GROOM UNDER FIRE (4 page)

She needed to turn back to the church. But if the others had left...

Mrs. Payne would have locked up, locking Tanya’s purse and phone inside the bride’s room. But she hadn’t been gone that long, surely someone might have stayed behind.

Cooper?

She wasn’t certain she wanted to see him, knowing how he felt about the thought of becoming her husband for just a few days—until she inherited. Once the money was hers, she could divorce him. Maybe he didn’t know that; maybe she should have explained. But she hadn’t wanted to force him to do something he clearly did not want to do.

They had once been friends. Good friends. Along with Stephen, they had been like the Three Musketeers—studying and hanging out together. But now Cooper acted like a stranger. Had his deployments overseas changed him that much?

Or was she the one who had changed? She used to want to have nothing to do with her grandfather’s money, but then she had nearly married to inherit it. Had gone so far as to plan a wedding to a man she loved but wasn’t in love with...

Tanya shivered at the cold wind and the eerie sensation that someone was hiding in the darkness, watching her. Coming for her. But then it wasn’t just a sensation. It was a certainty.

She blew out a ragged breath as the car circled again, driving even more slowly along the street. As long as she stayed on the sidewalk, maybe she would stay safe. But then the car tires squealed as the driver jerked the steering wheel. Sparks flew from beneath the front bumper as it scraped over concrete as the car jumped the curb and headed right for her.

She screamed, her legs burning as she ran.

But it didn’t matter how fast she ran or how loud she yelled, she couldn’t outrun a motor vehicle. She hadn’t been able to save Stephen, and now she wouldn’t be able to save herself.

Chapter Four

For the second time that night, Tanya’s scream pierced the air and Cooper’s heart. The car’s lights illuminated her. Her eyes were wide and her face pale with terror. He hurried to catch up but she was ahead of him, the car between them.

“Run!” he yelled, urging her to move as the car barreled down on her where she ran across the front yards of a row of houses. As a kid she hadn’t been able to run very far or very fast because her asthma would act up. Hopefully, she’d outgrown that.

Cooper had already drawn his weapon. But if he shot at the driver, the bullet might pass through the windshield and hit Tanya before the front bumper of the car could. So he aimed at the tires and quickly squeezed the trigger.

One back tire popped, deflating fast so that it shredded and slapped against the rim. But despite the flat, the car continued forward—straight toward Tanya.

Still running, Tanya veered between two houses. But the houses weren’t so far apart that the car couldn’t follow her.

Cooper shot out the other back tire and the car swerved, careening across a lawn. It scraped against a tree and proceeded to the street, cutting off another vehicle that blared its horn. Sparks flew from the rims riding the asphalt, but the car didn’t stop. Yet. Eventually it would have to, though, so Cooper figured he might be able to catch up to it on foot.

But he had a greater concern. “Tanya!”

He ran across the yards, stumbling over the deep ruts that the car had torn in the muddy spring lawn. Then he veered between the two houses as she had. Lights flickered on inside those houses, brightening a couple of the dark windows. They must have heard either the car or his yelling. His throat burned from the force of his shouts. “Tanya!”

He nearly stumbled over her where she lay sprawled across the ground. The light from the houses cast only a faint glow into the backyards, so he could barely see her. He holstered his gun and then dropped to his knees beside her. His hands shook as he reached for her.

Despite his efforts to stop it, had the car struck her anyway? Had it run over her once it had knocked her down? He couldn’t tell if she was conscious or not, if she was alive or dead. Her hair had fallen across her face, the strands tangled. He brushed it back as he slid his hand down her throat, checking for a pulse. Thankfully, she started breathing, but laboriously, the breaths rattling in her chest.

Obviously she hadn’t outgrown her asthma and all the running had brought on an attack. She opened her eyes, the light glinting in them.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “Do you need your inhaler?” He’d left it in her purse back at the church, though.

She sucked in a shuddery breath and then choked and gasped.

Cooper wanted to pick her up and cradle her in his arms, but he didn’t dare move her if she was hurt. “Did the car hit you?”

Bracing her palms on the ground, she began pushing herself up. But Cooper caught her shoulders, steadying her. “Don’t move. If you’re hurt—”

“I’m not hurt,” she said as she tried to control her breathing. “I just fell.”

Maybe she’d only been out of breath from running as fast as she’d had to so the car wouldn’t have run her over. “Are you sure?”

“I’m not hurt,” she repeated. “Because of you...” Then she threw her arms around his neck and clung to him as she had when he’d first arrived at the church. “Thank you!”

