Assumed Identity

by Julie Miller

  What was clear were the unmistakable signs of an exchange taking place. Bow-tie guy opened the envelope and pulled out a pair of photographs. Again, the angle was wrong to see the images clearly, but Jake thought he could make out a dark round halo that could be a head of hair. Pictures of Robin? Emma? Something else? The driver quickly pushed the photos down into the seat between them and pulled a business-size envelope from his jacket. He didn’t need Bow-tie guy to open the envelope to know that it was cash.

  Jake took another step onto the sidewalk, thinking how easy it would be to get into Bow-tie’s car and be waiting for him when he returned. He didn’t doubt that he could get a few answers out of him. But the driver pulled out a cell phone and Jake saw the gloves he was wearing—on a balmy spring night—and realized that he was the bigger threat.

  If this interchange was a threat at all. Jake inhaled a deep, steadying breath as the driver pulled the phone from his ear and asked Bow-tie a question before returning to his call. Had it always been his nature to suspect a conspiracy wherever he looked? What if there was an innocent explanation for this? Bow-tie had printed some pictures for a friend. He’d designed a floral arrangement and been paid a commission for his work. Even if it was something a little less savory, like selling porn or insider trading, it didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the danger lurking around Robin and Emma.

  Except... Ah, hell. Of all the people in this busy neighborhood to finally notice him, the driver glanced up into his rearview mirror, then turned in his seat to look right at Jake.

  Maybe he suspected Jake was a cop who’d seen the questionable transaction. Maybe the driver just wanted to know why he was curious about his business.

  Either way, the meeting was done. The man with the gloves ended the call. Bow-tie guy scrambled out of the car. The driver pulled out and turned the corner, heading north toward Robin’s shop. Jake obeyed his instincts, even if he didn’t understand where they came from. Ducking back into the alley, he ran its length until he burst out into the parking lot, just in time to see a dark-clothed figure scurrying across the sidewalk and jumping into a car parked in front of the shop.

  Had he been in the shop? With Robin?

  “Hey!” Jake shouted.

  Just as the car squealed out of its parking space, the rental car he’d been watching jerked to a stop behind it and honked. The near collision didn’t worry Jake as much as the bad timing.

  Breathing hard at the unexpected race he’d run, Jake swore and took off across the parking lot. Robin’s car was still here. And there was no mistaking it was hers because of the car seat strapped into the back. “Fool woman.”

  He ran straight to the sidewalk when the car slowed down, making sure the driver could see him there waiting for him in case he was thinking about stopping. Damn those instincts. The car had slowed, but when Jake ran a few yards farther, the brake lights flashed and it jerked to a stop. Jake hustled his legs to catch up to get a good look in the window at the man he suspected was harassing Robin. But when he reached the glass and closed his hand around the door handle, all he saw was a camera flash. “Son of a...”

  Blinded for a split second, he could do little more than spin away as the driver gunned the engine. It sped through the yellow light at the next intersection to the screeching protest of car horns and disappeared into the night. Right. Nothing suspicious about that.

  “Robin.” Jake’s chest heaved in and out as he muttered her name, unsure whether he was voicing a hope or cursing himself for what he was about to do.

  “Robin!” He dashed past the empty car in the parking lot and banged on the steel exit door. But one knock and the door bounced against his fist.

  Unlocked.

  Not a good sign. Every cell in his body screamed that something was wrong here. Every instinct told him Robin was in trouble.

  Reaching down, he pulled the hunting knife from his boot. Then he took a silent, steadying breath, fisted his hand around the door handle and swung it open.

  He slid inside to the glow of security lights and flattened his back against the brick wall beside the door, allowing himself a few seconds to acclimate to the eerie shadows. The only hint that anyone was still here was the sliver of light peeking out beneath the closed door of Robin’s office at the end of the hall.

