by Lora Leigh
It was like finally belonging.
CHAPTER 11
She was sleeping.
Nik stared down at Mikayla’s relaxed face as he moved back to the bed, a warm, damp cloth in hand.
Cleaning her gently, he couldn’t help but marvel at the softness of her skin once more. Unblemished, lightly tanned, her muscles toned with a feminine softness he could barely resist.
He’d nearly forgotten to wear a condom.
As he moved back to the bathroom, that thought tortured him. Not since he was a teenager had he forgotten to wear a condom. Not since the conception of the daughter he had lost. But he’d nearly forgotten with Mikayla.
Disposing of the damp cloth, he turned and braced his hands on the decidedly feminine sink and stared into the mirror above it.
What he saw there bothered him in some elemental way. The lack of emotion that had been in his eyes, hell, in his soul, for the past years was now replaced with too much emotion.
The pale blue orbs looked tortured. As tortured as he felt. He could feel the nightmares of the past moving in on him now, brewing from behind that closed door that had his nightmare emotions locked behind it.
That door was no longer locked. Mikayla had opened it, and now he had no idea what the hell he was supposed to do with the emotions welling inside him. What the hell was he supposed to do with Mikayla?
Stepping back into the room, he had every intention of walking out of it and back to the cold, lonely bed in the guest room. Why compound the mistake? he thought. Sleeping with her would only make it harder to leave later.
Amethyst eyes were opened now, watching silently as he stared back at her, as though she knew what he was about to do.
He had just taken her innocence, taken a gift that she could only give once. One she had saved all these years only to bestow it on a lost cause.
She would remember this night forever; he didn’t want it to end with her regrets.
Like a man walking to a death chamber, he moved back to the bed and the woman. Slid into it and gathered her against his chest as he wondered if sleep would ever hold anything but regrets after this.
“You have no responsibility to me, Nik,” she whispered in the darkness as he flipped the small bedside lamp off.
God, was she so wrong.
“I didn’t say I did.” He kept his voice low, fought to keep his emotions in check as he buried his fingers in long strands of hair that flowed out from her head.
He felt her lips against his chest as her fingers played softly against the light mat of hair on his chest.
“Tell me something about you,” she whispered.
Nik stared up at the darkened ceiling and realized how little she truly did know about him. How little he allowed anyone to know about him.
“I was married once.” He grimaced, wondering where the hell that admission had come from.
Rather than jumping in and questioning, Mikayla remained silent.
“I had a daughter. Her name was Nicolette.” He hadn’t told anyone about his child. He never talked about her. Sometimes, he felt as though Nicolette had been nothing but a dream.
“That’s a very pretty name,” Mikayla breathed softly against his chest.
Nik could feel the pain inside, just as sharp, as bright, as ever, but this time it seemed tempered by time, or by Mikayla.
“What happened to her?” she asked softly after several minutes had passed, an edge of sadness in her voice that warned him that she knew his baby was already gone.
“How do you know anything happened to her?”
Mikayla lifted her head from his chest until she could gaze down at him, the dim light from the moon spearing through the windows, giving her just enough perhaps to see by.
“If nothing had happened, then she would still be with you,” Mikayla said softly. “You wouldn’t be dodging bullets for a woman you barely know if you had a child depending on you to come home.”
God, how right she was.
“I was in the army.” He cleared his throat, remembering too clearly the decisions he had made because of his daughter. “I transferred out of the unit I was in for a desk job when my wife became pregnant. Nicolette was five when her mother decided marriage didn’t suit her. She was having an affair while I was working long hours to try to provide as much as I could for her and Nicolette. It wasn’t enough.
“I was at work when she left. The man she had been sleeping with had been mixed up in some bad business. Some of his enemies thought he was in the car with her and Nicolette. They intercepted it. Nicolette was shot.”
Her body was torn apart by the power and speed of the bullets that had ripped into her tiny body.
Nik could still see it. The blood, the horror. The knowledge that he hadn’t protected his child.
“It was my fault,” he finally whispered, accepting that guilt now as he had never before. Accepting it because he realized the care it took to hold a woman’s heart.
He hadn’t taken that care. He had nourished his job, nourished his position, and given his free time to his child, while his wife had been left on the outside looking in.
“How is it your fault?” Mikayla asked.
Nik stared back at her. “Because I wasn’t the husband I should have been, Mikayla. I wasn’t the man I should have been.”
“Nik, I’m so sorry,” she whispered, and he swore he saw the glimmer of a tear that eased down her cheek. “But it wasn’t your fault. Your wife made that decision, not you.”
Someone other than he shed a tear for the child who had never had a chance to live. The delicate little girl who wanted to be a ballerina. The laughing mischief maker who waited each evening for her “poppa” to come home.
“It was a long time ago.” He had to blink back the moisture in his own eyes.
Mikayla shook her head. “It happened yesterday. That’s how clear it is in your heart, Nik. You loved your daughter.”
He nodded slowly and said, “Yes.”
It happened almost nightly in his dreams, almost daily in his memories. And the ache never completely went away, though over the years it had softened.
