Killing Secrets (33 page)

A deep voice behind them cut him off. “Is everything all right in here?” Larsen Cook, who protected Rachel at night, stood in the doorway.

Patrick caught the time on the wall clock. Four-forty. Cook and Sprang usually changed shifts at the house after six o’clock, so they must have switched early for some reason. Stifling a groan, he blocked Rachel’s nakedness with his own, and looked over his shoulder at Cook. “Everything’s fine.”

The security consultant’s flinty gaze sharpened on the debris at their feet. “I have to hear that from Ms. James,” he said.

“E-Everything’s fine.” Rachel’s tremulous voice didn’t sound too convincing.

When Patrick turned back and tried to help her to sit up, she batted his hand away. “I’ve got it.” Blinking back tears she stumbled off the desk, her skirt falling down to hide her legs. She buttoned her blouse up to her neck with fingers that fumbled. “I have work to do,” she muttered, walking around him. “Come on, Cook.” She snatched Patrick’s truck keys off the wall rack and fled his office with Cook in tow.

Patrick listened to Rachel run up the wooden stairs and, a minute later, back down again with Amanda. They clattered past his office. The last thing he heard was a clap of thunder so loud it almost buried the sound of the front door slamming behind mother, daughter, and bodyguard. As the storm broke over Patrick’s head, he sat back on the front edge of his bare desk like a marionette with its strings cut.

What had he done?

Chapter Twenty-One

Time passed while he sat there beating himself up over Rachel’s anger and pain, his own idiocy, but he eventually became aware of the violence of the weather outside. The storm had broken with a vengeance, what his father called a “gully washer”. It was the kind of storm that caused six-inch thick tree branches to snap and crash through roofs like they were made out of paper-mâché. The wind drove the rain almost vertical so it slammed into his office window in sheets. With the sheer volume of water these infrequent storms dumped, it didn’t take long for the streets to overflow with water the predominately clay soil couldn’t soak up.

Rachel and Amanda are driving through those streets completely unaware of the dangers.

Larsen Cook was with them. He’d know what to do in this storm. If Rachel would take his advice.
She’d accepted the bodyguard’s renewed presence in her life but, when she felt threatened, she took risks. Like the night she ran away after she received the threatening package from her ex-husband.

The memory yanked Patrick from his inertia. Rummaging through the debris scattered on the floor, he tried not to think about how it all got down there. He located his radio beneath a file folder kicked under one corner of the desk and tried to raise Rachel on it. Nothing. Several of the crew responded to his call promising to watch for her so he knew the radio worked, but he didn’t find the knowledge reassuring.

Rachel might deliberately ignore his radio calls if she were upset enough. He tried Cook’s cell number, but he didn’t pick up either. That ratcheted up his alarm.

Don’t panic.
If they aren’t at the site, they probably just went home next door.

He dialed his parents’ house. “Have you seen Rachel and Amanda?” he asked his mother when she picked up.

“Not since I dropped them off at your place after our hospital visit with Dixon. Rachel said she had to pick up something,” she said. “Aren’t they there?”

“If they were, do you think I’d call?” he snapped. Pacing the floor from one end of his house to the other, he moderated his voice. “I’m sorry, Mom. I’m just worried. They went out again almost an hour ago and I can’t find them.”

It was his fault they were out there in the storm. When he should have been reassuring Rachel he’d make everything right with Jane, he’d goaded her into an argument instead. Then he’d practically ravaged her on the desk without considering her feelings. He wasn’t any better than her brutal ex-husband. It would be a miracle if she ever forgave him.

“You two are quarreling, aren’t you?” his mother said into his ear. “That’s why Rachel’s not sleeping. I thought it was worry about Dixon’s recovery, but she told me today she was happy with his progress.”

Patrick looked through the leaded glass in his back door in time to see lightning strike a couple of miles away. He jumped when the thunder crashed through the house seconds later. “How do you know she’s not sleeping?”

