by Lisa Childs
The Bachelor Bodyguards of Payne Protection Agency are back—and this time, it’s personal
Walking away from then-fiancée Amber Talsma was one of the hardest things sexy bodyguard Milek Kozminski ever had to do. But it was nothing compared to the shock of hearing she’d been killed in a car accident alongside the son Milek knew, deep down, was his.
Amber will do anything to keep her child safe. Which was why she had to fake their deaths—to evade the assailant who murdered her boss, then came after her. But now someone has found them. And when Milek learns the truth, he’ll stop at nothing to protect his son…and the woman he never stopped loving.
“You told me she’s alive.
“You need to tell me where she is,” Milek said, and his voice cracked before he could add, “Where they are…”
FBI special agent Nicholas Rus’s wide shoulders slumped with guilt, his black-haired head bowed. “I shouldn’t have told you.”
“No. You shouldn’t have told me now,” Milek explained. “You should have told me a year ago.”
“I didn’t know you a year ago… I didn’t know if I could trust you.”
“Obviously you know now, or you wouldn’t have told me that she—that they—are alive.”
Rus cursed. “And that was a mistake.”
“Why?” Milek asked.
“Because now you want to know where she is.”
He didn’t just want to know. He had to know. He had to see her—had to see for himself that she was really alive. And so was their son…
He’d broken up with her nearly five years before her death, and he hadn’t gotten over her in all that time. It didn’t matter that he knew she was alive; he was still mourning her.
“I need to see her.”
* * *
Don’t miss the next book in Lisa Childs’s
Bachelor Bodyguards series, coming spring 2016.
If you’re on Twitter, tell us what you think of Harlequin Romantic Suspense! #harlequinromsuspense
Dear Reader,
The Payne Protection Agency has another assignment—and like their previous assignments in the Shotgun Wedding series and in the Bachelor Bodyguards series, it’s personal. Bodyguard Milek Kozminski thought he’d lost his ex-fiancée and their child in a horrific car accident a year ago. But while helping his brother Garek survive His Christmas Assignment, the first story in the Bachelor Bodyguards series, Milek learned assistant DA Amber Talsma and their son, Michael, are alive. He’s not the only one who’s discovered the truth. The person who wanted Amber dead is even more determined to kill her.
Milek has his hands full protecting her and his heart full of feelings for her. But the reason he broke their engagement all those years ago hasn’t changed—because he isn’t sure that he’s changed from the outlaw he once was. He thinks Amber deserves a better man.
Amber has only ever wanted Milek. But while she trusts him to protect her life, she isn’t willing to trust him with her heart again. He broke it once, and she worries that he’ll break it again if she survives the attempts on her life. Milek will do anything to protect his family—even give up his life for theirs.
I hope you enjoy this second book in the Bachelor Bodyguards series.
Happy reading!
Lisa Childs
BODYGUARD
DADDY
Lisa Childs
Ever since Lisa Childs read her first romance novel (a Harlequin story, of course) at age eleven, all she ever wanted was to be a romance writer. With over forty novels published with Harlequin, Lisa is living her dream. She is an award-winning, bestselling romance author. Lisa loves to hear from readers, who can contact her on Facebook, through her website, lisachilds.com, or her snail-mail address, PO Box 139, Marne, MI 49435.
Books by Lisa Childs
Harlequin Romantic Suspense
Bachelor Bodyguards
His Christmas Assignment
Bodyguard Daddy
Harlequin Intrigue
Special Agents at the Altar
The Pregnant Witness
Agent Undercover
The Agent’s Redemption
Shotgun Weddings
Groom Under Fire
Explosive Engagement
Bridegroom Bodyguard
Harlequin Nocturne
Taming the Shifter
Mistress of the Underworld
Witch Hunt
Haunted
Persecuted
Damned
Cursed
Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.
With great appreciation for my awesome family! You’re the reason I enjoy writing about families—like the Payne family—like our family.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Excerpt from Midnight Secrets by Lisa Marie Rice
Prologue
Flames leaped from the wreckage of the mangled vehicle, rising from the blackened metal into the night sky. The scene drew Milek Kozminski’s attention from the drink sitting before him on the bar to the television screen above it. Country music emanated from the speakers of the jukebox, so he couldn’t hear what the reporter was saying about the crash. He could hear only the twang of the singer as he crooned about drinking.
Milek could relate.
To the singer.
Not to the crash.
