Bridegroom Bodyguard (6 page)

“I didn’t know it was a murder scene,” he said. “Any more than I knew that there was a murder scene at Chuck Horowitz’s house.”

The man nodded with a patronizing smile pasted on his pallid face. “That’s what all the criminals say....”

“Okay, maybe you should hit him,” Logan remarked. “You’re way out of line here, Sharpe.”

Parker didn’t care what the jerk said about him. He cared about Sharon. “What did you mean about Sharon? What do you know about her?”

“You don’t know who she is?” Sharpe asked smugly.

Parker really wanted to hit him. “Just tell me what you know...” He bit off the insult he wanted to add; it wouldn’t get him anywhere when the man thought so highly of himself. “...about Sharon.”

“She’s Judge Wells’s granddaughter....”

Judge Wells? The name sounded vaguely familiar. Maybe Parker had testified before him in a drug-arrest case back in the days when he’d worked undercover vice for River City P.D. He shrugged. “I don’t remember much about him.”

“Guess you only pay attention to the female judges.”

He really, really wanted to hit him now, but he restrained himself. “How old is this Judge Wells?” After all, he was her
grandfather.

“He’s dead.”

“Then how would I know the guy?”

“Ooooh.” The word slipped out of Nikki with a sudden nod of understanding.

“Your sister knows,” Sharpe said, “and she’s younger than you are.”

He turned toward Nikki; he would rather hear it from her than the defective detective anyway. “What do you know, Niks?”

Nikki shuddered. “It was a tragic story....”

“Oh,” Logan said. “I remember....”

“Where was I?” Parker wondered.

“We were kids when it happened,” Logan said. “It’s just that people seemed to bring it up every time they talked about the judge....”

Like people had brought up their father’s murder every time they talked about any other Payne. Yeah, they never forgot tragic deaths.

“Who died?” Parker asked.

“Sharon’s mother,” Nikki said. “She was really young. She was just a teenager when she had Sharon. The story goes that the judge and his wife didn’t approve, so she ran away from home. She was working nights at a gas station—” her forehead creased as she searched her memory “—or a convenience store when she was murdered.”

“That’s awful,” Parker said. Like Ethan, Sharon had also lost her mother when she was young. She would be able to identify with the little boy even more than she already seemed to.

Nikki shuddered again. “What was worse is that the girl couldn’t afford a babysitter, so she brought Sharon to work with her. She was there when her mother was murdered.”

“How old was she?” Old enough to remember?

“I think three or four,” Nikki said. “When customers came in, her mother would have her crawl into a cupboard behind the counter. The killer didn’t know she was there or she probably would have been killed, too.”

Horror gripped Parker. “Do you think she saw what happened?”

“She picked the killer out of a line-up.” Logan chimed in with the detail that he, as a former detective, would of course remember best.

“At three or four years old?” he asked in disbelief. He knew that young witnesses weren’t always the most reliable. But then, the face of her mother’s killer was probably one Sharon would never forget—even more than twenty years later. “Did she testify?”

“It didn’t go to trial,” Logan said. “The killer didn’t know there was a witness, so he confessed.”

At least she had been spared a trial. But the horror she must have witnessed...and finding Brenda murdered so violently had probably brought back all the old nightmares. He had to talk to her doctor. But would her doctor talk to him?

Parker was nobody to her. He wasn’t family. He wasn’t even her friend or he wouldn’t have left her alone to deal with the police. But he hadn’t known....

He’d had no idea how upset she must have been. He couldn’t keep his anger to himself, though, so he reached out for Sharpe. But Logan dragged him back. “You know all this about her and you still interrogated her in some little room? You sadistic blowhard! You have to know that she couldn’t have hurt her employer.”

“Maybe she wasn’t strong enough to have broken the judge’s neck,” the detective admitted. “But we know that she was the last one to go past the security system. We don’t know if she was alone.”

“She wasn’t,” Parker said. “The bodyguard was with Brenda.”

“I meant Ms. Wells,” he said. “She may have brought someone with her—someone who killed the judge for her.”

He was an even bigger idiot than Parker had thought. “Really? So she willingly put herself through witnessing another murder? That’s ridiculous.”

“It really is,” Logan added. “Have you ever even cleared a case, Sharpe?”

Finally color flushed the man’s pasty face, giving Logan his answer.

