Under the Microscope (6 page)

His brows lowered and he seemed to grow bigger and more menacing, though she knew he hadn’t moved a muscle. “Exactly,” he said, voice low. “Which is why you should leave it to me.”

She froze. “You’re taking the case.”

Maybe that should have been obvious. Otherwise, why would he be in Connecticut? But she needed to hear him say it, needed to know she had someone on her side.

“I’m taking the case.” He held out a hand and she shook almost numbly, two businesspeople sealing a deal in the strangest of settings, standing in the darkness as firefighters slowly gained control of the inferno that had once been her house.

Then Max’s lips twisted. “I had planned on mentioning professional detachment, and how it would be a good idea to keep our previous association separate from our business deal. But I’d say that horse has already left the barn.”

Raine lifted her fingers to touch her mouth, which still hummed with his touch, his flavor. “I don’t
know—” She broke off and took a deep breath. “The kiss was my fault. It won’t happen again.”

She couldn’t let it.

She’d had little security as a child, bouncing from one foster home to the next, so many different schools, so many different friends that it was easier not to bother. Longing for stability, she’d been too quick to grab on when Rory had wanted to take care of her. Rory, who’d barely been able to take care of himself.

No, Raine thought, this time she was going to succeed on her own. She would hire the help she needed to prove that Thriller was safe, that something—or some
one
—else had killed those four women. Max was the best man for the job, but so what? That didn’t mean she needed to lean on him.

Didn’t mean she needed him.

He looked at her for a long moment, but before he could say anything a thin, graying man approached from the driveway, where a wide stream of water ran beside her SUV and down to the street, looking oily and black in the darkness.

“Is this your car?” the stranger asked. He was dressed in street clothes, but a uniformed officer hovered at his side with the deference of a subordinate.

A detective, then, or maybe an arson investigator, Raine thought. Lord knows she’d need one of those.

She stepped forward and was aware of Max’s steady presence close behind her when she said, “My car. My house.” She clasped her hands together in front of her body to keep them from trembling. “I was inside. Max here got me out.”

“I’m Detective Marcus.” The gray-haired man indicated the officer at his side. “This is Officer Nichols. Why don’t you walk us through what happened?”

After providing her full name and salient personal details, she described her return home and what she remembered of the attack, which wasn’t much. She was able to give a general description of her attacker—white, medium height, brown hair and eyes—but though she could swear she’d seen him up close, the details eluded her. In the end, she had to shrug. “He was pretty average.”

As she spoke, she was acutely conscious of Max’s presence. She was too comforted by the warm solidity of his body, too aware of his every gesture and expression, and the silent hum of tension that ran between them.

When she finished, he took over the narrative, saying, “I got here just as the second cruiser arrived on scene. There wasn’t much smoke, and I could just see the flames through the window, so the neighbors wouldn’t have noticed the fire yet. I take it there was a hard-wired alarm system in place?”

That earned him a long look before the detective shook his head. “It was called in from the two-family across the street. Unit A.” He glanced at Raine, and she didn’t like what she saw in his eyes. “Are you planning a trip, Ms. Montgomery?”

“No, why?”

He gestured for them to follow. When they reached the driver’s side door to her SUV, he indicated an envelope lying on the dashboard. “Looks like an e-ticket. Mind if I take a look?”

Baffled, Raine started to say
go ahead,
but Max stepped between her and the detective. “Not without a warrant. You want to tell us what this is about?”

The detective’s eyes narrowed. “Who did you say you were again?”

“Maximilian Vasek of Vasek and Caine Investigations.”

The detective shifted his weight so it was equally balanced on the balls of his feet. A fighting stance. “Is there something I should know, Mr. Vasek?”

I’m standing right here,
Raine wanted to snap, but she didn’t because this was part of why she’d hired Max. She needed someone who knew how to handle cops and suspicions. She didn’t. Jeff and Tori didn’t.

They’d needed an outsider. They’d needed Max.

Only now that she had him, Raine wasn’t quite sure what to do with him.