“Lay down.” He pressed Mikayla back to his shoulder. “Nicolette would have loved you. You look like one of those damned fairies she was forever reading about.”
And Mikayla did. In that moment Nik realized how much she did resemble one of the little sprites in those long-ago books Nicolette used to make him read to her.
“A fairy, huh?” He felt Mikayla grin against his chest.
“A very beautiful, very wild fairy.” He almost smiled himself. “Flitting around and finding trouble every chance she has. You need a full-time keeper.”
“Are you applying for the job?” The laughter in her voice, the gentle teasing, was almost more than he could bear.
“Too many jobs already.” He had to close his eyes against the refusal he forced past his lips. “Let me get you out of this one first, baby. Maybe you’ll learn how to stay out of trouble after that.”
“You can hope.” Her voice had sobered, the realization that he wouldn’t, couldn’t, stay a silent reminder that nothing lasted forever.
“I can hope.” He kissed the top of her head gently before tucking her closer to his body.
He could hope for many things, though he had stopped doing so long ago. If one didn’t hope, then disappointment didn’t visit. Hoping meant you had something to live for, and living for something or someone else was asking for pain.
He’d make certain she was safe; then he would make certain someone watched over her. Someone other than him.
The next day Mikayla assured herself she had gone into this with her eyes opened. She wasn’t in love, she promised herself. When Nik left, and she knew he would leave, then she would be able to go on without nursing a broken heart.
It didn’t help to know she was lying. As autocratic as he could be, as dominant as he was, she was still falling in love, and that knowledge had the power to terrify her.
<
br /> He was so much more than most men she knew. Hell, more than any man she had ever known. In the dark the night before, she had learned something about him that she hadn’t expected. Something that might explain that dark, tortured air she glimpsed around him.
He’d lost so much. A whole life in some ways. A wife and a child. He’d obviously left the army after their deaths and now worked privately. But he was still alone. And a niggling little warning at the back of Mikayla’s mind whispered that he seemed to like being alone really well.
When he drove off after following her to the shop, Mikayla stared at his back with a frown for long seconds. He’d drawn away that morning. He’d already showered and had coffee when she got up, his gaze as frosty as ever as she fixed her own.
Perhaps frostier, she told herself as she stepped into the shop and greeted Deirdre before heading to her office.
There were phone calls to make. Nik was searching for Eddie’s killer, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t help him in other ways.
She hated being on the sidelines where her own protection was concerned. Mikayla didn’t hide from the realities of life. This was her life, and she was the one who had now become a killer’s target.
But why?
It took a while, but she finally managed to reach a friend of Eddie Foreman’s who had been elusive for so many weeks.
“Look, Mikayla.” Robert Cronin sighed after realizing who she was trying to get hold of him. “Let the police investigate this one.”
“Robert, they’re not investigating anyone,” she informed him wearily.
She had known Robert for years. Before his divorce, his wife had often come to her for dress alterations. As Robert was another construction foreman, though now no longer with Maddix Nelson, there was information as well as gossip that he had to be privy to.
“Why did you leave Maddix Nelson’s company?” she asked. “Just give me information, Robert. Help me.”
“Son of a bitch, you’re gonna end up dead,” he said and she could almost imagine the grimace on his craggy face. “Maddix Nelson ain’t no killer. If his granddaddy was alive, then I’d say be looking at him. That man was a pure black-hearted son of Satan if you ask me.”
She didn’t want a dissection of the family tree. Just information, she thought in frustration.
“Maybe Maddix is just better at hiding it,” she suggested.
Robert was quiet, though the distant sound of machinery in the background could be heard.
“There’s some talk,” he finally said. “Maddix has been seen in places that he shouldn’t be seen, maybe talkin’ to people he shouldn’t be talking to. The illegal sort. Eddie was at a party a few months ago; he used to get pretty drunk, ya know?” Robert cleared his throat. “Anyway, he said he had something on Maddix. Didn’t say what, but said it would bring him down.”
Mikayla bit at her lip. “Do you have any idea what it was?”
“He didn’t say, Mikayla,” Robert growled. “Whatever it was, though, Eddie was sure he could hurt Maddix with it. If Eddie told anyone what it was, then it would have been Steve Gainard. He’s the only one Eddie would confide in, if he was going to confide in anyone.”
And Steve had been out of town for months. Mikayla had left several messages with his service as well as on his cell phone.
“I can’t believe Maddix did this.” Robert sighed again. “But I can’t believe you lied about it, either. That puts a lot of us between a rock and a hard place, Mikayla. Like I said, his granddaddy was a real bastard. I wouldn’t have put anything past him before his death. That old bastard went so far as to threaten to disinherit Maddix’s father if he dared decide to have another child. He didn’t want Maddix’s daddy, Lowell, to have a large family. Felt it would take away from the company they were building.”
“But as you said, he’s dead,” Mikayla pointed out. “And it wasn’t Maddix’s grandfather I saw, Robert. It was Maddix.”
“Yeah, I hear ya.” Confusion filled his voice then. “I wish I had answers for ya, girl. I don’t like nobody takin’ potshots at ya. Drop this, before you get killed.”
