Mystery Lover

by Lisa Childs

  “How I conduct my business is none of yours, Miss Drake,” he warned her, his eyes darkening with anger.

  “You must have increased security at the estate to protect your daughter,” she pushed.

  A bone clicked as he clenched his jaw. “Miss Drake…”

  “Do you think this man might also be responsible for the death of your daughter’s nanny?” She finally asked what she’d considered the most important question of all, and the one she’d suspected he was least likely to answer. He’d absolutely refused to reply to any inquiries about his daughter in the past, determined to protect her from the public.

  “I didn’t let you in here for an interview,” he said, his voice so cold that she couldn’t suppress a shiver this time. “I let you in here so I could get some answers. And you are going to tell me what I want to know.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know anything about that man…” Except that he had saved her life last night.

  St. John tensed and tilted his head, then touched the earpiece she hadn’t previously noticed that he wore. “You are going to tell me what you do know,” he said, “but first you’ll have to excuse me.”

  “That’s fine,” she replied with a slight step back. “I’ll just show myself out.”

  “You’re not going anywhere just yet, Miss Drake,” he said with a glance toward the guards who stood near the front door. “Not until we talk.”

  She shook her head and eased another step away. “No…”

  “Help yourself to a drink.” He gestured toward the bar that lined one wall of the living room. “I’ll be back shortly.”

  “I won’t be here,” she murmured after he disappeared down the hall—with her file. If he’d hoped to slow down her investigation, his effort was pointless. She had copies of all her research. She walked from the living room into the marble foyer, but the guards—the blond man from the gate and another guy with a buzz cut that suggested he was ex-military—lifted their weapons toward her again. Anger and panic had blood racing through her veins. “You can’t keep me here.”

  “You wanted inside the gates, Ms. Drake,” the blond reminded her.

  She had wanted in, but except for that brief, irrational flash of fear, she hadn’t seriously thought that she wouldn’t be allowed to leave again.

  “SON OF A BITCH,” he murmured as he fumbled with connecting the wires to the charges. He stretched out his gloved hands, forcing them to steady. He needed to focus on what he was doing—not on her.

  He hadn’t allowed himself to be distracted before. Not with the enormity of what was at stake…

  But Jillian Drake’s beautiful face haunted him, her eyes so full of curiosity, intelligence and determination. She wouldn’t stop until she either found out what was going on or got herself killed. Hell, finding out what was going on was certain to get her killed.

  But it wasn’t just her life she risked with her prying.

  The wires connected, he headed for the exit. But, still distracted, he didn’t move fast enough to clear the building before the first charge exploded.

  Chapter Three

  Jillian peered down the hall in the direction Tobias St. John had rushed off. A thin beam of light, and an angry murmur, emanated from under the closed door of what she presumed was his home office.

  Something’s happening…

  And instead of being out there reporting it, she was stuck inside St. John’s compound—missing it. Her hand shook with frustration…and fear…as she reached inside her purse for her cell.

  Metal clinked as a gun shifted. “Ms. Drake.” One of the guards spoke her name as a warning.

  “I have to check my phone,” she said. But when she glanced at the LCD screen, the cell indicated no signal. What the hell…? She whirled toward the closest guard, that blond-haired giant. “Does St. John have some special device that blocks cell phones from receiving or transmitting calls?”

  A smirk curling his lip, the guy chuckled. “Maybe you didn’t pay for your service.”

  “I need to use a phone,” she said, careful to inject only impatience and none of her fear into her voice.

  The guy just chuckled again and shook his head.

  “C’mon, I need to make a call,” she implored him. She needed to get the hell out of there.

  “You planning on calling the police?” the other guard goaded her, as if she didn’t already know River City’s finest answered more to St. John than their chief.

  Who was to say that the nanny had really died at the park and not the estate? St. John? The authorities who’d believe whatever he told them in exchange for another donation?

  “I have to check in with my producer,” she said, which was actually the truth. “I’m late for work.”

  “Maybe you should have thought about that before you ran through the gates,” the blond guy said with that aggravating smirk.

  “My producer knows I’m here,” she warned them with a lie this time. “He knows I’m working on a story about St. John.” That much was true. And she was convinced, from the raised voice booming through that closed door, that something else had happened that she needed to be reporting.

  Then the door opened with such force that it slammed against the wall. “Bring the damn car around!” St. John bellowed at the guards.

  The two burly men nearly knocked heads together in their urgency to run for the door. Self-preservation compelled Jillian to follow them, but she’d disregarded that instinct before when she’d been chasing down a story. And she’d survived…

  “What’s going on?” she asked instead. “What’s happened?”

  St. John’s eyes gleamed with an anger so intense it almost bordered on madness. He shook his head.

  “I’m going to find out,” she persisted. “You might as well tell me.”

  As if he hadn’t heard her at all, he headed toward the door the men had left open behind them. Rubber screeched as the long black limo pulled up to the sidewalk.

  Rushing after him, she grabbed at the sleeve of his suit jacket and implored, “Let me go with you!”

  St. John caught her hand in his, his grasp so tight she winced in pain. “I’m sorry, Miss Drake, but that’s not possible.”

