Bodyguard Under Siege
Автор
Lisa Childs
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Chapter 1
Keeli’s hand shook as she stared down at the pregnancy stick she was holding. Despite the shaking, she could, unfortunately, still read it. The little plus sign stared back at her, almost mockingly. It could not be right.
Sure, she’d been sick for the past several weeks, but she’d thought it was Spencer Dubridge who’d been making her ill with his chauvinistic comments and attitudes. But if this test was accurate, he had actually made her sick another way—that night so many weeks ago.
The night she’d lost her damn mind...
Her skin tingled, and she shivered as she remembered the heat—the passion. But then she quickly pushed thoughts of that encounter from her head. Keeli needed to get back into the courtroom. She was supposed to be serving as backup to her fellow bodyguards if infamous drug lord Luther Mills tried anything during his trial.
And of course he would try something. That was why she’d been protecting Spencer Dubridge, because the detective had been threatened along with everyone else associated with Luther Mills’s arrest and prosecution for first-degree murder. Despite Luther’s best efforts over the past nine weeks, everybody had survived.
Although Keeli felt like dying...
She tucked the test into a clear plastic bag and dropped it into her purse. Then she pulled open the door to the bathroom stall and stepped out. She was all alone in the ladies’ room with only her reflection staring back at her from the wall of mirrors behind the row of sinks. Her face was pale, and it wasn’t just in contrast to the black sweater and pants she wore. The pallor of her skin made her eyes look even bluer and brighter than they usually appeared. After washing her hands, she ran her fingers through her long blond hair, pushing it back into place.
Dubridge was out there—probably waiting in the hall since he had yet to testify against Luther. Despite how incredibly handsome he looked in his dark suit with his crisp white shirt, or maybe because of it, she dreaded seeing him. But the chief of police had hired the Payne Protection Agency to guard everyone associated with the trial, so it was her job—as a bodyguard—to keep him safe.
He hadn’t made it easy for her—with his insulting, chauvinistic attitude or with that damn unfortunate attraction she felt for him. Her stomach churned, and feeling sick again, she nearly returned to the bathroom stall. How could she be drawn to such a chauvinist? He had been nothing but rude to her back when they’d worked together in the River City Police Department Vice Unit. And that certainly hadn’t changed when she’d been assigned as his bodyguard.
Bodyguard Barbie—that was what he called her.
She grimaced as she headed toward the doorway. As she pushed opened the door and stepped into the corridor, gunfire blasted, rattling the windows. People shrieked and dropped to the floor.
Keeli didn’t wonder from where the shots were coming. The shooting had to be taking place in Judge Holmes’s courtroom, where Luther Mills was being tried for murder.
How many more murders had he just committed?
Her heart raced with fear and dread. So many of her friends were in that courtroom. And maybe Spencer had already been called inside to testify.
She reached for her purse to pull out her weapon, just as Luther Mills appeared. He was dressed in a suit, his dark hair clipped short and his jaw clean-shaven. But with a gun in his hand, he still looked like the thug he was. He laughed when he saw her and grabbed her arm with his free hand, his grasp painfully tight.
She could have dropped him with an elbow or her knee. But she wouldn’t have been able to escape the armed men with him. They had their backs turned toward her, their guns blasting as they fired down the hallway. But if she overpowered Luther, they would see her.
Then she noticed something else—someone else—in the doorway next to the ladies’ room. A dark-haired head peeked around the men’s room door. Spencer...
She wasn’t the only one who spotted him, unfortunately. The men fired at Spencer, splintering the doorjamb near his head while Luther pressed his gun against her temple.
“Stay back, Detective,” Luther warned, “or your bodyguard’s brains are going to get blown all over this courthouse!”
Keeli was more worried about Spencer’s brains because of how close some of those bullets had come to his handsome face. “Stay back!” she told him. It was her job to protect him; she couldn’t let him get hurt because he was trying to rescue her.
But before she could say anything else, Luther jerked her away from the restroom doorways and dragged her down the hall. Using his back, he pushed open a door and pulled her inside a stairwell with him. Every instinct screamed at her to struggle, to stumble on the steps or fall to try to escape from him. But that barrel was pressed so tightly against her temple and his finger was nearly squeezing the trigger, so the gun could easily go off.
And now, if the test she’d taken was accurate, it wasn’t just her life she was risking if she tried to get away. And she wasn’t even sure that she should get away. If Luther made it out of the courthouse, she wanted to know where the hell he was going.
And there was no easier or more surefire way for her to do that than to go with him. She would have to be careful to escape—just as he had—before getting killed.
They didn’t make it easily out of the courthouse, though. Once they opened the door to the stairwell on the main level, more gunfire rang out. Courthouse security and other bodyguards fired at them. Luther ducked down, but he didn’t press on his trigger.
