Friend, Lover, Protector

Chapter 2

“My bodyguard?” she echoed, her voice squeaking. “A bodyguard? That’s ridiculous!”

Jack couldn’t have agreed more. The whole situation was deadly and getting worse by the second. Unless they got damn lucky damn fast, they were in big trouble.

Her eyes narrowed. “Why ever would I need a bodyguard?”

Jack looked behind them. The car wasn’t gaining, but they weren’t getting any farther away, either. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Later. Just step on it, will you?”

“Step on it,” she muttered. “Yes, sir.” She floored the accelerator. The van shot forward.

A stop sign marked an upcoming intersection. Dahlia must have had the same thought he did, because she showed no sign of stopping—and fortunately no other cars could be seen on the other roads. At the next crossroads, she braked to slow, ignored the stop sign and turned left onto a paved road. Tires squealed and the van swerved, but she managed to keep it on the road.

“Good girl,” Jack said.

“Up yours.”

She drove the way he would have, her handling of the van suggesting that she’d probably had training in evasive maneuvers and chase. He began to hope they’d get out of this in one piece. The car behind them didn’t make the turn as cleanly, and it fell a little farther behind.

He relaxed a little and looked over at the surprising Dahlia Jensen, Ph.D. Where he’d been expecting mousy, starched and boring, she was vibrant and alluring, despite her baggy clothes. She was clearly angry, pink suffusing the flawless skin of her cheeks. Her blond hair was caught in some kind of intricate loose braid that revealed the shell of her ear and the length of her neck and added to her femininity.

She pinned him with a glare from her dark eyes—brown, he realized, intrigued by the contrast to her fair skin and hair.

“Stop staring at me and keep an eye on that jerk behind us.”

“You’ve had high-speed training,” he said, ignoring her comment while keeping one eye on the car following them. “This is some souped-up van you’ve got.”

“I chase thunderstorms,” she said, looking at him from the corner of her eye. “You think I’d take off in a vehicle without any speed and without knowing what I’m doing?”

Jack glanced at the speedometer. Ninety miles per hour was a little faster than his preferred land speed, but he had to hand it to her. She knew how to handle the vehicle.

She didn’t show any sign of slowing even after they headed west and crossed back over I-25. Soon the traffic began to get heavier, and she reduced her speed. The car following them began to gain. It still looked more country than city when they passed the first of the signs that stated they were entering the city limits. Abruptly farms gave way to housing developments and office buildings.

Ahead a flashing light for a railroad crossing came on. The approaching train blared its whistle. Dahlia glanced briefly in the rearview mirror, and her mouth firmed into a straight line. The van gained speed.

Jack shuddered as he realized her intention. There wasn’t enough room to stop before the tracks. She was crazy. He glanced behind them. The car chasing them hadn’t given up, either.

The train was close. Too close.

The train whistled, long and loud and sounded to Jack like a death knell. What the hell had he gotten himself into?

“Come on, baby,” Dahlia muttered under her breath, leaning forward as if doing so would make the van go even faster.

The whistle blared again.

The van clattered across the tracks.

The train whizzed past, so close he could feel the compression of air between the train and the van.

“Thank God,” she whispered.

“You’re nuts! Nobody plays chicken with a train.”

She didn’t reply, which was just as well. If looks could kill, he was a goner.

Jack turned to look behind them. The car chasing them had come to a halt on the other side of the train. If luck was with them, the train would be a long one. A very long one.

It was. Each of the cars filled with coal. The train moved much slower than he had imagined.

He let out a sigh and glanced at Dahlia. He had never been with a more magnificent woman. Not just because she drew him physically but because of her courage and determination. Without exception the women he knew would have resorted to tears or hysteria by now. Thank God Dahlia wasn’t one of those.

When she flashed him another glance with her surprisingly dark eyes, he admitted to himself that he liked her even if she had scared a decade off his life. And liking her…that hadn’t been part of the deal.

Three blocks later Dahlia abruptly turned right, and a half block later brought the van to a skidding halt. “Out,” she commanded.

Jack stared numbly at her. “What?”

“You heard me. Out.”

“But, I’m—”

“I don’t want to hear any cockamamy story about bodyguards or anything else. For all I know that guy is after you. Not me. And one way to tell is get rid of you. Out.”

“You don’t understand.”

“I understand perfectly,” she said. “You’re a crazy person.”

