Bodyguard/Husband (16 page)

When they climbed back into her car, Jack grunted quietly.

Holly peered at him suspiciously. “Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked. “That car came so close! I was afraid it had hit you.”

It had.
Jack gritted his teeth against the burning sensation on the right side of his back where the car’s flared fender had scraped him. He navigated the rain-wet streets, his mind on their close call. Automatically, his brain calculated the timeline. They had spent about twenty minutes in the gym after Winger and his mother left. Was that time enough for Bob to get his
overbearing mother home and return with Miss Emma’s car?

“Tell me about the mama’s boy. Where does he live?”

“Bob?” Holly frowned, obviously uncomfortable with his question.

But then, he’d already noticed that she was the type of person who chose to see the good in everyone. It was an admirable quality, but a dangerous one. Not everyone was good. In fact it was probably one of the qualities that had attracted her stalker.

“He lives with his mother, over off of Pecan Circle.”

“Where is that in relation to the repair shop?”

“It’s the next street over. Would he have had time? You heard Mrs. Winger. They were going to stop at the grocery store.”

“I heard.”

“This is maddening.” She rubbed her forehead. “I don’t know if I can stand wondering what this maniac is going to do next. He’s trying to kill you!”

And he’d come pretty damn close tonight.
Jack shifted in the driver’s seat, ignoring the familiar sticky feeling of blood under his shirt. “I’m fine. He won’t try anything else tonight, and with any luck, tomorrow I’ll hear from the lab that they’ve isolated some epithelial cells from the book or one of the notes. Then we’ll have your stalker’s DNA. Meanwhile, the best thing we can do is stay calm and stay together.”

“Why do you have to sneak around and put yourself in danger while
he
gets to roam free? Why can’t you just have a citywide dragnet or something and be done with it?”

“There’s nothing I’d love better than to swab every
person in town for a DNA match, but the Constitution requires probable cause to invade someone’s privacy. Besides, it would alert the stalker, scare him off. And that’s precisely what we don’t want to have happen.”

His tone was harsh. He wasn’t unaffected by the near miss they’d just had. The stalker had nearly run them both down. He was escalating more rapidly than Jack or Eric had realized.

Holly was in immediate danger. The thought made his blood run cold.

Holly muttered something under her breath as he pulled into her driveway.

“What did you say?”

She jumped out of the car and slammed the door. “I said scaring him off sounds like a good idea to me right now. I’m ready to stand out here and scream at him to come on and get me, if that’s what he wants. I can’t stand this. We have no idea who he is or what he’s going to do next. All we know is he wants to kill you—” Her voice broke.

Acutely conscious that the killer could be watching them right now, Jack rounded the car in three long strides and put his arm around her, steeling himself against the supple warmth of her bare shoulder and the press of her erect nipples barely covered by wet cotton against his chest.

“Hush,” he hissed in her ear.

“I don’t want to—”

Jack clamped his fingers around her nape and covered her mouth with his, swallowing up the rest of her words. Her lips tasted salty. Ferociously driving the taste and feel of her out of his mind, he used the kiss to stop her from giving away the secret of their sham marriage.

But each time he kissed her, he found it harder to maintain his distance. His feelings were getting all mixed up in Holly’s strawberry scent, the warm passion of her lips, the way she responded when he touched her.

How was he supposed to keep her safe when she was driving him crazy with need?

He tried to think about his mother, about his oath to devote his life to saving other women from such a fate. But Holly uttered a small moan against his mouth and slid her arms around his neck.

“Holly,” he whispered as she kissed him back, parting her lips and allowing her tongue to touch his.

She moaned again, and this time the sound penetrated his desire-soaked brain.

What the hell was he doing? He pulled away, breathing hard. Holly’s lips were swollen, her eyes dewy with desire.

Suppressing a groan, still holding her close, Jack put his mouth against her cheek. “Please, Holly. Never, ever forget that he’s watching us.” Her skin felt like wet shimmering silk against his lips, taunting him with the impossibility of his situation. His body ached with longing as his brain ran through the litany of reasons why he couldn’t let his emotions get involved.
Her safety—her life—depended on his ability to remain detached.

