Yuletide Protector (Love Inspired Suspense) (11 page)

George lifted his shoulder, his hands hidden deep in the pockets of his tweed coat. “So, what are you two? An item?”

“What’s it to you?” Kevin retorted. “You’re divorced, remember?”

“How could I forget? But what is
your
role here?” George’s eyes became ice. It was something Daria had never seen before and it turned her cold as fear crawled under her skin.

“I’m her bodyguard,” Kevin said.

George’s laugh was like nails against slate, grating on every nerve ending in her body.

“That’s an interesting way to put it. I wouldn’t count too much on his abilities, Daria. As I understand it, his reputation is under scrutiny. You wouldn’t want a guard who gets so close that he can’t see danger coming.”

Eyes widening, Daria said, “What are you talking about?”

“Get in the truck, Daria,” Kevin said through clenched teeth. “We’re done here.”

She stared at the two men, a war raging inside her. Then, her insides shaking, Daria climbed into the truck and locked the door. Kevin didn’t need her protection against George. And George? She needed to be as far away from him as she could get. He wanted to kill her. She could see it in his eyes even as he smiled at her.

How could this be the man she’d married? How did she not know this side of him?

A few seconds later Kevin climbed into the truck, as well. George walked away toward the back of the parking lot.

“What did he say?”

Kevin glared in George’s direction. “He gave me a line about donating blood.”

She glanced across the parking lot to the blood-drive mobile. George was walking in that direction.

“It might not be a line. Ever since I’ve known George he’s donated blood regularly.”

“Right. I remember you telling me that before. He’s afraid of tainted blood.”

Daria nodded. “He’s scared of germs and catching something from someone else. So every few months he goes to donate blood and have it frozen in case he ever needs it.”

“Interesting. If he’s that much of a fanatic about germs, I’m surprised he’s risking a donation at a bloodmobile in a parking lot instead of at a sterile hospital.”

“I’m finding out that George is full of surprises.” Daria watched George’s movement in her rearview mirror. “What did he mean about you being under scrutiny?”

“He’s playing with me.”

“Kevin, how could he have known…”

“That I was in your house when the window was broken?” Kevin shook his head. “I don’t know. Ski was watching him. Carlisle was home the other night and never even went for his walk. The night guard verified it.”

“Maybe it was just a figure of speech.”

“Maybe.”

Daria’s blood turned cold. “Do you think George will follow us?”

Kevin took his eyes off the road for a brief moment and looked at her. The ferocious look on his face told her that for George’s sake, the answer had better be no.

D
aria wanted to cry. A bomb had gone off in her backyard. At least, it looked that way.

They’d been gone only a few hours, but the damage that had been done was extensive. The previously white blanket of snow that had made her house and yard look like a Christmas card now looked ugly and dirty, mixed with dirt around the yard.

The tulip bulbs she’d spent hours selecting and then planting last fall had been uprooted. Daria’s spirits plummeted even further as she stepped out of her truck. Her mood hadn’t even had a chance to level itself off after seeing George at the home-improvement store. Now this.

Spot was barking like a rabid animal in the next yard. If not for the fact that the snow shovels were strewn about in the backyard next to the dug-up flower beds, Daria would think the dog had broken free from his chain and had a field day digging yet another huge hole in her flower bed, as he had during the fall.

“Who would do this? Why would they do this?” she said, mostly under her breath. Tears filled her eyes and her bottom lip trembled as she eyed the destruction of
all her hard work. She clamped her teeth over her lip before Kevin came up beside her.

“Let’s get you into the house. Then I’ll check with the neighbor across the street to see if they saw anyone,” Kevin said. “If we get some witnesses to the vandalism I can file a report.”

“What good is a report going to do? They keep coming back here.”

The tension that had plagued Kevin throughout the ride back from the home-improvement store had now changed to worry. Pushing a lock of hair out of her face, Daria grimaced at the sight in front of her.

“My every attempt to beautify my yard seems to have been a waste of time.”

Daria could only stand and stare at the destruction until she felt Kevin’s gentle hand on her arm.

“Let me check the house first and then I’ll go see if the neighbors saw anything.”

Stumbling up the back-porch stairs, she slipped the key into the dead bolt on the back door. Try as she might, though, it wouldn’t budge.

Irritation bubbled up inside her and she groaned. “This is odd. It’s usually the front door that gives me trouble, not the back door.”

Frustrated and feeling utterly defeated, she jiggled the key in the lock, tears blurring her vision.

“Let me try.”

Kevin reached around her, but she swatted his hand away. Not only did she not want him to see her tears, she was determined to get the door open on her own.

“Put a little more pressure on it.”

“I’ll break the key in the lock if I force it any more.”

“I might be able to get it to turn.”

Giving in to defeat, she allowed Kevin to step in front of her and try the lock.

Kevin inspected the lock and began to jiggle the key.

