“I had to get the thumb drive to someone, and I trusted her to do the right thing with it.”
“I turned it over to the Marshals. But it was encrypted.”
“It’s a hit list,” Chris said. “Why is Lauren’s name on it?”
“Not that one.” Ryan coughed against his sleeve, a dry and harsh seal’s bark. “That’s nothing. Men who want to eliminate the Delaneys. I got their list, so they want to kill me.”
“How did you get it?” Chris felt like he was badgering a sick man, but he needed answers.
“Shouldn’t we try to get him out of here first?” Lauren asked. “He needs a doctor.”
“Help’s on the way,” Chris said.
“And the men who want to kill us are too, aren’t they?” Ryan said.
“All the more reason why we should leave,” Lauren insisted.
“He can’t walk out of here.” Chris glanced around the room, taking note of a door beyond the kitchen. “Lauren, regardless of who shows up here first, head for that door and get back to the SUV as fast as you can.”
“I can’t leave—” She stopped herself from protesting and nodded.
Another thing he loved about her—she was so quick to understand a situation. He didn’t need to tell her that neither Ryan nor he would benefit from her staying and having her safety as a distraction. If she was out of the way of potential gunfire, Chris could concentrate on staying alive.
“Who are those men?” Chris asked.
“They worked for our father. He fired them for not carrying out his orders as directed. Now they want to kill everyone who knows what they’ve done.”
“I don’t know what they’ve done,” Lauren objected. “Why do they want to kill me?”
“Simply because you’re Richard Delaney’s daughter.” Tears spilled down Ryan’s face unchecked. “But I had to let her know so she could tell you.” He raised his head to look into Chris’s eyes. “And then I gave her the USB drive, which made killing her sooner rather than later more important.”
“Then why did you do it?” Chris demanded.
“I wanted it to get to you.” Ryan was gasping for breath. “That drive holds the proof of who killed your father.”
And Ryan possessed it. Ryan, accused of being a henchman for his father.
Chris’s knees weakened. He feared he’d be sick as he asked, “Your father?”
Lauren gasped and pressed her hand to her lips, her pupils huge. “No.”
“Not directly. But he ordered it.”
“Why?” Chris barely managed the single word.
“He learned something from a prisoner and had to be stopped from testifying. Dad didn’t want to go back inside and would have. I suspected.” Ryan turned to Lauren. “When you broke off things with Blackwell, I wanted to get to the truth. I thought if Blackwell knew, he would leave the Marshals Service and you two could have your life together. But it wasn’t that easy. Our own father didn’t trust me to be sincere.”
“Because you weren’t.” Relief softened Lauren’s features.
“I wasn’t. But I pretended I wanted to be part of his dealings to find out and maybe stop him. I wanted above anything to stop him.” Ryan wiped his eyes with the backs of his hands and emitted a long, shuddering sigh. “But nothing will stop him except getting locked up again. So I gathered proof and was about to get out when I was arrested on evidence one of Dad’s henchmen planted on me. Then the threats came when I was in prison before the trial, and I ran the first chance I got.”
“You were going to turn state’s evidence,” Chris said.
Ryan nodded.
“And they had to kill you before you testified against them.”
Ryan nodded again. “And I didn’t know who to trust. My father has law enforcement of all sorts on his payroll. So I risked getting the USB drives to you, Lauren, and to Mom. I didn’t know they were so close behind. I thought I had time. I thought—”
A thud upon the door warned them none of them had time.
“Lauren, run,” Chris shouted.
Then he dived to drag Ryan to the floor as gunfire blasted and the door burst open, its lock blown away. Ryan rolled beneath the table. Chris turned, crouched, fired once, twice.
One man fell back with a cry. Chris shot again—once, twice, three times.
Before a sledgehammer knocked him into the chairs Ryan and Lauren had been sitting on moments earlier.
As blackness overtook him, Chris saw a second man fall.
* * *
Lauren raced across the snow. Every instinct of love and protectiveness told her to stay, to somehow help. She did what she had trained herself to do years ago—use her brains. Intelligence said run from gunfire. She was unarmed. She didn’t know how to use a gun. She was not bulletproof. She could do nothing but get away so neither man she loved would be distracted by her presence.
If either was still alive. She thought she heard the voices of three men shouting. Two against three weren’t terrible odds, but Ryan was so weak and ill, and Lauren hadn’t seen a weapon anywhere near Ryan. So it was three against one. Worse odds. If only reinforcements would come.
She would do her best to bring them, show them the way if she could reach the SUV.
She located the skis and slammed her feet into them. She took precious moments to calm herself. She didn’t need to fall out there alone in the dark and cold. For the moment, she didn’t need to think about what Ryan had said.
She sped along the path they had taken, going faster through the trail she and Chris had cut earlier. It shone in brighter light, and she realized the snow had stopped and moonlight glowed off the white carpet below. A good thing. She couldn’t manage a flashlight.
