The air trapped in her lungs broke free in a sob. She nodded. Her voice wasn’t in her command anymore—she couldn’t trust herself to speak, so she didn’t answer him. He pulled her into his arms, held her so tightly she thought she might just become a part of him. There was nothing but him, and her, and their child. He cupped the back of her head, kissed her cheek, her temple.
“Don’t cry, Ivy. Don’t cry. You’ll be in my every thought, every dream, every breath. I love you so much, honey.” He kissed her mouth, the softest, sweetest kiss he’d ever given her. “You’re why I graduated today, you know. I will make you proud. I’ll write you every week. If I can’t mail the letters during boot camp, I will right after. I’ll call when I can. I’ll take care of you, Ivy.”
Someone was pulling them apart from each other. She cried out, “Kit—oh, God, Kit. Don’t do this. Don’t go. Don’t leave me.”
The soldier and the sheriff drew him toward the car. “I’m not leaving you, Ivy,” he said, looking back at her. “I love you. I always will.”
Ivy covered her face and wept. Her dad yanked her hands from her face and spun her around. “Now watch him leave. You watch that punk walk away. He doesn’t want a whore. No one does.”
Ivy shut her diner down for the night, turning the big “Open for Home-Cooked Meals” sign to its flipside that read “See you in the morning!” She checked the front door to be sure it was locked. Her employees were switching off lights as they exited from the back of the building. Following the trail of deepening shadows, she returned to her small office behind the kitchen.
A stack of invoices awaited payment. And she had a daily inventory to take. She stared at the papers, but couldn’t focus on them. Now that she was alone in her building, the silence was oppressive. She glanced at her cell phone, then quickly looked away. Giving any focus to it might summon the man she’d been struggling to get out of her head. Kit Bolanger. Nearly six and a half feet of coiled muscle and focused intent, the ex-spec ops soldier had been her boyfriend in high school and was her daughter’s father. He’d appointed himself their protector—protection they’d never needed until he came back into their lives.
Something about him stripped her of her good sense. He was like a drug to her. An addiction. A day didn’t go by that she didn’t think about him, didn’t think about what might have been. Like any addiction, she knew she had to resist his seductive pull. He wanted to pick up where they left off, but she wasn’t going down that road a second time. He wasn’t the staying kind. Losing him the first time had almost killed her; she couldn’t risk falling for him a second time.
She grabbed a clipboard with an inventory checklist and hurried out of the office into the unlit corridor. The invoices could wait until tomorrow, but she needed to check her food stores for the next day. She was stalling for more time before having to face Kit again. He’d wanted her to call before the diner closed, which she hadn’t done. She had a business to run and wasn’t finished with her tasks. Her daughter was safe at the house where Kit had settled them after the home invasion earlier in the week. Kit’s sister, Mandy, and several others were there if Casey needed anything. It made sense to take advantage of the time here and get some things accomplished.
The basement access was behind a closed door, tucked underneath the flight that led up to the next floor. The transom windows over the front and back doors let the late evening light into the corridor. The daily inventory was a quick task; she’d be back up before it was fully dark. She unlocked the door, then flipped on the basement lights. The bare bulb over the stairs sent out a burst of light, then blinked out. Making a mental note to replace it, she started down.
When she took over the restaurant a year ago, she’d removed the junk hoard the previous owner had left in the basement, cleaned every inch of it, then gave the old brick walls a fresh coat of whitewash. The shelves, refrigerators, and freezers were laid out with a crisp precision that made daily inventories easy.
Halfway through her checklist, she heard a noise upstairs. Her diner was one of a dozen buildings on either side of Wolf Creek Bend’s Main Street—all three blocks of it. The building next to her housed a twenty-four-hour gym. Sometimes sounds from there carried over in strange ways to her building.
That wasn’t the case now.
What she’d heard came from the stairs to the apartments—the unoccupied apartments above her diner. She clutched the clipboard to her chest and quieted her breathing as she waited for the sound to come again.
And it did. A distinct creaking of the old wooden stairs.
Oh. God.
No one was supposed to be in the building. One of the employees might have returned for something they’d forgotten, but no one had any business going up to the apartments. The lights were mostly off in the diner, but on down here. Whoever it was had to be up to mischief. They’d see the light and find her.
She hurried to the switch at the base of the stairs and flipped it off, blanketing the basement in darkness. Hopefully, without the light over the stairs, whoever was in her building hadn’t seen the thin line of light beneath the basement door and wouldn’t think to look for her down there. She had no choice now but to call Kit. She reached into her pocket for her phone, then remembered she’d left it on her desk.
Cripes, her heart was beating so hard, she was certain the sound would give her away. How many people were up there? The door to the diner was only a few feet from the basement door. Could she make it up the stairs and into the diner before anyone saw her?
She hadn’t locked the diner’s door when she came down here, because both external entrances to the corridor were supposed to be locked. Of course, she hadn’t checked them. And now, she wished she’d phoned Kit before everyone left, as he’d asked. After the shoot-out in town a few days earlier and the battle that had happened at Ty’s house where they were staying, she couldn’t very well argue that he was exaggerating the danger they faced. And now there was no way to reach him without getting back to her office.
Listening again, she heard the footsteps inside the front apartment now. She quietly hurried up the stairs, pausing outside the door to the hallway, listening. She couldn’t hear anything on the other side of the door. She eased the door open a crack. She couldn’t see anything in the dimly lit corridor.
Drawing a fortifying breath, she pushed the door wide open, paused for a fraction of a second. She heard nothing, saw nothing. She bolted across the hallway into the diner. Throwing the lock, she leaned against the door and released the breath she’d been holding. When her heart quit slamming against her ribs, she hurried down the narrow hallway to her office. Setting the clipboard on her desk, she reached for the phone where it had last been on top of the invoices.