Instead, he let the men with them fire back at the guards, allowing them to take the bullets meant for him, as he pulled Keeli along with him. They were headed toward a back door that opened onto an alley. It should have been secured, but the guard manning it held the door for Luther and for her.
The guard must have been on the drug dealer’s payroll as so many other people had been. Police officers and assistant district attorneys and crime scene technicians... And now apparently courthouse security guards, too. Maybe that was how he and his men had gotten weapons past the ordinarily high security of the courthouse.
A van was parked in the alley, its side door standing open to the cargo area in the back. The colors identified it as a police van, but it wasn’t a police officer driving it. Or if it was, he worked for Luther because he shouted, “Get in! Get in!”
Gunfire continued to blast, echoing through the alley. The guard holding open the door suddenly fell back against it, and as his body slid down the metal, he left a thick trail of blood behind and pooling beneath him.
As Luther headed toward the van, he dragged Keeli along with him but kept her between him and that open back door to the building—the door the guard’s body propped open now. Spencer suddenly appeared in that doorway, his gun raised toward Luther—toward her.
Over the past several weeks, he had probably felt like shooting her once or twice. She’d certainly felt like killing him a time or four or ten. He was so damn infuriating.
But instead of firing, he shouted, “Let her go!”
Luther chuckled in amusement as he pressed the gun barrel even more tightly against her temple.
She flinched, and a curse slipped from Spencer’s lips as he noticed her pain. Hopefully Luther hadn’t because she knew better than to reveal any weakness to him.
Mills stepped through the open side door of that van. “Don’t try to follow me,” he warned the detective as he dragged her up into the vehicle with him. “Or you’ll be picking up pieces of her off the road behind me.”
He had a gun—not a knife. But she wasn’t about to point that out to him. She wasn’t about to say anything until she found out where the hell he was going and who all was helping him.
He pulled the door closed, and the driver pressed hard on the accelerator, tires squealing as he sped out of the alley. She and Luther fell against the side of the van. Keeli could have broken away from him then. She also probably could have jerked open that door and jumped out. It looked as though Luther hadn’t closed it tightly. If he had, it would be locked on the inside—since it looked like the jail transport vehicle with a cage between the front and the back. But instead of testing the lock, she just sat down on the floor.
Luther narrowed his dark eyes and studied her face as if trying to figure her out. They’d met before—back when she’d worked vice. Of course he hadn’t known she was a cop at the time, or she probably wouldn’t have survived her undercover assignment. Unlike most everybody else in the vice unit who’d been after him, she’d focused more on sex trafficking, which was the one major crime Luther Mills had not committed.
“You better not be playing me,” he warned her. “Or I really will cut you up in pieces.”
Panic pressed heavily on Spencer’s heart as he watched the van race away with Keeli locked inside—with that animal Luther Mills. How the hell had that happened?
He cursed as he ran toward the parking garage and the unmarked detective’s vehicle Keeli had parked there when they’d arrived at the courthouse. Footsteps echoed his and he turned, with his weapon drawn, to make sure none of Luther’s crew was trying to stop him.
Parker Payne was at his heels. “Where the hell are you going?” Keeli’s boss asked him.
“I have to try to catch them!” Spencer said. He was not about to lose Keeli—not that he actually had her. Except for that one night...
But he was beginning to believe that had all been just a dream, that it had never really happened. That they had never actually been together like that—out of control with desire for each other.
“You can’t!” Parker snapped. “Didn’t you hear Luther’s threats?”
Keeli’s boss must have caught up with them just as they’d been heading out that back door to the alley. Spencer hadn’t noticed Parker or anyone else, though. He’d been too focused on her, too focused on that damn gun pressed to her head.
Should he have tried to take the shot? But that would have meant risking Luther squeezing the trigger as he went down, taking Keeli with him.
“I’m damn sick of Luther’s threats,” Spencer said. Luther’s reign of terror was why Keeli was in danger in the first place—because she had been assigned to protect him from the crime boss.
Now Spencer needed to protect her. Keeli was in far more danger than he had ever been. She was the one who had been kidnapped. Why had Luther taken her? Just to make sure he got away? Or to kill her?
“Luther’s making good on some of those threats,” Parker said.
Spencer stopped running as dread gripped him. He hadn’t been in the courtroom when the shooting started. He’d been in the men’s restroom while Keeli had been using the ladies’. And once the shooting had started, he’d thought only of finding her but, unfortunately, Luther had found her first. Now he wondered what had happened to everyone else.
“Who’s dead?” he asked anxiously. Spencer knew that, since his arrest nine weeks ago, Luther Mills had threatened to eliminate everyone associated with his trial: the eyewitness, the crime scene tech, even the judge’s daughter, the assistant district attorney prosecuting his case and Spencer. Some of these people were Spencer’s colleagues, some of them friends as well. “Or hurt?”
