Montana D-Force (Brotherhood Protectors Book 3) (5 page)

Bear released the hand he’d been holding. “Sorry. I thought that was the reason you came back to Eagle Rock.”

“I came back to write a script and deal with my parents’ house.” Mia closed her eyes and focused on remaining calm.

For several minutes she remained silent, knowing what she had to do, but not liking it any more now than when she was sixteen. She drew in a deep breath, released it and opened her eyes. “You’re right. I came back because I wondered if anyone else had suffered an attack like mine. I couldn’t live with the guilt. If I had reported the attack when it happened, my attacker could have been identified and put in jail. Instead, he’s been free to commit more attacks. Because I was a coward, others could have been hurt.”

“Others could have been hurt because of
him
, not you. He’s the bad guy in this situation.”

As they entered town, Mia stared at passing vehicles and people on the sidewalks. “I really have no idea who it could have been.”

“Was there any guy who’d made a pass at you? Someone you might have rebuffed?”

Mia shook her head. “I barely knew what a pass was. Yeah, I watched guys and girls flirt, but I guess I wasn’t ready for it. We were in a small school. Everyone knew everyone else.”

“Meaning, he knew you, and you knew him,” Bear said quietly.

A chill slipped across her skin. “As far as I knew, I didn’t have any enemies. I was an introvert, more into my books than boys. My friend Kylie was the social butterfly, the cheerleader and popular girl. Why would someone target me?”

“Maybe he saw you as a challenge?” Bear suggested.

Mia shot a glance his way. “A challenge?”

Bear nodded. “Some sick bastards like the challenge of getting away with things. Especially with women who would be too shy to call the police and report an attack, if she lived to tell.”

That had been exactly what Mia had done. Or not done.

She pointed to the right. “This is the hardware store.”

Bartlett’s Hardware was a small building, probably as old as the town of Eagle Rock. The windows were gray with dirt and age. The sign listed to the right, in need of a more secure mooring, and the paint on the side of the building curled from the harsh Montana winters and age.

For bigger projects, most people drove into Bozeman to the shiny, newer warehouse stores with huge selections. At Bartlett’s, a rancher could get the basics. Nails, boards and fencing materials.

Mia used to accompany her father to Bartlett’s when she was little. She’d found the aisles full of interesting items. Her father had patiently answered her questions about everything from electrical fuses to gardening shears.

Her chest tightened as she entered the store, half-expecting to see her father pouring nails into a paper bag.

“Mia?” a voice said from across the floor.

Mia glanced up at a familiar face. Thirteen years was a long time, but she recognized Phillip Townsend instantly. Still tall, he’d filled out in the shoulders and arms. Mia remembered him as long and lanky, like a young colt. The bulkier football jocks had picked on him, relentlessly.

Mia waved. “Hi, Phillip.”

“Let me know if I can help you,” he said, from behind the counter.

Mia nodded. Turning to Bear, she noted the narrow-eyed stare he gave Phillip. She touched his arm. “What do we need?”

“Nails, woodscrews, white exterior paint and lumber,” Bear said. “I’ll get the nails and screws and then meet you at the counter.” Her bodyguard veered off to the left, down an aisle with metal bins filled with nuts, bolts, screws and nails of many shapes and sizes.

Mia wandered along the other side of the same aisle, staring at the hinges and cabinet doorknobs without seeing them, memories of her father filling her with sadness.

Phillip appeared beside her. “The hinges are on sale. Two for one.”

Mia smiled. “Thanks. I’m not sure we need them, yet. We’re here for boards, screws, nails and a can of white exterior paint. My bod—handyman is making repairs to my house.”

Bear rounded the end of the aisle, carrying two paper bags bulging with nails and screws. “I could use six eight-foot-long two-by-fours, treated pine, and eight ten-foot one-by-six decking boards.”

Phillip nodded. “Just got a load in yesterday. I’ll notify the guys out back to set them aside.” He hurried back to the counter and lifted an old rotary dial telephone.