“I’m crazy?” he shouted. “You’re certifiable. You could have gotten us killed.”

“Like we wouldn’t have been if we’d been stuck on the same side of the tracks as that guy. Get out. Right now.” She held up her HAM radio. “Or I’m calling the cops.”

“That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said.” He opened the door and stepped onto the pavement. “Call the cops, Dahlia Jensen, or better yet, go see them ’cause you’re gonna need them. And do it soon.” He slammed the door, and she sped away.

Frustration and fear for her vied equally with a reluctant admiration. He could only hope that she was going to the cops as she had said. Since he’d deliberately left his pack in the van, he had the opening he needed to look her up as soon as he identified the car following them. Not that he needed an excuse. His best friend had asked him to keep the lady out of harm’s way, and he would, with or without her cooperation.

At the moment, though, he wished he was with his platoon. The intelligence that had come down over the month had them all believing that they’d be deployed for a recon mission. There he knew what to expect, and he had trained for it. Even though he was on medical leave, he was carrying a pager. If the mission went down, he would be called back to be part of the support team.

This business with Dahlia Jensen, Ph.D.—correction, blond bombshell—had him feeling as nervous as he had the first time he’d trained under live fire.

Five minutes later Dahlia pushed open the doors of the police station and marched over to the desk, where a receptionist watched her approach. She had been expecting a crusty desk sergeant like the ones usually seen on television.

“Can I help you?” the young woman asked.

“I’d like to report a crime.” That sounded pretty mundane compared to the fright that raced through her veins.

“Let me get an officer to take your report.”

She called someone named Bob on the phone, and Dahlia stood for the next two minutes drumming her fingers against the counter and refusing an offer of coffee. That was all she needed—more acid in her stomach.

A door slammed, and she watched an officer amble toward her, reminding her of Jack’s deceptively slow walk this morning. The officer, like the receptionist, looked young enough to be a student at the university.

He smiled. “Officer Bob Jones. Can I help you?”

“I was fired at this morning. With a gun,” she added, just in case he didn’t understand.

His eyebrows shot up, and Dahlia sensed she had his attention as she hadn’t before.

“Please. This way.” He led her down the hall, and two minutes later she sat at a table across from him and a concerned-looking sergeant.

Succinctly Dahlia related what had happened and did her best to answer their questions. No, she didn’t know the man shooting at her. When she was asked for a description, she drew a blank—all she remembered was the gun, which looked like any other to her. As for the car, it was beige or light brown or white. Dirty. She couldn’t answer the questions about whether it had two doors or four, its make or model or any other useful details about it, not even if it had Colorado plates.

The two policemen looked at each other and finally Jones said, “You haven’t given us much to work with here.”

Dahlia didn’t like admitting they were right. “I want protection.”

“You think this was personal, then? You have an ex giving you trouble?”

“No.” She shook her head. “No. I don’t know this guy.” She snapped her fingers. “A bullet hit my van. I heard it ping. So there’s gotta be a dent, right, maybe even a hole?”

The two officers followed her out to her van. After a scant minute of looking, she realized this was going to be futile. She had been caught in several hail storms, so the van was damaged from that. Plus, she usually traveled on gravel roads, and that probably accounted for some of the other damage. Identifying a single small dent made by a bullet from all the others wasn’t going to work. No hole, which meant there wouldn’t be a bullet.

Officer Jones shrugged, then said, “What probably happened here, ma’am, is the fellow was looking for an easy victim to rob. There’s nothing to indicate that you need protection.”

Jones pulled a card from his pocket and passed it to her. “Anything else comes up…you call me.”

It was only after she began driving away that she realized she’d failed to mention Jack Trahern at all. Odd, especially as she had been thinking about him the whole time.

Jack watched Dahlia’s van speed away as he shoved his revolver into the waistband of his jeans and pulled the tail of his shirt out to cover it. Then he calmly walked back to the main thoroughfare and stepped behind an enormous cottonwood tree to wait for traffic to resume after the train went by. At the very least he’d have a license plate number.

This was far different from his normal stakeout as a sniper with the Army Rangers. The last time he had been on surveillance, he had been hidden in a tree in a South American jungle, doing his best to ignore the mosquitoes and covering his team through a sniper’s scope attached to his rifle. Hostages from the American diplomatic corps had been rescued in a mission that would be classified for some time.

