Surrendering to the Sheriff (14 page)

So why hadn’t he?

Why hadn’t this guy taken out the biggest threat—the county sheriff? That was an unsettling thought because it led him back to his mother.

Aiden pushed that aside, since it wouldn’t help him now, and he tried to figure out the best way to approach this. The guy had the gun to Kendall’s head, but Aiden had to believe the kidnapper had been told to bring her in alive. That meant he didn’t want to kill her.

Well, not now anyway.

“Come on,” the guy said to Kendall. He dropped his left arm to her waist and started dragging her out of the entry.

Unlike the other kidnapping thugs, this guy was a little shaky. And he’d apparently given up on his demand to disarm Aiden. That could be both good and bad. Good because a nervous kidnapper would be more likely to make a mistake. Bad because a mistake could lead to Kendall getting hurt.

Aiden motioned for Sarah to come closer, and he waited for the guy to glance behind him to see where he was about to step.

That was the best chance Aiden figured he’d get.

Aiden tossed his gun aside, figuring he’d need both hands for this half-thought-out plan. He did. Aiden pushed Kendall to the side, praying that she wouldn’t fall, and in the same motion, he went after the goon. He put his old football skills to work and tackled the guy.

They both went to the floor.

His shoulder hit, hard. So hard that the pain shot through him. Aiden hoped he hadn’t dislocated it, because the guy tried to wallop him upside the head with his gun. Aiden grabbed hold of the guy’s shooting wrist to stop him from doing that and from getting off a shot.

Kendall scrambled out of the way, thank God. At least Aiden thought that was what she was doing, but she didn’t run out of the house and toward Sarah. She scooped up his gun and tried to take aim at the would-be kidnapper.

“Run!” Aiden managed to shout to her.

She didn’t listen. Worse, she didn’t get behind Sarah when the deputy made it into the house. Sarah, too, took aim. Not that she had any more of a clean shot than Kendall did. Aiden and the masked idiot were punching each other’s lights out, too close to each other for Sarah or Kendall to try to take out the kidnapper.

Using as much force as he could, Aiden bashed the guy’s shooting hand against the marble floor. It didn’t work. The guy held on. So Aiden did it again.

And again.

Aiden could have sworn that he heard fingers breaking, and finally the idiot let go. The gun dropped from his hand. But before Aiden could even knock it out of the way, the guy scooped it up again and took aim.

At Kendall.

The blast was deafening, and it echoed through the nearly empty house. Echoed through Aiden, too, and even though he couldn’t actually hear, he yelled out Kendall’s name. He turned, praying that she hadn’t been shot again. But she was standing there.

Aiden said a quick prayer of thanks for that.

But she still had his gun in her hand. A gun that was still aimed at the kidnapper. Unlike Kendall and Sarah, the man wasn’t standing. He’d flopped back onto the floor, his breath rattling in his throat.

“I shot him,” Kendall said, and sounded as if she was about to fall on the floor, too. Not from an injury but from the shock of what’d just happened.

She had indeed shot the man.

“Call an ambulance,” Aiden told Sarah.

He scrambled across the floor, tore off the man’s mask. A stranger. A stranger who was about to bleed out. No way would he last long enough for the medics to get there.

“Who hired you?” Aiden demanded. “Tell me!”

But the man didn’t speak. His eyelids drifted down, and there was another gravelly breath.

His last one.

Kendall made a sound, too. One that let Aiden know that she was within seconds of falling apart. He made it to her in one step and pulled her into his arms.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Kendall was afraid if she stopped moving, she would collapse. First, she’d paced while waiting for the ME and Jeb, the young deputy, to arrive. Of course, Aiden had tried to get her to sit down, but she couldn’t. She had to keep moving. It was the only thing that seemed to be keeping the horrible images at bay.

She could still feel the gun in her hand even though Aiden had long since taken it from her. She could also still hear the sound of the blast. Could still see the glimpses of the kidnapper falling to the floor. The pacing pushed them aside, for several seconds anyway, but it was that brief reprieve that was keeping her from falling apart.

“You ready?” Aiden asked Sarah, and the deputy nodded. “Let’s go,” he said then to Kendall.