When Mia started to follow Phillip, Bear touched her arm, holding her back. “You know him?”

“We went to high school together,” Mia said. She glanced at Bear’s face and frowned. “You don’t think he could have been the one, do you?”

“He’s a guy.” Bear’s lips pressed into a tight line. “As far as I’m concerned, all males in Eagle Rock are suspects until proven innocent.”

She frowned. “And that’s why I don’t want to file a report. Phillip is one of the nicest guys I know. I doubt he had the strength to toss me around back then. He was nothing but a twig, tall and painfully thin.”

“You’d be surprised what a thin, wiry man can do when he sets his mind to it.”

“Yeah, well, Phillip isn’t the one,” Mia said and stalked to the counter.

Phillip glanced up from the phone and smiled. “The guys are bringing the boards around. Where do you want them to load them?”

“Into the black pickup,” Bear said.

“So you’re Mia’s handyman?” Phillip asked.

Bear nodded and stuck out his hand. “Tate Parker.”

Phillip reached across the counter and shook Bear’s hand. “Phillip Townsend.”

So now, Mia knew her bodyguard’s full name.
Tate Parker.
She studied him from beneath her lashes. Yeah, she could see him as a Tate. But Bear suited him more.

“I’m glad to see Mia back in town,” Phillip said. “We haven’t seen her in Eagle Rock since…” His smile faded, and his gaze met Mia’s. “Sorry.”

That pang of loss still hit Mia hard, but she pushed it aside and focused on the man in front of her. “Don’t be. I haven’t been back in the year since my parents’ funeral.” She took both of his hands and smiled. “How are you? I didn’t get much of a chance to talk to anyone last time I was home. Weren’t you engaged? I seem to remember my mother saying something about that.”

Phillip’s hands tightened in hers, briefly, and then he pulled them away. “I was. Not anymore.”

“I’m sorry things didn’t work out,” Mia said.

“Allyson and I were supposed to have gotten married last August. She had it all planned, the venue chosen, bridesmaids lined up and a dress purchased.

The pain in the man’s face was more than Mia could take. She touched his arm and asked, “What happened?”

His lips twisted. “I don’t know. One day she was happy and excited about the wedding.” Phillip’s head dipped. “The next moment, she was dead.”

Mia gasped and pressed her fingers to her mouth. She didn’t know what she expected him to say, but dead wasn’t it. “What happened?”

Phillip looked up and away. “I wish I knew. Maybe the stress of wedding planning got to her. I thought we had it together. We had a plan. Then she was gone.”

“I’m so sorry,” Mia said.

“I just wish I’d known she wasn’t happy. I’d have done anything to change that, even give her up, if that’s what she’d wanted. I just wish I’d seen the signs.”

“Signs?” Mia frowned. “Was she ill?”

Phillip nodded. “Allyson committed suicide.”

Mia’s heart seemed to hit the bottom of her belly like a solid lead weight. Pretty Allyson Severs, with her dark hair and bright blue eyes, had always had a smile on her face. How could anyone so happy hide such darkness inside?

Mia paid for the boards, nails, screws and paint and left the hardware store, her heart heavy. As Bear pulled out on the road, Mia pointed. “Go right at the first road.”

“Where are we going?” Bear asked.

“To the cemetery,” Mia said. “I haven’t been there since the funeral last year.” She turned away from Bear and stared out the window as tears slipped down her cheeks.

It wasn’t as if she’d expected coming home would be easy. She’d come, knowing it would be hard.

B
ear parked
the truck in a gravel parking lot across the street from a small wooden church. A wrought-iron fence surrounded a cemetery filled with grave markers and headstones with the names of people who’d been a part of the Eagle Rock community as far back as the eighteen-hundreds.

Mia sat staring at the view out the window of the pickup, her cheeks streaked with tears.

Bear’s chest squeezed. He knew the pain of losing loved ones. He and his army brothers had been through so much together. When one died, the others grieved. Bear never forgot the faces of his fallen brothers.