The landscape in front of him today was so ordinary it was difficult to imagine that danger lurked on the other side of the long coal train, which rolled past for another six minutes.

The plates turned out to be temporary ones, the paper variety taped to the inside of the filthy window, only the word Colorado legible. He watched the off-white car continue on, committing to memory everything about it. The vehicle was remarkable only in that it was completely unremarkable. The driver, though—Jack would remember him. Thin face and a long thin nose.

A second later a city bus stopped in front of Jack, and a couple of people got off. He fished some coins out of his pocket and boarded the bus.

As he’d done more than once since his buddy Ian had called yesterday afternoon, Jack reviewed what he knew about the situation—the key to keeping ahead of and out-thinking his adversary. Dahlia’s sister, code name Linda, had witnessed an execution-style murder and had been placed into custody after the defendant—a businessman with organized crime connections—began making threats on her. His buddy Ian had taken the woman’s child to Alaska to be with Dahlia’s other sister, code name Rachel. Only, their cover had been blown, and they had been forced into hiding. A guy with connections back to the defendant in the murder case had assaulted Dahlia’s parents, and they now had police protection.

Ian had called Jack after he’d been unable to convince the local police that she needed protection, figuring that Dahlia could be a target.

“This whole thing has blown up in the past twenty-four hours. Rosie and her folks didn’t know anything about all of this until I got here,” Ian had said. “Rosie doesn’t know I’m calling you, and I want to keep it that way. She’s got enough on her mind.”

“You’ve got it.”

“Name your price.”

“Hell, man, don’t insult me. You know I don’t want your money,” Jack said.

“Okay, then. Call it expenses.”

They had talked awhile longer, and Jack had finally agreed to let Ian deposit the funds he wanted into Jack’s account. Not that he planned on using a single penny of the thousands of dollars that had shown up in his account when he’d gone to the bank to withdraw travel money.

Ian had the good fortune to have won a huge lotto. “Friends” had shown up by the truckload, all with some reason why Ian should part with his cash. He’d been generous to a fault, funding everything from the delivery of babies to ski vacations. Jack was determined to be the same kind of friend to Ian he’d been before—one who couldn’t care less about his money.

Jack had first become friends with the man when they were assigned as buddies in Ranger school. That sometimes seemed like a thousand years ago. It had been hate at first sight, and they had to immediately get past their differences. The training was set up to reinforce teamwork, and if they didn’t work as a team, they both would fail. Ten years later, and he didn’t have a closer friend than Ian.

Jack would have preferred going to Alaska to protect Ian’s flank, but if being here was what his best friend needed, Jack would do the job without a second thought. He had a month of accrued leave that he had just begun. With nothing but time and regret on his hands this was a way to fill his time. He had a year left on his hitch, and he’d been given several choices of how to spend that time. None of them appealed to him a bit.

Ian had tried to convince Jack that he could pass himself off as a student, which would provide the cover to protect Dahlia until her sister testified. Jack had been a decade younger the last time he was in a college classroom, and one thing he knew for sure. He didn’t look like a student.

As for the professor—he had imagined an old-fashioned woman who would match the old-fashioned name of Dahlia Jensen, Ph.D. and figured that he’d be spending boring days at the back of a classroom. Until he had arrived last night and had gone to the university, he hadn’t known she chased storms. He would rather jump out of airplanes with a faulty parachute than be anywhere near a thunderstorm. It was an aversion he’d acquired when a tornado flattened the trailer park where he and his mom had lived.

The ride back up University Boulevard wasn’t that long, but along the way Jack kept worrying about all the things that could go wrong. At the top of the list was someone catching up with her before he did. If Dahlia had gone to the cops, he would arrive back at her office on campus before her.

When he got back to his car, he fished the keys out and slid behind the wheel, hoping that Dahlia would arrive soon and head for her office. He moved the car to where he could keep an eye on the faculty parking lot behind the building. By the time a half hour passed without her arrival the dull gnaw in his gut grew into full-fledged worry. He got out of the car and headed for Dahlia’s office. According to the student assistant, she wasn’t expected back.

Jack hurried back to his SUV and headed for her house with the address that Ian had given him and the map he had picked up when he arrived last night.

The trip to Dahlia’s house was a scant fifteen minutes from the campus. He figured her for a condo kind of gal, so the Victorian-era bungalow that matched her address came as a surprise. He liked the lines of the house and the big shade trees that sheltered it. The front door, sitting at the back of the wide porch, was nearly invisible. At night, you could hide a platoon on that porch unless the porch light was on.

