by Rebecca Deel
“You need someone to watch your back. If Satterfield is behind this and he manages to take you out, all of us are vulnerable. You can’t go by yourself.”
“That’s why I’m going with him.” Grace folded her arms across her chest as if daring Trent to tell her no.
He tugged her tighter against his side. “It’s not safe, baby. I might run into trouble.”
“That’s all the more reason why you need me. You’re taking me with you or I’ll ask Zane to give me the address and take a taxi. You don’t want me to go unprotected, do you?” She unfolded her arms and circled his waist. “I need to do this, sweetheart. Let me do what I can to keep you safe for a change. If there’s trouble, I’ll do whatever you tell me. I know you can handle the trouble and protect me at the same time.”
He sighed. The only way to keep her in the suite was tie her to a chair and he wouldn’t do that. “If I take you with me, you have to promise you’ll do exactly what I tell you to do, no questions asked. There may not be time to explain until later.”
“You have my word.” An impish smile curved her lips. “Just don’t get used to it. This is a crisis situation with a real possibility of danger. On a normal day, you can expect a protest if I don’t agree with something you want.”
Trent chuckled. “Understood.” He looked at Nicole. “I want you to stay here and watch over Mason while he rests. I’m almost positive no one followed us, but I’m not arrogant enough to assume I didn’t make a mistake or miss a tail.”
“I don’t need a nap,” Mason protested.
“So watch a movie. The soreness will grow worse as the day progresses. Do your body a favor and give it a chance to recover. Keep taking the pain meds and step up your fluid intake. Don’t leave the suite for any reason. The fewer people know we’re here, the better for all of us.”
Minutes later, Trent drove from the garage and headed toward the downtown bypass. He’d rather not drive past their old hotel and chance someone recognizing them. The bypass took longer because he had to circle around the city. The good thing was he’d have many opportunities to spot a tail and lose them before they arrived at Ron Satterfield’s home.
Trent drove slowly past the house, scanning the area. Not much cover in the front. The curtains were drawn, giving the place a desolate air.
“Doesn’t look as though he’s home,” Grace murmured.
“No car out front, but I noticed a three-car garage in the back. We’ll need to check inside, see if there’s an empty slot where a vehicle should be.” He continued to the corner and turned right. On the next block, Trent parked in the deep shadow of a tree. Grace reached for the door. “Wait.”
They sat in the SUV for several minutes while he watched for anyone showing interest in them. No curtains twitched. No vehicles drove past at a snail’s pace. There weren’t many houses. Unlike his neighborhood in Nashville, the lots in this section of Dumas were large, many of them without fences. Sidewalks connected the lots with the detached garages at the back of the houses, forming an alleyway between the blocks.
“Come on, baby. Let’s go for a walk.” Time to see if Satterfield was part of the problem or the solution.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“What do you want me to do?” Grace glanced around, happy to have an active role in protecting Trent for once, and nervous at doing something illegal. Did the police throw you in jail for breaking into a house if you didn’t steal anything? She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer. If Barton or Weston had their way, she and Trent would be behind bars in a heartbeat.
“Relax against me, Grace.” Trent slid his arm around her shoulders. When she walked too fast, he slowed her down. “We’re taking a walk, not running a race. Slow, relaxed movements are overlooked. The quickest way to draw attention is moving fast.”
Easy for him to say. Covert operations were his life. Grace was an upfront kind of woman. This cloak-and-dagger stuff didn’t come natural to her.
They walked to the end of the street, turned right, then ambled up the alley between the blocks of houses. A concrete driveway circled Ron’s home.
As they drew closer to the house, Grace examined the building’s facade. Beautiful stonework, gray with the occasional red intermixed, created an old-world ambience that charmed her. Maybe one day she and Trent would have a house similar to this. She smiled at the thought of filling a large home with children. Trent St. Claire would be an amazing father and her parents longed for grandchildren to spoil.