His mother snorted. “She’s been creeping down the stairs in the middle of the night to work at the table in the breakfast nook. Two of the stairs squeak, you know.”

He did know. His dad caught him sneaking out of the house a couple of times as a teenager before he accepted he’d never pull one over on his policeman father and decided to fly right.

Before she re-connected with her father at the hospital, Rachel had been working at the site trailer on the landscape designs for Katy. But then, she’d taken over the Southgate job so it wasn’t surprising she felt it necessary to work in the middle of the night to finish Katy’s projects. But was that the only reason she wasn’t sleeping?

Was she as restless as Patrick? He wanted to believe she was missing him as much as he did her, but he had no illusions. She was devastated by what he’d just done. He’d seen the bleak look in her eyes before she ran away.

“Yes,” he admitted to his mother, turning his back on the storm outside to resume his pacing. “We had a disagreement.” A weak word to describe his stupidity.

“Are you sure that’s all it is because she’s not eating either. It’s not like her to—”

His mother’s words stopped registering as his gaze fixed on Rachel’s radio sitting on one corner of Jane’s desk. She’d left without it? Rachel wasn’t upset enough to leave Denver in the middle of a storm, was she?

Memories of the day he and Karly argued, the way his wife ran away after their argument, the horrible events that led to her death, reared their ugly heads. “I’ve got to go, Mom,” he said abruptly. “Call my cell if they show up.”

“Patri—”

He hung up and rolled his shoulders to ease the fear threatening to paralyze him. Rachel wasn’t Karly. She wasn’t suicidal. Greg Bishop was still out there somewhere. She wouldn’t leave Denver until Amanda was safe from him. Staying presented another problem, though. Rachel had become a target for Patrick’s saboteur as well. That meant danger was coming at Rachel and Amanda from two different directions. Could it have become too much?

Dammit, where were they? Why hadn’t Cook guard responded to Patrick’s call?

His gut twisted. He’d allowed his dick to endanger the very people he wanted to protect. He had to find them.

He snagged his radio off his desk, and then picked up Rachel’s so he wouldn’t get caught without a functioning battery. Digging out his wet weather gear stored in the hall closet, he also grabbed a couple of flashlights and his emergency pack, still packed from his last hiking trip into the mountains to Lost Lake. He didn’t know how long it would take to find the missing trio. He wanted to be prepared for anything.

With no idea where they’d gone, he could only hope Rachel had the good sense to pull the truck to the side of the road somewhere until the storm passed or he tracked her down. She’d said she had work to do, so he’d start with the one project he knew she was working on.

Using the base radio on the credenza behind Jane’s desk, Patrick checked in with his crew at Southgate again. None of them claimed to have seen her. That didn’t mean she wasn’t there. The way they all catered to her, if she’d told them she didn’t want to talk to him, they’d cover for her. He understood. He could live with that. They could lie through their teeth as long as she and Amanda were safe.

With a growl of frustration, he decided to check Southgate himself. If she’d actually gone somewhere else, well, he’d cross that bridge when,
if
he came to it. Climbing into his dad’s half ton pickup, the one he’d been using so Rachel could use his larger crew cab, the sense of impending disaster that had built all day suddenly took form. He’d never felt so helpless.

