, it just never would have occurred to me.”

“Okay, Alexa. Why not start back at the beginning? What happened with your fiancé?”

Her head dropped for a moment. He could almost see her trying to collect her thoughts and gather her courage. Admiration flickered briefly before he squashed it. Leaning forward, he waited.

“Brett Stevens and I had been dating for six months.” His heart wrenched at the sorrow on her face, in her voice. “We had gone to high school together, but never really knew each other. There were over five hundred students in our graduating class. We met up again at a five-year get-together and just clicked. We dated for six months before we got engaged. I know that doesn’t seem like a long time, but we’d been talking marriage since the second month. We’d gotten engaged just five days before he died. I was over the moon.”

She swallowed. He knew that she was struggling, but to her credit, she kept going. “I went to a conference, and when I came home, he was in the hospital. An overdose. No one even knew we were engaged. Brett wanted to wait to announce it.”

The heartache in her eyes was painful to even watch. But he made himself. Maybe if he could get some answers for her, she’d have some peace.

“So he was in the hospital...” he said when the silence grew too long.

She ran a hand through her shoulder-length blond hair. “Yeah. He was actually supposed to be one of my patients. Isn’t that ironic?” She huffed a bitter laugh. “When I told the head nurse who he was, she put another nurse in charge of his case. During the night shift, he was somehow given the wrong IV. He went into cardiac arrest. They were unable to revive him.”

She stood, began to pace. “I was investigated because I was on duty that night. All the night staff were, but the police looked especially hard at me because of our relationship. Something about the significant other often being the culprit. To make matters worse, I had gone in to visit him during my break.” Alexa shook her head. “It was like being on one of those TV crime shows.”

No doubt. “I’m guessing that you were cleared of any wrongdoing.” It wasn’t really a question. If she hadn’t been, she would never have been hired as a nurse practitioner again.

“Yes. By the police. But the other nurses at the hospital were noticeably colder to me. I could tell that they weren’t convinced. Someone started the rumor that I had driven him to attempt to kill himself and then had finished the job. It was horrible. I knew that wasn’t the case, but still, I did wonder if it was my fault. If I had failed him. The guilt nearly destroyed me. Which is why I handed in my notice and sought out a new home in a quiet town where nothing exciting ever happened.”

“Why do you think you failed him?”

The glance she flung in his direction clearly said she thought he was being thick. “Seriously? I’m a nurse. I came back from a medical conference to find the man I planned to marry had been admitted into the hospital after supposedly trying to kill himself.”

“Surely, though, you knew you weren’t at fault when he died at the hospital.”

Alexa shrugged. “I wasn’t the nurse taking care of him, so obviously I knew that I hadn’t made the mistake with the IV. However, I thought that if I had realized he’d been depressed and gotten him help, he wouldn’t have been in the hospital to begin with.”

“Alexa, I will look into his death and the situation at the hospital. I will say this—I find it too much of a coincidence that both your fiancé and a man under your care at a medical facility have been hurt, or worse. Add to the mix the flowers that you got from a flower shop destroyed by arson.” He tightened his lips. He knew in his gut that Brett had been murdered. Without absolute proof, though, he was reluctant to voice the thought. Even though he was sure both Parker and Alexa were thinking the same thing.

“Alexa? Are you all right? Maybe you should sit down.” Parker’s concerned voice broke into his thoughts.

Looking up at the woman standing on the other side of the table, he understood why. If he thought her face was white before, it was completely colorless now. For a second, he feared she’d faint. He stood and moved to her side. Gently he urged her back to her seat. When she sat, he pulled out the chair beside her and sank into it.

“Alexa?” He touched her shoulder.

Finally, she turned her head, slowly, like it took great effort. “He followed me, didn’t he? The man stalking me followed me from Chicago. I hadn’t realized that someone was watching me there, too.”

That startled him. “Too? Alexa, has someone been watching you?”

The urgency of his voice seemed to jerk her out of her of the dark place she’d gone in her mind.

“I don’t know. I can’t be sure. It’s just that sometimes...sometimes I feel like someone’s watching me. You know the feeling?”

Both sergeants nodded.

“Where are you when this happens?” Parker asked. “At work? Home?”