It was gone.
She sent a look at the open door. The hallway was still empty, but someone had been in her office, had taken her phone. The implications of that took a full second to filter through her terror. Whoever had been here might still be inside the diner with her right now.
A landline was in her office. She could use it to call Kit or the police, but first she needed to secure her office. As she turned back toward the door, she saw the silhouette of a man stepping in front of her doorway. She gasped, then realized—seconds before she screamed—that she knew the man. It was Kit. He was here already.
Thank God.
He held up her phone. “Looking for this?”
“How did you get in here?” she asked, panting from the adrenaline still screaming through her veins.
“I let myself in.”
Relief began to mix with anger that he’d scared her. “The door was locked.”
“I unlocked it.”
“You don’t have a key.”
“I didn’t need a key.” He stepped forward into the light that spilled into the hallway from her office. He looked furious. “Where were you?”
“In the basement.” She held her ground in the face of his aggressive posture. He was nothing like her phantom memory of him. He was taller and wider, leaner and stronger. The loneliness in his blue eyes had hardened into anger.
“I thought I made it clear you weren’t to be alone in this building.”
“I have a business to run, Kit. I can’t pop in for a half-hour here and there, do a little drive-by management, and think the diner will run itself.”
“Any applicants yet from the position you posted?”
Ivy lifted her chin. They’d had a rather heated discussion about that this morning. Kit, half-owner of the diner, had insisted she hire a couple of managers to replace her—for a little while, anyway. At least until things around them calmed down. Mayhem or no, she couldn’t hand off the diner to a couple of people she didn’t know, no matter how experienced or talented they were, and expect it wouldn’t affect the business.
“Several applications came in today.”
“Good. Give it a week, then pick the best ones and interview them. I want you out of here for a while.”
“I can hire two people or I can hire five. It won’t matter. A manager isn’t the same as an owner.” She was resisting, resuming the argument where they’d left it.
“You train them to manage the day-to-day work of your diner. Then you manage them. You’ll still be making the strategic decisions for the business. You can do that with a minimum of in-person interaction. Max and Greer can get you set up with a server so you can access your software from home. If there are problems, you’ll see it pretty quickly. You can deal with the paperwork at the house. And from now on, I don’t want you to be the first in or the last out—or ever here alone.” He met her gaze, held it a moment before driving his point home. “If I could let myself in, so can my enemies. I am not flexible on this.”
Ivy looked away from him. “The diner can’t support two more salaries. Making me do this will kill what I’ve started.”
“I’ll cover the expense.”
“But why would you do that?” She shook her head. “Why?”
“Let’s just say I’m protecting my investment.”
She locked eyes with him. He was still half shrouded by the dim corridor, but the light of her desk lamp touched his face. Of course, it was all about his investment. They weren’t the people they’d been thirteen years earlier. They’d been children then. Looking at the implacable set to his jaw, she knew they’d never have made it, had fate not intervened and separated them as kids. Not for long, anyway. Not once they’d become adults.
“You’re a silent partner,” she reminded him. “You’re not involved in day-to-day operations. This isn’t your decision to make.”
He stepped closer, into the light that framed the hard contours of his face. “My job, as a silent partner, is to ensure that you, as the active partner, can do your job. You aren’t any good to me—or Casey—if you’re dead.”
“Leave my daughter out of this.”
“
Our
daughter.”
She scoffed at that. He’d never taken an active interest in Casey. “She’s not a pawn to be used in your machinations.”
“Everything and everyone is a pawn, Ivy. Don’t be naive.” He glanced at the papers on her desk. “Gather what you need. We’ll come back with Max tomorrow to get your software set up. You can do up a new schedule for your staff then.”
She turned to her desk, filled with a quiet rage. She wished she’d picked a different town to start the diner. Any town other than this. She’d worked too long and hard to become self-sufficient only to have him pull the rug out from under her. He’d backed her in the diner, helped her find an angel investor. Though she was entirely dependent on him now, the diner was doing well enough that she expected she’d be able to buy him out in another five years. Until then, she had no choice but to work with him.
Footsteps came from the floor above her. Alarmed, she flashed a look at Kit. He was unconcerned. “Max and Greer are setting up video surveillance around the building.”
“They can’t. Kit, I’m only renting this floor and the basement. They’ll have to clear it with the management company.”
“We cleared it.” A muscle ticked in the corner of his jaw.
Understanding dawned on Ivy. “You own this building, don’t you?”
For a minute, he didn’t answer. His jaw continued to bunch as he nodded. “And the house you’re renting. I don’t leave things to chance.”
Ivy shook her head. “You were the angel investor, weren’t you?”
He didn’t answer her. He didn’t need to. He’d out-maneuvered her, built walls around her before she’d even known the game was in play. He didn’t just own her livelihood or the building her business was in or the house she rented.
He owned her. She was trapped.
Her relationship with him had landed her in the middle of his war against a local prison gang and their terrorist allies. Her daughter was asleep in the house where his team of terrorist hunters lived. Her stomach knotted as she realized there was nowhere she could go with Casey that wouldn’t leave them in danger. Unless they truly made themselves disappear….
“We could run, you know.” She looked at him. “I know how to live off the grid.” She’d done it the first three years Casey was alive. Not because of a desire to lose herself in the world, but because she hadn’t known what else to do when her parents kicked her out. Without an income, she wasn’t able to rent an apartment in the beginning. And once she’d found employment as a nighttime worker cleaning offices, the pay was minimal. She hadn’t been able to afford housing in any safe neighborhoods, so she and Casey had lived in her car. Her parents’ car, actually. She had no cell phone, no credit cards, no bank account, no home address. The places where she worked paid her in cash. Living in a car was doable with an infant. It wouldn’t be as easy with a twelve-year-old.