Baby Breakout (9 page)

Not now that her baby was back.

“I heard screaming and nearly called the authorities.” Mrs. Osborn stared down the hall toward the dark shadow enveloping the little girl. “Looks like I should have called.”

“No. I just overreacted to finding Isobel’s bed empty,” Erica explained with a self-deprecating chuckle. “It’s late and I’m tired.”

“And you’re not alone,” Mrs. Osborn said. “Who is that man? I’ve never seen him around before…”

She had never seen any man around Erica unless he was a client of her accounting business. After Jed, she hadn’t dared trust another man—especially when she had Isobel’s safety to worry about even more than her own.

Her stomach pitched again with the horror over what could have happened to her baby had Isobel been in the apartment when that man had broken in…

The old woman’s wrinkled brow furrowed into deeper lines of confusion. “Actually I think that I might have seen him before…”

“He’s an old friend of mine,” Erica said. “You’ve probably seen him in some pictures I’ve had around here.” She opened the door to the hall before the woman could ask to see those photos.

But Mrs. Osborn was already peering into the living room and, with a trembling hand gesturing toward it, noted a lamp lying on the floor.

Erica forced a smile. “He—he couldn’t find the lights in the dark.”

Mrs. Osborn leaned closer and clasped her hand. “If he’s threatening you, I’ll go back to my apartment and call the police. I’ll get you help.”

“I don’t need help,” Erica lied.

She desperately needed help. She had stumbled into a murder scene, had had her apartment broken into and, for long, horrific moments, had believed that her daughter had been abducted.

“Everything’s fine.” She glanced back at Jed and forced a smile. “He really is a friend.”

“Oh.” Mrs. Osborn nodded in sudden understanding. “He’s an old
boy
friend.”

“Yes.” She hadn’t had to lie this time.

For a short while before his deployment, Jed had been her boyfriend. Their connection had been so instant and deep that she had believed it could have lasted forever.

But, like everyone else who had mattered in her life, he hadn’t given her the chance.

Now she couldn’t give him one. She had to get rid of him this time—had to make sure that he took his danger out of her previously safe world.

She clasped Mrs. Osborn’s hand tighter—ready to give her the message the older woman had already suspected Erica wanted to give her.

Call the police…

* * *

J
EDIDIAH
K
LEYN
HAD
CHANGED
.
That was the first thing he’d noticed before he’d punched the man. With his buzz cut and bulky muscles, Jed didn’t look all that physically different from the war hero who had returned from his tour in Afghanistan with a Purple Heart.

But he was very different—mentally and emotionally.

He was harder. Tougher. Ruthless in a way that he had never been. Jed would undoubtedly kill to protect the woman and her child.

Before Jed and Erica had walked in on him, he’d had time to look at all the
family
photos inside the apartment. But the kid hadn’t been in her bed. Not that Jed would have given him time to grab the little girl. He had been too focused on catching him.

And killing him?

He rubbed his jaw, which had swollen from the blow Jed had dealt him. He snorted in derision at his quick flash of anger. He had no right to be mad about it. He’d had that one coming. Hell, he had a lot more than one coming to him.

But Jed wouldn’t land another punch. Jed had already won too much in his life.

It was
his
turn to win.

And Jedidiah Kleyn’s turn to die.

Chapter Eight

Trying not to imagine
who she had entertained here, Jed ignored the red walls and white lace curtains of Erica’s bedroom. His attention was focused on the tiny female tucked under the red-and-white quilt. She slept deeply. Peacefully. He would probably never sleep again.

But then it was already morning. Sunshine radiated through those lace curtains, warming the hardwood floor and enveloping the bed and the sleeping child in a circle of ethereal light.

Voices emanated from the living room. The old woman had left a while ago. Who the hell…

He spared one last glance at his sleeping daughter, assuring himself that she was safe in Erica’s room. There was no fire escape so that someone could break the window and quickly grab her without being noticed. Isobel was much safer in her mother’s room.

But what about her mother?

He didn’t hear her voice. As he crept down the hall toward the living room, he realized the voices came from the television set. Erica stood before it, the remote clasped in her slightly trembling hand.

