Page 65 of Unlikely Guardian

“I paid off the pizza delivery guy. He let me hide in the trunk of his car. Then I used my key to get in the house,” Erica explained. “I turned off the security system.”

Even in the darkness, she saw the flash of anger in Jason’s eyes. “Where were the two police officers during all of this?” he snarled.

“I, uh, used a stun gun on both and tied them up.”

There, she saw it. The skepticism on Jason’s face. It would have been next to impossible to get close enough to two trained officers and surprise them with a stun gun. Lilly didn’t know for sure, but she suspected both officers were probably dead. And that meant Erica had shot them with her gun fitted with a silencer.

Would she try to do the same to Jason?

It was too painful for Lilly to consider. Here, she’d just gotten back her life, and she might lose everything.

She frowned.

Listening to herself.

What the heck was she doing standing here, waiting for the worst to happen? So what if Erica had a gun on her? She had something that Erica didn’t. She loved Jason and Megan. And it wasn’t Erica’s kind of psycho possessive love, either. It was the kind of love that could make her do anything to protect them.

Anything.

Lilly stared at Jason. Hoping that her now unyielding expression conveyed that she was about to do something to get them out of this dangerous situation. He obviously got the point, and didn’t approve, because he narrowed his eyes.

Jason’s change in facial expression must have alerted Erica because Lilly felt the woman go stiff. “Don’t do anything stupid,” Erica warned.

Lilly didn’t have anything stupid in mind.

She hoped.

Of course, anything could qualify as stupid if it wasn’t successful.

Lilly gave Jason one last glance, and she gathered all her fear, all her energy, all her anger, and focused those emotions right into the elbow that she rammed hard into Erica’s stomach.

Erica gasped and made a kind of garbling sound that indicated she was fighting for air. Good! Lilly did some fighting of her own. She turned, ignoring the wobble in her legs, and slammed her hand against the gun to try to dislodge it. Erica somehow kept control of it.

Jason charged toward them and, fearing that Erica would turn her gun on him, Lilly grabbed the woman’s wrist and put it in the tightest lock she could manage.

Erica reacted. Mercy, did she ever. With the strength of ten men, she shoved her entire weight against Lilly, off-balancing her. Not that it was that hard to do. Wobbly legs didn’t give her much of an advantage.

Lilly felt herself falling, and she couldn’t do anything to stop it. She reached out for anything, but her hands only grabbed at the air. She landed hard on the floor just inside her bedroom.

Thankfully, Jason didn’t fall right along with her. He launched himself at Erica. They both crashed into the wall. But the crash didn’t cause Jason to loose focus. When the scuffle was over, Lilly could see that he now controlled both weapons.

The breath of relief that Lilly was about to take stalled in her lungs. Before she could take that breath, she heard the sound behind her.

But it was too late for her to react.

Too late to stop what was happening.

The arm curved around her neck, and Lilly felt the barrel of a gun jam into the back of her head.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Jason had known this situation could quickly get out of hand. That was why he’d been so anxious to get the gun away from Erica. During all his concern about doing that, while also being worried about how to keep Lilly and Megan safe, he’d overlooked one important detail.

That Erica might not be working alone.

And she wasn’t.

He became painfully aware of that when he came up off the floor with Erica in tow, and he saw Lilly. She didn’t have a triumphant, we-got-her expression. But a frightened one.

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