Delores Fossen - Undercover Daddy

“I need your help,” Luke told Rusty. “Look for two men driving around town in a black car. One is blond. The other is wearing an eye patch. If you find them, take them in for questioning.”

Rusty assured Luke that he would, and Luke hung up, slipping the phone back into his jacket pocket.

“I blame you for this,” Elaina snarled in a hoarse whisper. She frantically looked around the room and extracted an umbrella from a tall reed basket by the door. Presumably, she planned to use it as a weapon.

Luke moved to another window in the living room where he had a better view of the street and the side of the yard. He kept his gun ready.

“How do you figure?” he asked.

“Those men must have followed you to Crystal Creek.”

Luke couldn’t completely rule it out, but that scenario wasn’t very likely. “If someone followed me, I would have noticed.”

“Maybe not,” she fired back.

“ I would have noticed ,” he insisted.

Maybe someone hadn’t followed him per se, but they might have gotten the information from Collena Drake and backtracked until they found Elaina.

Now the question was—what the hell did they want?

Luke didn’t want to get into a lengthy discussion, or argument with Elaina to try to figure all of that out. Later, he would have to learn what kind of hornet’s nest her dead fiancé had left her to deal with. Because according to what Elaina had said, these men were almost certainly connected to Kevin.

Unless…

There was an outside shot that they were connected to him. Oh, man. He hoped that wasn’t the case.

Elaina moved to the window next to him and stared out. “Do you see them?”

“No.” In fact, no one seemed to be around.

Except Elaina, of course.

She moved so close to him that he caught her scent. Something fresh, floral and feminine. Something that he didn’t want to smell or notice. Luke stepped away from her and moved to a window in the adjoining dining room.

Of course, she and her feminine scent quickly followed him. “How long before you hear something from your partner?”

“Soon. He’ll be as thorough and as fast as he can possibly be.” Luke only hoped that it wouldn’t be hard to spot two strangers in the small town. Thankfully, there wouldn’t be many guys with an eye patch.

“This is a nightmare,” she mumbled. “And this is what I’ve been trying to avoid for over a year.”

Luke spared her a glance to see how she was physically reacting to the situation. Elaina had a white- knuckled grip on the perky yellow umbrella, but other than that, she seemed to be holding up.

“You sure that’s all you were trying to avoid?” he asked.

Elaina’s grip tightened even more. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Maybe you were trying to avoid me because I’m Christopher’s father.”

She probably would have pounced on that accusation if Luke hadn’t noticed the car driving toward the house. He held up his left hand to cut off anything she might have said, and then raced back to the front door so he’d have a direct shot if it became necessary.

Luke waited, his heart in his throat, as the black four-door car slowly approached and stopped in front of the house. A blond man was driving. The guy with the eye patch was riding shotgun.

This didn’t look good.

He took out his phone and called Rusty Kaplan again. “The suspects are at the sitter’s house. Get here ASAP.”

He put his phone away so he could focus on keeping his weapon aimed and ready. Beside him, Elaina did the same. She lifted her umbrella.

Luke rolled his eyes at her attempt to defend herself. “Get down on the floor,” he ordered.

“I want to protect Christopher,” she countered.

“Well, it won’t happen with an umbrella. Get on the floor in case they fire shots.”

“Oh, God,” she mumbled.

She was obviously terrified at the thought of bullets flying.

So was Luke.

But it wouldn’t help matters if Elaina got hurt. In fact, it was his responsibility to keep everyone in the house safe. He might not have been the one to bring these men to Crystal Creek, but there was too much at stake for him to not make sure they did no harm— especially to his son.

Instead of getting on the floor, she stooped down next to him and put her shoulder against the door so she could peek out the stained-glass sidelights. “I can’t just hide. I have to do something to stop them.”

Luke knew how she felt.

“For now, the best way to help is stay put. Backup in on the way.”

The men didn’t leave their parked car. They just sat there, watching the house, occasionally saying something to each other.

More than anything, Luke wanted to go out there to confront them. But that was too big of a risk. If he got shot or hurt, then that would leave Christopher, Elaina and Theresa without protection. He couldn’t do that. But he could try to make sense of all of this while they were waiting.

“If these guys are looking for Kevin’s software modifications, what do you think they’ll do to you if they can’t get them?” he asked.

“They’ll kill me.” Her voice wasn’t shaky or trembling. Nor was she hesitant.

Luke didn’t take his eyes off the car or the men inside. “And these guys didn’t show up until after you’d adopted Christopher?”

“That’s right.” Now, there was some hesitation. “Why do you ask?”

“Because they might not be associated with software but with the adoption itself. Maybe they’re working for someone who wanted to cover their tracks.”

“Maybe. But the people involved with the adoption ring have already been arrested.”

“That’s why they’d need to hire someone on the outside to do it for them,” Luke pointed out.

Especially if their crimes included murder.

There, Luke had finally made a connection that he didn’t want to make. A connection that linked him with these goons in the car. And it also might link them to his estranged wife’s suspicious death. “What did this so-called adoption agency tell you about Christopher’s birth mother? Specifically, what did they say about her death?”

“Nothing.”

“They didn’t even tell you that she was dead?”

Elaina’s eyes widened, and she shook her head. “I didn’t know. The paperwork was sketchy at best, and I never dealt directly with them. Only Kevin spoke to them.”

Great. One crook dealing with a bunch of others who were making a fortune in the baby-selling business. The police had estimated that Kevin had paid nearly fifty thousand dollars for his son.

“You think they killed your wife?” Elaina asked.

The woman was certainly good at connecting the dots. “Someone did,” Luke mumbled.

He heard Elaina suck in her breath. Luke had a similar mental reaction. Just thinking about Taylor’s death affected him that way. Even though Taylor and he had fallen out of love long before their separation, he would always blame himself for not being there to protect her.

“I had Taylor’s body exhumed,” Luke explained. “They’re doing the autopsy in a day or two, but it looks as if she had help dying from complications from a C-section.”

That was all Luke had time to say.

Because the two men stepped from the car and started walking toward the house.

ELAINA LIFTED HER umbrella, knowing it was probably futile and borderline stupid, but also knowing that she wouldn’t let these men get to her son.

If that’s what they intended.

It was entirely possible they’d come just to kill her. She wasn’t ready to die, but she preferred that to any attempt they might make to harm Christopher.

The two men stopped at the end of the walk and stared at the house. The blonde said something to the other and then glanced over his shoulder at Elaina’s car. They obviously knew she was there.