And for the first time since he’d buried his wife and unborn son nearly two years earlier, he prayed.

~~~

A vicious gust of wind smacked the three-quarter ton pickup broadside, wrenching at the steering wheel beneath Rachel’s hands. It had been stupid to let her pain and anger drive her from the safety of Patrick’s office out into this storm with her daughter. To compound her foolishness, she’d only stopped at Southgate long enough to pick up the directions the real estate mogul, Grant Colbert, had given her the day he proposed she submit a bid. He’d waited five days while she sat with her father at the hospital. She could have waited another day to make this trek out to the property. But, when Larsen Cook suggested they wait out the storm, she’d still been too upset with men in general, and Patrick in particular, to listen.

Living all over the country growing up, she was used to severe weather conditions so she didn’t think Cook’s concern was necessary. It didn’t help Patrick tried to call the bodyguard either. That, more than anything, drove her out to the empty county roads northeast of Denver’s airport where ten-acre country estates were springing up like exotic wildflowers.

Every mile she traveled, however, the storm worsened and she regretted forbidding Cook from taking Patrick’s call. She’d mentioned where they were going to his foreman, John Branson, but the man had been loading his truck to go home for the day. Who knew if he would miss them if they didn’t come back?

Her bravado weakening, she glanced at the man sitting in the passenger seat. Somehow, Cook’s calm demeanor and the fact he hadn’t fastened his seat belt—to keep his mobility in an emergency situation, he’d explained the first time she mentioned it—eased some of the tension from her shoulders. “Keep your eyes peeled for the abandoned barn with
Stirling Stables
painted on it,” she said. “We should be able to spot four-foot letters across the front of it, despite the rain.”

Peering through the rain-washed windshield, she tried to spot the building which would pinpoint how far they were from the next turn. Between the deceptive sameness of the open prairie roads, the dark pall of the storm, and their distance from city lights that might cut the gloom, it was difficult to spot the various landmarks in Colbert’s directions. She should have called the man, told him she wasn’t taking the job, not traipsed out here to scope it out!

Why had she thought to take on another project after Southgate was finished? Maybe it was because Colbert was so complimentary when he’d asked her to draw up a design for him, and Patrick had taken exception to the man’s manner. She shouldn’t have allowed her conflicting emotions to provoke her into accepting the challenge. The police were closing in on Greg. Jack had reported only yesterday that they’d found the motel where he was staying, although he’d checked out by the time they got there. Soon she’d be free to go about her life again and she would take Amanda back to Dallas where they belonged.

Rachel had every reason to return to Texas with Katy’s proposal to make her a partner on the table. After months of backbreaking work to save her older friend’s livelihood after Greg destroyed it, she had a personal stake in seeing its continued prosperity.

But, with Katy’s health no longer keeping her from running her own affairs, and the managers Rachel had trained for all three nurseries, she didn’t really need Rachel any longer. The truth was Rachel needed Katy. Rachel had originally planned to get her friend back on her feet, then leave. However, she’d also found a hole to crawl into, a place to lick the emotional and physical wounds she’d sustained during her disastrous marriage. And, for the first time in years, she’d found peace and some facsimile of contentment.

Katy recovered. The question was, had Rachel? Her dream was always to have a landscaping business of her own, but was this the way she wanted to get it? Once Great-aunt Amanda’s estate was settled and she paid off the last of debts threatening Katy’s homestead, Rachel could buy her own nursery. A whole franchise of nurseries. For that matter, she could quit working altogether and fill her life with luncheons and cocktail parties as her mother’s brothers expected of her.

It wasn’t the life she wanted for herself or for Amanda. So the question came down to one thing. Would she return to Texas because she wanted a stake in Kolthern Nurseries, or was she simply looking for a familiar bolt-hole to dive into so she could lick fresh emotional wounds? The ache buried deep in her heart since she left Patrick’s office suggested the latter.

If she didn’t get away from the man—and soon—she’d do something she’d really regret. Like beg him to love her back. Patrick didn’t want her that way. He’d made that abundantly clear after his parents’ return. Pain lanced through her breast at how easily he’d pushed her from his bed, out of his life. How long would it take her to do the same?

When he took her in his arms in his office, laid her down on the desk and kissed her like he was desperate to have her again, as he had the night he’d shown her what lovemaking could be like between a man and a woman, she’d almost caved. One second longer under his sensual demand and her twitching fingers would have taken a life of their own. She would have grabbed him and never let go. She’d been
that
close to settling. For his desire. For whatever scraps he reluctantly gave her. It took every ounce of willpower she had to walk out of his office.