  “We can talk,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I’ve found out about that man—the one everyone’s been seeing at the crime scenes.”

  His lips curved into a grin. “There’s nothing to talk about anymore.”

  “What—what do you mean?”

  “He might have gotten you out of harm’s way last night—” St. John chuckled “—but he didn’t get himself out of it tonight.”

  “There was another explosion?”

  He nodded, and anger flashed in his eyes again before the grin reappeared. “And there’s a body…”

  Her heart kicked against her ribs. “His?”

  St. John’s broad shoulders lifted in a slight shrug, but his eyes gleamed with satisfaction.

  “Let me go with you!” she insisted, anxious to get to the scene and learn the truth.

  “It’s over, Miss Drake. There is no story,” he said, leaving her standing in the foyer as he stepped inside the limo and slammed the door.

  The attacks on his businesses might have ended tonight, but the story was still out there, waiting for Jillian to break it. She stepped over the threshold to follow the car that was pulling away, but something tugged at her skirt, holding her back. She glanced down into the bright eyes of a dark-haired little girl.

  Just as she had that file on all of St. John’s enemies, Jillian had compiled information on every aspect of his life, including his family. Of course, that hadn’t taken long as the only family he had was his daughter.

  “Hello, Tabitha,” she greeted the child as she crouched to her level.

  “You’re that lady,” the little girl exclaimed, “the one my daddy watches on TV.”

  “Uh, yes,” she replied, surprised that St. John actually watched her special reports. “My name is Jillian Drake.”r />
  “Jilly,” the child murmured.

  A smile curved her lips, and she nodded. “Your daddy had to leave,” she explained, glancing around to see if the new nanny had followed the child down the stairs from her bedroom. Tobias couldn’t have run out without a thought to his daughter’s well-being. St. John was notoriously overprotective of his child. But of course he thought the threat to her safety was gone, so he probably hadn’t given orders to the guards to stand sentry at her bedroom door. Instead they’d left with him.

  The little girl shook her head, tumbling her tangled curls around her thin shoulders. She trembled as the cold breeze blew through the open door and hit her thin cotton nightgown. Her fingers still knotted in the fabric of Jillian’s skirt, she tugged again until Jillian leaned closer.

  “Can I tell you a secret?” the child asked, her blue eyes solemn. Had she not realized that her father watched Jillian every night because she was on the news? At five years old, Tabitha St. John was undoubtedly too young to understand what a reporter did and who Jillian was.

  But Jillian found herself nodding in reply. After all, what kind of secret would a child want her to keep? The fact that she was up past her bedtime? “You can tell me anything,” she offered.

  Tabitha pitched her voice to a breathy whisper and shared, “That man is not my daddy.”

  “What man?” Jillian asked, wondering if the child had a male nanny.

  “That man that just left…the one who looks like my daddy…” The child shuddered. “He’s not my daddy.”

  Blood. So much damn blood…

  The man—or monster some people believed he was—couldn’t figure out what blood belonged to him and what to someone else. He stared down at the streaks of it on his gloves and covering his torn jeans and coat. His guts twisted with pain and guilt over the senseless loss of a good man.

  This was his damn war. If there were any casualties, it should have been him. Not someone who’d only been trying to help in the battle to bring down St. John.

  Once again in the familiar shadows his existence had become, he leaned against a brick wall and stared down the narrow alley to where the building behind him burned, smoke and flames rising from it. His mind flashed back to the night before, to when he’d carried Jillian Drake to safety. If he hadn’t grabbed her when he had, he might have had her blood on his hands, too.

  Hell, he still might. She wasn’t about to give up trying to figure out what was going on in River City.

  Sirens wailed in the distance, but help came too late. For his friend. And maybe for him…

  But he couldn’t give up now. Not yet. Not with so much riding on his winning this war. He sucked in a breath, ignoring the piercing pain in his ribs, and eased away from the wall. He had to keep walking…had to increase the distance between himself and the burning building and all that blood.

  JILLIAN DROPPED to her knees so that she could peer directly into the eyes of the solemn child. “Honey, what do you mean?”

  The little girl shuddered. “He’s not my daddy.”

  “Why would you think such a thing?” Jillian asked in surprise. She’d thought herself the only one who, as a child, had wished her father wasn’t her father. “Did you just have a bad dream?”

  Tabitha shook her head. “It’s not a dream.” Her bottom lip trembled as tears welled in her eyes. “I—I wish it was. Then I could wake up.”

  Jillian had no experience with children. Instead of babysitting, she’d had a paper route, which she’d kept as she’d gotten older and worked on the school paper. But some instinct she didn’t know she possessed compelled her to wrap her arms around the child’s shaking shoulders. “It’s okay, honey. It’s okay…”

  Tabitha buried her face in Jillian’s hair and sniffled. “No, it’s not. I want my daddy…” Her quiet voice rose with a cry that squeezed Jillian’s heart.

  She pulled the child away so that she could study her delicate, tearstained face. “I still don’t under stand, sweetheart. Why do you think Tobias isn’t your father?”