“Okay?” He put his forehead against hers as an image of his mother’s limp, bruised body seared his brain. He would not let Holly become another murder statistic.

“Okay,” she snapped, then added more softly, “okay.”

He felt her tense body relax just a bit. He loosened
his hold, but kept his arm lightly across her shoulders. “Let’s go inside, sweetheart.”

She glanced at him, and in the darkness he saw her eyes glittering damply. Frightened eyes. Trusting eyes.

“Sh-h-h.” He guided her into the house and gestured for her to stay still while he quickly checked the rooms. No sign that anyone had been there.

He returned to the living room, where she stood straight as a small drenched soldier.

“I don’t know how long I can do this.”

He stepped over to her and handed her a towel he’d retrieved from the bathroom. “As long as it takes. You have to accept that everything has changed. This sick— This person has taken over your life.”

She blotted her face with the towel and tried to step around him. “Oh, trust me, I do know that. The trouble is, you’ve taken over my life, too.”

And you’ve taken over mine.
But Jack had to be twice as careful. He was walking a tightrope as thin as a spider’s silk and as high as the Empire State Building, and he had no net. Not only did he have to convince the killer he was in love with Holly, he had to keep himself from becoming emotionally tangled up in her life.

It was a problem he’d never had before. Why was it so easy, in unguarded moments, to believe that he and Holly could really be married? When had he become so interested in family, in home, in community? Things he’d never even considered before suddenly seemed important. Like sitting across from her in the kitchen late at night and talking. Falling asleep listening to her soft breathing. Cooking dinner with her at her great-uncle’s house.

He was just going to have to work harder at keeping
his mind on his job and off his vic. He caught her arm. “It won’t be much longer. We’ll get him, I promise.”

She made a small, distressed sound. “Can you really promise that? I mean, look what happened tonight. You could have been killed. Danny was a cop and it didn’t keep him from being murdered.”

Jack had an overwhelming urge to promise her the moon and the stars and the Milky Way if it would take the sadness from her golden-brown eyes. He’d seen that haunted look too many times, in too many victims.

But his rational side knew hollow romantic promises wouldn’t keep her safe.

He forced a laugh. “Trust me, Holly, I don’t want to die. I’m doing everything possible to make sure nobody else dies because of your stalker. We’re not in this alone. There’s an entire division of the FBI working on figuring out who the killer is. And what happened tonight is what we want, what we need. The whole point of my being here is to draw him out. He’s getting desperate, and desperate men make mistakes.”

Her gaze held a look that Jack wasn’t willing to analyze. Her eyes welled with tears and her lower lip trembled until she bit it. She blinked and a single tear escaped down her cheek. “So we just wait? I can’t go through this again. I keep thinking if I’d realized what was going on, Danny might still be alive.”

Regret and sadness slammed into him, as it did every time he thought of his friend. He knew what she meant. He felt the same way. But he knew that neither he nor she was responsible. An obsessed killer was.

He relaxed his grip on her arm and ran his fingers along the delicate curve of her biceps. “You’re not to blame for anything that’s happened. That’s one of the hardest things for a stalking victim to accept. It’s not
your fault. And we’re not just waiting, Holly. Every move he makes brings us closer to him. Every mistake he makes gives us more of an advantage. I need you to be tough, to do whatever it takes to psyche yourself. You have to be convincing as a woman madly in love with her husband.”

Holly’s eyes widened and that thread of awareness that was stretched to the breaking point between them zinged like a guitar string. His words hung in the air.
Madly in love.

It took a huge effort to remove his fingers from the fascinating, soft firmness of her arm. He used the act of peeling off his soaked jacket to avoid looking at her.

Whatever it takes.
He was giving her advice he wasn’t willing to take himself. Because he knew what would work. If they made love, then both of them would be convincing. He hadn’t needed Eric to remind him that a man and a woman who are intimate act differently around each other.

He closed his eyes. The one thing that would cinch their cover story was the one thing he couldn’t do. He was an FBI agent and Holly was the victim of a crime. He’d sworn to protect her. He would not take advantage of her fear and vulnerability.