Staring at the cemetery reminded him of those men who’d died and the families who’d been there to receive the caskets draped in U.S flags.

Forcing back the raw emotion threatening to overwhelm him, Bear eased out of the truck. His leg ached, but he didn’t let it slow him down as he rounded the front of the vehicle and opened Mia’s door.

When she didn’t move, he waited patiently.

Then she turned and slid down, her foot missing the running board. She would have fallen if Bear hadn’t held out his arms and caught her, pulling her against his chest as he staggered backward, unsteadily. When he had his balance, he loosened his hold and stared down into her face.

“Thanks.” Mia swept her hair back from her face, and then laid her hands on his arms. “I’ve got this.”

Bear released her and let her lead the way through the headstones. He followed ten feet behind, giving her the space she seemed to need.

Mia wandered through the rows, pausing briefly at a large headstone with the names Harvey and Lois Chastain inscribed. Based on the dates the couple had lived, they would have been Mia’s paternal grandparents. She ran her hand over the smooth granite and moved on, coming to a halt near the back of the graveyard. This row didn’t stretch all of the way to the end like the others had.

Stopping at a pink and gray granite headstone, the second on the row, Mia dropped to her knees and stared at the names.

Bear leaned against a tree and let Mia have the time to visit the graves of her beloved parents. She murmured something to their ghosts, more tears trickling down her cheeks. Then she stretched out, lying face-down across the grass.

Bear started toward her, but stopped when another woman he hadn’t seen before straightened from a grave at the end of the short row.

Blond hair streaked with gray framed a sad face. The woman laid a single pink rose on the grave, kissed her palm and blew the kiss to the headstone. Then she turned toward Mia and frowned. “Mia? Mia Chastain? Is that you?”

Mia pushed to her feet and looked at the woman. “Oh, Mrs. Severs. I just heard about Allyson. I’m so sorry. Allyson was a sweetheart. Everyone loved her.”

As Mrs. Severs closed the distance between herself and Mia, Bear straightened away from the tree and took two steps toward the pair.

Mrs. Severs pulled Mia into her arms and held her, rocking slightly back and forth, like a mother rocking her child. For a long moment, the two women hugged.

Bear stood back, reluctant to interrupt the touching moment.

Finally, Mrs. Severs leaned back and held Mia at arm’s length, “I’m sorry about what happened to your parents.”

Mia brushed tears from her cheeks. “Thank you. I didn’t know about Allyson until today.”

Bear moved closer to Mia as Mrs. Severs let go of her arms, her shoulders sagging. The woman glanced over Mia’s shoulder at Bear.

“This is my handyman, Tate Parker,” Mia said, waving her hand toward him. “We just saw Phillip at the hardware store. He still can’t believe it. He said she seemed so excited about getting married. Everything seemed to be going so well.”

Mrs. Severs gave a half-smile that didn’t reach her blue eyes. “I’d never seen her so happy, what with all the wedding planning. Allyson and Phillip were perfect for each other. Then one day, it was as though the light went out of her. Her father and I had spent the weekend at our cabin in the mountains. When we got back, Allyson didn’t seem the same. She refused to come out of her room, and she’d quit eating. Whenever we tried to talk to her, she just cried and locked the door.” The older woman seemed to choke on her words.

Mia slipped an arm around Mrs. Severs, her own eyes filling with tears.

“We talked to Phillip,” Mrs. Severs continued. “He said he hadn’t spoken to Allyson since they’d been out the night we left. He’d said they were fine. They’d talked about the honeymoon, and Allyson had seemed happy. The next morning, he called. She didn’t answer. He came to the house to speak to her, but she didn’t come to the door. He went around the house to her bedroom window and knocked on the glass. She came to the window, but said she wasn’t feeling well and didn’t want to make him sick, too.

“When we got home, we could tell she’d been crying, but she didn’t want to talk about it. It went on like that for two days. The third morning after our return…” Mrs. Severs sucked in a shaky breath. “We found her hanging from the ceiling fan in her bedroom.”