  Her bottom lip trembled again. “He just isn’t…”

  “Tabitha! Why aren’t you in bed?” a female voice, pitched to shrillness, demanded. “You’re not supposed to be down here.”

  Jillian glanced up to the blond-haired woman standing on the stairs. “I’m—”

  “Yeah, I know who you are,” the woman said as she ran down the last of the steps, grabbed Tabitha’s shoulders and pulled the little girl away from Jillian. “What are you doing here?”

  Jillian rose to her feet and reassured the anxious woman. “It’s okay that I’m here. Mr. St. John let me in.”

  “He’s gone now,” the woman pointed out. “And you should be gone, too.”

  “Who are you?” Jillian asked, wondering at the identity of the young woman who St. John had taken the time to tell he was leaving, apparently via telephone or intercom, before he’d rushed off.

  “That’s not any of your business,” the woman replied.

  “My new nanny,” Tabitha murmured, her eyes narrowed in a glare as she glanced up at the woman. “Susan…”

  Jillian could understand the woman’s anxiety, given that her predecessor had been murdered. But her reporter’s instincts had her suspecting that there was more to Susan’s unease than another woman’s death.

  The blonde squeezed the little girl’s shoulders, then turned her around and steered her toward the stairs. “Get back to bed,” she ordered.

  “I want to talk to Jilly,” Tabitha protested.

  “Get to bed now!”

  The child and Jillian both winced at the volume and the tone of the woman’s angry command. “You don’t have to yell at her,” Jillian protested. For a brief moment she slipped into her own past—with all the angry voices echoing inside her head. “Please don’t yell at her.”

  “Now!” Susan said, with another shove at Tabitha’s back. The child stumbled up the steps.

  “Don’t be so rough with her,” Jillian said. While she had no experience caring for kids, she had experience being one—one who’d been yelled at and shoved around her whole childhood. “I’ll report you to Mr. St. John,” she warned the woman. Despite his reputation as a ruthless businessman, he’d always been described as a patient, loving father. He must have been too busy with the business attacks to realize that the new nanny was not working out. “I’ll tell him how you’re treating his daughter.”

  A smug smile curved the woman’s lips. “He’s aware that she’s become a problem.”

  Jillian flinched. “A problem?” That was how her father had described her, too—as a problem, a mistake, as someone who’d always been in his way….

  “She’s a difficult kid,” Susan explained. “She needs a firm hand. It appears you need one, too.”

  “I want to make sure Tabitha’s all right. She just recently lost her longtime nanny. You should be more sensitive with her.” Jillian didn’t have to be an expert on children to understand that.

  “You talked to her for a few seconds. You have no idea what’s going on with her or what she needs right now,” the woman replied.

  “True,” Jillian admitted with a slight sigh. “I have no idea…” The girl’s claim had confused the hell out of her.

  “What? Was she spouting that nonsense about her father not being her father?” the woman asked with a derisive snort.

  Jillian had learned long ago to never reveal a source. She just lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “Why would a little girl say something like that?”

  Unless the claims about what kind of father St. John was were as inaccurate as those eyewitness reports describing the man with no face as a phantom…

  “Because she’s a spoiled brat,” Susan replied with disgust now. “Daddy is a little too busy dealing with the coward who’s going after his businesses to give her his undivided attention for once, so she’s acting out.”

  “Really?” Jillian persisted.

  The woman glared at her now. “You know what�
��s been going on. You’ve been reporting the breakins and explosions. You know someone’s going after him.”

  Jillian nodded. “Of course I know that. Do you have any idea who this…coward is?” She wouldn’t have referred to anyone brave enough to take on Tobias St. John as a coward.

  Susan pursed her lips and shook her head, tumbling bleached-blond hair around her thin shoulders. “I don’t know anything about his business.”

  “You’re really just the nanny?” she asked. The woman seemed more familiar with St. John than an employee who’d only been working for him for a couple of weeks would.

  That smug smile curving her lips again, Susan just nodded in reply.

  “So you’d be the expert on children,” Jillian prodded the blonde, who nodded again. “I guess I know nothing about kids because denying her father seems an unusual way for a five-year-old to act out.”

  “You know nothing about Tabitha St. John,” the woman reminded her. “She’s a smart little girl, precocious even. She knows how to cause trouble. Are you?”

  “Am I what?” Jillian asked.

  The woman stepped closer to her, as if threatening Jillian, even though she was shorter and slighter. “Are you going to cause trouble?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she lied. Hell, ever since she was a kid, she’d been referred to as a trouble-maker—because she found out the things people would rather no one else knew. But she’d missed some things over the years, things she should have noticed.

  “Are you going to cause trouble for Mr. St. John?” Susan repeated. “Are you going to report that nonsense his daughter told you?”

  “I never report anything I can’t prove,” Jillian assured her.

  “Then you’re an unusual reporter.”

  “Working for Mr. St. John these past two weeks, you must have come to expect the unusual,” Jillian said. “After what happened to his last nanny, aren’t you afraid?”

  Susan shook her head. “The estate is well-protected. No one’s going to get on the grounds without his permission. He’ll make certain of that.”

  Jillian nodded. “You seem to know him pretty well. Do you know why someone’s attacking his business?”