“Milek...” A soft voice, cracking with emotion, called to him. He twirled his bar stool to find not only his sister, Stacy, standing behind him but her husband, who was also his boss at the Payne Protection Agency. Hell, most of Payne Protection had come with them—Logan’s twin, Parker, and their younger brother, Cooper, and younger sister, Nikki. And Mrs. Payne, her warm brown eyes full of sympathy and something else, stared at him the way the others did—with concern.
“What the hell is this?” he wondered aloud. “An intervention?”
He had been drinking more lately than he should have but never enough that he lost control. He couldn’t afford to lose control—as he once had, so long ago. That time had sent him to a juvenile detention center and his brother, Garek, to prison. But Garek hadn’t actually done anything wrong.
The others said nothing, just continued to stare at him. And his heart began to beat quickly and heavily. Tears streaked down his sister Stacy’s face while her thin frame—but for the slight swell of her newly pregnant belly—trembled with sobs. Was something wrong with her baby?
He turned to Garek now—as he and Stacy always had since they were little kids. Their parents had never been there for them, but Garek had.
Garek’s face was flushed with emotion, and he strode over to the jukebox and jerked the cord from the wall. The music died, leaving the bar eerily silent but for the television anchor’s voice.
“Assistant district attorney Amber Talsma lost control of her vehicle on slick roads, causing it to roll down a steep ravine, where it burst into flames. She and her young son are confirmed dead in the crash.”
His heart stopped beating.
No, not Amber...
He twirled back toward the television. In a corner of the screen there was a picture of Amber with her bright green eyes and vibrant red hair. There was also a photo of her son—with his blond hair and pale gray eyes.
A big hand grasped his shoulder, offering support and turning him back toward the others who all stared at him with so much concern and pity.
“He was yours,” Garek said.
With his hair and eye color, the little boy looked like both Milek and Garek.
“She never told you.” Garek looked at their sister. Usually her tears would have affected him—would have had him fussing over her, especially now. Amber had been her best friend. But Garek stared at their sister as if he’d never seen her before. “Stacy knew. But I didn’t know, Milek. I swear I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.” He dragged Milek from the stool then and into his arms. “I’m so damn sorry...”
He had known. Even though another man had claimed the boy as his, Milek had known the truth. But he’d thought then that the kid would be better off without him as a father—just as he’d believed Amber would be better off without him as a husband, which was why he’d broken their engagement.
Even though it had nearly killed him, he had forced himself to give them up—because he’d loved them and wanted better for them. Now they had nothing. And neither did he.
They were gone.
Chapter 1
Amber Talsma had been dead for a year. But no one had gotten any closer to finding out who had killed her. Or tried to. Amber hadn’t lost control of her car and driven into a ravine. She had actually been shot at—just weeks after her boss had been gunned down outside his home. Someone had wanted her dead, too.
So she had died—to keep herself and her son safe. The accident had been staged; empty caskets buried in their graves. Then she and Michael had disappeared. They were Heather and Mason Ames now.
But when she glanced in the rearview mirror—as she did now as she drove to Mason’s school—she still saw Amber. Her long red hair had been cut and dyed brown. Brown contact lenses covered her green irises. But her features were the same. Was that how someone had recognized her?
The letter had arrived just an hour ago—delivered to the mailbox of Heather Ames. She hadn’t recognized the handwriting, but she’d opened it. Photos had fallen onto the floor. Several of them of her and Michael—at the park. At his school. At the grocery store. And through the front window of the very house in which they lived now. She’d turned over the back of one of those photos to find a note, an implicit threat, scrawled across the back: I know who you really are...
And obviously where she was, as well.
But how?
Only one person knew she was alive: the FBI agent who had helped fake Amber’s and Michael’s deaths. Special Agent Nicholas Rus had been the one she had called about the shots being fired at her—into her home.
She shuddered as she remembered how close the bullets had come to hitting her son—to taking his life. If she’d lost him...
It wasn’t a risk she’d been willing to take. Sure, she could have hired bodyguards. Agent Rus had even suggested that—while he tried to find her boss’s killer, who was probably also the person who’d shot at her—she should hire the Payne Protection Agency.
But she had been too proud to reach out to Milek again. He would have cared she was in danger, but would he have believed she was? He hadn’t believed her when she’d told him she was pregnant with his son. He’d accused her of using her pregnancy to get him back—to trap him.
Even now, over five years later, the heat of embarrassment rushed to her face. That was why she had never admitted to her best friend she’d actually told Milek about his son. But it hadn’t been just embarrassment. Her best friend was also his sister, and she hadn’t wanted to cause problems between Stacy and her brother.