“Isn’t that too loud?” he asked, then remembered that their daughter was a sound sleeper.

Erica didn’t bother reminding him. She just gestured at the screen. “They’re running your story again.”

He didn’t even glance at the TV. “That’s not
my
story.”

Someone else had concocted the story that had sent him to prison for crimes he hadn’t committed.

“The part about breaking out of prison and being an escaped convict is your story,” she said. “And that’s what Mrs. Osborn will see when she watches this. She’ll recognize you. You have to leave before she calls the police.”

She tossed the remote onto the couch and moved toward the door, as if to see him out. But he didn’t follow her. Instead he headed to where he’d brawled with the intruder. She had righted the lamp that had fallen to the floor, but the shade was dented from where it had struck the hardwood.

He would have had Rowe check it for prints, but the man had worn gloves. What had he been looking for? The lamp sat atop a bureau crowded with picture frames. Isobel’s face, so much like his sister Macy’s, smiled out of most of them from infancy to her current age. The drawers were shut, no papers disturbed.

Jed doubted the man had been looking for files like those taken from Marcus Leighton’s office. Jed was afraid that what he’d been looking for had been across the hall with Mrs. Osborn…

“I’m sure your neighbor is asleep in her bed after her late night,” Jed assured her. The woman was very old, her eyes foggy as if she had cataracts. He doubted she had been able to see much more than his shadowy outline, let alone enough of his features to recognize his face.

Instead of worrying about her neighbor, Erica should be in her bed with their daughter. Dark circles rimmed her pale blue eyes. But she trembled with anxiety.

“You need to leave,” she insisted. “Now. Before it’s too late.”

“You really think I should leave?” he asked. “After what happened last night?”

Her breath shuddered out as her mind followed a different path into the past. “A man died.”

“I didn’t kill Marcus.” He’d thought he had convinced her of that, but obviously she still had her doubts about him.

“I know.” She pointed toward the TV again. “But the authorities won’t. They’ll think you’re even more dangerous than they already do.”

They were already going to shoot him on sight; now maybe they wouldn’t even wait to make sure it was him before they started firing. Would sticking close to Erica and Isobel keep them safe or put them in more danger?

“If I leave, that man might come back,” he warned her.

“And if you stay, and Mrs. Osborn recognizes you, he won’t be the only one breaking into my home.” She glanced toward her door, her eyes widening as if she could imagine a battering ram breaking apart the wood and a SWAT team bursting into her living room.

He could imagine the same thing, but he could also imagine that man coming back…for her and Isobel. And his gut told him that man would prove much more dangerous than any lawman with a shoot-on-sight order. “I can’t just leave you…”

“Why not?” she asked. “You didn’t come here to protect me. You came here to force me to provide you with an alibi and clear your name. I can’t do that. I can’t perjure myself and swear that you never left me that night.”

“I didn’t want you to perjure yourself,” he said. “I wanted you to tell the truth.”

“I have,” she said.

He wished he could be certain that she told the truth. But after learning that yet another friend had betrayed him, he dared not trust a woman he really hadn’t known very well at all. She hadn’t just kept his possible alibi from the police; she’d kept his daughter from him, too.

“So why are you still here?” Erica asked with such intensity that the question must have been nagging at her for a while.

He gestured toward her bedroom, to where their daughter lay sleeping. He couldn’t put into words what he already felt for his child—the protectiveness, the affection, the devotion…

“Until a few hours ago, you didn’t even know Isobel existed,” Erica reminded him.

“Whose fault was that?” he asked, the question slipping out with his bitterness. She could have gone to his trial or visited him in prison to at least let him know that he had become a father.

Her delicately featured face flushed, but she shook her head in rejection of any culpability. “It was Marcus Leighton’s fault for convincing me of your guilt. If there was any chance that you were the killer your own lawyer thought you were, I didn’t want you to have anything to do with my baby.”

Jed couldn’t fault her for that. She was a good mother. Instead he cursed the man whom he’d once considered a friend.

Macy had wanted to get him a better lawyer, one with more experience with criminal cases, but he had been loyal. Why hadn’t Marcus? The man had promised that no one else would work as hard at proving Jed’s innocence than he would, and Jed had trusted him.