Her yard was well kept but plain compared to the vivid flower beds of her neighbor’s. As Jack drove by he looked for her van. It wasn’t in the driveway or beneath the carport. The old guy working in the yard next to hers waved as he came by, and Jack waved back. His concern for Dahlia’s safety came to the surface even as he cautioned himself that she might have gone to the grocery store or somewhere else.

Jack went around the block, then parked beneath a huge shade tree about a half block from her house, where he had a clear view of her driveway.

Dahlia arrived about ten minutes later. She didn’t notice him. He would have preferred it if she had been a little more aware of strange cars in the neighborhood. Deciding the more he knew about her routine, the better, he sat in the car and watched. She parked her van under the carport, then came back to the mailbox at the street, waving to the old man next door. Her dog trotted along at her heels.

Dahlia was taller—a lot taller than he’d thought. He’d noticed earlier that she was stacked. A man would have to be blind not to notice. She had layered a tailored shirt over a T-shirt. The khaki pants were on the baggy side, which made the curve of her hip and the length of her leg all the more tantalizing. The conservative outfit was a hell of a lot more sexy than a blatant display would have been, though he admitted he wouldn’t have minded that, either.

She wandered over to the fence separating her property from her neighbor’s. They stood talking while the guy cut her a bouquet of tulips. When he handed them to Dahlia, she leaned across the short fence separating them and gave the man a lingering hug. She pressed a kiss against the old guy’s cheek.

A memory slammed through Jack, so vivid that instead of Dahlia he saw his ex-wife, Erin.

They had been married maybe three months, and already her pregnancy was showing—but it would, since she was more than five months along. She had come home, waved to him and stopped to give his grandpa a hug and a kiss on the cheek.

Jack clenched his hands around the steering wheel and shook his head. Ten years and a hell of a lot of water had passed under that particular bridge. His grandpa had died before the baby was born. And as for the baby and Erin…neither of them had turned out to be his. Everything Jack had thought to be true about his marriage had been a lie.

Since then he’d lived by a simple credo. He didn’t do permanent. He didn’t make babies. He didn’t have sex with a woman he couldn’t walk away from.

He stared at Dahlia and the old man. Deliberately he reminded himself that just because his ex-wife had betrayed him didn’t mean others would. In his head he knew that. In his gut, where he made the important decisions, he didn’t believe it. Memories or not, he was here to do a job. That’s all. No matter how hot she was, no matter how much she drew him.

Okay, he thought. She’s off-limits. Because I’m being paid to protect her, and I sure can’t do that if I’m thinking…about stripping off those baggy clothes and discovering what she’s hiding. Irritated, he hauled his thoughts back. I don’t do permanent. And there she is, permanent right down to the picket fence in her yard. She’s off-limits. End of story.

She gave the old man another hug, and another knot twisted through Jack. Deliberately he catalogued the women that had marched through his life—not that there had been that many—the ones he made damn sure that he could walk away from. As for Dahlia, he liked her. Another reason she was off-limits.

The bouquet in hand, Dahlia went back to her car and scooped up a number of items, including his pack. Jack slouched down in his vehicle, telling himself that the reason he was staying in the car rather than following her into the house was to acquaint himself with the sounds and activity of the neighborhood. Sooner or later he needed to go inside and talk to her. Since she had his pack, he had the opening he needed to get into her house.

You’re here to do a job. Focus, he told himself. Instead he kept thinking about how she’d look without her clothes. He shifted uncomfortably in the seat. Focus. Now that he knew the danger was real—he hadn’t really believed that it was—he needed 100 percent of his concentration on the job at hand.

Unbidden, the luscious expanse of her breasts behind the deep vee of her tailored shirt filled his mind—this time without being covered.

No way was he ready to face her.

Dahlia climbed the steps to her porch, unlocked the door and went inside. The house was quiet except for the almost silent whir of the ceiling fan and the hum of the refrigerator motor. Boo followed her into the house, her nails clicking against the hardwood floor.

Dahlia set everything down except the tulips, which she held as she pulled a vase out of the cupboard. After she had filled it with water and arranged the flowers, she carried the vase to the counter and set it next to the phone. On impulse she picked up the receiver and dialed her sister, Rosie.