Читать книгу Watching Over Her - Lisa Childs, Carla Cassidy - Страница 25

Chapter Seventeen

“I’m sorry,” Blaine said, his voice gruff from the smoke that still burned in his throat and saturated his hair and clothes. “I didn’t mean to scare you.” He slid his hand from her lips. But he wanted to cover her mouth again—with his. He wanted to kiss her.

Maggie sat up and threw her arms around his neck. “You did scare me—so badly,” she said as she trembled against him. “I thought you didn’t make it out of Ash’s house.”

“Where is Ash?” he asked, furious that his friend hadn’t been the one guarding her door. Dalton Reyes had been standing outside, and while Blaine admired what he’d done with the Bureau, he wasn’t sure he could trust him, even though Ash obviously did.

“I begged him to look for you,” she said.

Begged or manipulated? He shook off the thought, angry with himself for letting Tammy Doremire get to him. She was probably the real manipulator. “Why?” he asked.

“I wanted to make sure that you hadn’t had aftereffects from the smoke,” she said.

“I’m fine.” But he wasn’t. He was in even more danger than her almost sister-in-law had warned him about. He was in love with his witness.

“Then where were you all this time?” she asked, her eyes glistening in the darkness as she stared up at him.

Guilt and regret tugged at him for leaving her alone. After the fire, she had to have been terrified. But apparently she’d been more concerned about his safety than hers or she wouldn’t have sent her protection away. She wouldn’t have sent Ash out to find him.

Anger at Ash flashed through him, but then, he couldn’t blame the man for letting her get to him. She had gotten to Blaine, too.

“I was working the case,” he said. “Trying to track down a suspect.”

“Mark?” she asked. From her tone it was obvious that she was still reluctant to believe Andy’s brother could have anything to do with the robberies.

“I went to see Tammy Doremire to see if she’d heard from her husband yet.” Mark was definitely one of the robbers—probably the mastermind, no matter that his wife thought he was an idiot.

“Has she heard from him?” she asked with more concern than suspicion.

He shook his head.

“He’s her husband,” she said. “How can she not know where he is?”

“I don’t think their marriage is that great,” Blaine said. His sisters would have killed their husbands if they’d gone hours, let alone days, without checking in with them. Hell, Buster probably knew where her husband was every minute of every day.

“Is he seeing someone else?” Maggie wondered.

“Maybe.” He was thinking of Susan Iverson, but he added, “She thinks you know where he is.”

She gasped. “I don’t.”

“She thinks you two may have been involved.” He could believe that Mark had been interested in Maggie. But he believed that she thought of the man only as an older brother—maybe as a link to her dead fiancé.

She gasped. “That’s crazy.” And she drew back from him. “Do you think that, too?”

“No.” He trusted her. He believed her.

But then he worried that maybe he was being a fool. Maybe she had manipulated him just as Tammy had warned. Maybe Maggie had manipulated Blaine into falling in love with her. Or maybe he was just scared that for the first time in his life he’d fallen in love and he worried that she would never be able to fully love him back. Not when her heart still belonged to her dead fiancé.

* * *

BLAINE WAS STANDING there right in front of her, right beside her hospital bed, but Maggie felt him pulling away from her. Whatever Tammy had said must have gotten to him—must have gotten him doubting her.

She felt like a suspect again.

“If I knew where he was, I would tell you,” she said. Not because she thought Mark was guilty of anything, but to prove his innocence. Then Blaine would be able to focus on who was really involved in the robberies.

“His wife thinks you know...”

“His wife is paranoid,” she said. Tammy had never been nice to her; she was the kind of woman who couldn’t be friends with other women. “She’s delusional, too, if she thinks I’m having an affair with her husband.”

“Maybe there’s another reason you might know where Mark is,” Blaine said. “Maybe he’s hiding someplace that Andy might have gone. Did he have an apartment or a house of his own?”

Everything kept coming back to Andy and those damn letters she’d written him. If only she’d had something to tell him about other than her job.

If only she’d had the guts to tell him about her feelings, her true feelings...

She shook her head. “No, it would have been crazy for him to have a house or apartment when he was hardly ever home. Andy stayed with his parents whenever he was home on leave—which hadn’t been that often since he joined the Marines after high school.”

“He wasn’t home much?”

After seeing how mean a drunk his father was, she understood why he hadn’t come home a lot. “No.”

Then she remembered that he hadn’t always come home. “He did sometimes stay somewhere else...” She should have thought of it earlier, but it was a place she’d wanted to forget.

That muscle twitched in Blaine’s soot-streaked cheek. “Your place?”

“No.” As much as she had missed her best friend when he’d been gone so long, she hadn’t wanted him to stay with her. She hadn’t wanted him to think they were more than they were. She should have said no when he asked her to marry him; she should have refused that ring.

“Then where else had he stayed?” Blaine asked.

