Lisa Childs - Single Mum's Bodyguard

She hadn’t needed to worry that night. Or now.

But yet she couldn’t step back. She had a million and one things to double-check. And she didn’t want to miss the ceremony, either.

She wanted to see Penny marry her soul mate even as she felt a pang of envy that she might never find hers. Her judgment was as poor as her mother’s had been. Just like her father, Blue’s father hadn’t been a man she could count on. He’d wanted only one thing from her. And it hadn’t been her heart.

Now her heart belonged to another male. To her son. She continued to stare down at her beautiful baby...until a shadow fell across him.

Then she glanced up at the window. Since this was the daylight section of the basement, the window was halfway up the wall. So she didn’t see a face. She saw only legs standing in front of that window. Then she saw the black-gloved hands reaching down to try to lift the sash.

To try to get inside that nursery full of children.

And a scream slipped from her throat.

* * *

Her scream tore at Dane’s heart, making it race with the fear he heard in her voice. Other cries echoed hers, startled cries of kids. He pushed open the door he’d seen her enter moments ago—as he’d followed her mad dash down the stairs and hall toward this room.

Toward her son...

He saw her hurriedly step back from the window with the baby clasped in her arms, nearly falling over the children sitting on the floor behind her.

This was Dane’s worst nightmare. A room full of crying kids. But the fear he’d heard in Emilia’s voice drew him to her side. “Emilia,” he said.

After he’d seen her nearly tumble down the stairs, he’d called out to her in the hall. But she’d ignored him. She ignored him again.

So he reached for her. And yet when his hand closed around her shoulder, she flinched and jerked away from him. Now anger churned in his guts. What had happened to her those long weeks she’d been missing?

How badly had she been abused?

She had a bruise on her shoulder, which was bare. Her pale blue dress had thin spaghetti straps. If she’d gotten that injury in captivity, the bruise should have faded by now. Why did it look so fresh and painful?

She blinked and stared up at him, the dread still in her pale blue eyes.

“What’s wrong?” he asked her.

Clutching her son tightly against her with one arm—maybe too tightly, if Dane could guess from how hard he was crying—she gestured with her other hand at the window. “Someone was there, trying to get in.”

He glanced at the window. Sunlight glinted off the glass. “Nobody’s there.”

“There was,” she insisted, her voice tremulous. With fear or doubt?

He glanced around the room, at the teenage girls who struggled to comfort crying babies and toddlers. One of the girls shook her head. “I didn’t see anyone.”

“There was a shadow,” the other babysitter, the one with the black hair, said. “I’m not sure...”

If it was human, or just a shadow...

Emilia reached out now and clasped Dane’s arm. His skin tingled beneath her fingers. “There was someone there trying to open the window.”

He nodded. “I’ll check it out.” But she held tightly to his arm, so he couldn’t pull away and escape her and all those crying children.

If he didn’t leave soon, he might do something stupid...like reach for her again, like try to hold her like he had tried the night she’d awoken in the hospital, screaming. That had been a mistake on his part. He wasn’t made for comforting—women or kids. He couldn’t give what he’d never received.

He glanced down at her hand on his arm, and she jerked it away as if embarrassed that she’d been holding on to him. As he passed her, she murmured, “Thank you.”

He wasn’t certain if there was really anything to check out. But when he headed outside, he found other bodyguards walking the grounds. His invitation really had been an assignment. Security was high at this wedding.

High enough?

Why would someone have been trying to get inside the nursery? Or had they just been looking for an open window to get inside the church undetected?

He walked around the white brick building to the back and found the window to the nursery. The woodchips beneath it had been disturbed, some brushed aside enough that he could make out a footprint.

He leaned down and peered into the window, and his gaze met Emilia’s pale blue one through the glass. He nodded. And it was as if her shoulders slumped with relief when she should have been tensing with fear.

What the hell was going on with her?

Lars had been right to worry about her. Dane had thought that her brother had just become overly protective of her after the abduction. But maybe Lars wasn’t being protective enough. She had that bruise on her shoulder, marring the pale silk of her skin.

“What are you doing?” Jordan “Manny” Mannes, the dark-haired bodyguard, joined Dane near the window. “I already checked that window. It’s secure.”

“It was you?”

“Yeah, I’m a perimeter guard,” Manny said. “I thought you were interior.”

Dane nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I am.”

“Then what are you doing out here?”

He glanced back at the window. “Someone saw you,” he said. “And thought you were trying to get in, not making sure that no one else could.”

After what she’d been through, it was no surprise that Emilia had suspected the worst. But was that because of her recent past or her present?

Manny leaned down and looked in the window, too. “Ah, I didn’t even realize anyone was in there. Is that Lars’s little sister?”

He said it like she was a child. But she wasn’t a child. She was twenty-something and already a mother. She and her son were a ready-made family.

Dane waited for the shudder, but fear didn’t grip him like it usually did whenever he thought of family. His experience with family had been nearly as bad as some of his missions with the Marines.

Where was that shudder? He needed the fear. It was all that had kept him alive during his deployments. Being afraid had kept him alert, had made him cautious.

He had never needed to be more cautious than now, when Lars had asked him to stick close to Emilia. He suspected he needed to be more afraid of the beautiful blonde than any enemy he had ever faced.

* * *

While his friend continued to lean over and stare into that window at Lars’s sister, Manny straightened up. No. He hadn’t missed her. If she had been inside the room earlier, he would have noticed her. Sure, she was off limits because she was Lars’s sister. That didn’t mean he would’ve failed to spot her, gorgeous that she was.

“No, man, I’m sure there was nobody in there when I checked that window earlier,” Manny said. “The room was empty.”

Dane shook his head. “How is that possible? She saw you just a few minutes ago and those kids were already inside the nursery then.”

Manny tensed, every one of his bodyguard instincts at attention. “I checked that window over an hour ago when I first arrived at the chapel.”

Dane cursed. “Did you see anyone hanging around this side of the chapel?”

He didn’t even have to think about it. “Hell, no. I would have investigated if I had. It’s just been me and Cole patrolling the grounds with a few of the guards from Parker’s agency.”

Each of the Payne brothers had their own franchise of the security business now. Parker, a former vice cop, had all former police officers on his team. Cooper’s unit consisted of former Marines like himself, with the exception of his sister, Nikki, who was as badass as any Marine that Manny had ever known. Then Logan, the brother who’d started the security business, had all family members working for him. But that family was all inside the church for the wedding of the Payne matriarch.