Page 11 of Too Lethal to Love

The way she’d cried, “Danny,” and screamed for help in her sleep after he’d tucked her into bed, and the terror in her eyes when she’d awoke.

He’d thought Danny was a guy who hurt her somehow, not the man she’d loved. Envy panged in his chest. He shut it down. “What happened to your fiancé?”

Scarlett appeared in the doorway. “What about her fiancé?”

Beth stiffened. Kane ignored Scarlett’s concerned tone as he dipped his head to Beth’s ear and whispered, “I know this is hard, but it’s time to tell her and the team. We need their input.”

Beth wrapped her hand around his wrist. “No. I don’t want to…I can’t do this now.”

The tremor in her hushed voice strengthened his intentions to find the bastard who made her shake in her sexy-as-fuck heels. “It will be okay, I promise.”

“It hasn’t been okay for a very long time, Kane. You can’t make it better.”

He could. If only for tonight, he could kick out the guests, take her to bed, and prove he could make her feel more than better. But he wouldn’t. She was Scarlett’s best friend. And he’d promised her she’d be okay, which meant offering protection from anything that could hurt her, including the potentially lethal events in his future that could leave her with more scars.

Beth sat ramrod straight in the wooden chair at her kitchen table. Kane flanked her, his steel leg pressing into hers like an immovable security blanket. With faces as hard as stone, yet with a river of anger and empathy coursing beneath their tough exteriors, the VIPER team listened to her account of what happened since she’d gone to the bakery. Nobody needed to know her whole twisted saga. Tonight’s events had rattled her enough.

The arrival of Ryan Bradley, VIPER’s chief information security officer, and Admiral Edgar, VIPER’s director, should have made her feel even safer. Ryan was former military. At thirty-five years old, he held as many degrees as Scarlett. He radiated the least amount of alpha hormones, but the outline of muscle under his tailored white dress shirt suggested the time he spent in a uniform wasn’t solely in front of a computer.

He shot her a smile from across the table. Sympathy brimmed in his kind gaze. She managed a weak grin. When she’d met him and his uncle, the governor of Maryland, a few weeks ago at the Army vs. Navy football game,she’d sensed strong convictions and good hearts inside both men. She’d been glad a man like Governor Bradley held a seat in Congress. Now she was thankful his nephew—with thick, wavy blond hair and an authoritative, sexy professor kind of look that merely hinted at his brilliance—sat in her kitchen.

Beth figured Admiral Edgar must also have formidable skills if he’d been chosen to lead Project VIPER. The tall, lanky sixty-something-year-old stood at attention by the sink, his big fists clenched at his side. The impeccable neatness of his starched red western-style shirt, dark, pressed jeans, and shiny black cowboy boots paraded his military background. His penetrating gaze and the hardness in his square jaw embodied his commitment to truth and justice. Add spurs and a six-shooter, wrinkled clothes and a cloud of dust, and he could be a sheriff from the Wild West.

He touched his palms together in prayer. “I am deeply sorry for your trouble tonight. Please tell us more about your initial contact with the stalker.”

Beth sat up straighter. Even though her kitchen nearly busted at the seams with testosterone, she still felt vulnerable. “I agreed to meet the man I met on the dating site at a local bar for a drink. His profile said his name was Bobby Collins.”

Edgar’s bushy eyebrows furrowed. “This contact was made on the site’s page, not through your personal email or via text or phone, correct?”

“Yes.” If anyone else in the room had asked her that question, she’d shoot them a snarky comeback about not being too stupid to live. Edgar, however, wasn’t in her kitchen for the beer and cake. He’d declined the party invite because of a prior commitment. Someone alerted him about tonight’s events, and he thought it was serious enough to drop whatever he was doing and come.

“What happened next?”

“After Danny and I reconciled, I sent Bobby a messagevia the site and took my profile down. The next day I got a pleading text message to meet with him. I blocked his number, but similar texts, and then messages to my personal email kept coming. I got a new phone number and shut down all my email and social media accounts, but he kept finding me.”

“According to police reports, false accounts with the dating site had been established during that time frame.” Ryan stroked his trimmed goatee. “The hackers were never identified.”

Beth eyed his laptop. “Did you just hack into the police department?”

Scarlett raised an eyebrow from across the table. “You act like that sort of thing has never happened in your kitchen before.”

“Point taken.” She’d sat at this table many nights watching Scarlett try and locate the stalker. If she couldn’t find him, Ryan wouldn’t either.

She turned her attention back to Edgar and reiterated what she’d told Kane about being ambushed in the dark alley.

“I tried to fight.” God, she’d tried. Her vision dimmed as the crack of her skull against the ground reverberated in her head. She blinked a few times to refocus. “I blacked out, but I remember hearing voices. I heard the stalker say something in Spanish but couldn’t make it out as Danny screamed my name.”

Those voices she heard nearly every night in her dreams keened through her mind. She clenched her fists in her lap to stop herself from plugging her ears.

Kane covered her hands with his and squeezed. “Take your time.”

His strong grip belied the patience in his tone. She welcomed both. Pulling in a breath that did nothing tountwist her insides or calm her frantic heartbeat, she forced herself to speak. “Then I heard a gunshot. Then nothing. The next thing I remember is waking up in the hospital and learning that Danny was…”

She dropped her head and closed her eyes. Tears she didn’t want to spill in front of everyone bullied their way past her lids. Kane’s grip tightened as he muttered a curse. She heard a chair scrape across the floor. A moment later, Scarlett stood next to her.

Beth’s shoulders shook as a sob gurgled up her throat. She forced it down. Crying didn’t change a goddamn thing. Every day since the attack, she’d pushed herself to leave the house, to go to work, to live a normal life and not hide in fear or wallow in sorrow. Yet right now, the final word of not just the sentence she couldn’t finish but Danny’s life was stuck on the edge of her tongue.

Scarlett stroked Beth’s hair. “Danny didn’t make it.”

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