Page 83 of Deadly Attraction
Will looked sheepish. “I might have stayed there for bit of time before I showed up on your doorstep looking for a job. Hadn’t thought of it until now.”
He’d been homeless when she took him in, but when he’d come to her that day with nothing but his backpack and his belief in bad luck, he’d been clean and polite. He’d also been honest with her about his PTSD and his need for a quiet environment. He’d wanted to be productive and he had a way with animals. After her own bad experiences with people and situations, her distrust had reared its ugly head. Yet Will had won her over almost instantly when he’d taken Lady under his care.
“You think our unsub might be using it as a landing pad?” Mitch asked.
Unsub. Unknown Subject. Emma knew the term from her days in the courtroom.
Will roughed his hair with the towel. “I think there’s more than one of them now. The one that paid us a visit the other day and a second who rode in on the Danika crazy train.”
Emma held her tongue over the crazy comment.
“Which might explain why we couldn’t find any evidence of the visit from our first unsub,” Mitch said, rubbing his chin, “but the second one just left two bodies and some footprints behind.”
“Two different stalkers.” Emma nodded her head, a rush of excitement taking hold. “One well-versed in subterfuge, the other not. One with violent tendencies, the other not. Why didn’t I think of that? It makes total sense.”
Mitch pulled his gun from its holster and checked its chamber and clip. His focus jumped to her briefly, then to Will. “My teammates will be here within the hour. All we have to do is keep our visitors at bay. Once backup arrives, we’ll get Emma out of here and hunt down these bastards.”
Will pushed off the counter. At his feet, Lady whimpered and raised a paw to scratch at his leg. He reached down and rubbed the top of her head. “I’d like to be in on the hunt.”
Something passed between Will and Mitch that made Emma shiver. The two men in her kitchen weren’t afraid to kill. They’d probably both seen more bloodshed than she could imagine.
She didn’t want to imagine it. The horrors that haunted these two would bring most people to their knees.
Mitch nodded at Will. “You stay here, man the entry points. I’ll take Emma upstairs where I can keep an eye on the entire sector.”
They were trapped. Sitting ducks. A volatile cocktail of fear and anger pushed through her veins. “What about me?” she asked. “What can I do?”
He took her hand and drew her with him to the stairs. “You know that telescope you have in the attic?”
She swallowed, her feet feeling like leaden weights as she climbed after him. “Of course.”
He waited until they reached the top of the landing, Salt and Pepper ever their constant companions. “You’re the lookout for my team. Train your scope on the southern horizon and look for incoming cars.”
Emma felt for her pistol in her waistband at her back. The metal was cool, such a contrast to Mitch’s warm hand. There were possibly two men out there who wanted to do her harm. Possibly harm Mitch and Will. The horses, the dogs. No way would she allow that to happen, no matter how scared she was. No matter whether or not help was on the way.
Squeezing his hand, she gave him a quick kiss on the lips. “I’ll draw the curtain over the window so only the lens peeks out. The unsubs will never see me.”
He kissed her back, a soft, quick kiss that meant as much as the deep, soul-sucking ones he’d given her the night before. He touched her forehead with his. “I swear to you, I will get you out of this.”
Her hand brushed his waist. “I know you will.”
He wasn’t a goddamn bodyguard.
An investigator, an analyzer, an undercover operative—hell, yeah. Mitch had been all of those things. Shortly after Mac’s death, he’d donned fake personas and went head-to-head with crime lords and terrorists. His anger and grief had been so acute, pretending to be someone else had been the only way he’d kept himself from blowing out his own brains.
More recently, he’d found his calling working with criminal profiles, predicting outcomes and using statistics and algorithms to stop the bad guys for NI. All from the cool, calm, detached space behind his computer screen.
He protected people on a broad scale, shutting down criminal organizations from the top down. Pulling the plug on terrorist groups, stopping wars from the safety of information, facts, intelligence gathering. He didn’t tackle one-on-one projects like this.
Because when you had to look the person counting on you in the eye, keeping them safe made you vulnerable.
Sweat dotted the back of his neck. His face felt flushed, his hands shaky as he made the rounds upstairs, checking out the windows for any sign of their visitors. The place was eerily quiet, soft rain still falling and running down the glass. He’d secured Emma in the attic, giving her the blow-off task of watching for Coop and the others riding to her rescue.
Because he couldn’t be her knight in shining armor. If he could somehow conjure up a way to get her off the ranch and into that goddamn safe house, he would do it, but therewasno way. The vehicles were disabled. He couldn’t take the chance of putting her on a horse now and exposing her to whoever was out there, because she was correct—the first visitor might have been a control freak whose assignment was simply to terrorize her, but this latest addition had taken that to a new level and killed a guard in order to make the threat very clear. Regardless, none of the horses were up to the trek out of the valley and into town.
He’d already tried getting the sheriff back out there. A stressed out, overworked, and underpaid secretary had taken the call, assuring him there were officers in the area but all of them were busy assisting highway patrols with the traffic, especially after the road rage incident. While some of the wildfires were now under control, several outliers continued to burn. Christmas morning had started out somewhat peacefully for rest of the world, but here, people were trying to get back to their homes.
“Someone will be with you shortly,” she’d said.