“We’re not hiding anything,” Max said. “And
we’ll be happy to show you whatever you want as soon as you get back with that warrant. Until then, I’m taking Ms. Montgomery to a hotel while you search the scene for evidence pointing toward the man who tried to kill her.”

After treating Max to another stare, the detective glanced beyond him to Raine. “Don’t leave town.”

“Of course not,” she said between numb lips. “I have a business to run.”

Or more accurately, a business to save before it was irretrievably crippled.

Raine pinched the bridge of her nose. What the hell was going on? Why had someone torched her house? Max’s words echoed in her brain.
The man who tried to kill her. Kill her. Kill her…

He touched her arm, nudging her toward the driver’s side of the SUV. “Get in.”

She did as he directed, then scooted over the center console to the passenger’s seat when he climbed in nearly on top of her, crowding her with his big masculine body. “Hey,” she protested, “I can drive. And what about your truck?”

“I’ll get it later.” He held out a hand without looking at her. “Keys?”

She dug the spare set from their hiding place in the passenger foot well and passed them over. Without another word, he started the engine and popped the transmission into Reverse.

Keeping one eye on Detective Marcus, who was making a slow circuit of the front of the smoldering building, Max backed the SUV down the driveway and out, navigating between the fire trucks and splashing through the stream of dirty water that carried pieces of her life like worthless flotsam.

Raine saw a single high-heeled slipper in the mess, one of a pair she’d bought to celebrate Thriller’s acceptance by the FDA. Her eyes filmed with tears.

Rather than have Max see, she turned to stare out the window, at the faces of her neighbors, whose expressions ranged from horrified to fascinated as they watched the firefighters pick through the smoldering wreckage of the house.

She swallowed hard. “Where are we going?”

“Like I told the detective, a hotel. Got any preference?”

She directed him to the Guildford Inn, a mid-sized hotel she’d used once or twice when she’d needed someplace to put out-of-town scientists.

While they drove, she tried to pull herself together. It was okay. She could do this.
Just think of it as time to regroup,
she told herself.
Don’t think about the house or the guy in the house. Just think about a shower.

But when she got to the check-in counter and
reached for her purse, she stalled because it wasn’t there. Presumably, it had been destroyed in the fire, along with her credit cards. Her walking-around money. Her license.

Pretty much everything that identified her as Raine Montgomery and allowed her to function in the modern world.

“I’ve got it,” Max’s voice said behind her.

Her face heated when he slid his credit card across the counter. Feeling awkward, she wandered away and stared out a window at the night-quiet street.

Was the man out there, watching her? Or was he long gone, having gotten what he wanted?

What
had
he wanted? Why had he been in the house in the first place? She didn’t keep any valuables there. Hell, she didn’t
have
any valuables besides Thriller, and even that might be worth nothing if they didn’t work fast.

“Come on.” Max touched her arm. “We’re all set.”

They rode up to the fourth floor in silence. It felt strange to walk down a hotel corridor with a fresh key card and no luggage, and felt stranger still to have Max open the door for her. She turned to thank him, to ask what room he’d be in, but he followed close on her heels, crowding her into the room.

When she stepped back, he turned and shut the door, locked it and set the chain.

He glanced at her, eyes hard. “It won’t keep you in, but I’ll hear if you try to run.”

Awkwardness morphed to confusion. “If I
what?
” Then she understood and anger burned away the weaker emotions. “Why the hell would I run?”

The corner of his mouth kicked up, but there was no humor in his expression. “That’s what you do. You run.”

Her blood ran cold even as her face flamed. “Not. This. Time.”

Not ever again.

He reached into the heavy leather jacket he wore over his flannel shirt and pulled out a folded sheaf of papers. “Then what is this?”

Raine took the papers, which proved to be the e-ticket Detective Marcus had asked about, along with a boarding pass and itinerary. They were all in the name of Corraine Asherton, who was apparently traveling to Madrid that night.

There was no return flight.

