“Your mother’s knee was bothering her, so she took some pain pills,” Dad said. “She won’t wake up for another six hours.”
That was good. At least, if the police stormed inside, her mother wouldn’t wake up.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Hart said. “I hadn’t wanted to disturb either you or your wife.”
That much Wendy believed was definitely true. Could she believe the rest of what he’d told her, though? That the chief had hired the Payne Protection to guard the principals in Luther Mills’s trial?
It made more sense than his working for Luther. Part of the reason she’d had a crush on him, besides his movie star good looks, was that he’d been such a good cop. He’d made so many arrests.
“I just really needed to see Wendy,” he continued. Then he holstered his weapon and held out his hand. “I’m Hart Fisher.”
Her father stared at his hand for a long moment. “And how do you know my daughter?”
“We used to work together,” Hart replied. “I was a River City detective.”
“Oh.” Her father nodded. “Of course…”
Had she mentioned Hart to him? She might as well have. She’d told her mother about her crush, and her parents told each other everything. Her face heated even more as her discomfort increased. She tended to share too much with her mother.
Her father extended his hand and heartily shook Hart’s. Maybe a little too heartily. Even though he was pushing seventy, her father was a big man, and the former football coach still worked out regularly.
“I’m Ben Thompson.” He greeted Hart, but he wasn’t smiling.
“I am really sorry,” Hart said again. “I just need to speak with Wendy for a few moments, if that’s all right with you, sir?”
Her father grunted. “That’s not up to me.” He looked at Wendy, really looked at her in that way fathers had that made their children squirm. Or in the way that coaches made their players squirm. “Do you want him to stay, Wendy?”
Now she felt compelled to apologize. “I’m sorry, Dad…”
“You’re an adult,” her father said.
Sometimes she wondered if he really believed that, though. But he must have been trying to prove that he did because he stepped into the hall and pulled her bedroom door shut—leaving her alone with Hart Fisher. Her bodyguard.
That was what he was. Not her boyfriend.
She didn’t want him as either. Not anymore. Now was not the time for her to start dating anyone, not when everyone and everything she cared about had been threatened.
Her face was still so hot that she probably could have melted an ice cube on her forehead.
“I don’t want my parents to know about the threats,” she explained. “That’s why I told my dad that you’re my boyfriend.” She didn’t want Hart to think she wanted that—that she wanted him. Just a short time ago, when he’d been lying on top of her, she’d thought he might have wanted her, too.
But that wasn’t possible. He still wouldn’t have noticed her if he hadn’t been assigned to protect her.
Hart nodded. “I get it,” he assured her. “And now I need to get you to that meeting.”
She shook her head.
He sighed. “Do you still not trust me, even after I covered for you with your dad?”
If he was working for Luther, he probably would have shot her father instead of apologizing to him. But just because Hart wasn’t working for Luther didn’t mean she should trust him.
He groaned at her hesitation and reached for his cell. “I’ll call the chief—”
“That’s not it,” she said with a glance at the closed door. “I can’t just walk out of here with you in the middle of the night.”
Her father was bound to have questions if they left the house now. In fact, she wouldn’t be surprised to open her door and find him waiting in the hall outside. She had never been a very good liar, so she was already pushing her luck with all the lies she’d already told.
“We’ll go out the way I came in,” Hart told her as he headed toward her open window. After slinging one leg over the sill, he held out his hand to her.
Wendy was scared. Not of falling out the window. She’d climbed out that window a time or two in her youth, but not with a boyfriend. Not even to meet a boyfriend. She’d just climbed out to go to movies that had opened after her midnight curfew. She knew it was a short drop from the window to the porch roof below. Then it was an easy climb down the trestle at the end of the porch to the ground.
No. She wasn’t scared of falling.
She was scared—of spending too much time with Hart Fisher. She suspected she was in almost as much danger from him as she was from Luther Mills.
“You’ve definitely got a problem,” Hart told Chief Lynch as he and Wendy joined him in the conference room at the Payne Protection Agency.
The chief arched a gray brow over blue eyes that were bright and alert despite the late hour. “Did something happen at Ms. Thompson’s home?”
Besides her not waiting outside for him like he’d thought she would be? Besides his making the risky move of breaking in and nearly getting shot?
Hart shook his head. “But that’s the problem. Nobody noticed me sneaking in and out of that house.”
“My father did,” Wendy chimed in with a slight smile.
Hart shuddered as he remembered the older man throwing open the door and training that gun barrel on him. “It’s good that he can protect himself and your mother.” He turned back to the chief, who stood at the end of a long conference table. “Because I don’t trust that unit you have stationed outside their house to protect them.”
The chief flinched.
Hart felt a twinge of regret that he had offended the older man even though Woodrow Lynch shouldn’t have been offended. He hadn’t had much to do with the existing police force. He hadn’t hired or trained them. He’d just recently taken the position of River City police chief after giving up his role as an FBI Bureau chief.
Wendy must have been offended, too, because her elbow jabbed his ribs. Now he felt a twinge of pain—from where her elbow had jabbed him earlier when he’d tried helping her out of the bedroom window. After elbowing him aside, she’d easily slipped over the sill and had moved silently across the roof to the trestle. He’d insisted on going down first, to catch her in case she fell and to make sure nobody could grab her on the ground.
That had been a mistake because, from the ground, all Hart had been able to see was her ass as she’d scrambled down the trestle. She had moved so quickly that she’d slipped. When he’d caught her, his hands cupping her ass, she’d elbowed him again.
That time might have been an accident. This time was definitely not. But Hart wasn’t out of line—not with lives at stake.
“Somebody should have noticed us leaving,” he insisted. What if he had been one of Luther’s crew?
Neither the chief nor Wendy could argue with him now. Lynch sighed. “That’s why I brought in Payne Protection.”
“Why Parker’s team?”
The question came from