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Rules are rules. Talk to “Uncle Jimmy.” I think he’ll support me on this.
Mitch.
There was no pause this time.
“No! Don’t use my name. He’ll find me.”
“He’ll find you?” Mitch questioned aloud. He sent a brief message. “Who?”
He waited.
“Emmett Raines.”
“Who is Emmett Raines to you?” Mitch typed. “Did you think I was him?”
“Please!!!” she answered.
Mitch ran the name through his head and drew a blank. Maybe Emmett was an old boyfriend. She said he’d escaped. Maybe she saw enemies where none existed.
But the itch along his neck had him thinking otherwise. Real or not, her obvious fear dissipated the remnants of his anger. Reminding himself that it wasn’t his help she was seeking, he typed in a response.
“I’ll have one of my men look into it.”
He could almost feel her answer leap off the screen, as if he were talking to her in person and could read the expression in her eyes again.
No! Forget it! Just forget it! Don’t send anyone else to the house. Don’t come here again. And don’t call me princess!
What? The message ended abruptly, and he knew she’d signed off. Mitch stared mutely at the screen, wishing his own frustration could be transported across the modem links. He didn’t know what irritated him more, the idea that she thought she could dictate his actions and go over his head to his superior, or the discovery that she might be a little human like the rest of the world.
She didn’t like the nickname. She had gotten personal.
Their little e-mail interlude had left him as heated as last night’s face-to-face encounter. He could picture her eyes darkening along with her emotions. He could imagine that stubborn little chin pointing upward as she vented her fury on him.
He could see the fear in her posture as she stiffened her shoulders and tried not to let it show.
“Joe!” He bellowed for his lieutenant.
“Boss.”
“Sorry.” Mitch looked up guiltily, finding Joe waiting in the open doorway with his usual forgiving smile. “Emmett Raines. Check the wires. He just walked away from Jeff City. I want to know everything there is to know about him.”
“Anything in particular I should look for?” asked Joe.
“A connection to Jack or Casey Maynard. Something isn’t right.” He glanced at his computer screen. “I need to figure it out.”
Joe jotted the name on his notepad. He pointed to Mitch’s phone. “The commissioner’s on line two. I’ll get right on this.”
Mitch nodded his dismissal, punched the blinking light and picked up the receiver. “Commissioner Reed.”
A smooth, politic voice answered. “Mitch. I’ll forgo the pleasantries. We need to talk.”
“You’re damn right we need to.”
“WHO THE HELL does he think he is?” Casey muttered to herself, still stewing over her computer conversation with Mitch Taylor earlier that morning. The words on her monitor blurred together as her eyes glazed over. She removed her gold-rimmed reading glasses and rubbed at her tired eyes.
Normally, she found the content of medical articles an interesting read. But today it was simply a jumble of technical jargon that made little sense. Knowing she was ahead of her deadline, she saved the text she was editing and turned off the screen. Her clients shouldn’t be penalized for her inability to concentrate.
She slipped into her shoes and tied them, adjusting the platformed boot on her right heel before shifting onto her feet. Needing the extra support after last night’s uncustomary stress, she tightened the Velcro closures of her leg brace and walked over to the row of windows that gave a panoramic view of the backyard.
Judith’s husband, Ben, tended the pool house with efficient regularity, just as he had in her training days. But what had once been a symbol of her family’s success and personal triumphs now stood like a glass-domed testament to all she had lost.
Her dreams. Her family. Her faith.
She’d worked hard after the attack to get her body into shape. To teach herself how to walk again. Months of physical therapy in her private gym and in that pool had put her body back together as much as the shattered remnants of it would allow.
But no amount of training could restore her trust or heal her wounded heart.
Casey breathed in deeply and exhaled, fogging up the window in front of her. She rubbed the spot clear, acknowledging that her restlessness wasn’t entirely Mitch Taylor’s fault.
She missed the color that had once been part of her life. She missed the activity. She missed the demands she used to make on herself, the anticipation and reward of setting goals and achieving them.
But it could never be any other way. Especially now. She had to keep a lower profile than ever or he’d find her. Though he’d be smarter to run in the opposite direction, she knew Emmett Raines would come looking for her. She’d made a mistake once he wouldn’t allow her to make again.
