“You believe he’s on our side now?” Logan wanted her to trust him so badly, the ache was a hollow craving deep inside him. He swallowed, fingering the delicate heart-shaped choker at her throat. Unlike the heart in her chest, this one he could touch easily, hold in the palm of his hand, protect and adore. She’d give him this one, if he asked. He wished like hell that she’d gift him with the one that mattered most.
“Obviously if they’ve hurt him, he’s not on their side, but we don’t know that anything like that has happened.” She sent him a compassionate smile that only made his chest tighten more. “You believe Xander tried to help us, and for your sake, I want you to be right.”
He closed his eyes. Her words hurt, but even though she couldn’t quite trust, the fact that she was willing to comfort him meant so much.
No way was he letting this woman slip through his fingers again. When they left here—if they left alive—he’d move heaven and earth to unmask the motherfucker threatening her and silence him forever.
“You going to be okay?” she asked softly.
Compartmentalize. It was something he did well on missions. Having Cherry here was messing with his head some. He needed to focus on getting the job done.
“Fine. We’ll see Chaz in a few hours. Maybe he knows what’s happened to Xander.”
Tara held up the access card they’d used to sneak into Kantor’s office. “Or maybe he’ll come by himself for this. In the meantime, I need to ship all the data we collected to Bocelli and let the analysts plow through it.”
“Yeah, if we tried ourselves, it would take days.”
“That we don’t have.”
Logan didn’t have days left with her, either. Two at most. Forty-eight hours was not a lot of time to mend broken trust and allay all her fears. If he had weeks or months—years, even—to prove his constancy and devotion, he’d use them. But he had two fucking days before she might be out of his life again forever. Dominion had been his lifeline for years, but losing his membership and status there was nothing compared to losing Cherry. As a teenager, he’d dealt with the loss of his mother. As a man, he wanted that tight family unit again. He wanted to create one with Tara. By not taking her birth control pill, it told him that at least some part of her subconsciously wanted that, too. What would it take for her to give him a chance?
She turned away to prepare for the data upload. Logan handed her his digital camera so she could upload those images, wishing he had the answer to his question.
With a sigh, he sat back on their bed and pulled out the photo he kept in his wallet of his family. This had been their last Christmas together. Hunter hadn’t had his driver’s license for long and had nearly killed everyone in the car on the way to the photographer’s. At six, Kimber had been the only one whose life hadn’t flashed before their eyes. They’d all been fighting like dogs when they walked in—then his mother had burst out laughing. Everyone else had joined in for one of those priceless moments of family harmony captured as the photographer had snapped the picture.
A few months later, his mother had sought a divorce. She’d been murdered a year after that. His father had spent a decade and a half as an angry recluse. Hunter had been so bitter that Mom had left—and Dad had let her. He really hadn’t spoken much to either of them until Amanda Edgington had been cruelly murdered. By then, it had been too late.
Logan had never understood his brother’s behavior. Whether she’d remained married to his father, Amanda had always been and would always be his mother. He still missed her. She’d had a soft spot for him, and he’d milked it as a kid. Times like now, he also missed her sage council. He wished she could have spent more time with Tara, given him some insight to the female mind. In fact, the day he’d found Amanda’s body, Logan had gone to see his mother to tell her that he was in love.
Everything in his life came back to the fateful day that had changed everything.
Logan rubbed his thumb over his mother’s image. He hated the thought that, if he managed to convince Tara to trust him again with her heart, his mother wouldn’t be there to see him get married, have children, grow middle-aged with the woman he loved. Another fucking hole in his heart.
As he stared at the photo, a bit of gold caught his attention. He pulled it closer to his face, staring hard. He wondered if his eyes were deceiving him.
They weren’t.
“Okay,” Tara said as she rose from the laptop, fingers clutching the heart pendant. “Data is uploading. It’s going to take a while.”
Now he knew why that little charm was so fucking familiar.
On wooden legs, his heart pounding, he rose and crossed the room.
“What is it?” Concern spread across her face.
He swallowed, trying to moisten a suddenly dry mouth. When he got close enough, he nudged her hand aside, cradled her heart pendant in his fingers, and turned it over. Exactly where he expected to see it, Logan spotted a familiar little dent in the gold.
“You keep looking at that. Are you worried that Brad or some boyfriend gave it to me? It isn’t like that. I’ve had it for years. My stepfather gave it to me—well, I found it, and he said that he’d intended to give it to me—to serve as a reminder to be careful with my heart.”
“When?” he barked the question at her.
“Sh-Shortly before we broke up.”
“How shortly?”
“The night before.”
Logan could barely control his rage. All this time, he hadn’t understood . . . He still didn’t know why—but he’d find out. At least he now he knew who. But one thing he knew as well as his own name: Tara could only be wearing his mother’s necklace if Adam had ripped it off of Amanda’s broken neck while killing her.
Chapter Sixteen
THE enormity of his realization made Logan stumble back to the bed. Almost blindly, he sat, thoughts whizzing through his head. Maybe there was another explanation. Maybe the killer had taken it off his mother’s neck not as a trophy, but for its monetary value. Maybe he’d pawned it. And maybe Adam had simply purchased it.
Maybe. But that was a pretty big coincidence.
His mother’s murder had been a crime of passion, not greed. That necklace wasn’t worth more than a few hundred dollars and had been the only item missing from Amanda’s apartment. The killer had left her old wedding rings, worth thousands more. The police—along with his father—had watched the local pawn shops for the pendant, but it had never appeared. Besides, upscale Adam had always loved his little princess. Why would he buy her a token at a pawn shop?