But Cooper couldn’t accept her gratitude—not with the guilt plaguing him. It wasn’t just guilt that had his heart racing, though. It was fear. And probably her closeness. With every breath he took, he breathed her in; she smelled like flowers and grass. And the grass reminded him that she could have been killed. He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her away from him. “What were you thinking to leave the church on your own?”

She tensed. “I was thinking I wanted to get the hell out of there.”

Was that his fault for not immediately agreeing to his mother’s suggestion that he marry her? Had he hurt her pride?

“Then why didn’t you leave with Nikki when she took your sister home?” he asked.

She uttered a mirthless chuckle. “Do you really think I would have been any safer with my sister?”

“She wouldn’t have tried to run you over with a car,” he pointed out as he helped her to her feet.

She stumbled as if her legs were still shaky. But instead of leaning on him again, she steadied herself. “No,” she agreed, “but she might have tried to shove me out of one.”

He couldn’t argue that, not after the way Rochelle had attacked her in the church.

“Cooper!” Logan called out to him as he ran between the houses and joined them in the backyard. “I couldn’t catch the car.”

He had forgotten that his brother had been right behind him when he’d left the church. His order for Logan to stay with their mom had been overruled—by their mother. She’d reminded them that the police officer was still in the parking lot and even if he wasn’t, she could take care of herself. She was armed, and their father had taught her how to shoot very well.

Logan was huffing and puffing for breath. “I could barely keep up with you.”

When Cooper had heard Tanya scream, he had taken off running. He reached for his cell phone now. “Did you call the police?”

“Called ʼem,” Logan said, which was confirmed with sirens whining in the distance. “Did you get a better look at the car than I did?”

“Long and dark,” Cooper replied. “With the windows too darkly tinted to see inside.”

“What about the plate?”

“There wasn’t one.”

This hadn’t been some drunk driver whose car jumped the curb and veered into a yard. This near-miss hit-and-run had been planned.

Just to scare her or to kill her?

* * *

T
ANYA
HELD
HER
breath, pressing down the fear that threatened to choke her. She stared up at the dark windows of her apartment, wishing she could see inside, but she stood on the sidewalk three floors below. Light flashed behind the arched window in the peak of the attic where she lived.

Was it the beam of a flashlight or the flash of gunfire? She gasped, and the breath she’d held escaped in a rush of fear.

“You shouldn’t have let him go inside alone,” she admonished his brother. “The driver of that car could be in there, waiting...” For her. And Cooper would step into the trap her stalker might have laid for her.

She should have had one of the police officers who’d taken the report for the near hit-and-run bring her home. They had offered a ride and protection. But the Payne brothers had assured the officers that they would make sure she stayed safe.

How? By putting themselves at risk?

Logan chuckled. “Cooper can handle himself and whoever he might encounter.” His slight grin slipped into a frown that furrowed his brow. “He wouldn’t have survived three deployments in Afghanistan if he couldn’t.”

But how many soldiers had survived war only to come home and die in an auto accident? Or some other freak crime—like a shooting? She kept her gaze trained on those third-floor windows and saw another flash of light.

Reaching out, she clutched Logan’s arm. “I see something! Something’s happening up there!”

Logan’s gaze rose toward the third floor, too. “I don’t see anything...”

But he must have been concerned, too, because he pulled out his cell phone. He pressed a button for what must have been a two-way feature and then he called out, “Cooper?”

Not even a crackle of static emanated from his phone, it remained dead.

She shuddered as the horrible thought occurred to her that Cooper might have been dead, too. She hadn’t heard any shots, but some guns had silencers. She knew that from watching TV. The person who might have been waiting in her apartment could have had one.

She tugged on the sleeve of Logan’s wool overcoat. “You need to go upstairs and check on him!”

“He needs to stay with you,” a deep voice coming out of the darkness corrected her. “Like someone should have stayed with you at the church so you didn’t go running off on your own.”

She hadn’t started running until the car had jumped the curb to chase her down. But she didn’t bother pointing that out since the sharpness of his voice showed he was already angry with her.

And Logan was already asking, “Did you clear the apartment, Cooper?”

“No.”

Logan snorted derisively. “Why not? It doesn’t look that big.”

The studio apartment had formerly been a ballroom, so it was bigger than it looked—with a bathroom tucked into a wide dormer. If the attic space didn’t have issues with being too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter, the rent wouldn’t have been affordable enough for her.

“I cleared it for intruders, but there were other threats,” Cooper explained.

Logan tensed and held up his phone, his fingers ready to press buttons. “What do we need? Bomb squad?”

“If it was a bomb, I would have taken care of it,” he assured his brother. “No, it was
literally
other threats.” He passed his brother the desecrated engagement announcement.

