by Lisa Childs
*
Lars uttered a ragged sigh of relief and let his body relax against the wall of the ER waiting room. The doctor had just assured him that Emilia would be all right. But when he thought of everything she had endured—alone—anger surged through him again. She’d lost a lot of blood during childbirth and had an infection due to poor—if any—postnatal care. She was also dehydrated. The doctor had said Lars had found her just in time.
He already knew that. If he and Nikki hadn’t stormed the warehouse when they had, she would have been dead—because Webber’s men would have killed her. That was why they had come back with the van. Of course there was only one of them alive to admit it.
And Lars doubted he was going to talk.
But Emilia could. She could tell the prosecutor what hell Webber had put her through. Not that he wanted her to relive that. There had to be another way.
First he had to see her. Her and Nikki…
Both of them would be okay. He had overheard the physician’s assistant telling her family that the bullet had just grazed her. None of her brothers had been appeased, though. They’d started walking toward him, stopping only when the doctor came to speak to him.
Now that the MD was gone, they surrounded him again. When he moved to step forward, Logan shoved him back against the wall.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
“Nowhere near Nikki,” Parker warned him.
“Back off,” Dane said as he shoved between the twins. “His sister is here, too.”
Lars stared down the men who all looked eerily similar. Cooper and Nick looked exactly like the twins. “I’m going to see Nikki,” he said.
“You’re lucky she’s alive!” Cooper said. “Or I would forget about all the years we’ve been friends.” His hands tightened into fists. But he held them at his sides.
For the moment.
Lars wouldn’t have cared if he’d hit him. “I am lucky she’s alive,” he wholeheartedly agreed. Because he didn’t know what he would do if something had happened to her.
Just considering the loss overwhelmed him. How had she come to mean so much to him so quickly? Because she was Nikki…
She was strong and smart and indomitable.
“You were supposed to wait for us all to get there,” Logan said.
“Would you?” Lars asked. “If you thought your sister was about to be killed, would you have stood around waiting for anyone else?”
Logan’s cheek twitched above his tightly clenched jaw. “I’m not going to wait for anyone else,” he said. “I’m going to stop you before you put Nikki in any more danger.”
As he reached for him, Dane stepped between them, trying to protect him. Lars didn’t need his protection.
“I have no intention of putting her in danger again,” he assured them all.
“He might not,” Nikki said as she pushed through the door between the ER and the waiting room. “But I sure as hell do.”
Her brothers turned toward her, all uttering some form of protest. Lars knew their words fell on deaf ears. Nikki couldn’t hear them. She was too focused. Her gaze cut through the group gathered in the waiting room. She wasn’t looking at him. Disappointment flashed through him because of that. He wanted her to look at him the way he looked at her—hungrily. He wanted her, wanted to close his arms around her and never let her go.
Blood had already leaked through the bandage at her temple. A single drop of it had trailed down the side of her face like a crimson tear. But Nikki wasn’t a crier. She was too proud for that. Too tough…
“No,” he said now, raising his voice above the others. He had her attention now—and her irritation—which hardened her dark eyes and furrowed her brow.
She glared at him.
But he didn’t care about her anger. He cared about her life, so he told her, “You are not putting yourself in danger again!”
The glare slipped away, and she smiled at him almost as if she felt sorry for him. “You won’t be able to stop me.”
Then she gestured at the man she’d been looking at when she’d first walked into the waiting room. And Nick Payne stepped closer.
“Lars Ecklund, you’re under arrest,” Nick said as he began to read him his rights.
Lars laughed until he felt the cold metal of handcuffs encircle and snap closed around his wrists. He strained against them.
“What the hell!” he protested. “You can’t arrest me!”
Chapter 22
“What the hell are you charging me with?” Lars asked Nick as he shoved the larger man ahead of him down the hall toward a holding cell.
He’d passed booking without fingerprinting him or taking his mug shot. And he’d brought him in the back way. As far as most people knew, Lars Ecklund was still a dead man.
Nick couldn’t officially arrest him. But he could name some charges that might have stuck. “Manslaughter. Breaking and entering. Obstruction of justice.”
“If you were going to charge me with any of those things, you would have to charge Nikki, too,” Lars pointed out.
“You want me to?”
“Hell, no.” Then Lars paused and glanced back over his shoulder at him. “Actually, it might be a good thing. It would stop her from risking her life again.”
“Nothing’s going to stop Nikki from doing that,” Nick said with resignation. When the call of shots fired at the warehouse had come in, Nick had been blaming himself for giving Lars bad advice. But now he knew even more that his first instinct had been the right one.
His advice had been sound. There was no changing Nikki. And there was no trying to protect her.
“This is what she does,” Nick explained to Lars and to himself, “just like you were a soldier and you’re now a bodyguard. Nikki’s a bodyguard and a damn good one.”
She didn’t have the gift or curse or whatever Nick and Penny had, but her instincts were infallible. She knew what she was doing. And Nick, more than anyone, never should have doubted her.