The mile and a half to the SUV felt like it took all night. Gasping—or maybe sobbing—she unlocked the SUV and tossed the skis into the back. Moments later, she was cranking the engine and roaring out of the narrow road. Somewhere she thought she caught the wail of a siren. Reinforcements. Probably too late.
And she hadn’t told Chris she loved him.
Maybe that was good. With the news Ryan had imparted, Chris could never renew their relationship. She was worse than a criminal’s daughter. She was the daughter of the man who’d ordered the execution of Chris’s father.
Tears blurring her vision, she hit the main road before she saw it. The snow there was packed into icy ruts. The front tires caught and spun, gained traction, sent her jouncing into the far lane. With care, she turned the wheel, trying to steer in the right direction. She hit ice instead and began to spin once, twice.
The back tires slipped into a ditch and held, each attempt at gunning the engine digging the SUV deeper.
And lights blazed in the distance.
Lauren leaped from the SUV and ran toward the trees. Unless the driver of the oncoming vehicle saw the SUV in time, impact was inevitable and she wasn’t about to become a human pancake. She plowed through the ditch and took refuge behind a tree.
The oncoming vehicle sat up high. A truck roaring with its speed. Too much speed for the road conditions. He wasn’t going to stop soon enough. By the time he spotted the SUV and tried, he was too close. He slammed into the SUV and the truck went airborne.
Lauren ran deeper into the trees. The arc of headlights shone through bare branches. Metal shrieked. Glass shattered. Then silence fell.
Lauren turned back to see the truck roof-down in the ditch and the sheriff’s SUV a mangled heap mere yards away.
By the light of moonlit snow, the truck looked black with oversize tires.
FOURTEEN
Chris didn’t remember Christmas Day or the next. Consciousness and memory returned with vague glimpses of uniforms—doctors, nurses, law enforcement of half a dozen different kinds. Civilians arrived in the forms of his mother and sister. Even Donna Delaney stopped to thank him for helping
her son, also in the hospital for an infected bullet wound to his leg and double pneumonia.
He was in the hospital under the watchful eye of deputy US marshals.
“He’ll have to do some prison time,” she said, “but not as much as we feared. He has too much information to share.”
“Against his own father?” Chris felt so weak he wasn’t sure he spoke loudly enough for her to hear.
“Especially against his own father. Some of that man’s employees, as he liked to call them, were helping Ryan all along.”
“I knew he had to have accomplices. But he’s giving them up for prosecution?”
“Among others.”
“And those men after us?”
Donna looked surprised. “Didn’t anyone tell you? You shot two of them and the third one was knocked unconscious when he tried to flee and ran into the SUV Lauren was driving.”
“He hit Lauren?” Chris tried to sit up.
Pain drove him back—pain in his heart more than the pain in his chest from his bullet wound.
No wonder she wasn’t there. She’d been hurt—or worse.
“Tell me, is she...?” He couldn’t say it.
All the things he had thought about Lauren helping her brother stabbed his conscience. All the years they had wasted because he was bent on justice were no more than a waste.
But it wasn’t justice he had sought. It was revenge. And revenge was not what the Lord wanted for his life. He had taken into his own hands bringing down the man who’d killed his father and destroyed the best thing he had going for him—Lauren’s love.
Now he was too late to realize it and make amends.
“She’s all right,” Donna said. “When the SUV spun out and went into a ditch, she knew enough to get out and run into the trees before the truck ran into her.”
“Smart lady. But why hasn’t she come to see me?” He sounded pathetic.
Donna gave him a look of sympathy. “I asked her that myself. She’s staying with me, you know, so she can be close to Ryan while he’s here in the hospital. But she says she’s Richard Delaney’s daughter and that will never change.”
“That won’t, but I can,” Chris said.
He had. Being with her again had told him he had his priorities upside down. If only he could talk to her, let her know, ask for forgiveness for not trusting her and ask for another chance.
“You’ll have to do some fast talking to convince her,” Donna said. “You thought her capable of helping her brother and stealing your gun.”
Another thing to beat himself up over—believing she would hide his gun from him.
“I suppose one of the men chasing us stole it and planted it in her backpack.”
Donna shook her head. “One of Ryan’s accomplices did it to sow discord between you two in the hope you wouldn’t work together and compare notes. So you wouldn’t find Ryan quickly with Lauren’s help.”
“It nearly worked.”
Because of his need to prove—what? That he was the best deputy US marshal in the division?
“I’ve made a lot of mistakes,” Chris said. “I hope none are irredeemable in her eyes.”
“I doubt they are.” Donna’s touch on his shoulder was kind, nearly maternal.
But not entirely reassuring.
Later that day, when he asked his mother about when he would see Lauren, she merely gave him comforting platitudes. “When you’re out of here, we’ll see about you visiting her.”