Bear’s heart broke for the mother. No parent should outlive a child. He couldn’t begin to imagine finding his child the way Mrs. Severs had found hers.

For a long moment, Mia held Mrs. Severs. The woman’s shoulders shook with her silent sobs.

“Why?” Mia whispered. “She was a beautiful, happy person.”

Mrs. Severs dug a tissue out of her pocket and blew her nose. “We didn’t know. I looked for a note, anything that would explain what she had been going through. She left her engagement ring on the nightstand. That’s it.”

“No fight with Phillip?” Bear asked.

“Phillip was just as torn up about it as we were. He swears they didn’t fight the night of their date. Everything was normal when he left her.” Mrs. Severs drew in a ragged breath. “I even read through her daily journal, hoping to understand.” The woman paused, her brows wrinkling.

“What did you find?”

“It was odd. She’d written an entry the night she’d gone out with Phillip. It was all about the honeymoon plans. Every word seemed upbeat and happy. But she didn’t finish the page like she usually did. It was as if she’d stopped in midsentence and never went back to finish the entry. I found the journal underneath her bed. Not tucked in, but upside down, as if it had been thrown or fallen from her desk and kicked across the floor.”

A cold sensation washed over Bear. He touched Mia’s back.

She glanced over her shoulder at Bear, nodded, and then turned to the older woman. “Mrs. Severs, would you mind if I looked at that journal?”

She shook her head. “No. I suppose you could. Although I don’t see why. Nothing’s going to bring her back.”

Mia squeezed the woman’s hands. “I’m so sorry. Allyson was my friend. I’d just like to read through those last couple of days, as a kind of closure.”

“Certainly,” Mrs. Severs said. “Phillip has been so good to us. The poor man seems so lost without her. I don’t have the heart to tell him that it hurts when he comes over. Just his being there reminds us of what we’re missing. They would have been married. She might have been pregnant with our first grandchild. Now, we’ll never have grandchildren.”

Mrs. Severs stood with her eyes closed, tears dripping down her face. After a moment, she wiped her cheeks. “If you want to see the journal, please come during the workday. I’d rather my husband didn’t know. He gets upset every time Allyson’s name comes up. You know how close they were.”

Mia nodded. “I remember.” She hooked her arm through Mrs. Severs’s arm. “Let me walk you back to your car.”

“Thank you, dear,” Mrs. Severs said.

Bear fell in step on the other side of the frail woman in case she collapsed from her misery. When they arrived at her car, he helped her into the driver’s seat.

Mia leaned into the open car door. “Do you mind very much if I follow you back to your house to have a look at that journal, now?”

Mrs. Severs glanced at the clock on her dash. “I suppose that would be okay. I didn’t have any more plans for the day. I’m never much good after I visit Allyson.”

“Do you want me to drive you home?” Mia asked.

Bear’s fingers curled into fists. He didn’t want her to drive with someone else. How could he protect her if she wasn’t with him at all times?

“No, thank you, dear. I can get myself home.” She gave Mia a wan smile. “I’m sad, not helpless.”

“We’ll be right behind you,” Mia said and closed the car door.

Mrs. Severs backed out of the parking lot and pulled onto the road heading back into town.

Mia and Bear hurried to follow.

Once inside the truck, Mia turned to Bear. “I didn’t want to see or talk to anyone after I’d been attacked.”

“We don’t know why Allyson shut down,” Bear said. “It could have been something else.”

“But if it was him…” Mia pounded her fist on the armrest. “If only I’d—”

Bear reached out and touched her arm. “Stop it. You are not responsible for that bastard’s actions.”

“You didn’t know Allyson,” Mia cried. “She was so beautiful, loving and full of life. I can’t think of anything else that would make her want to take her life. I wanted to take my own life when it happened to me. But I was too much of a coward to do even that.”

“Sweetheart, you were anything but a coward. You did the bravest thing of all…you lived and made something of yourself, despite your fears and insecurities.” Bear shook his head. “You’re an amazing woman. Sadie said you write scripts for movies. The scripts you write make people laugh, cry and feel.”