She couldn’t drop it. The injustice of it, as well as the knowledge that dropping it would only convince everyone she was lying. She couldn’t do that. She wasn’t a liar. She knew what she had seen.
“Thank you for your time, Robert.” She ended the call with a sense of falling further into the rabbit hole her life had become.
“Anytime, Mikayla,” Robert promised her. “Tell your daddy I said hi. I’ll be prayin’ for ya.”
She ended the call and stared at the phone for long moments before calling Nik.
She gave him the information quickly and didn’t have to wait long for his reaction.
“You were to stay out of this,” he growled, anger surging in his voice.
“Look, I’m texting you Robert’s cellphone number. He’s willing to talk to you as well.”
“I told you to stay out of it,” he snapped again.
“And I told you, this is my life,” she retorted. “You don’t know the people to talk to, Nik; I do. I may not be able to get all the answers, but this is something we didn’t have before.”
“Text me the damned number,” he snarled. “Then get off that fucking phone and keep your ass out of trouble until I get back. Do you understand me?”
She almost grinned.
He sounded protective rather than angry.
“I’ll do my best,” she told him, knowing he knew better. She knew better. If she could manage to think of another direction to go in this, then she would make the call or the visit or send the e-mail. As she told him, this was her life, and she wasn’t giving up.
Texting the number after hanging up, she stared at the phone, rubbed her brow, then made a quick note of the information Robert had given her before adding it to the file she was keeping.
Disregarding Nik’s orders, she made a few other calls, but the information Robert had given her couldn’t be confirmed by the few sources she had to talk to whom she could rely on. That left her with yet more dangling threads to this.
Threads she would have to pick at later, she thought as she hung up the phone an hour later.
The rest of the day was spent like most others. Mikayla worked on the dresses in the back, kept several fitting appointments, and even managed to sell two more of her own designs before closing time came.
As she and Deirdre were standing at the register counter waiting for Nik, an explosion shattered the quiet of the store.
Glass rained into the shop as the mannequins standing in front of the window toppled over, knocking a rack of dresses to the floor and leaving Mikayla to stare at it all in shock as the sound of tires squealing seemed to echo around her.
Deirdre was screaming something. Cursing was more like it, as Mikayla stared in shock at the destruction.
“That was a fucking gunshot!” Deirdre screamed at her. “My God, Mikayla!”
“Call the police, Deirdre.” Mikayla felt almost numb inside.
She couldn’t have avoided the shot if it had been for her. She would have been dead. But it wasn’t her they were after this time. It was her store. Her livelihood. Her security.
Someone was trying to frighten her, trying to force her into backing off.
She pulled her cell phone from her purse and pulled up the address book and Nik’s number.
“Mikayla? I’m on my way to pick you up,” he answered immediately.
“I might be a while leaving,” she told him. “Someone just shot into the shop and destroyed the front window. I have to call Dad to get this boarded up for the night. I can catch a ride—”
“I’m on my way.” The line disconnected.
As Deirdre stood over the rack of dresses that had fallen, Mikayla watched as she pushed in her father’s number and called him. Just as with Nik, she had no more than gotten the explanation out than he had hung up with a terse, “We’re on our way.” Which of course meant the whole family was arri
ving.
At least the window would be boarded up quickly, she thought wearily.
She hadn’t moved from the counter. She had no intention of moving.
“Go home, Deirdre.” Mikayla stared at her friend as she looked at the pile of clothing helplessly once more.
Deirdre’s head snapped up, her expression disbelieving as she turned back to Mikayla. “Do what?” she asked incredulously.
“Go home. Dad and Nik will be here soon. Don’t bother coming back in for a while.”
It wasn’t a brick thrown at the window. This wasn’t spray paint on the glass. That had been a bullet, and Deirdre could very well have been in the way of it.
“Like hell,” Deirdre snapped as she stalked back to the counter. “I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be damned if some jackass is going to run me off.”
“You’d rather one of them kill you?” she asked her friend point-blank. “That was a bullet.”
“No fucking shit,” Deirdre yelled back at her, her hands going to her hips. “And I saw the car they were in and got part of the plate number. Fuck ’em.” Rage was glittering in her green eyes. “I’m not going anywhere.”
The end of her sentence was punctuated by the hard, furious throb of the Harley as it jumped the sidewalk and came to a hard stop.
Mikayla watched as Nik jumped from his seat and through the opening where the window had been and strode quickly to her.
He’d done that so smoothly, she thought inanely. Stepped up on the seat, those long legs stepping onto the window frame, and in the shop he came. As though he owned the place.
“Are you okay?” His hands gripped her shoulders, his eyes, no longer frozen but burning with rage, going over her quickly. “Dammit, Mikayla. I told you to let me take care of this.”
Mikayla felt herself shaking then. She was gripping his forearms as though they were a lifeline.
“That makes twice since Eddie’s murder,” she whispered shakily as she stared up at him. “What do they say about the third time?” A charm?
“It’s okay, baby.” He pulled her against him, his hand at the back of her head, pressing her to his chest as he sheltered her with his harder, stronger body. “God, baby, you have to stop pushing buttons here. Let me handle this.”