  Jake’s blood simmered in his veins. Working late with the back door wide open? A scan through the workrooms revealed the back of the shop was empty and that nothing seemed out of place. Maybe she wasn’t working at all. Maybe her attacker had come back to finish what he’d started. Maybe that Houseman guy outside the Shamrock was here to finish that conversation that had upset her so. Maybe the threat in the phone call she’d tried to tell him about had become a reality and she was lying in that office injured, unconscious again, or worse. How many times did this woman have to be hurt before she wised up and put her safety before her job? How many times did he have to come bail her out?

  If stealth wasn’t vital to securing the place, Jake would be cursing up a blue streak. He was as ticked off about Robin putting herself in a position to get hurt as he was the fact that it made him sick to think she might have gotten hurt. Preparing for the worst-case scenario, Jake pressed his back against the hallway wall and crept through the darkness toward that light. He could just bet, too, that she was here alone, that she hadn’t told anyone she was working late. Maybe she was counting on Bow-tie guy to walk her to her car. She’d put her trust in some traitorous schlub who wasn’t coming back....

  That’s when he heard the muffled shouts. Punctuated by a thumping that vibrated through the wall at his back, he pinpointed the source of the muted cries for help. They weren’t coming from her office. They were close by. Was there another locked room in here? A closet?

  He flipped around to the opposite wall to use his eyes to search.

  “Stay away from her.” Thump. Thump. Thump.

  Robin? He zeroed in on the source of the sound and found the seams of a door, camouflaged to match the wallpaper around it.

  And then he saw the steel pin wedged into the door handle. A walk-in refrigerator, like the one at the bar. The chain that hung from the pin rattled with every thump. She’d been locked inside.

  He removed the pin and yanked the door open. “Rob—”

  “Stay the hell away from my baby!”

  Jake dodged a blast of pepper spray, catching Robin by the wrist and knocking the canister from her grip. But not before the stinging chemical splashed his neck.

  “Jake? I’m sorry. I thought...” She froze for a second, her wrist pinned to the wall beneath his hand, her eyes glued to the knife he still held, her face blanched with shock and confusion.

  “Ah, hell.” He tucked the blade into his belt and released her. “Don’t you have any sense, lady? You know what I thought?”

  Instead of answering, she shoved him back a step. “Emma!”

  She charged down the hall and Jake ran after. “I haven’t secured that end of the building yet.” He grabbed her by the arm, but she twisted away and shot through her office door. “Damn it!”

  He caught the door before it slammed back in his face and followed her into the room. “I just disarmed you. How are you going to defend yourself now? You’re running blind into an unknown situation. Your outside door is swinging wide open. Nobody else is here. There’s nothing good about this scenario. You want to tell me what the hell is going on?”

  Completely ignoring every stern warning, she hurried across the room to Emma’s bassinet.

  “Robin—”

  “Shh.” Seriously? She pressed a finger to her lips before leaning over the white basket. Then she reached inside and whispered a prayer.

  Ignoring the burning skin at his collar and his fuming frustration, Jake toned it down a notch as she pulled up the cover. He sure as hell didn’t want to be responsible for scaring Emma again. “Is the kid okay?”

  “Sleeping.” She smiled as tears spilled over her cheeks. “Like a baby.”
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  And then she crossed the room and walked into him. No, she burrowed into Jake’s chest. She pressed her cheek against his pounding heart and wrapped her arms around his waist, clinging to him the way a drowning woman clung to a life preserver. “Thank you.” She hiccuped a sound and squeezed him a little tighter. “Thank you.”

  The emotions that had raged through Jake’s system—concern, anger, suspicion—short-circuited.

  “Ah, hell. Robin?” Forgetting that this was all kinds of dangerous, Jake wound an arm behind her waist and palmed the back of her head, holding on just as tight. She quivered against him before settling impossibly closer, nestling her head beneath his chin, imprinting his body with the memory of small, sweet breasts, long thighs and firm hips. Was she crying? Shaking with anger? He’d been chasing a suspicious employee and a mystery player with a lot of money and a collection of photographs. What had she been dealing with in here? “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled.”