“She has no motive, either,” Parker pointed out.

“The judge made her trustee of the estate with a generous income.”

Nikki laughed. “She’s Judge Wells’s granddaughter. I hardly think she needs money.”

The color deepened in Sharpe’s face. “But she doesn’t just get money out of the deal. She gets the kid, too.”

“What?” Parker asked.

“Brenda Foster’s will awards Sharon Wells custody of the kid.”

“But the kid has a father,” Parker pointed out. He was Ethan’s father. But he wasn’t about to announce that in front of Sharpe and provide the man with his own motive for killing Brenda.

Sharpe shook his head. “Birth certificate states father unknown. She probably used a sperm donor.”

Now Parker’s face was the one that flushed with embarrassment. He had been a sperm donor—but an unwitting one. He had even insisted on using a condom, but Brenda must have compromised it somehow.

“But if someone can prove he’s the boy’s father,” Parker persisted, “as the sole parent, he would become the boy’s guardian.”

Sharpe shrugged. “It would probably go to court. He’d have to fight for custody. I doubt he would have killed the judge because it probably just complicates his life.”

So Parker was off the hook for murder. And fatherhood?

But he wanted his son. He wanted to fight, but he didn’t want to fight a woman who had already been through too much in her life. Could Sharon even handle a fight?

Hell, she couldn’t handle any more attempts on her life. Parker would deal with the custody issue after he’d dealt with whoever wanted him and Sharon dead.

Chapter Nine

If someone can prove he’s the boy’s father...

The words she had heard as she’d walked out to join the others in the waiting room still rang in Sharon’s ears now, as she stared down at the sleeping baby.

Why had they been waiting for her? She was scarcely more than a stranger to them. But when they had turned toward her, she’d seen it on all of their faces—that overly solicitous concern that told her they knew. They knew what had happened to her mother. And they thought that witnessing it had made Sharon fragile.

Weak.

And passing out in the interrogation room had only proved their opinion of her. Would Parker use that against her in court when he fought her for custody of his child?

“Didn’t he even wake up?” Sharon asked the boy’s grandmother. She had been gone so long, away from the baby for far longer than she had wanted to be away.

“He woke up,” Mrs. Payne said with a sigh. “And he cried most of the time you were gone. He only fell back to sleep a short while ago.”

So he had cried for hours without her?

When Parker exercised his parental rights, she would be away from Ethan for far longer than a few hours. She would be cut out of the rest of his life. And he wouldn’t remember her any more than he was likely to remember his dead mother.

Tears stung her eyes, but she blinked them back. Too many of the Paynes already thought she was weak.

But Mrs. Payne must have caught her action because she rubbed her back, as she probably had the crying baby’s to soothe him to sleep. “While he’s sleeping, you should get some rest. You must be exhausted.”

She had been exhausted a couple of sleepless nights ago. She was beyond exhausted now. But she worried that if she slept, she wouldn’t see Ethan again. “I—I just want to watch him sleep....”

To assure herself that he was all right, that he wasn’t gone like his mother, like the bodyguard, like all those people who had died for no reason that she could fathom...

She and Parker had come no closer to learning why someone wanted them dead; they had only found more dead. The tears threatened again. She blinked harder but one slipped through her lashes and rolled down her cheek to drop onto the sleeping baby. Her breath caught, but he only sighed.

Next to her, Mrs. Payne had tensed, but she relaxed with the child. “It’s like he knows you’re here. He recognizes his mother’s presence.”

But Sharon wasn’t his mother. And she was probably only his guardian for now...until a judge decided the biological father’s rights overruled hers.

She shook her head. “No, I—I’m not...”

Why hadn’t Parker told his family right away? He’d been upset with her for letting him believe she was the baby’s mother. Why had he let his family believe it even after he’d learned the truth?

“Judge Foster was Ethan’s mother,” Sharon said. “And I worked for her—first as her law clerk and then as her nanny.” Brenda had kept telling her that she didn’t have the aptitude to be a lawyer, and Sharon’s failed attempts at passing the bar supported that supposition.

All those years she had spent in school and studying...

And she’d found what she loved by default. She had found Ethan because Brenda hadn’t been able to keep any other nanny working for her.

“You love him like he’s yours,” Mrs. Payne observed. “And he loves and relies on you like you’re his mother.”