Now he knew better than to ever trust again.

“Go,” Erica urged him. “Find out who bribed him to betray you. Find out who wanted you to spend the rest of your life in prison.”

“I intend to,” he said. That hadn’t changed, but it was no longer his first priority. “Proving my innocence was my whole reason for leaving during the riot at Blackwoods.”

“So go,” she urged him again—almost desperately. She had been afraid of him earlier—when he’d tricked her into opening the door. But this fear, haunting her blue eyes, was even greater. She wasn’t afraid of him anymore, but she was afraid of the danger he’d brought into her life.

“I can’t leave without you and Isobel,” he said. Chances were good her intruder would return. Soon.

She shook her head. “We can’t go with you. We can’t live on the run. You can’t ask that of us…”

“I don’t want you living on the run,” he said. “I just want you living. I want you safe.”

But he wanted more than that. He wanted
her
in every way. He stepped closer to her, and she must have seen desire in his eyes because her breath audibly caught.

And maybe she wanted him, too, because she leaned toward him. He lowered his head to hers. She gasped at his nearness, and her breath warmed his lips. Then he covered her mouth with his.

A man on the run from authorities and a killer, he had no time for kisses. But, in this moment, there was nothing he would rather be doing than kissing Erica Towsley.

* * *

E
RICA
LIFTED
HER
HANDS
,
pressing her palms against his chest. She needed to push him away—to push him out of the door and out of her and Isobel’s lives.

But instead, her fingers curled into his shirt, and she clutched him closer. Rising up on tiptoe, she pressed her mouth tighter to his. He parted her lips, deepening the kiss.

His tongue touched hers and ignited a fire within her. Her legs trembled as desire rushed through her. Her nipples tightened, and heat filled her stomach. And all those disjointed memories from that night—the night they conceived their daughter—flitted through her mind.

As if he felt her trembling, he swung her up in his arms—clasping her tight to his chest. And he kissed her more deeply, his tongue sliding in and out of her mouth until she moaned.

She ran her hands up the back of his neck to clasp his head, and his closely cropped hair tickled her palms. She tingled all over as passion pulsed inside her.

He groaned and moved, carrying her over to the couch. He lowered her to the cushions and followed her down, covering her body with his.

He was so big. So muscular. So heavy, even though he balanced most of his weight on his bulging arms. She wrapped her arms around him and pulled him closer. Then she wrapped her legs around his waist and arched into him—wanting,
needing,
more.

He lifted his mouth from hers and stared into her eyes; his were dark and hot with desire. “Erica…?”

How could she have ever thought that he had drugged and taken her choice away from her? Even though he’d been locked up for three years, he was giving her a choice now—instead of just taking what she was freely willing to give.

Why was she so willing? Maybe she had been locked up, too, for the past few years—afraid to trust because of what she had considered such a betrayal of her love. But Jed hadn’t betrayed her.

If anyone had betrayed anyone, she had betrayed him when she had let Marcus Leighton make her doubt him. She’d already apologized, but she had to say it again. “I’m sorry…”

With a shudder, he rose up—pulling away as if she’d rejected him. “No, I’m sorry,” he said. “This is crazy. We can’t do this—”

“We shouldn’t,” she said.

For so many reasons. The most pressing was that he couldn’t stay. He was a man on the run who had already brought her nothing but heartbreak and danger.

“But we can,” she continued. It wouldn’t make up to him the three years of his life that he’d lost, but it might help them regain some of the closeness and promise they’d had before he had gone off to Afghanistan and broken off their relationship.

“And I want to.” She grasped his shirt in both fists and tugged him down toward her.

His hands covered hers, and he stared at her, his gaze dark with a breath-stealing intensity. Then he pulled her fingers from his shirt.

At least one of them had the sense to realize this was neither the time nor the place for making love. But still she had to blink back tears of disappointment. Then she was blinking to clear her eyes as he pulled off his shirt and tossed it onto the floor next to the couch. All rippling, sinewy muscle, he was so damn sexy.

Her breath caught as desire overwhelmed her. She touched him, sliding her fingertips across the hair-dusted silky skin. Then she lifted up to press her lips to his chest. His heart thudded against her mouth.