While Tanya sucked in a breath of indignation that Cooper had gone through her things, his brother released a ragged breath of relief.

But Cooper wasn’t relaxed. His jaw was clenched so tightly that a muscle twitched in his cheek. He was obviously mad as hell, his dark gaze intense as he stared at Tanya.

She glared back at him. He was only supposed to make sure her place was safe. The thought of him going through her boxes and drawers and closets reminded her of all the things he might have found, like her weakness for silk and lace underwear.

“There are more of those,” he told his brother. “Did you know about the threats?”

“No,” Logan replied.

“Now you know,” Cooper said. “Get on it. Check out her ex-boyfriends, her cases at work—”

Logan grinned. “Are you forgetting which one of us is the boss, little brother? I’ve been doing this for a while. I need to talk to the client first to get the names of those ex-boyfriends and difficult cases.”

Cooper shook his head. “I’ll do that.”

If she were actually a client, she would rather talk to Logan. She could be more honest with him because she suspected he would be less judgmental. But she wasn’t actually a client and needed to remind the protective Payne brothers of that. “I haven’t hired—”

Cooper interrupted her as he spoke to his brother. “Tanya and I need to talk.”

As if Logan, too, had forgotten he was the boss, he nodded his agreement. “I need to touch base with Parker...”

Probably to see if he had found Stephen. But if he had, he would have called. Even if he’d found him dead, he would have called. She shuddered now, so forcefully that she couldn’t stop trembling.

“If you completely cleared her place, get her inside,” Logan, as the boss again, ordered. “She’s freezing. Or in shock...”

“Or getting pissed off that she’s being ignored,” Tanya suggested. “Yes,” she continued, ignoring them as they had been ignoring her, “she’s definitely pissed off.”

Logan patted his brother’s shoulder before heading toward his car parked at the curb. “Good luck. You may be the one needing protection now.”

As if Tanya could take out a Marine, no matter how angry she was. And she actually wasn’t as angry as she was scared. For Stephen. For herself. For Cooper...

“I won’t hurt you,” she assured him.

He uttered one of his brother’s derisive snorts as if he didn’t believe her. “Did you tell Stephen that, too?”

Her palm itched to slap him as her sister had slapped her. Her cheek throbbed at just the memory of that blow—or maybe because she’d hit it again when she’d done the nosedive running away from the car. Bristling with anger and with guilt over Stephen’s disappearance, she said nothing as they climbed the stairs to her apartment.

Since he had the keys he’d gotten from her landlord, he unlocked the door and stepped inside first, as if checking again for an intruder. Then he flipped on the lights.

A banker’s box had been knocked over, the contents spilled across the library table that also served as her dining table and desk. She gasped. “Someone was in here?”

He shook his head. “Not that I could tell.”

“You did this?” He must have gone through her things in a hurry. Maybe he hadn’t had time to look through her closet and drawers. She glanced around, but it appeared nothing else had been disturbed. So she focused again on the contents of the box. All those threats...

She had packed them away—hoping to forget them but not foolish enough to throw them all out.

“You haven’t exactly been forthcoming with information,” he bitterly reminded her. “If we’re going to find Stephen, we need to know everything.”

If...

She wasn’t naive. She knew it was very likely that they would never find Stephen...either alive or dead. But she wasn’t ready to face that possibility. She would have preferred Cooper offer assurances and promises. But she knew him better than that. He would never give her what she wanted from him—at least he hadn’t when they were teenagers.

“There isn’t much to tell you,” she said, especially when it came to exes. “I haven’t really dated much.” Because of the threats. And maybe because of him, but she didn’t want him to suspect that she’d hung on to an old crush. “I’ve been too busy with work.”

“How long have you been a social worker?” he asked. “Since you graduated college? You must have handled a lot of cases.”

She sighed as faces jumbled in her mind. “A lot,” she agreed, “but none recently. At least not personally. I became a supervisor four years ago. I delegate now.” Which meant giving too much work to too few employees.

“Now,” he said. “But four years ago there must have been cases you handled that hadn’t gone well.”

She flinched, remembering the losses. The people she hadn’t been able to help. If she had Grandfather’s money, she could do so much more than she was able to do now. “Of course there were cases that went badly. Children I had to remove from neglectful or abusive parents.” She shuddered at the painful memories. “But that was years ago...”

“Some people have a hard time forgiving the person they perceive tore their family apart,” he said with a glance out toward the street. “Mom says Logan has never missed a parole hearing for the man who shot my father. He’s determined to make sure that the guy never gets out of prison—at least not alive.”