He led her out of the house, past the group of CSIs and lawmen who’d come to investigate the shooting, and they headed to his truck. Sarah was right behind them and got into one of the cruisers.

By Kendall’s calculations, it’d been nearly an hour since the shooting, and a death almost certainly meant Aiden and Sarah had plenty of work to do. But he didn’t drive toward his office.

“Are we going to your place?” she asked.

“Yeah.” He glanced around, no doubt to make sure there wasn’t another attacker lurking around. “Sorry that it’ll have some bad memories for you, but it was either there or a hotel. At least my house has a security system. And this time, I’ll use it.”

That brought on the images again, and even though she didn’t say a word, Aiden reached over, took her hand and brushed a kiss on her knuckles.

“This wasn’t your fault,” he said, his voice strained but yet soothing at the same time. “You did what you had to do.”

“I didn’t intend to kill him. I only wanted to stop him from shooting. Now he can’t say who hired him to come after us.”

“You,”
Aiden corrected. “Not us.”

Because her head was a mess, it took Kendall a moment to realize what he meant. The kidnapper had definitely come after her, and he’d been trying to get her out of her house and to heaven knew where when he was dragging her out of the foyer. And then there was what he’d said to Aiden.

Soon, someone will contact you about what you need to do to get her back.

“Someone still wants to use me to get you to destroy evidence,” Kendall concluded.

“Or maybe that someone wants it to appear that way.” He drew in a long, weary breath. “Whoever hired this latest thug could just want you dead. Maybe because he or she believes Yost said something in the pharmacy that could blow his boss’s identity.”

“But Yost didn’t say anything that could have done that.”

Had he?

Like now, she’d certainly had a lot on her mind, so Yost could have accidentally revealed something.

But what?

“If there’s anything to remember about what he said, it’ll come to you,” Aiden added.

Maybe. But if she did remember, would it be in time to stop them from being attacked again?

“I need to press all three suspects once more,” Aiden went on. “Well, at least the two who might talk. My mother’s lawyer told her to remain silent.”

Something normally reserved for the guilty. But there probably wasn’t much that Carla could say that would make her look innocent. Not about the fifty grand or her stay in the institution. A past stay in an institution wasn’t proof of guilt, but the DA could argue that she had a history of violent behavior. Of course, the DA would need more than just a history to file charges against her for these kidnapping attempts and attacks.

“Anything on Palmer’s and Joplin’s financials?” she asked.

Kendall wasn’t even sure she wanted to have this conversation, but it was better than just sitting there and staring out at the darkness. Plus, her hands had started to tremble again. And Aiden noticed all right, because he was still holding on to one of them.

“Nothing so far,” he answered, “but that doesn’t mean we won’t find something. Eventually, this person has to make a mistake.”

Yes, but that didn’t mean he or she couldn’t keep hiring gunmen.

Aiden took the turn to his small ranch, and when he reached the house, he stopped the truck directly in front of the porch. Definitely some bad memories here, since it was where she’d been shot and one of the kidnappers had died.

Of course, her own house was loaded with plenty of bad memories now, too. Along with the jail and the sheriff’s office. She was running out of places where she felt safe.

They waited until Sarah had parked, and Aiden hurried them inside. This time, he set the security system and had Sarah and her stay in the entry while he did a thorough search of the house. No doubt to make sure someone hadn’t broken in and was lurking inside, waiting to attack.

There was no sign that it’d been a crime scene just forty-eight hours earlier. Someone had even cleaned up the blood on the floor. Kendall was especially thankful for that.

“There’s the guest bedroom and a bath next to it,” Aiden said to Sarah, pointing to a room just off the hall. “Help yourself to whatever’s in the fridge. I’ll have Kendall upstairs with me.”

Upstairs, in his bedroom.

Despite the fact that it meant another night in close quarters with Aiden, at least the second floor would be a little more secure, since an attacker would have to get past Sarah and then up the stairs. Plus, with the security system, they should have enough warning.

She hoped.

“I’ll have someone pick you up clothes and such in the morning,” he told her while he shucked off his holster.