She paused, glanced at Trent. Her boyfriend had been absent so often in the past year, he hadn’t met her family yet.
“What is it, baby?”
“I need to introduce you to my parents.”
He nodded. “I’m looking forward to it. What should I know before I see them?”
“They’ll grill you. Mom is fiercely protective and Dad was never friendly to the dates I brought home.”
“They might have a problem with the secrets I have to keep,” he warned.
Probably. But she was confident Trent would win them over.
He guided her behind the house, pace still easy. “Let’s see if our friend Ron is home.” He knocked on the back door, waited a moment, knocked again. When Ron didn’t answer, Trent tugged a pair of thin rubber gloves from his pocket and into place over his hands, then knelt, thin metal tools in his grasp.
Grace stared. Lock picks? “I don’t have to worry about breaking a window if I lock myself out,” she whispered. “I didn’t know you could do that.”
He flashed an amused look over his shoulder, stood. “Stay behind me,” he murmured, handing her a pair of gloves. Once she’d donned the protection, Trent turned the knob and slipped inside the darkened interior.
Grace closed the door behind herself, glancing around with curiosity. Although nothing appeared out of place in the kitchen, the counters were barren save for a coffee maker. Ron either wasn’t a chef or he was too busy to cook. She didn’t know anything about a law career, but Grace was friends with a couple of paralegals who told stories about the long hours their bosses kept and the mounds of paperwork that came with the job.
After Trent signaled her to wait in the kitchen, she used the time to search, opening drawers and cabinets as quietly as possible. Her eyebrows rose. Nice cutlery. Real china and crystal. She recognized the china pattern as one her aunt preferred. Grace and Nicole preferred stoneware to delicate place settings. A good thing, too, in light of her feelings for her boyfriend. Just contemplating rough-and-tough Trent sipping coffee from a delicate china cup curved her lips.
Trent returned. “Clear. Ron’s not here. Neither is Clarice.”
“I hope he’s in a good mood if he returns while we’re in his house.” She opened the refrigerator. Standard bachelor fare. Lots of cold cuts, bread, condiments, sodas, alcohol. No real ingredients to cook meals, confirming her earlier suspicion Ron didn’t cook much. “Nothing interesting in the kitchen.”
“We need to search the rest of the house. No lights. If we split up, we’ll cover ground faster.”
“What do I look for?”
“Anything connected to you, Nicole, or Devin. I’ll take the first floor, you take the second. Thirty minutes tops, baby. If something happens, hide and wait for me to come to you.”
Grace nodded and hurried from the kitchen. On the second floor, she found four bedrooms and two bathrooms. Although she felt uncomfortable searching the master bedroom, Grace forced herself to look through the dresser, nightstand, and closet. She grabbed her cell phone and knelt on the floor. She didn’t think a light would show if she kept the beam pointed toward the floor. Raising the bed skirt, she turned on her flashlight app.
The only thing under the bed was a shoe box. Grace almost ignored the container, figuring Ron ran out of closet space for shoes. Checking would only take a minute, though.
She stretched out her arm and grabbed the box. Still covered by the bed skirt, Grace lifted the lid and shined the light on the contents of the bo
x. Her gasp filled the otherwise silent room, her cheeks heating. Oh, man. She didn’t want those images burned in her brain. How would she look Ron in the face after seeing too much of him?
Pushing back the tide of distaste, she dropped the lid and stood, box clutched in her hands. She should show Trent. Once he saw proof of their suspicions, she would return the box to its hiding place under the bed.
The next bedroom was a little used guest room. Didn’t feel lived in like the master bedroom. Pretty but lifeless. The third bedroom doubled as an exercise room. A treadmill, an elliptical, and some kind of weight system with a metal frame and pulleys and cables everywhere.
The fourth bedroom served as an entertainment room. Huge television, several comfortable reclining chairs in black leather, a fully-decked out bar with a mirror and lights. Ron’s DVD collection was extensive, befitting the obvious investment in his television screen.