Of course, Adam Sterling hadn’t actually given it to Tara; she’d found it. And he’d let her wear it. Had she stumbled onto Adam’s trophy from the kill, then he made up a story about buying the necklace to remind her to guard her heart so Tara wouldn’t get suspicious?
If that was the case, if Adam was the real killer, that also meant he’d threatened to kill his own stepdaughter—more than once.
But why? True, Adam had never liked him, had bullied him about leaving Tara alone almost from the beginning. He’d ignored her stepfather. If Cherry hadn’t wanted him, he would have respected her wishes, but he’d refused to let Adam make that choice for her. Suspecting it would finally have an impact on Logan, had the asshole threatened Tara instead? Had he been afraid that Logan would see the necklace around Tara’s neck and guess the truth? Why not just make up some other excuse so that Tara didn’t wear it? It probably gave the egotistical bastard a sick thrill to know that his princess wore the key to solving the murder around her throat, and because he’d split them up so effectively, Logan would never know. Fucking bastard!
Then came the biggest question: What motive would Adam have for killing his mother in the first place? She’d been a good teacher, involved with her students’ lives to the point that she’d led a weekslong effort to find one of her runaway students.
“What is it?” Cherry darted to his side, wrapping an arm around his shoulder.
Logan looked into her worried face. What the hell was he going to tell her? She didn’t trust him about Xander, so how could he possibly tell her that he suspected her own stepfather, the only stable parent she’d really known, might be a killer?
He couldn’t—at least not now. Not only could he not prove anything, now wasn’t the time to mess with Tara’s head. They were here to find Darcy, stop the sex ring, see if they could nail the elusive owner of this house of kink gone wrong. He needed to strengthen his bond with Tara now, both to solidify their partnership on this mission and to build a foundation for their future. Accusing her stepfather of being a cold-blooded killer without adequate proof wasn’t going to help his cause.
Scrubbing a hand over his face, he sighed and grasped for the first excuse he could think of. “Just worried about Xander.”
Tara frowned. “Then why the twenty questions about my necklace?”
She never had let much slip past her, but he wished she would now.
“Sorry. Bunny trail. Guess I worried that Brad had given it to you, and that you were wearing it because you still had feelings for him,” Logan mumbled. “I need to get my head on straight.”
“I don’t love Brad.”
Inside, he rejoiced . . . until he realized that didn’t necessarily mean that she was willing to admit that she loved him. And even if she did, now there was a whole new obstacle in front of them. Fuck. No way was he leaving Cherry alone with Adam again, but he also had no way of keeping them apart without telling her about his suspicions. Since he couldn’t prove it and she didn’t trust him, where would that leave him?
“Knowing that makes me really happy, baby.” He kissed her softly, hoping like hell it wasn’t the last time. “Stay here. I’m going to see if I can find Xander. Use the sat phone to check in with Bocelli.”
Tara grabbed his hand. “You seem really upset. Please be careful.”
Everything on her sweet face said that she cared—deeply. He’d never loved another woman in his life and knew that he never would. What the hell was he going to do if his suspicions were right?
“You be careful, too. Don’t go anywhere. Don’t open the door for anyone.”
With her nod, Logan slipped out. At some point, he had to get a call out to his dad, tell him what he’d discovered, see if someone on the Tyler P.D. would reopen his mom’s cold case, get the latest threatening note he’d received at Dominion into their hands. He needed to ask the Colonel if he could think of any reason that Adam would want Mom dead. And he needed to figure out when and how the hell he was going to approach Tara about this—while keeping her safe.
Because, above all, that was his first priority.
TEN minutes after Logan’s departure, a knock sounded at their door. Tara jumped, fearing that Jordan had been waiting for an opportunity to get her alone. He’d been eerily absent since last night. Or
worse, that Kantor had somehow discovered that they’d broken into his office and had come for retribution.
Taking a taper out of the decorative candlestick on the nightstand and cursing the fact that she’d been unable to smuggle a weapon onto the island, she gripped the candlestick behind her back as she opened the door. But it wasn’t Jordan or Kantor standing on the other side.
“Xander? You’re okay.” He looked mussed and slightly heavylidded but unharmed.
“Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?” He sauntered in.
“We overheard Kantor say they’d killed a man and to screen the employees more carefully. When we got back and Logan couldn’t find you, he freaked out.”
The bad-boy Dom repressed a smile. “That’s actually kind of sweet, but I’m fine.”
Clearly. But if Xander hadn’t been their victim, who had?
“Why didn’t you answer your phone when Logan called?”
“I had to occupy Marciela so she wouldn’t notice that her access card was absent.”
“Occupy?”
A very wicked grin crossed Xander’s face. “Do you have it?
Dear God, he’d slept with one of the maids to swipe her access card? Wincing at the thought, Tara set down the candlestick and fished the card out of her back pocket before handing it to him.
“Were you going to hit me?” He didn’t look intimidated in the least.
“If I had to. All of today’s shit has made me a little jumpy. Kantor almost found us in his office. If it hadn’t been for that kitchen fire that sent him running . . .”
“I’ll have to pay Alfredo his hundred bucks. Sounds like he performed on schedule.”
That implication flattened Tara. “You paid someone to start that fire?”
“I knew Kantor was going to need a well-timed distraction.”
Tara stared at Logan’s friend. He’d made the entire search not only possible, but run smoothly. They weren’t out of danger yet, and until Bocelli’s analysts had sifted through the data, they wouldn’t know if their break-in had accomplished anything. But without Xander, they certainly wouldn’t have had that opportunity.