He cursed again, dismissing that. “I’m a deputy sheriff.”
“And that didn’t stop him from getting to me,” Paige reminded him just as quickly.
Good grief, she might as well have slugged him with a two-by-four. Because it was the truth. And it was a truth that Jax had struggled with for the past year.
He hadn’t managed to save her.
But someone obviously had.
“What happened?” he demanded.
She paused, gathered her breath. Maybe her thoughts, too. “By the time the San Antonio cops got to the crime scene, I was barely alive. In fact, the first cop on the scene did report me as dead. That’s the report that went out to you and everybody else. But the paramedics managed to revive me in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. I knew if word got out that I was alive, the killer would just come after me again.”
He mentally went through all the details and saw one big question at the end of that explanation. “Who helped you come up with this stupid plan?”
“I came up with it.” She glanced around again. “And I convinced a cop at SAPD who knew about me to go along with it.”
Jax didn’t miss the glancing around, nor the hesitation in her voice.
“Who helped you?” he pressed.
She dodged his gaze. “Other than the cop, Cord Granger helped.”
Jax would have cursed again if he could have gotten his jaw unclenched. Cord Granger, a DEA agent. Also the biological brother to his adopted sister, Addie.
Cord and Addie’s father was none other than the Moonlight Strangler himself. Though the law didn’t have the actual identity of the vicious serial killer, they knew from DNA comparisons that both Cord and Addie were his biological children. Children the killer had abandoned when they were a little more than toddlers, and neither had any recollections of the man.
Too bad.
If they had a name, then they could find and arrest the piece of slime.
Something that Cord had made his top priority.
Jax had never cared much for Cord. And this wouldn’t help. Because Cord was much more concerned about catching his birth father than he was with the safety of the people around him. Jax wouldn’t have put it past the man to actually use Paige to draw the killer out. And now he’d apparently put Paige up to lying to him.
Not just any old lie, either.
But one that’d crushed Jax and the rest of his family.
“You were a fool to trust Cord,” he finally managed to say. Jax shoved his thumb against his chest. “You should have trusted me instead.”
She huffed. Not an angry sound, but more like stating the obvious. “We weren’t exactly in a good place, Jax.”
That was the wrong thing to say. A new wave of anger came. “You’re sure you didn’t die because you didn’t want to face the divorce?” Or maybe because she hadn’t wanted to face him?
Her eyes narrowed when their gazes connected again. “No. It was to save Matthew and you.”
Jax didn’t have time to figure out if he believed that or not. Because he heard something he didn’t want to hear.
Belinda’s voice.
“Jax, are you all right?” the nanny called out.
Belinda was on the back porch, peering into the garage. She could almost certainly see him, but probably not Paige. Paige kept it that way by stepping into the shadows.
“Tell her to go back inside,” Paige insisted.
Jax opened his mouth to ask why, but because he was watching Paige so closely, he saw the urgency slide across her face.
And the fear.
“I’m fine,” he told Belinda. “Just checking a few things before I head to the office.”
He waited to see if that’d be enough or if he truly would have to tell her to go inside. But thankfully, it worked. Belinda went back in and closed the door.
“What happened?” Jax asked Paige. And he didn’t need his lawman’s instincts to tell him that not only had something happened...
Something had gone wrong.
“What made you come back now?” he pressed.
The fear in her face went up a significant notch. “I think the Moonlight Strangler is on his way here to draw me out.”
All right. That upped his concern, too. A lot. “And how exactly would he do that?”
Paige’s mouth trembled. “The Moonlight Strangler is coming after Matthew and you...tonight.”
Paige stood there and waited for Jax to react to the news she’d just delivered.
And he reacted all right.
He turned, ready to bolt inside the house. To protect Matthew, no doubt. But Paige took hold of his arm to stop him.
“Just listen to what I have to say,” she insisted. “I don’t want to give the Moonlight Strangler a reason to fire shots into the house.”
He slung off her grip. “Neither do I, but I’m not going to stand here while he goes after my son.”
Our son, she nearly corrected, but Paige figured that was a different battle for a different time. They had to survive this one first.
“The killer likely knows I’m here,” she explained, hoping it would get Jax to stay put. “I figure he’s watching me. Somehow. Maybe with cameras. Maybe he’s out there somewhere in the woods with infrared equipment. He’s been watching me for the past three days, though I haven’t spotted him yet.”
Jax’s eyes narrowed. “And even though you knew he was watching, you brought him here, to my doorstep?”
She had no trouble hearing the anger in his voice. Or seeing it on his face. “I didn’t have a choice.”
“There’s always a choice,” he snapped.
They weren’t just talking about her being here now, but all the other things that’d happened between them. Again, another battle, another time.
Paige stopped him again when he tried to bolt. “The killer would have come here no matter what I did because he knew he’d be able to use Matthew and you to get to me.”
He went still. Not in a good way. But in that calm, almost lethal way of a lawman who’d just heard something he didn’t want to hear. “And how the heck do you know that?”
“Because he’s sent me several texts. And, yes, I’m certain they’re from the Moonlight Strangler because he knew details about my attack that hadn’t been released to the press. In the last one he sent, he said if I didn’t meet him tonight at 9:00 p.m., then he’d go after Matthew and you.”
That was still nearly two hours away.
Not much time to pull off a miracle. But it might be enough time to bring all of this to an end. An end that would keep Matthew and Jax out of danger.
Jax stood there, obviously processing that, and cursed again. Glared at her, too.
She deserved the profanity and the glare. Deserved every drop of rage that he wanted to sling at her. Because he was right. She had turned his life upside down. Her precious little boy’s, too.
“If you knew the killer was watching you, following you, then why hide here?” Jax asked.
She’d