That was why he’d agreed to arrest Lars at her request. Because he felt guilty…
Lars stared at him as if trying to accept what Nick was telling him. But he struggled with it. “I’ve never met anyone like her,” he said. “My sister is so vulnerable and needs protecting.”
“Nikki doesn’t need protection,” Nick said and ignored the little voice in his head calling him a hypocrite. He tended to forget that himself every once in a while. “She’s a Payne—through and through. She’s a protector.”
“She needs to protect herself,” Lars said, and his face paled slightly as if he was reliving her getting shot at.
He probably was.
“She has always protected herself,” Nick said. Until now…
Until now she had also protected her heart. She’d worked hard to fall for no one. She’d never even shown any interest in anyone since she’d found out about her father’s betrayal—about him.
Until Lars…
She hadn’t protected herself from him. It was obvious she cared about him too much.
“And she protected you by having me arrest you,” Nick said. “You may not have gotten past Logan and Cooper if I hadn’t slapped the cuffs on you. Even Parker was pissed.” He chuckled as he remembered how they’d all gathered around Lars in the waiting room, threatening him. He hadn’t grown up with his family, so he tended to appreciate them more. He appreciated how they all had each other’s backs.
Lars must not have appreciated them, though, because he glared at Nick. “I don’t need protection from anyone.”
“Liar,” Nick said.
Lars tensed so much that Nick was surprised the handcuffs just didn’t break and snap off his wrists. But he was glad they held. He really wouldn’t want to piss off a man like him, a man this big and muscular.
“You need protection from Nikki,” Nick warned him. “She can hurt you more than anyone else can.”
Lars didn’t argue with him. “She really had you arrest me?”
“No kidding,” Lars remarked. “Talk about abuse of power.”
Nick shrugged. “I only have it for a little while longer. Might as well abuse it while I have the chance.”
“What?” Lars’s brow furrowed with confusion.
Of course he was new to town. He didn’t know everything that had happened in River City.
“My old boss is giving up his chief special agent position with the Chicago Bureau and becoming police chief here.” Nick smiled at what Woodrow had called his semi-retirement. He would be very busy with the River City PD and with his new bride. “I’ll be a full-time bodyguard soon.”
“So arresting me is some kind of last hurrah for you?” Lars asked.
Thinking of all the real criminals he’d taken down over the past several months, Nick chuckled. Viktor Chekov, the notorious crime boss Nick had busted a while ago, would be insulted if Lars Ecklund was Nick’s last hurrah.
So he explained, “This is our best chance of getting that baby back for your sister.”
Lars stopped struggling against the handcuffs and turned fully around to face him now. “What? How? I’m supposed to be dead.”
“Exactly,” Nick said. “And dead men can’t get in trouble for roughing up another inmate—like one just recently arrested at the scene of a shoot-out in a warehouse.”
“The guy who survived?”
Nick nodded. “Just don’t kill him, okay? Or I will arrest you for real.”
“Is he the one who shot Nikki? I fired at him before he could hit her again, but he ran away. I think he might have been wearing a vest, too.”
Thank God Nikki had been wearing one, or she would have been as dead as Nick had feared she was. He’d been an idiot to doubt her, though. Nikki was like a cat, but he suspected she had more than nine lives.
“Is he?” Lars persisted.
Nick refused to tell him that, or he had no doubt Lars would kill the guy. And most people only had one life. “Nikki wants you to get him to make a call to Webber assuring him that the job is done—the girl dead and her body disposed of where she will never be found.”
Lars’s throat moved as if he was about to choke—probably with emotion at the thought of how close that had come to happening.
“And you’re right,” Nick said. “Every one of them would have stormed that warehouse, myself included, if we thought our sister was inside and about to be killed.”
Lars shook his head. “I still shouldn’t have let Nikki go in, too.”
Nick snorted. “Like you would have been able to stop her. You would have had to knock her out and tie her up. And her brothers, myself included, would really kill you if you ever laid a hand on her.”
“I wouldn’t respect you if you didn’t,” Lars calmly agreed.
And Nick understood why he was Cooper’s friend and Nikki’s…
Whatever Nikki considered him. He was a good guy. A man of honor and integrity.
“So lock me in that cell and let me get this done,” Lars said.
Nick hesitated a moment before undoing the cuffs. He was breaking rules left and right. But with a new baby at home, he understood what Lars’s sister must be going through. He couldn’t imagine how crazy he and Annalise would go if someone stole their child. And he knew he would do whatever necessary to bring their baby home.
“Yeah, don’t kill him,” Nick advised as he finally unlocked the cuffs.
“Dead men can’t phone their bosses,” Lars reminded him. He was the first man Nick had arrested who seemed eager to get inside a jail cell.
But Nick grabbed his arm, holding him back. “I can’t protect you in there,” he said.
“I don’t need protection.”
“Once you go inside you’re on your own.”
Lars nodded. “I’ll be fine.”
Nick hoped like hell that was true because he had a feeling Nikki would be devastated if something happened to this man. And because it was her idea, she would never stop blaming herself.