Nothing interesting in the bathrooms. Disappointed she hadn’t found anything to help them, Grace descended the stairs in search of Trent. Paper rustling drew her to the room at the end of the hall.
She stopped in the doorway of an office, box propped on her hip. “Find anything?” she asked.
“Yeah. You?” He looked up. “What do you have?”
“A box of pictures.” She grimaced. “Take a look, then I’ll return them to the place where I found them.”
“What kind of pictures?”
“The kind I’d love to erase from my brain.”
He took the box from her hands and set it on the desktop. Lifting the lid, Trent stilled, whistled softly. “I see what you mean. Looks like you and Nicole were right. Clarice and Ron are involved.”
He upended the box and started skimming the photos before tossing them back inside. Studying one picture for a few seconds, he held it out to Grace. “Look at this one.”
“Do I have to?”
“It’s not like the others.”
Grace took the photo from his hand. Shock held her immobile for a moment. Clarice and Ron were hunters? “Never saw that coming.” Was it possible Clarice was simply doing the girlfriend thing of supporting her boyfriend’s hobby?
No, she decided. Clarice had her own gun and seemed comfortable holding it. Her free hand rested on the head of a deer, not something Grace would do in a million years. She’d seen enough results of gun violence in the ER to make the prospect of shooting an animal unpleasant. “Devin’s wife doesn’t seem the type to go tromping through the woods and fire a shotgun.”
Trent chuckled. “First, you don’t tromp through the woods to hunt, not if you want to be a successful hunter. Second, she’s not holding a shotgun. That’s a rifle.”
“There’s a difference?”
“A big one, babe.”
“I wonder if Devin shares her passion for hunting.”
“Next time you see him, ask. Might be interesting to see his reaction to your question.” He turned back to the desk and continued glancing at pictures and returning them to the box. “The interest in hunting explains Ron’s home in the mountains.”
“And here I thought the place might be a vacation getaway, leaving the stress of the city and job behind.”
“The house would serve that purpose as well. Ron hunts prey in the courtroom and in the woods. When you hunt, you have to push everything else aside and focus on the task at hand. Cornered prey can turn on you. Makes the hunt that much more dangerous.”
“Experience talking?”
“Oh, yeah,” he murmured. Finished with the photos, Trent replaced the lid. “Where did you find these?”
“Under his bed. I’ll return them.” Grace hurried up the stairs, cognizant of the thirty-minute deadline approaching fast. She slid the box under the bed skirt, then returned to the office. “What now?”
Trent picked up several pieces of paper, stuffed them into the pocket of his black cargoes, and secured the opening.
“I thought we weren’t taking anything from here.”
He inclined his head toward the copier in the corner. “I made copies of the originals. Ron won’t know we have them.”
“What are they?”
“I’ll show you later.” He grabbed the originals of the documents and returned them to a desk drawer. Once again, he pulled out the lock picks and secured the drawer.
The doorbell chimed.
Grace’s heart raced. “Oh, no.” Had a neighbor seen them at the back of the house and come to investigate? If so, would he announce himself by ringing a doorbell?
“Door’s locked and obviously it’s not Ron.” Trent strode to the window facing the driveway at the front of the house and eased the curtain aside. He uttered a low growl.
“Who is it?”
“Weston and Barton.”
Worse than a neighbor. Man, she so didn’t want to see the inside of a jail cell. If she was arrested for breaking and entering, would the hospital suspend her? And what about Trent? Despite what he let the detectives believe, her boyfriend wasn’t on an official mission. If he was arrested, would Maddox terminate Trent’s employment? “What should we do?”
He sent her an amused glance. “Nothing. They don’t know we’re here.”
“We’re waiting them out?” Grace didn’t know if she could, her tension already unbearable.
“I think the detectives are here to find out what Ron knows about the Randalls, maybe ask followup questions concerning Devin’s poisoning.”