Parker flinched. “The chief.”
Woodrow Lynch wasn’t just the man who’d hired Parker’s security agency for extra protection for everyone associated with the trial. Lynch was also Parker’s stepfather. Parker had already lost one father—years ago.
Spencer reached out and gripped his former coworker’s shoulder. “Is he...?”
“Not dead,” Parker said with a shake of his head. But Spencer didn’t release the breath he held until the man added, “Just a shoulder wound.”
Now he sighed. But then the breath jammed up again in his lungs when he thought of Keeli—alone with a killer. She could be the next one getting injured or even killed. Suddenly, that sense of urgency gripped him again, making his heart pound furiously and his pulse race hard and fast.
“We have to try to follow them,” Spencer insisted as he began to run toward his vehicle again. “We can’t let him get her too far away from us.”
From him...
But he’d been the one pushing her away for years. When they’d worked together in the River City PD Vice Unit, she’d requested the most dangerous assignments, and it drove him crazy how she always rushed in without waiting for backup. Either she’d been trying to prove herself or she’d had a death wish. He’d never been able to figure that one out. All Spencer knew for sure was that he’d already lost someone he’d known—someone like her who’d been too headstrong to accept any help. Keeli probably thought that was why he didn’t want her as his bodyguard—that he was too proud and stubborn to admit he needed protection. He just didn’t want her taking those unnecessary risks for him. So he’d been obnoxious to her for years—at first to get her to leave her job in the vice unit and then to get her to quit her assignment protecting him.
“Keeli can take care of herself,” Parker said.
Everybody had been telling him that—for years. No one more vehemently than she had. But he wanted to be the one to take care of her. Just like he’d wanted to take care of Rebecca. He’d lost his chance with Rebecca. Now he might have lost Keeli, too.
Forever...
Luther glanced in the side mirror, watching for anyone following them. He couldn’t believe he’d gotten away from the courthouse as easily as he had. Sure, he’d lost most of the special talent he’d hired to help with his escape. Several had gotten shot in the courtroom.
Thanks to Parker Payne and his damn bodyguards.
He glanced back at Keeli—to where she sat in the back of the van. A safe distance from the courthouse, Luther had had the driver stop and let him out of the locked cargo area, so he could ride up front—separated from her by that protective glass.
She was one of those damn bodyguards. So even after taking her weapon, he didn’t trust her.
Maybe he should cut her up and leave pieces of her like bread crumbs along the road. That would send a message to Parker Payne to mind his own damn business and stay the hell out of Luther’s.
But it wasn’t just Parker that Luther had to worry about. Detective Dubridge had arrested him once, so he would be even more determined to arrest him again.
For escaping.
And kidnapping his bodyguard.
Why hadn’t Keeli fought him harder—either at the courthouse or when he’d had the cargo area opened so he could move to the front? She could have tried to escape then, too. But she hadn’t...
Luther knew the former undercover vice cop pretty well. She was usually feisty. A fighter...
But she hadn’t fought him at all. He glanced back at her again. Her face was pale. With fear?
She’d never shown any before.
Before he’d had the driver open the back of the van, Luther had frisked her for weapons and grabbed her purse. The red leather bag was heavy, so her gun was probably in it. He unclasped the flap on the front of it and looked inside the deep bag. Sure enough her Glock lay on the bottom of it in a holster. But that wasn’t what caught his attention.
He noticed the test in the plastic baggie. And he laughed. “Congratulations, Mama,” he said.
And her face got even paler.
Maybe that was why she hadn’t fought him—because she was pregnant.
“Who’s the daddy?” he wondered aloud. The last he’d heard about her, she was single. Maybe being a bodyguard left no more time for a relationship than it had when she’d been an undercover cop. So who had she hooked up with?
She pressed her lips together as if to hold in the answer. Was that just because she didn’t want to tell him? Or because she was disgusted with the answer herself?
And he knew.
He laughed harder. “Detective Dubridge...”
It seemed as if every damn one of Parker Payne’s bodyguards had crossed the line with the person they’d been assigned to protect. He could understand the guys with the women. But he couldn’t understand Keeli Abbott. She was the kind of beauty who could have any man she wanted.
He snorted then. “Why Dubridge?”
She shook her head, looking as befuddled as Luther was. Maybe she hadn’t fought him because she’d wanted to get away from Dubridge.
“It was a mistake,” she murmured.
For a moment Luther had thought bringing her along might have been a mistake—that she was playing him. But now, seeing this pregnancy test, he realized how important a hostage she was. The Payne Protection Agency would back off to keep her alive. And now so would Dubridge—because if he lost Keeli, he wasn’t just losing his bodyguard, he’d be losing his kid, too.