*
Grasping the steering wheel in stiff hands, Nikki was tense and nervous. She had to force herself not to press too hard on the accelerator. Traffic was heavy downtown. All the cars in front of her car were traveling too slowly, keeping her from the River City Police Department.
Sending Lars to jail had been a horrible idea. Sure, he was big. But there could have been a bigger criminal locked up with him. While he had tried over and over to protect her, Nikki had willfully put him in danger.
Of course he could have refused to go along with her plan. But she doubted that. He would do anything for Emilia—even risk his life.
Or take a life.
If he killed the guard, though, and Webber never got a call, he might try to run—before they had a chance to rescue Blue. Candace would try to stop him, but on the estate, even with Milek and Gage there, they were outnumbered. And now they were tired.
Their shifts had lasted too long. Nikki needed to go to the estate to relieve Candace. She couldn’t expect her pregnant friend to risk her life for the little boy who had come to mean so much to Nikki. And Nikki had promised Emilia. She would get to see and hold her son.
She would…
But what about her brother? Would Emilia get to see him again?
“Oh, Lars…” Nikki murmured, her heart beating quickly with fear. What had she done?
The music stopped as a call came in to her Bluetooth. She pressed a button on the steering wheel to accept it.
“Nikki Payne?” a vaguely familiar voice asked.
Then she realized that the caller—who came up on the dash screen as unknown—was Myron Webber. “Yes,” she replied. “This is Nikki.”
“Ms. Payne—”
“Nikki.” She corrected him, forcing a smile into her voice. She wanted him completely unaware that she knew what a bastard he was.
“Nikki,” he eagerly repeated her name.
“I was just on my way to the estate,” she said.
“Good,” he said. “I won’t leave until you get here.”
“Leave?” Hadn’t Lars been able to coerce the man to make the call? Or worse yet, had something happened to him before he had the chance?
“Yes, the adoptive couple would like to take the baby tonight.”
“But—but is that legal?” Nikki asked. Like that would matter to a man who had ordered two murders within the past two days.
He chuckled. “As the baby’s legal guardian, I can okay their taking him tonight. The official paperwork will take longer to process. But this way they can start bonding with the baby right away.”
The baby needed to bond with his mother. Maybe, through her breast milk, he had been able to do that. Maybe he would recognize her if he ever got the chance to be in her arms.
“Of course it all has to be official,” Nikki said. She hoped like hell it wasn’t that cold couple who wouldn’t even hold the baby. But it didn’t matter…
It wasn’t as if the adoption was actually going to go through. They would never get Blue. She would make sure of that—no matter what she had to do.
“There’s plenty of time for the adoption process to go through,” Webber said as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
And she knew that the call had been made. Webber thought there was no way he could be caught—that both Emilia and Lars were dead.
She couldn’t wait to see his face when he learned the truth. Maybe she should have gone into law enforcement instead of protection—because she would have loved to slap the cuffs on him herself.
“I need to stop by the office,” Nikki said, “to get an SUV to use as the transport vehicle.”
“We will be using my car and driver, of
course,” the lawyer insisted.
“Our company SUV has bulletproof glass,” she said.
“I hardly think that will be necessary now.” Now that he thought Lars was dead.
“It’s company protocol,” she fibbed. Fortunately she had been so close to Cooper’s office that she pulled into the parking lot as they spoke.
Webber had one more request for her. “Wear something dressy, and I’ll take you out to celebrate after we drop off the baby.”
She shivered at the thought of going out with him. “Celebrate?”
“Yes, we can celebrate the little guy getting a new family.” He was probably going to celebrate the murders of Blue’s real family, though.
Nikki couldn’t wait to see his face when he realized how they had tricked him.
“Sounds great,” she said as she imagined her celebration. “I will be there soon.”
And hopefully soon she would be able to put Blue in his mother’s arms and the lawyer behind bars instead of Lars. For Webber’s sake, she hoped Lars had not been released because she was sure the Marine would rip the lawyer apart for the pain and misery he’d put his sister through.
*
Lars might have been safer in jail than he was stepping into the Payne Protection Agency. Not only did Nikki’s brothers want to kill him but now it sounded as if they all wanted to kill each other, too. The minute he pushed open the door he heard voices raised in anger. He couldn’t tell who was whom; just as they all looked alike, they all sounded alike, as well.
“That’s crazy!”
“It’s not going to happen!”
“It’s out of the question!”
Maybe they were discussing his murder and how to dispose of his body. After the way they had acted in the hospital, he wouldn’t have put it past them.
Then he heard a female voice rise sharply above the others. “Stop being idiots!”
That was his Nikki. His heart stopped beating for just a moment as he considered what he’d thought—what he felt. He had never been possessive of anyone before—had never thought he would want to be. But Nikki…
She was so tough—so independent. She would never want to be anyone’s—let alone his.
“I know what I’m doing,” she continued. “Haven’t I proved that to you all over and over again the past couple of years?”