“But Allyson might be alive today if I had reported my rape thirteen years ago.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Why else would a woman on the verge of the happiest day of her life take her own life?”

Bear couldn’t explain why Allyson Severs had committed suicide. Only Allyson could answer that. Unfortunately, the woman had been successful in her attempt to end her torment.

Bear’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel. If he ever found the guy who’d raped Mia, and could potentially have raped Allyson and caused her to commit suicide, he’d kill the bastard, inflicting on him a slow, very painful death.

A
t Mrs. Severs’s home
, the older woman invited them to visit Allyson’s room. “The journal is on her desk. I’m going to make a cup of tea and take something for a headache. Can I get anything for you two?”

“No, thank you,” Mia said, anxious to read Allyson’s last words. She hoped to find a clue as to why the young woman had taken her life.

“I haven’t changed anything in Allyson’s room since she passed. I can’t bring myself to do it. I keep hoping I’ll wake up from this horrible nightmare and she’ll come dancing into the room, laughing.” Mrs. Severs snorted and turned toward the kitchen. “If you don’t mind, I’ll let you go look. I can’t go into her room.”

Mia watched as Mrs. Severs walked away. She supposed a mother never got over losing her daughter. Mia wondered if she’d get over losing her parents. Like Mrs. Severs, it was difficult to enter those places that reminded her of them. Coming back to her parents’ home had been one of the hardest things Mia had ever done. She kept expecting her mother to be in the kitchen when she walked through the door. But her mother wasn’t and never would be again.

As Mia entered Allyson’s room, her heart constricted, and her throat all but closed. A wedding dress, wrapped in clear plastic, hung on the closet door.
Bride
magazines littered the desk, and what appeared to be the couple’s official engagement picture had been framed and placed on the nightstand, facing Ally’s pillow.

She found the journal on the desk, lying open across the array of magazines. The page on the left had writing halfway down the lines. The right page was completely empty.

Mia sat in the chair and turned back to the beginning of the entry for the last day of Allyson’s happiness, if not the last day of her life. What had happened to make her so depressed she’d taken her own life?

Mia bent to the journal and read from the beginning of that day’s post to the abrupt ending.

Bear stood behind her, leaning over her shoulder, reading along.

Just as her mother had said, Allyson posted about her day at work as a kindergarten teacher, how the children had made her laugh. She’d written that she’d barely been able to focus, because she’d been so excited to see her fiancé that night to talk about where they would spend their honeymoon. And the evening had been magical. Phillip had taken her to a nice restaurant in Bozeman where they’d talked about the different places they could go.

We finally settled on the beach vacation in—

“It’s as though something interrupted her,” Bear said.

“I agree.” She turned back several pages and read through a week’s worth of entries. Nothing jumped out. The entries were similar to her last one, all about her days at work and her wedding plans.

Mia flipped back even farther to two weeks before Allyson’s last entry. She happened to land on a weekend page. Allyson had gone to Bozeman with her bridesmaids for them to try on their dresses. She’d left it up to them to choose the style they preferred as long as the dresses were in the same material and color. They’d made a party of it.

Though it was a great day, one thing disturbed me. We were supposed to stay the entire day and return late this evening, but one of my bridesmaids had to get back early. She said it was because she needed to bake cookies for her Sunday school class, but I think she didn’t want her husband to get mad if she came back really late. I’m not sure what’s going on with her, but the others were disappointed to leave early.

The passage didn’t name the bridesmaid, and Mia wasn’t convinced it meant anything, so she moved on, reading the rest of the entries for that week.

“See anything that stands out?” she asked Bear.

With Bear hovering over her shoulder, Mia became hyperaware of his body so close to hers. Several times she lost focus on the words, breathing in his outdoorsy scent.
She could feel his heat, and it made her pulse quicken. What would it feel like to lie next to him, to be held in his arms and feel his hands sliding across her body?