“You sure you have to go?”
“You trust hotel security to keep Emily safe?”
Good point.
“I want to stay here, trust me,” he said, “but we need to figure out what’s going on with Emily and Sean. I brought in some help, so it should be a quick fix.”
“I understand,” I said, “but just be safe.”
Liam said nothing in response. It wasn’t hard to figure out why. He can’t make that promise.
“Call me in the morning,” he said as he handed Charlotte back to me.
And then, one more time, he planted a kiss on my lips. It wasn’t rough. It wasn’t anything but tender, sweet, and kind.
If it was a sign, it was one I wanted to feel for as long as possible.
“Lock your doors, keep Bucky on standby, and keep Charlotte in your room,” he said.
“You think—”
“It’s not a question of what I think; it’s a question of taking every precaution possible. If you think you can trust yourself to do it, sleep with a gun by you. We’ll talk in the morning.”
He spoke as he opened the front door. By the time he said we’d speak, he was hanging in the doorway.
“OK, will do. Goodnight, Liam.”
I expected him to half-say “goodnight” before he closed the door and went back to his truck. But he paused just long enough in the doorway, looking at me, then at Charlotte, then at me that I felt touched.
“Good night, Charlotte. Good night, Kelly.”
And then, as I expected, the door shut, and he hurried to his truck without looking back.
But unlike before, I knew he’d be back.
I couldn’t bear the idea of the alternative.
Chapter 18: Liam
It was a damn good thing I wasn’t the emotional, expressive type.
Because damn, for what was supposed to just be a few minutes of hello before heading back to the hotel had somehow turned into so much more. I didn’t even want to repeat what had been said in my head, not because it wasn’t touching, but because if I dwelt on it, I wouldn’t have the focus needed to do my job for Emily.
I didn’t want to leave at all, really. A reasonable belief Sean could be here was one thing; a complete paranoia was another. But as Scott had often said, paranoia was our training trying to ring an alarm in an imprecise manner. There was no such thing as coincidence.
That, and there was no reason to expect someone else to clean up a mess you were tasked with handling. Burke might help in Miami, but at the end of the day, this was my job.
I headed straight for my truck, never once turning back, knowing that if I did, I would feel a tug to head back inside for my little girl. Small wonder that—in theory at least—DOM had been set up for loners without family. The second that you got family involved, it—
Rustling.
I immediately got into a defensive posture, ready to strike with a fist as I reached down for a pistol. I’d gotten my hand to it when I visibly relaxed at the disturbance.
Fucking Bucky in the bushes, emerging to say hello to me.
“Jesus Christ, you fucking dog, scared the shit out of me,” I said as I knelt down and petted him. Sure hope he’s a nastier fuck to anyone else. “You’re in charge of protecting this house in case shit goes down. You hear me? You protect Kelly and Charlotte and do whatever you need to for their safety. Don’t fuck this up. Got it, boy?”
Bucky just sat there, looking like a giant goofball with his tongue sticking out. Obviously, he was a dog capable of inflicting serious damage, perhaps even killing an intruder. But I didn’t know of any animal that had a larger discrepancy between the aggressive nature of it and the cuteness of it. Maybe some type of dolphin, fuck if I knew.
“All right, Bucky, ya fuck,” I said, standing up. “Take care of it.”
I left the dog with one more pat on the head and got back into my truck. It was evening now, and though there were still some remnants of light, evening would fully consume Breckenridge either by the time I got back to the hotel or shortly thereafter. As an agent, I both loved and hated the night. It made for the easiest sleuthing and stealth, but the same went for enemies. Very few people had the gall, after all, to execute a kidnapping or hit in broad daylight.
Kelly is not Kaylie or Emily. She’s not some city girl who can’t handle herself. She’s got Bucky, and she knows how to shoot a rifle. Stop acting like she’s a pussy who needs you to be her knight in shining armor.
What could I say? This shit with Sean had me all fucked. Assholes like him weren’t supposed to come back like he apparently was.
I drove back to the hotel. En route, I called Burke to try and get an update, but my call went straight to voicemail. I had hoped like hell that he would have updated me with something, at least saying that he had eyes on Sean, but I’d gotten nothing. Maybe I did have a damn good reason to worry about Sean being here by some…whatever the fucking opposite of a miracle was.
I got to the hotel. Nothing was on fire, no one was panicking, nothing looked out of the ordinary. I looked at every person I passed by, from the old people bundled up for temperatures twenty degrees lower than what we actually had to the blissfully unaware children. No