H
OLLY WAS RELIEVED
that Jack had stepped away from her. She couldn’t stand the way he touched her, sometimes in impatience, sometimes with an achingly sweet tenderness that made her want to believe he was everything he seemed to be—including attracted to her.

“Well, that’s simple enough. Be tough and act like
we’re blissfully happy while we wait for him to try to kill you again, is that it?”

“Basically, yes.” He held the jacket in one hand. His shirt was plastered to his skin and his lightweight khaki pants were so wet they were translucent.

Holly could see his boxers, and more, outlined under the wet material.

Averting her eyes, she bit her lip. “Give me your coat. I’ll hang it up in the laundry room. You need to get out of the rest of those wet clothes.”

His dark gaze swept her length as his words echoed in her ears.
Whatever it takes.
She shivered and imagined herself suggesting to him that if they made love they’d be more convincing. Even as ripples of anticipation and desire spread through her like wavelets from a drop of rain in a pond, she knew she couldn’t say that.

For an instant his eyes flared with a dark flame, then he dropped his gaze and started unbuttoning his shirt. She stared at the efficient movements of his fingers as he pushed each button through its buttonhole.

He shrugged out of his shirt and tossed it to her. When he did, she got a glimpse of a pink splotch on the back of his T-shirt.

Blood! Her suddenly nerveless fingers dropped the shirt. “Jack, you’re bleeding.”

Jack reached over his shoulder and tugged at the wet cotton. “It’s nothing. The car got a little close.”

Her heart lodged in her throat. “A little close? It
hit
you! I knew it! Oh God, why didn’t you tell me? We need to call Dr. Franklin. No, we’d better go to the emergency room at Forrest General.”

He shook his head, his damp hair spiked from run
ning his fingers through it. “I said it’s nothing. I’ll just take a shower.”

Holly touched his shoulder blade where the stained T-shirt stuck. His muscles jerked.

“It is not nothing. Let me see it.”

He pulled away. “I said no.”

“Look, Agent Macho, either you let me look at that or I’m calling Dr. Franklin.”

He glared at her with those glacial eyes. “What are you going to say? ‘My husband got a scratch’? Don’t bother. He’ll just tell you to do what I’m going to do anyway. Clean and bandage it.”

Holly lifted her chin and cocked her head slightly, her heart in her throat at the site of Jack’s blood. “That is not a scratch. Now, you listen to me. Dr. Franklin delivered my mother and he delivered me. If I ask him to come over here to take a look at my husband’s back, he will.” She saw defeat glimmer in Jack’s eyes and knew what he was thinking.

Small towns.

“Now take off that T-shirt.”

Jack made a noise like a growl, but he turned his back and stripped off the wet shirt.

Raw abrasions furrowed along his ribs. The bleeding had stopped, but the scratches ran a good five inches across his back—he was going to be sore. She could already see the beginnings of a dark bruise.

“Your shirt wasn’t torn.”

“See. It’s not even a scratch. It’s more like a strawberry burn. The car just barely skimmed me as it passed.”

“Skim—” She couldn’t even finish the word. She took a shaky breath. “He could have killed you.”

For an instant, she was back there, protected by
Jack’s body pressing her against her car, as Miss Emma Thompson’s Chevy sped past. Now she knew what had happened when Jack grunted and his body jerked. The car had scraped his back.

This was life and death. This stranger who had come into her life without her permission to be her bodyguard, who took up way too much of her space and stirred desires she had suppressed for far too long, was risking his life every day to protect hers.

Tears filled her eyes as she put her hand on his shoulder. His muscles flinched. “Jack…”

Jack turned around. “I told you it’s just a—”

She uttered a little cry at the sight of his bare torso. Scars crisscrossed his right upper chest and shoulder, pink against his golden skin, newly healed, like so many she’d seen in her work as a physical therapist. Her trained eye recognized them as surgical scars, the newest no more than a couple of months old.

Life and death.

“Oh, Jack.”

He muttered a curse.