She raised her hands, palms up. “Yes, to both. Home, work, once outside the post office. I never actually saw anyone suspicious. Nor have I noticed the same person in several places.”

Gavin digested that information, not liking it at all. “What about other incidents at the clinic? Anything unusual or suspicious stand out to you?”

When she shook his head, he held in a sigh. Not from impatience with her. She was a victim here. No, he was impatient with the idea that he had to let her go home without any assurance that the attacker was beyond bars. Who would protect her?

He would have to make sure that she was safe.

“Was it my fault?” she asked in a small, dull voice. “Did Brett die and did Noah get shot because of me?”

“No!” She flinched from the force of his response. He gentled his voice. “No. Alexa, it’s not on you that some creep is following you. You did not ask for it. And you certainly don’t deserve it. No woman does.”

“I get that, but Brett—”

He cut her off. “Brett loved you, right? I am sure that he wouldn’t want you to blame yourself.”

Gavin waited for her nod, then he stood. “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’ll see about getting you some protection where you live. Obviously, you’ll need to take some time off work—”

“I can’t!” she interrupted him.

“What do you mean you can’t?” Why would anyone want to go to work when someone was literally gunning for them?

Parker stood and came around the table. “Alexa, you’re in danger. Going to work will bring that danger to the others who work there.”

“Gah!” She exploded into a standing position so fast her wooden chair fell over with a loud clatter. Parker stooped to pick it up. Alexa strode to the window. The tension was vibrating off her. “I get what you’re saying. I do. But I don’t have a choice. Maybe if we weren’t in the middle of a flu epidemic. As it is, the clinic is already short-staffed. We have patients who depend on us.”

Gavin considered the situation. “Hold on for just a minute, okay?” He strode to the door.

“He’s always on the go. Don’t mind him,” he heard Parker murmur to Alexa as he exited. He rolled his eyes, smiling briefly to himself. The amusement was short-lived.

He had a job to do. A woman to protect, and a stalker to find. A stalker who had already murdered in order to get close to his obsession.

A stalker who would kill again unless Gavin could stop him.

THREE

Using a knuckle, Gavin rapped sharply on Chief Paul Kennedy’s office door. Impatiently he waited for the chief to answer. He was getting ready to knock again when Lieutenant Jace Tucker strolled past him.

“The chief’s not in, Jackson,” Tucker informed him. “He had to go with his wife to the doctor. He said he should be back in the next hour or so. Anything I can help you with?”

“Is Irene okay?” He hated to think of anything being wrong with the chief’s feisty red-haired wife. Irene was well-loved by all the officers. Paul Kennedy was her second husband. Her first, Tony Martello, had been a solid cop. And a good friend. Four years ago, he’d been killed in the line of duty. The loss had been devastating to all involved. Especially to Irene. They were all happy when she and the chief had found each other.

She was also Lieutenant Tucker’s sister. He didn’t seem too worried. So it couldn’t be that bad. Right?

“Nothing serious,” Tucker said, confirming his thoughts. “What do you need?”

Switching gears, Gavin related what he’d learned so far. “What I’d really like to do is to order some sort of protection for Alexa.”

At this moment nothing was more important than the frightened woman sitting in the conference room. “The woman ran from Chicago. And all evidence points to her stalker being from there, too.”

Lieutenant Tucker straightened, his gaze sharpening. “Really? Let’s put this on a priority level. I will inform the chief when he gets back. Can you hang with Miss Grant until we get the details worked out?”

He ignored the jolt of relief at the words. He should not, under any circumstances, have a preference for which officer stayed with Alexa. Nor should he be glad to have an excuse to stay with her.

The sooner he got her back to her place and another officer watching over her, the better. He’d been with her only a couple of hours and she was already messing with his mind. He didn’t need that. Hadn’t his dealings with Lacey taught him anything? He was better off alone than setting himself up for that kind of heartbreak. And heartbreak and disappointment it would be. He was the kind of man that women liked until someone steady and smooth-talking came along. Someone like his brother, Sam.

He wasn’t going there.

Alexa’s life was in danger. He was chasing her stalker turned sniper. As far as he was concerned, that was as far as their connection would go. Could go. He refused to allow it to become anything more.