The jangle of the front-gate buzzer made every muscle in her body tense until she looked over at the clock on the mantel—it was 12:10. The McDonalds were still here. She breathed again, consciously forcing herself to relax. Shoulders first. Biceps. Elbows. Wrists and hands.
Almost as soon as Casey was breathing normally again, Judith entered the library and announced, “Mr. James Reed is here to see you.”
Casey’s dread changed into a cautious smile. “You don’t have to be so formal.”
“Some habits die hard. Should I fix him lunch?”
The drawn look that had haunted Judith’s face eased a little with the arrival of company. For that, Casey was glad, even though she knew Jimmy’s visit would include a painful discussion on the subject of Emmett Raines. “I’ll ask. Go ahead and let him in through the kitchen.”
Minutes later, Police Commissioner James Reed, looking fit and dapper with his silver hair and charcoal suit, entered the library with a broad smile. “Cassandra.”
He met her halfway and gave her a stiff hug and a pat on the back. Holding herself on her good leg, Casey kissed his cheek and tightened her arms around his neck. “I’m glad to see you.”
He pushed away from her, holding her elbows in his palms. “I can only stay a few minutes. But I didn’t want to disappoint my favorite girl.”
He made her feel all of ten years old. She tried to match his smile but failed. “I thought you’d be here…sooner.”
From across the room, another voice answered in a dark, taunting baritone.
“We shouldn’t be here at all.”
Casey looked over Jimmy’s shoulder to the man filling the doorway. Mitch Taylor was even bigger than she remembered. The room shrank as he strode in. He stood a couple of inches taller than her Dutch uncle’s six feet, and she suspected the imposing dimensions of his chest and shoulders could be attributed more to the man than to the tailoring of his suit.
She lifted her chin to ward off the impact of his raw masculinity. Jimmy stepped aside, allowing Mitch’s whiskey-brown eyes to peruse her from head to toe. The warmth she experienced under his scrutiny left her feeling much more grown up than her uncle’s reassurances had.
Unaccustomed to having any man besides her doctors study her so thoroughly, and even more unfamiliar with the responding tension tingling along the surface of her skin, she angled away from him, automatically shielding the weak side of her body. “Captain.”
“How badly did I hurt you?” He spoke in a hushed rumble that shivered along her spine. The unexpected softening of his hard-edged expression did funny things to her pulse rate. She felt her own features relax.
“I’m a little…” Stiff and sore, she would have finished. But Jimmy’s patience with polite conversation had ended.
“You didn’t. She requires her cane or leg brace to walk.” His crude explanation shattered the illusion of compassion, and reminded Casey of the real problem at hand. She threw back her shoulders and lifted her chin.
Without making direct eye contact herself, she saw Mitch look at Jimmy, then back at her. His on-the-job mask returned.
“You should be in a safe house. Or at the very least, under around-the-clock police protection.”
His back-to-business mode made it easier for her to summon her defenses. “I asked you not to come here.”
“No, you ordered me not to, princess.” He swung his gaze over to Jimmy. “But a higher authority prevailed.”
Acknowledging his cue with a nod, Jimmy took Casey by the upper arm and guided her toward the sofa. “We want to talk to you, Cassandra.”
Once she was situated, he sat beside her and clasped her left hand between both of his. Not a good sign. “I didn’t want you to know about Raines’s escape so soon, but now that you do, I want you to know that I’m taking care of everything. I put him away once, and I’ll put him away again. He won’t get any satisfaction coming after my family.” He climbed off his soapbox and gentled his tone. “I promised your father that I’d look after you. And I trust that Mitch is the man to help me do that.”
She glanced over at Mitch, who struggled to make himself fit in the brocaded wingback chair across from her. He shook his head as though he already doubted the wisdom of this so-called plan.
Definitely not a good sign. She looked back at Jimmy, only half-joking with her question. “What, you’re going to send him over to the house and have him scare me to death every night?”
Jimmy’s hands tightened around her own. “No, dear. I’m assigning him to be your bodyguard.”
Chapter Three
Casey clicked her stopwatch as the outstretched fingers touched the wall. A dark-haired nymph shot up out of the water and splashed Casey’s shoes as she turned and sat on the edge of the pool.
“How was that?” Frankie Reilly asked, her young chest heaving with the exertion of her efforts.
She tossed Ben and Judith’s twelve-year-old granddaughter a towel. “Not bad. But I was swimming an extra length in that same time when I was your age.”