“If they catch us, we’ll end up in jail. I don’t look good in prison orange.”
His laugh was low. “Don’t worry. As long as we’re quiet, we should be fine. If they do come inside, I’ll deal with them.”
That was easy for him to say. Grace trembled so much, she feared she would shake apart. How did he do this for a living? And she had thought her job was high stress. What a laugh. If this situation almost did her in, she couldn’t imagine how she’d react to guns fired at her and knives brandished in her direction. She already respected Trent and his skills. This tiny insight made her appreciate his courage and strength even more.
“I’d rather not have to handle the detectives any time soon. I spent more time with them than I’m comfortable with.”
“Agreed.” He eased her against his chest, wrapped his arms around her while keeping an eye on the detectives. “Unfortunately, we’ll have more run ins with them, especially if Ron is missing as well as Clarice.” He lapsed into silence.
A moment later, he squeezed her gently. “They’re leaving. We’ll wait a few more minutes, then leave here.”
“Are we going straight to the hotel?”
Trent shook his head. “We have to be sure we aren’t followed.”
“Will you tell me what you found?”
“When we return to the hotel. Saves having to repeat myself.” Ten minutes passed. Trent looked at Grace. “Time to go now. People who live around here should return from work soon.”
Trent led her to the back door. He signaled her to wait, then opened the door a crack. When he was satisfied, he clasped Grace’s hand and they walked out of the house. “Same as before, sweetheart. Slow and easy.”
Instead of going back the way they’d come, the two of them continued down the alleyway, passing five more houses before Trent nudged Grace toward the street where the SUV was parked. He slowed them even further, stopping twice to kiss her in a leisurely fashion.
Good grief. She wasn’t sure her heart could handle much more. Between Trent’s burning kisses and the pressure to run, her heart raced as though she’d completed a marathon.
Finally, they reached the SUV. Trent tapped the remote, unlocking the vehicle. Another kiss, then he tucked her inside and buckled her seatbelt. Sliding behind the wheel, he cranked the engine and drove from the neighborhood. “You were great, baby.”
“Thank you for agreeing to let me come with you. The experience was…enlightening.”
He cast her a quizzical glance.
“I’ve never seen you in action on a mis
sion. I don’t know how you do this for a living, Trent. I thought my heart would fly out of my chest and we weren’t really in any danger.”
Her boyfriend huffed. “This was a piece of cake. I hope you never see me in combat mode.” His expression darkened. “If you do, it means I failed to protect you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
After making sure they hadn’t picked up a tail, Trent stopped at a restaurant for takeout. Returning to the parking garage, he escorted Grace to the elevator. “How do you feel about kids?” he asked as the car rose to their floor, keeping his attention on the doors in front of him. Was he rushing her?
Grace’s head whipped his direction. “I love them. Why?”
Thank goodness. Yeah, he hadn’t been subtle. But the subject of children was important to him, to them. He wanted a family, although not enough to give up the woman of his dreams if she’d been against the idea. Didn’t mean he wouldn’t have tried to persuade her to reconsider, even stoop to encouraging her to spend time with Del and Ivy’s babies when they were born in a few months in an effort to stir Grace’s interest in having a child of her own.
Pregnancy could be problematic for his sister who suffered from Sjogren’s Syndrome. Might be caveman of him, but he wanted to pass on the name St. Claire to the next generation.
“Given any thought to how many children you might like to have?”
“Two or three.”
“Dogs or cats?”
Another surprised glance from Grace. “Dogs. No cats. I’m allergic to them.”
Awesome. He was a dog man himself, but he would have tolerated a feline in order for his kids to have a pet while they grew up.
“Where is all this going, honey?” Her gentle voice caused the region around his heart to warm.
“Future plans.” He refused to say more at the moment. Besides, Grace was a smart woman. He’d already told her he loved her. The next logical step was marriage.
The elevator arrived at their floor and the doors slid open. Trent shoved the key card into the slot and twisted the knob.