She nodded. “I do love him—very much.” And if she hadn’t been afraid that she wouldn’t be able to keep him safe on her own, she might not have brought him to Parker. But she wasn’t equipped to protect him from fires and bombs.... Eventually he would have been hurt just from being around her. Maybe the best thing for the boy would be for her to turn down the guardianship and let the Paynes have him.

“Are you going to fight me?” Parker asked.

She was so tired that she hadn’t even heard him climb the stairs to the top-floor master bedroom, where he’d set up that portable crib what seemed like so long ago.

“Fight you?” Mrs. Payne asked. Her brow furrowed as she turned toward her son, clearly puzzled.

It wasn’t her place to tell the woman what her son had not, but Sharon found herself explaining, “Judge Foster gave me guardianship of Ethan in her will.”

She was sorry that the woman was dead, but she still resented how she had treated her son—more like a possession than a person. But then, Brenda Foster had been too busy to get to know the little boy, to appreciate how smart and affectionate he was.

Mrs. Payne continued to stare at her son. “Then why would
she
fight
you?
”

He furrowed his brow now, obviously as confused as she had been with him. “Because there is no way that I am going to give up my son.”

Pain struck Sharon’s heart. “So because I’m not his blood relative, you would cut me out of his life?” Then anger surged within her and the heat of it dried up her tears. “I’ve been with him pretty much every day since he was born, and you expect me to just give him up? To just walk away?”

That was what her grandparents had expected her mother to do—to give up her baby to strangers. To just give her up and walk away and forget all about her.

But maybe they’d been right. Maybe if her mother had, she would still be alive—since she would have been in college and not working at a convenience store in a bad area of the city.

“Nobody’s asking you to do that,” Mrs. Payne said.

Sharon stared at Parker; he wasn’t asking. But it was what he expected.

“A judge might,” Parker said.

“A judge might not care that he has your DNA,” Sharon replied. “You didn’t even know about him until I brought him to you.”

“You’re probably regretting that now,” he remarked, his blue eyes glittering with sarcasm and resentment. He had every right to be angry that she had been awarded guardianship over him—but she was not the one he should be angry with.

She had actually regretted not telling him earlier. She’d thought the judge was wrong to keep him from his child. But then she remembered her excuse for doing that. “According to Brenda, you never wanted to be a father.”

“That’s why she tricked me.”

There were other reasons why Brenda had admitted that she had chosen Parker as the father of her baby: because he was smart and handsome and protective and had the kind of charisma that drew everyone to him. But Sharon didn’t want to tell him that and add to his argument for custody.

“You have said before—a lot—that you never wanted to be a father,” Mrs. Payne agreed.

Parker sucked in a breath. “Mom, whose side are you on?”

She pointed toward the sleeping baby. “I’m on my grandson’s side. I don’t want him to have to give up either one of you. And if you take each other to court, you might both lose him.”

Sharon sucked in the breath now. That hadn’t occurred to her.

“If you both prove the other unworthy of parenthood, the judge might put Ethan into the foster-care system,” Mrs. Payne pointed out. “Doesn’t a judge still have to approve this guardianship?”

There had been so much going on with the attacks and the murders that Sharon hadn’t considered that there was more to the process than just Brenda granting her guardianship of Ethan.

What if a judge didn’t approve? Given her history as a woman with a traumatic past, she might not be considered emotionally stable enough to be a guardian.

“And just because you’re his father doesn’t mean you’ll automatically get him,” Mrs. Payne continued. “You’ve never had any interest in children or in being a father—”

“That was before I knew that I am a father,” Parker replied defensively.

Sharon reached out and grasped Parker’s arm; his muscles tensed beneath her touch. She was tense, too. “We can’t lose him to the system.”

Too many kids got lost in the system. Her grandfather had definitely made certain she was aware of what could have happened to her if he and her grandmother hadn’t been gracious enough to take custody of her after her mother’s murder.

Parker narrowed his eyes and studied his mother. “So you must have a plan for your grandson since you have a plan for everyone. What do you propose we do?”

“Propose,” Mrs. Payne said. “Marry her.”

Sharon must have fallen asleep; she had to be dreaming. Because there was no way that anyone would have suggested that she—shy, quiet Sharon Wells—marry a devastatingly handsome playboy like Parker Payne. But it didn’t matter whether or not it was a dream because it would never become reality. Parker Payne would never ask her to marry him.