“What was the plan?” Max asked, voice dangerously low. “Hire me to make it look like you were sticking it out, then fake your own death in a house fire?” He muttered a curse. “All that about not being able to afford a retainer was bull, wasn’t it? You’ve probably already stashed the money overseas. No doubt you’ve—”

“Stop it!” she said sharply, anger and denial
forming a hot, messy ball in her throat. “Stop saying that! I wasn’t leaving. These aren’t my tickets. I’ve never seen them before in my life!”

His eyes darkened and he deliberately took a single step away from her, as though stopping himself from doing something he’d regret, or maybe reminding himself not to. Voice sharp, he said, “When you left Boston General, your boss tried to pay me for the time I’d spent watching out for you. I wouldn’t let him, because I figured it’d been my decision to stay, and because the danger turned out to have come from inside the hospital.” He shrugged. “Maybe I felt responsible, maybe I wanted to hold on to the resentment. I don’t know. But I do know that whether I volunteered or not, you used me. You hung on to me and begged me to tell you it would be okay. You implied there was something between us, something we should work on once you were out of the hospital. That was a lie, though, wasn’t it? As soon as you got what you wanted, you took off.”

Raine braced herself against the words, against the sting of accusation in his eyes, which seemed bigger than the situation warranted. But she’d known this was coming. She’d been prepared for it, as much as she could have prepared to deal with a mistake as big as this one. “I know this sounds bad, Max, but it wasn’t about you. It was about me.
I couldn’t deal with being around people who knew I had miscarried. I felt like every time someone looked at me, they were thinking about my uterus, wondering how I’d ended up pregnant by a man I’d already divorced. It was…” She searched for the word and finally said, “It was invasive.”

“So you ran,” he said flatly.

“I escaped,” she countered. “But I’m sorry for hurting you.”

“You didn’t hurt me. You made me feel like an idiot.” He looked at her then, and there was no warmth in his eyes. “I won’t let that happen again. I’m not going to let you put me on this case and then disappear.”

A chill shimmered through her body. “What does that mean?”

He shucked off his jacket and tossed it on the bed nearest the door. “That means I’m going to stick with you for the duration, babe. Consider this an added bonus. You’ve just bought yourself a round-the-clock bodyguard.”

Chapter Four

“Are you trying to punish her or protect her?” William asked the next morning, his voice tinny with a bad cell connection and background noise.

Max leaned up against the wall outside the hotel room, partly to give Raine privacy while she showered and dressed, partly to give himself a moment of breathing air that held no hint of her scent, no warm sense of the false intimacy created by sleeping in the same room with her once again. “Would it make me a bad person if I said it was a little bit of both?”

William chuckled. “No. It’d make you an honest one.” Then his tone sobered. “Watch yourself, though, for both of our sakes. This is going to be a high-profile case—it’s going to play out in the media as much as in the FDA and the courts. If things go wrong and you’re on camera defending her…”

“I won’t be on camera,” Max said tightly. “And
I won’t be defending her unless I have evidence worth defending. So far, I don’t.” Hell, he didn’t have much besides the reports of four dead women, a thin file of papers that said Thriller shouldn’t be lethal, and a house fire that was either attempted murder or attempted escape, depending on whether he believed Raine or the weak-seeming evidence.

“Just be careful, okay?”

Though Max knew William wasn’t just talking about the case anymore, he said, “Don’t worry. I’ve got it under control.”

But once he’d hung up, his optimism drained quickly. He had a bad feeling about the case. About Raine.

Was she in danger, or just dangerous?

The hotel-room door opened, framing her at the threshold. She was wearing the same clothes she’d been in when she’d knocked on his apartment door the previous day, but the expensive black pants were worn-looking, her camel-colored sweater was snagged and smeared with soot, her red wool jacket hung limply and the hat was long gone.

Without it, she looked less mysterious and more vulnerable, an impression that was only heightened by the dark smudges beneath her eyes, mute testimony to the awkward night they’d passed, together, yet not together at all.

She’d tossed and turned well past 3:00 a.m. He
knew that for a fact because he’d been awake, restless in his own bed, listening to her breathe.