“Have there always been scrapings around the keyhole?” he asked.

“What scrapings?”

Before Daria could see what he was talking about, the key turned.

“There,” Kevin said with a grunt.

Opening the door and swinging it wide, Daria breezed by Kevin and walked into the kitchen first. As soon as she did, she stopped short and charged back, colliding with his chest.

Her body grew cold.

Kevin wrapped his arm around her as she fell against his chest, trembling violently. The quiet sobs that escaped from her lips made it difficult to speak.

“What is it?”

Holding Daria with one arm, Kevin pushed into the kitchen and immediately froze. She glanced back over her shoulder to see if what she’d seen was really there.

In a large heap on the floor was the hummingbird vine Daria had pointed out to Kevin that first morning. It sat on top of a large pile of dirt in the middle of the kitchen floor among the bulbs she’d planted last fall. It all looked ominous. The flowers George had given her, decayed from having been tossed in the compost pile for days, were arranged in a vase on the counter.

“Daria, I want you to get in my truck, lock the doors and stay there.”

“No,” she said on a sob.

“Get in the truck,” Kevin said, his voice low but stern. “They may still be in the house.”

Staring at the floor, she said, “And if they come running outside, I won’t be safe there, either. The only place where I’m safe is with you.”

Kevin didn’t seem happy with her answer, but he didn’t argue. Instead, he listened for obvious signs the intruders were still on the premises. Daria didn’t hear any movement, but that didn’t mean a thing.

Daria closed her eyes and hugged her middle as Kevin walked into the living room, gun drawn. She stood in the center of her kitchen, looking at the dirt on the floor from the pulled-up tulips as tears burned her eyes.

A stranger had been in her house and had breached that little sense of safety she felt. Even with Kevin sitting out front for days, someone had still had the nerve to break in and…Where did Kevin go?

Daria ran a few steps down the hall and immediately realized she should have stayed in the kitchen. In the living room, she was greeted by the sight of the Christmas tree knocked over on its side on top of more dirt. The lights were hanging off the branches and the popcorn garland she’d painstakingly strung was half on the tree and half on the dirt pile.

Unable to look at it, Daria turned and stalked past Kevin toward the stairway.

“Where are you going?” Kevin asked.

“I’ll be right back.” And she disappeared into the darkness.

“Wait, I haven’t checked upstairs.” But she was already gone.

Kevin fumed as he raced up the stairs after Daria. Somehow, with all the precautions they’d taken, George had still managed to touch her. And while this mess
looked like random street-kid vandalism, the flowers in the vase screamed personal. George may not have used his own hands, but he’d definitely found a way to reach in, grab Daria and scare the daylights out of her. The question was, why? After everything he’d done to hide the fact that he was trying to get at Daria, why would he broadcast it like this?

“Watch out for the eighth step. It’s very weak. I haven’t had a chance to fix it yet,” he heard Daria yell down as his boots hit the worn wood.

The wood groaned beneath his foot. He felt a slight bend, and Kevin figured he’d found what she was hollering about. Searching the darkness, he grazed the wall until he found the light switch. When he flicked it on, the room remained dark. The only light in the room was what was coming in from downstairs.

“There isn’t any power up here,” she called out. “There was a bad leak in the roof and it did a lot of damage in one of the rooms. The roof is fixed, but some of the electrical wiring needs to be replaced, so I had an electrician shut off the upstairs power for now.”

A small beam of light came on in the last room down at the end of the hall. Kevin found Daria on the floor among some scattered boxes holding a large battery-powered emergency flashlight and poring over a large opened box.

“The only things of importance I have I keep up here because I don’t want them to get ruined while I work. These don’t look like they’ve been touched,” she said, sniffing and wiping her wet cheeks with a quick swipe of her hand.

Kevin glanced around the room, walked over to the closet and opened it.

“I already checked it. There’s no one up here.”

“You should have waited for me,” he said.

He heard her big sigh of relief. “Thank goodness, it’s still here.”

“What?”

“My great-grandmother’s bracelet. It’s the only thing I own, besides the house, that is of any real value. It’s not worth a lot of money, maybe a few hundred dollars, but it’s been in my family for a long time. It was the one thing my parents always let me keep when we moved. I would have been heartbroken if it had been taken.”

“We need to check the rest of the house,” he said. “Why don’t you pack all that away and come downstairs.”

“I will in a sec.”

Kevin smiled, shaking his head as he turned away and walked to the doorway.
Stubborn woman.
He waited for Daria by the door. There was no way he was going to leave her alone until he knew where and how the vandal had gotten into the house.

They both went downstairs and he called the station as Daria looked around. He figured they could leave the bedroom for last, although in reality that was where thieves did the most damage. Most of a person’s valuable possessions were kept in the bedroom in “secret” places under the mattress or in a hidden drawer.