Growing up as they had, the Kozminski siblings were close. They’d had to stick together because they’d had no one else. When Milek had been in juvenile detention and Garek in prison, Stacy had grown close to Amber, too—so close that they were like sisters. Her husband, Logan Payne, the CEO of Payne Protection, would have protected Amber and Michael. Or he would have tried.
But a year had passed without the DA’s killer being apprehended. Could anyone have kept Amber and Michael safe for a year if the killer had known they were alive?
It had been safest for her and her son to play dead. She had convinced the FBI agent of that, and he’d agreed to help her. Then.
But he’d also promised to find whoever was after her—whoever had killed her boss. The FBI agent had been assigned to the River City Police Department to clean up the corruption within. The DA could have been killed to cover up some of that corruption, so it had definitely been Rus’s case. But it was one he had failed in his promise to solve.
She had trusted him, not just because he was an FBI agent but also because he was the half brother of Stacy’s husband. But he wasn’t a Payne. And the corruption in the police department and perhaps in the DA’s office, as well, proved that nobody was incorruptible.
Had Agent Rus sold out to whoever wanted her dead? Had he told them where she was?
* * *
“You told me she’s alive. You need to tell me where she is,” Milek said, and his voice cracked before he could add, Where they are...
FBI Special Agent Nicholas Rus’s wide shoulders slumped with guilt, his black-haired head bowed. “I shouldn’t have told you.”
“No,” Milek agreed.
His blue eyes wide with surprise, Rus glanced up from his desk in his office at River City PD. His assignment was lasting so long he’d been given an office that had once belonged to one of the captains he’d arrested for corruption. It had windows looking out onto the busy precinct. But his attention was focused only on Milek.
“You shouldn’t have told me now,” Milek explained. “You should have told me a year ago.”
“I didn’t know you a year ago.”
Milek snorted. “We met at least a year ago.”
“We met,” Rus said. “But we didn’t know each other yet. I didn’t know then if I could really trust you.”
“Obviously you know now that you can, or you wouldn’t have told me she—they—are alive.”
Rus cursed. “And that was a mistake.”
“Why?” Milek asked.
“Because now you want to know where she is.”
He didn’t just want to know. He had to know. He had to see her—had to see for himself that she was really alive. And so was their son...
“That’s not all I want to know,” he said.
Rus groaned.
“I want to know why.” For a year she had haunted him—so many images of her had played through his mind. Amber smiling, her beautiful face aglow with love. Her face flushed with passion, her lips swollen from his kisses. Amber crying, her green eyes drenched with tears. But the one that had haunted him most had been the horrific footage of that crash. He’d imagined those flames consuming her and their son—taking them away from him forever.
But they had never really been his.
He shook off his regrets and asked, “Why would she go to such lengths to fake her death?”
And the death of their son...
“Was it because her boss was murdered and she was afraid she might be next?” She had worked more closely with the DA than any other assistant had. It was possible that whoever murdered him might have wanted to kill her, too.
Rus sighed again and leaned back in his chair. “There was no
might about it. She and her son were nearly killed the night before the crash.”
Milek shuddered. He hadn’t lost them, but he’d come close. “What happened?”
“Shots were fired into her house.”
“I didn’t see it on the news.” Not the way he had seen the footage of the vehicle crash. And if the shooting had been reported, it would have been brought up during the coverage of the accident. The media would have speculated that the crash hadn’t been an accident. But nobody had questioned it. There had been an ice storm the night of the crash; it hadn’t just seemed possible but probable that she’d lost control.
But Amber had never really lost control of anything. Not the way he had...
Because he’d known her so well, he should have questioned the wreck—especially after her boss’s murder. And because he’d once been so connected to her, he should have known she wasn’t really dead. But he had lost her years before she “died.”
“She didn’t report it to the police or the media,” Nicholas Rus replied. “She reported it to me.”
She had called the FBI agent. Why hadn’t she called him? Probably because she hadn’t trusted he would come. Or that he would care...
When he’d broken their engagement, he had worked hard to make her believe he hadn’t cared about her anymore. He had succeeded—too well.
“And you kept it quiet.”
Rus nodded.
Milek cursed him.
“I didn’t know who I could trust,” Rus reminded him. “I came to River City to investigate corruption. I didn’t know who all might be involved in that corruption.”
“Me?”
Rus nodded. “You and your family have quite the notorious reputation.”
And that was why Milek had ended their engagement. For her...
His reputation hadn’t been the only reason, though.
“Now I know that reputation is undeserved,” Rus added.
It was undeserved for Garek and Stacy. Milek couldn’t claim the same. He sighed. “You were right,” he grudgingly admitted. “You were right to keep the shooting quiet. You were right to trust no one.”
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