This afternoon, she found it difficult to concentrate on the observations and advice a trainer should give her pupil. But then she didn’t usually have six feet two inches of disgruntled detective nosing around the pool deck and adjoining rooms, either. She glanced at Mitch running his hand along the seams where the exterior glass walls connected to the steel support beams that formed the building’s skeleton.
He prowled back and forth, his eyes on a continuous scan of both the building itself and the yard outside. Silhouetted against the waning sunlight like a dark sentinel, he created an ominous presence that should keep stalkers and murderers and madmen at bay.
But despite the heated interior of the pool house, Casey crossed her arms and hugged herself to contain a shiver of apprehension. She should feel safe having such an imposing protector on the premises. Instead, she felt more vulnerable than when she had learned of Emmett’s escape.
She’d felt safe with her bodyguard seven years ago. So safe that she never realized the perfection of Emmett Raines’s ability to disguise himself. Until it was too late.
Until she realized her bodyguard was Emmett Raines.
“Casey?” Frankie tugged on her arm, startling Casey from her silent study of Mitch. “Do you want me to swim it again?”
Fortunately, the girl had caught her staring instead of the detective. She wasn’t ready to explain her need to memorize identifying details about people, especially when the person in question seemed to delight in pointing out anything about her that seemed suspicious.
She apologized for her distraction. “Let’s pack it in for now. Building your endurance is important, but so is dinner.”
Frankie pulled on her nylon jacket, then leaned over to whisper to Casey. “He’s cute, isn’t he?”
The conspiratorial note in the budding adolescent’s observation about her interest in Mitch caught Casey in open-mouthed surprise.
“For an older guy, I mean,” the girl amended.
Casey pressed her lips together and formed an appropriate reply. “ Cute isn’t exactly the word I’d use to describe him.”
Intimidating, maybe. Compelling.
“Oh, c’mon. I’ve seen you watching him. Almost as much as he watches you.”
“What?”
Frankie shrugged, as if the explanation was simple and Casey was a dingdong for not catching on. “Besides Grandpa, he’s the only guy I’ve ever seen you hang out with.”
“I am not hanging out with him.” She tried to defend herself against a twelve-year-old’s philosophy.
“That’s right.” Mitch’s keen radar picked up that he was the topic of their conversation. His deep voice didn’t alarm Casey half so much as being captured in the cross-hairs of those ever watchful eyes. He invited himself to join them. “I’m just the hired help.”
She heard the challenge in his voice and wondered at its cause. He’d certainly made it clear he wasn’t interested in being her bodyguard, but it wasn’t her choice. Jimmy had dismissed every argument she made. She hadn’t been able to convince either man that she’d be safer on her own.
So why did he keep on pushing the point? She’d be just as happy if he did take his big, brooding presence and leave.
“Isn’t that right, princess?” he prodded.
Casey breathed in deeply, curbing her tongue in front of their rapt preteen audience. “Somehow I don’t think you’re referring to me as the heroine of a fairy tale.”
He swept his arm out in a broad circle. “If I told you this Gothic house of horrors would be a nightmare to defend, with its locked-up rooms and see-through walls and blind drives, would you come with me to a safe house?”
“No.”
Frankie chose that moment to add her own observation. “Did you know there’s a hidden stairwell from the upstairs down to the back of the kitchen?”
Mitch made a face that earned a laugh from Frankie. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
The girl was on a roll. “There used to be a tunnel, too, that ran from the main house out to the pool house. But Grandpa boarded it up since no one lives out here anymore.”
“It just keeps getting better and better.” He shifted his gaze up to Casey. “And you feel safe here?”
“I did.” Casey emphasized the past tense, letting her expression tell Mitch that he was the reason she felt threatened in her own sanctuary.
“What is it with you and cops? The commissioner said I had to be here, so I’m here.” He crossed his arms and edged forward, the bulk of his shoulders closing in like the granite walls of her estate. Casey stood as straight as she could, holding her ground against him.
“I have known cops and worked with them my whole life. I am not afraid of them.” She tipped her chin to meet the aggressive thrust of his jawline. “And despite what you’re implying, I am not some snob who looks down on them because I’m a judge’s daughter and you’re an officer who serves the court.”
“So why don’t you want me here?” he demanded, the tip of his nose nearly touching hers.
“Because I’m afraid of…”