  “No, you shouldn’t have. You scared the tar out of me with that giant knife. And I was already...” She fisted her hand and pressed it against his shoulder, a friendly reprimand rather than a punch. Good. He was glad she still had the gumption to call him on his crude lack of manners. Made him feel a little less like the bad guy here. But then her fist opened up and her fingers dug into his shirt in one of those clutching grasps that made him crazy, and the skin and muscle underneath danced in response to the needy contact. She was burrowing in again and Jake couldn’t seem to remember why this was a bad idea.

  “Already what?” He tunneled his fingers beneath her hair to find chilled skin at her nape. Oh, man. How long had she been locked up in there? His shoulders seemed to shift of their own volition, folding around her to surround her in warmth. He’d rethink this whole embrace thing tomorrow. Right now he felt like he needed to hold on to her, too. Like touching her was the only way he could convince those worrisome instincts of his that she was all right. Just like she’d needed to see and touch her baby to know that Emma was safe. Only, Robin wasn’t all right. She was shivering. “Honey, you’ve got to talk to me. I can’t keep coming over here to watch you every damn night and keep tabs on all the idiots who work for you—”

  “You’ve been watching...? Did you just call me honey?”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “I was kind of hoping you did mean it.” With a heavy sigh that moved against him like a caress, Robin released her death grip and took a step back. “You sure you want to call me that, though? You keep showing up to save me and I bring the police into your life—which clearly makes you uncomfortable—and then I...hurt you.” She gently touched the irritation mark the pepper spray had left on his skin. The faint sheen of tears that sparkled in her eyes at the damage she’d done to him was more apology than he needed.

  He pulled her hand away and clasped it between them. “It’s not like I haven’t been hurt before. And by a lot bigger and meaner than you, I’m guessin.’”

  “You guess?” She reached up and cupped the side of his jaw, gently tracing the scar there with the pad of her thumb. “You don’t know who did this to you? Oh, Jake.” Lifting her other hand, she brushed her fingers across the rigid scar that bisected his temple. “That bastard should be drawn and quartered for hurting you like this. I can’t imagine how much pain you must have suffered. Is that why you don’t like Detective Montgomery? Because the police didn’t find your attacker?”

  She was talking unsolved crime, extending that protective maternal shield to include him in her fierce compassion. But the stroke of her fingers across his skin was eliciting something far more sensual than anything he’d feel for somebody’s mother. And he hadn’t been thinking about the clue he’d inadvertently revealed about his blank slate of a life. He hadn’t been thinking, period.

  “Robin,” he prompted, trying to convince them both that that endearment and any mention of his past had been slips of the tongue and nothing more. His body was still warm, his concentration still misfiring, after holding her. He didn’t need her to keep putting her hands on him, touching him the way a pretty woman touched a normal man. If he was smart, he’d put some distance between them. Jake pulled her hands from his hair and face and retreated to the door, ostensibly checking to make sure no one else was in the building. “What’s going on? You didn’t get locked in by accident, did you?”

  “I don’t think so.” She swiped the tears from her face and picked up a bulky, plain white business envelope. “I mean, at first, I thought my staff had forgotten I was still here. But I got this in the mail today. There was no message like the others.”

  “Others?”

  Robin handed him the envelope and backed away as though its touch repulsed her. Then she nodded toward the stack of papers on the corner of her desk. “I’ve gotten something every day, ever since that article about my attack was in the paper. Phone calls, too. I reported them to Detective Montgomery. But he said until the creep actually does something, there’s not much KCPD can do.”

  “Do you think Houseman is behind this?”

  “I don’t know. He calls me every day, saying it’s urgent we talk, but it has to be in person. At least he identifies himself. I keep putting him off.”

  She hugged her arms around her waist as Jake picked up one letter and unfolded it. “Son of a...”

  It was a photocopy of Robin, a blurry image taken of her pushing Emma in her stroller on the sidewalk outside the shop. Robin’s face had been x’ed out with a marker and a cryptic message had been scribbled across the bottom. You don’t deserve her.

  “Are they all like this?”