But he still hadn’t heard from Lauren when he finally got to go home on New Year’s Eve.
Sore and weak, he let his mother and sister pamper him, pushing an ottoman beside the sofa for his feet, building the fire in the fireplace, giving him an endless supply of hot chocolate and Christmas cookies. In the corner, the tree still shone in multicolored glory, wrapped presents beneath. His family had waited for him to celebrate. They would open gifts on New Year’s Day.
He bit off another point of a cookie shaped like a star and savored the buttery sweetness on his tongue. This was what he had so wanted when he’d set out from Chicago over a week ago. As much as he loved being with his mom and sister, his life didn’t hold the same completeness he thought it would once he knew who had killed his father. Now the career decision he had made seemed pointless like the star cookie in his hand. It was just a circle with no clear direction.
He set the sweet aside, no longer hungering for his mother’s superb baking. He closed his eyes and recalled the most delicious meal he’d eaten of late—the bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich Lauren had prepared for him. Simple fare from a delightfully complex lady.
“I like the tree-shaped ones myself.” At the sound of the voice, Chris’s eyes flew open.
“Lauren?”
She stood in the center of the room, gazing at him, her lips curved in a tentative smile. “Hi, Chris. I hope you don’t mind. Donna said you wanted to see me.”
“I’ve wanted to see you since I regained consciousness. Where were you?”
“I’ve been here for an hour and a half, talking to your mom and trying to get up the courage to come in to see you.” She bowed her head. “I’ve been giving you time to adjust to the idea you almost married the daughter of the man who had your father killed.”
“I almost married the lady I love.” He held out his hand. “The lady I still love. The lady I still want to marry.”
“Chris, you can’t. I’m still Richard Delaney’s daughter. You’re still a deputy US marshal. I don’t think the two facts mix well.”
“Neither do I.”
Something flashed in Lauren’s golden-brown eyes. “Then why did you want me to come all this way to see you?”
“To tell you—will you sit? I’m getting a crick in my neck.”
She hesitated, then sat beside him on the sofa. “What did you want to say that Donna claims needed to be said in person?”
Chris faced her, one hand covering hers where it rested on the cushions. “I was wrong. I joined the Marshals Service for all the wrong reasons. They were reasons so wrong I couldn’t see what was right and good in my life. That’s you. I love you and want a second chance, or at least a chance to show you your father’s and brother’s activities have nothing to do with you.”
“They may to your bosses.”
“Then I need different bosses.” He touched his chest. “This is probably going to render me unfit for anything but desk duty anyway, and I’d die of boredom with that.”
Lauren’s eyes widened. “Will you go back to the law?”
“In some capacity. Maybe prosecuting attorney. I don’t know yet. I have time to decide.” He caressed her fingers. “You can have time to decide too. As much as you like, but I hope it’s not a lot. We’ve wasted too much already.”
She peeked at him through her lashes. “What am I supposed to be deciding?”
“If you can love me again.”
“I never stopped. When I was running away from that cabin, I kept thinking how you could be killed and I never told you I still love you.”
“Will you tell me now?”
“I love you, Chris. A thousand times over to make up for all the times I just couldn’t. My dad. Your dad. My brother getting you shot. Are you certain?”
“More than anything. More than I was five years ago.” Though pain twinged through his ribs, he turned so he could grasp her other hand. “Will you marry me, Lauren Wexler Delaney?”
“As soon as we can.” She leaned toward him.
He bent his head and their lips met as the clock struck midnight. A new year for a new beginning in their life together.
* * *
If you enjoyed this book, pick up these other exciting Christmas stories from Love Inspired Suspense:
Military K-9 Unit Christmas
by Valerie Hansen and Laura Scott
by Lynette Eason
Lone Star Christmas Witness
by Margaret Daley
Bodyguard for Christmas
by Carol J. Post
Cold Case Christmas
by Jessica R. Patch
Find more great reads at www.LoveInspired.com.
Keep reading for an excerpt from Christmas Escape by Valerie Hansen, book one of the Military K-9 Unit Christmas anthology.
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Dear Reader,
Thank you for taking a chance on me, an author new to contemporary romantic suspense. Romance and suspense are an irresistible combination and I am thrilled to share Chris and Lauren’s story.
Besides the danger in which Chris and Lauren find themselves, this is a story about a second chance at love. In the past, they allowed self-doubt, shame and anger to get in the way of the life God intended them to share. Now they have a second opportunity, not just at that love but at making their hearts right with God, setting their priorities straight and looking forward instead of into a past they cannot change.
As for the setting, I couldn’t resist a Michigan winter. It’s a place and season I happen to adore.
I love to hear from my readers. You can contact me through my website, www.lauriealiceeakes.com, or find me on Twitter, @laurieaeakes, or on Facebook as Author Laurie Alice Eakes.
Warmly,
Laurie Alice Eakes
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