One thing was for sure, finding evidence that a thief had rummaged through your most personal belongings was never easy, regardless of whether or not something was taken. It robbed a person of something much more valuable than money. It took away their sense of security. And Kevin knew Daria had already been struggling to hold on to hers.

By the time Jake arrived, Daria had confirmed that nothing on the main floor appeared disturbed except for the uprooted flowers in the kitchen and the overturned Christmas tree in the living room.

“It doesn’t look like there was any forced entry on the main floor,” Kevin said. “Although they definitely tried the back door. There are markings all over the lock. That’s why you had a hard time with the key. They probably damaged the lock.”

Jake pulled out a small brush and bottle of powder from the fingerprint-dusting kit. “What about the basement?” he asked.

“The bulkhead is wooden,” Daria answered. “I haven’t had a chance to replace that with a metal one yet. The wood may have been weaker than I realized.”

“That may be how they got in.”

Daria followed Kevin and Jake down to the basement, staying one step behind. Even though the small light at the base of the stairs was lit, Jake panned the musty cellar with the flashlight, delving into dark corners. Except for Daria’s tools and an old table saw, the cellar was virtually empty. A short flight of stairs led to the closed bulkhead in the back of the basement.

Jake walked to the bulkhead and shone the light on the stairs. A long split in the wood by the frame said it all.

“That’s how he got in,” he said. But Daria wasn’t paying attention. Instead, she was on the floor by the pile of tools, picking them up and putting them into their rightful place.

Kevin held her hand back. “Don’t touch them yet. Don’t touch anything.”

Daria groaned, leaning back on her heels. “They took my big wrench. I can’t tell you how many times that
thing saved me from having a flooded basement before the plumbers did their repairs.”

“Is the wrench all that is missing?”

She looked around. “I think so. They made a mess of my toolbox. These tools cost a small fortune and are too valuable with the work I’m doing in the house for me to just keep them on the ground like that.”

Jake moved away from the door and shone a light in the direction of the strewn-about tools. “Any chance you could have left the missing wrench somewhere else in the house when you were working?”

Daria glanced up at him, lifting an eyebrow in challenge.

With a chuckle, Jake said, “Guess not.” He snapped off the flashlight. “Is Ski tailing Carlisle today?”

Kevin shook his head. “Ski had to work with his dad today. You were on duty, so there wasn’t anyone else to tail him since the department won’t foot the bill. We didn’t have to worry about what George was up to though. He found us at the home-improvement store.”

“Any incident?”

“Other than sending my blood pressure through the roof, no. He made some veiled threats but nothing concrete enough to take action.”

“So this couldn’t be his handiwork.”

“Not directly, anyway. Maybe he wanted us to see him at the home-improvement store to give him an alibi at the exact time he had someone here.”

Jake made a face. “That’s speculation. We can’t prove that Carlisle had anything to do with this at all.”

Daria had been quiet until now. “Why would kids put those flowers he gave me in a vase? They’d have left them on the compost pile.”

That thought nagged at Kevin. But everything about this break-in screamed amateur.

“What are you thinking?” Daria asked.

Kevin sighed. They’d dust the tools. See if they could lift a print or two off one of them they could use to find out just who was involved. If they managed to make a match, they’d question the kids, see if Carlisle hired them to do the deed.

“Any pro who’s been around knows what’s valuable. Professional thieves know a gold bracelet like the one you have upstairs is easy to trace at a pawnshop. It’s unique. Not to say they wouldn’t take it if that was all they found. But if they came in through that bulkhead like we think, they would have hit pay dirt right here. You have a gold mine in this basement.”

“What do you mean?”

“Tools, the good stuff like you have here, can’t be traced and they gain high money on the open market. If whoever broke into the house knew what he was doing,” Kevin said, pointing to the back of the cellar, “he’d have stopped right here, took what he could carry and left without ever making it upstairs. There wouldn’t have been any need to go farther.”

“What about the mess in the kitchen?”

“That’s the point,” Jake said. “Whoever did this was probably an amateur. The temptation of what you have here would have been too great for a professional thief. But nothing was taken. Whoever did this came here with a purpose. Not to steal from you. Maybe it was kids trying to have fun. Maybe it was something else. Regardless, I’m going to get started on those fingerprints.”

When Jake went upstairs, Daria sighed, brushing her
hands on the thighs of her jeans. “I’d better go clean upstairs before the whole house smells like compost.”

Kevin couldn’t take it anymore. “Hold on a sec.”

Taking two steps toward her, he gathered Daria into his arms. He’d wanted to give her space. But he couldn’t bear to just stand there while she looked so hurt.

“You don’t have to hold it all in,” he said. “It’s perfectly natural to have a good cry.”

“I already did that upstairs.”

“I don’t mean a few tears. I mean, a good cry. You know, the kind where you just let someone else take care of you for a little bit while you have a meltdown? You hold so much in and take it all on your own shoulders, but you don’t have to.”