  “Variations on the same theme. I’m an unfit mother. I deserved what happened to me. He’s coming to take my baby away.” Her gaze fixated on the envelope Jake still held. “There aren’t any words in that one, but I get the message loud and clear. He can get to us. He has gotten to us.”

  He opened the envelope to find shredded bits of soiled yellow yarn inside. The frayed strands were of the narrowest skein— The remnants of a baby’s knit cap? “Is this Emma’s?”

  The tiny cap hadn’t just unraveled and gotten dirty. Someone had taken scissors or a knife to it. Someone who’d been very, very angry. “She was wearing it the night of the attack. I wondered why I couldn’t find it afterward. He must have taken it as a souvenir. I thought an attempted rape was frightening enough, but this...this scares me.” She moved back to the bassinet to watch her daughter sleep. “I thought he’d locked me in the fridge room tonight so that he could kidnap her. I don’t know how he got in. I was running late, but there should have been someone else here, waiting for us in the parking lot.” She spun around as a new concern hit her and hurried toward the door. “Are they all right? Did anyone else get hurt?”

  Jake grabbed her arm before she could get by him and blocked her exit. Before she could voice a protest, he placed the envelope back in her hand and released her. “They all left.”

  “They left?”

  “Ten minutes after closing, your parking lot was empty.”

  “You were watching. But...” She seemed to be having a tough time processing that she’d been abandoned by her employees. Shaking her head, she returned the envelope with Emma’s cap to her desk. “It must have been a miscommunication. Mark thought Leon was waiting for us—Leon thought Mark was.”

  “One of them could have locked you in and then driven away.”

  “I refuse to believe that.” Would she refuse to believe her employee was selling pictures that could have been of her or Emma? “Everyone here cares about my daughter. We celebrated her arrival. They all want to take care of her when she’s here. They wouldn’t put her in danger. What would be their motive for the assault and these threats?”

  “You said you suspected someone was cooking the books.”

  The fire in her eyes was coming back as she got defensive of her people. “Why go to all this trouble to cover up an embezzlement? We’re talking about two thousand dollars, not mi
llions.”

  “I’ve seen people do worse for less.” Had he?

  “The people I know don’t act that way.”

  “Then someone you don’t know waited until he could sneak in unnoticed.”

  She drifted a step closer. “I thought you were watching.”

  Jake braced his hands on his hips and squared off against her. “I thought you’d have enough sense to leave with the others.”

  “If you’re going to spy on me, at least do a thorough job.”

  “You’re not my responsibility, lady. I don’t owe you anything.”

  He raised his voice to match the accusation in hers. The baby cooed in her bassinet, stirring in her sleep.

  Robin palmed Jake’s biceps and nudged him out the door. “Could we take this out in the hallway so we don’t wake Emma?” She stepped into the shadows with him, resuming the discussion in a more rational tone as soon as she closed the door. “Are you sure you didn’t see anyone come inside?”

  She’d come to him for help, and now she was blaming him? “I left for a few minutes to see if I could find the car that was watching you the other night.”

  “Did you see it?”

  Jake scraped his palm over his stubbled jaw, stifling a curse. He was to blame. He’d dropped the ball tonight, getting distracted while the real danger was close at hand. “I thought I saw something suspicious, but I can’t be sure. There was a car out front pulling away when I ran back. Still couldn’t make out the driver. A guy in the car I’d been tailing snapped a picture of me and drove off in a hurry.”

  “There were two men?”

  “Possibly.” Maybe her assistant’s rendezvous hadn’t been about the pictures at all. Maybe it had been a ruse to get him away from the shop so an accomplice could get inside to Robin and Emma. Jake had suspected two people had been involved the night of her assault—the attacker and a getaway driver. Maybe the tag team had been back at work tonight.

  “Jake. What are you thinking?”

  “That it’s a good thing I came back.” He pulled the knife from his belt and slipped it back into the sheath inside his boot. “I may have scared off the guy before he could get to Emma. I made a lot of noise running through the alley.”