* * *

B
Y
THE
TIME
he had gotten rid of everyone else, Sharon had fallen asleep in the middle of the king-sized bed in the master suite. And he found himself standing over her, watching her sleep.

She was exhausted. That was the excuse she had given for passing out during her interrogation, the reason she had given for checking herself out of the emergency room before the doctor had even seen her. The dark circles beneath her eyes proved her weariness.

But the way she murmured and twitched in her sleep betrayed her stress. And her fear. Finding the judge dead must have brought all those horrible memories rushing back to her.

He wanted to gather her into his arms and hold her close—to protect her. Maybe his mother was right. Maybe he should marry her. Not just so they would have a better chance at keeping Ethan but also so Parker could protect her.

He was no closer to finding out who wanted them dead. Certainly it involved the judge, but how had Brenda dragged him and Sharon into whatever mess she’d created?

He had lost touch with Brenda—probably shortly after she’d conceived Ethan. He needed to delve into her life more and find out what she’d been up to, and nobody knew her life better than Sharon did.

That was probably why Sharon was in danger. She had to know something that she wasn’t even aware that she knew. And that something had put her life at risk.

Brenda had put her life at risk.

He had to protect Sharon. He leaned down and reached out for her, skimming his fingertips across her cheek. Her skin was so smooth, so silky. She was young—probably even younger than he’d realized when he had first seen her with her hair in a tight knot. Her severe suit had also made her look older. But now with the jacket discarded on the floor and her blouse all rumpled, she looked like a teenager who had dressed up in her mother’s clothes for an interview.

But after witnessing what she had at such a young age, had she ever really had a normal life? She must have grown up so fast. By picking her mother’s killer out of a line-up, she had been the one to bring him to justice. To get justice for her mother...

He wanted to get justice for Ethan—for
his
mother. But he also wanted to keep safe the woman whom Ethan probably saw as his mother, the woman who had actually been taking care of him. Sharon.

Marrying her wouldn’t be enough to keep her safe, though. He had to find out who was after them before they wound up like Brenda and her bodyguard....

Dead.

A cry broke the eerie silence of the penthouse. It hadn’t come from the baby, though. It had slipped through the parted lips of the woman. A whimper full of pain and fear followed it.

It pierced his heart. He cupped her cheek in his palm. “Sharon...”

She was exhausted, but he would rather wake her up than leave her in such a state.

“Sharon...”

Her thick lashes fluttered as if she struggled to wake. Or maybe it was the dream—the nightmare—that she struggled to escape. Finally her eyes—those enormous light brown eyes—opened, and she stared up at him.

But the fear didn’t leave her face. It was as if it increased, as if she’d become more afraid. Was she afraid of him? Because of the custody thing or because of the suspicions that he’d seen on her expressive face back at Brenda’s house?

She must have wondered if he had killed her boss. She might even wonder if he’d killed the bodyguard, too.

But then she reached out, as if trying to hold on to him—as if seeking his protection. And he heard it, too. The footsteps on the stairs. She knew he had gotten rid of everyone, that he had told them not to come back until he called for them.

Logan was the boss—as he always pointed out—but even he respected that this time Parker was giving the orders. The only one who might have disregarded his wishes was his mother, but she’d wanted to give them time alone—to think about her suggestion of marrying.

And while Logan might have thought about crossing Parker, he wouldn’t disobey their mother. That was how
he
had wound up married.

His mother was so convinced that she was right that she was sure he would realize it, too, if she gave him enough time. So she wouldn’t have let anyone disturb him.

He reached for his gun. But he didn’t want any more dead bodies and not just because Sharon didn’t need to see another one.

But because dead bodies meant dead ends.

If he killed whoever was coming after him and Sharon, he wouldn’t be able to find out who had sent that person. He needed his would-be assassin capable of talking.

But if he didn’t use the gun, he risked the person getting away or taking him down first. That meant he was putting Sharon and Ethan in danger.

He reached for the gun again, but then he pressed it into her hands. And he leaned close to whisper in her ear. “If it looks like he’s getting the best of me, pull the trigger. I took the safety off....”

She gasped in protest of taking the gun. But he hadn’t given her a choice.

He turned toward the stairwell. But he couldn’t risk the intruder reaching the top and maybe firing wild shots around the room, taking them both out. So he vaulted over the railing and rushed down the steps.