When they got to his room, he dropped the holster on the nightstand and was about to sit down on the bed when he looked at her, then at the floor. Aiden didn’t groan, not out loud anyway, but she could see the dread of spending another night on the floor.

Kendall was dreading it, too.

For a different reason.

She was still trembling, her mind and body a basket case, but Kendall knew there was a fix for that. A temporary one anyway.

And the fix was Aiden.

“Yes, I’m sure of this,” she said because she knew the question would come up fast.

Heck, it still might come up, but Kendall did something about that, too. She slipped her arm around Aiden’s neck, pulled him to her and kissed him.

*

A
IDEN
KNEW
THIS
was a mistake, but he just didn’t care.

He was tired of fending off this fire. Tired of wanting and not having. And especially tired of not having Kendall in his arms.

Well, he had her there now.

A sane man would have just kissed her a time or two and put her to bed.
Alone.
So that she could get the sleep she needed. But because he’d been forced to kill a man a time or two and knew what was going on in her head, there wouldn’t be much sleep for her tonight.

Kendall made a soft sound, part relief, part pleasure. Aiden was right there with her on that. Yeah, kissing her amped up every part of his body. Made him burn. But there was also the buzz beneath the fire. The feeling that this should already have happened again.

Multiple times.

He pulled her closer, mindful of the stitches in her arm, but if they were bothering her in the least, she didn’t show it. However, what she did show was that she was just as eager to keep up the kisses as he was. So Aiden moved his mouth to her neck, dropping some more kisses along the way.

Kendall responded with another of those silky sounds. Not much relief in it this time, though. The heat was taking over and making them both crazier than they already were.

Somehow in all that craziness, Aiden remembered to lock the door just in case Sarah came up to check on them. He also killed the lights and kept Kendall away from the window. Once he had those things taken care of, he went back to kissing her the way he wanted.

All over her body.

From her neck, he went to her breasts, shoving up her top so there’d be no clothes in the way. He wanted his mouth on her bare skin, and that was exactly what he got.

She tasted like everything good that he’d ever wanted or needed.

Probably not a good thing, but he was past the point of reason here. Past the point of anything that didn’t involve getting Kendall on that bed.

Kendall wasn’t exactly fighting the idea, either. She was already battling with his shirt, trying to get the buttons undone while she surrendered to the kisses that’d made their way down to her belly. Going with his no-clothes rule, Aiden rid her of her jeans. Then her panties.

And he kissed her in another spot that he’d wanted to kiss since this insanity started.

Oh, yes. This was definitely leading straight to the bed.

Kendall got them moving in that direction all on her own. While she yanked at his clothes. While she cursed him, too, but Aiden was pretty sure it was the good kind of cursing brought on by the need for immediate relief of this fire inside them. He knew exactly how she felt.

They landed on the bed, Aiden adjusting her at the last second so that her arm wouldn’t be pressed against him or the mattress. But her stitches seemed to be the last thing on Kendall’s mind.

Ditto for the pregnancy.

That stopped him for a moment because he darn sure should have considered it before now.

“Is this okay?” Aiden glanced down at her stomach.

“Of course.” And she hauled him right back to her, along with ridding him of the rest of his clothes.

Aiden accepted her
of course
. Obviously, at this point he would have accepted almost anything as long as he could have her.

His bare skin against hers only revved up the heat. And soon, very soon, Aiden knew that foreplay was about to go right out the window. Later, if there was a later that involved kisses and such, maybe he could make it up to her. For now, though, he just took everything Kendall offered him.

Everything.

He adjusted their positions again, moving on top of her, and eased into her. He immediately felt that punch of need explode in his head. It was something he would have liked to have savored for a while, but Aiden knew that wasn’t going to happen.

That need dictated everything. The speed and intensity. And it wasn’t just for him but for Kendall, too.

“Let’s finish this,” she said in that satin voice that he couldn’t have resisted even if she hadn’t been looking up at him.

Aiden kissed her. Because it was his way of holding on to this. With the taste of her on his mouth. The heat of her skin on his.

With everything falling right into place, Aiden finished this.