“The Doremires have a cabin near Lake Michigan—at least, they had it before Andy died,” she said. “I’m not sure if they kept it after they divorced. I can call Mrs. Doremire and ask...”

He shook his head. “No. Let me check it out. I don’t want anyone tipping off Mark before I can track him down.”

“I’m not so sure his mother would call him.” Especially since she hadn’t seemed to want anything to do with her life before Andy’s death.

Janet Doremire was right—that life was too short to waste. The fire had proved that to Maggie. She was lucky that she hadn’t lost her baby and Blaine.

“I don’t want to take that risk. Where is the cabin?” he asked.

“It’s north of where they live,” she said. “Close to Pentwater. But I don’t know the name of the actual road. I would need to show you where it is.”

He shook his head. “I can’t take you along with me. I’ll be able to find it. I know that area.”

“But you sound like you’re from out East,” she said.

“New Hampshire,” he said. “But my sister lives near Pentwater.”

“Which sister?”

“Buster.”

She wanted to meet all of his sisters, but most of all Buster because he talked about her with the most affection and exasperation.

“It’s good you have family within a four-hour drive.” Her family was too far away to offer much support. “So maybe you will stay here even after you find these robbers?”

He shrugged. “I can’t think about that until I finish up this case.”

Probably because he would be moving on to the next case.

“I need to find that cabin,” he said.

“It’s really remote and hard to find,” she warned him. Even if she could talk Blaine into taking her along, she wasn’t certain that she would be able to find the cabin again. She had gone there only a couple of times with Andy—one summer during high school and most recently when he had proposed to her. She shouldn’t have gone then. She should have known what he was going to ask her.

“It sounds like the perfect place to hide,” Blaine murmured. “He has to be there.”

Maybe he was. “But just finding Mark won’t prove him guilty of the robberies.”

“I’m hoping to find more than Mark. I’m hoping to find the guns, the cash. Hell, if it’s so remote, it might be their hideout.”

And that meant that he might find not just Mark there, but the other robbers—if Mark really was involved.

“You can’t go alone,” she warned him. “Not if there’s any chance that it’s their hideout...”

Because they weren’t going to want to be found. Blaine hadn’t died in the fire, but that didn’t mean that he was safe—especially since he kept willingly risking his life.

* * *

BLAINE COULDN’T TAKE her along for so many reasons, but he missed Maggie when she wasn’t with him. He worried about her. The doctors had assured them that she was fine. They had even released her.

In his opinion, that had been too soon. But then, keeping her in the hospital wouldn’t have ensured her safety. Someone had nearly abducted her from an ER. Had nearly burned her up in the home of an FBI agent.

Maggie wasn’t safe anywhere.

Hell, he couldn’t even trust her safety to a friend like Ash. She’d gotten to him. So he’d left her in the protection of the one person he knew who could not be sweet-talked or manipulated.

Maggie would be safe.

But as his SUV bounced over the ruts of the two-lane road leading to the cabin, he wondered about his own safety. The place wasn’t just remote. It was isolated. He had seen nothing but trees for a long while. This was the kind of place where serial killers would bring their victims, so nobody could hear their screams for help.

Blaine shuddered with foreboding. But maybe he was just overreacting, as Maggie kept insisting. Maybe Mark wasn’t involved. Maybe he was just taking a time-out from his jealous wife and his drunken father and the loss of his brother...

Maybe the guy really had nothing to do with the robberies, and Dalton Reyes’s informant had identified the wrong guy. As Maggie had pointed out, a lot of guys looked like Mark Doremire. Andy had. Hell, even Ash did.

Even though he would have to start all over looking for suspects, Blaine almost hoped Mark had nothing to do with the robberies. If he didn’t, Blaine could just check in with him and make sure that everything was all right with the man.

Then he could return to Maggie and ease her worries about her letters to Andy inspiring the robberies. She already took on too much responsibility for everything that had happened. Maybe that was his fault, too—for being so suspicious of her. Maybe he should have told her that he trusted her.

Instead he had pulled away from her. Physically and emotionally. He needed distance. He needed perspective. Hell, maybe if Mark wasn’t at the cabin, Blaine would hang out for a while. He would try to regain his lost perspective.

But he worried that time and distance wouldn’t change his feelings for Maggie. He would probably always love her. And she would probably always love Andy.

Finally some of the trees gave way on one side of the two-track road, making a small space for a little log cabin. Blaine couldn’t see any vehicles. Only a small space of the dense woods had been cleared for the cabin, so he doubted there were any vehicles parked around the back.

Maybe Maggie had been right. Mark wasn’t here. Coming here had probably been a waste of Blaine’s time. Because no matter how much distance he gained, he was unlikely to gain any new insights.

Still, he shut off the SUV and stepped out of it. He would take some more time to enjoy the silence.

To clear his head.

But the silence shattered as gunfire erupted. And Blaine worried that he was more likely to lose his head than clear it.