Read the book: «Guarding His Witness»

Chapter 1

Feeling like he’d been called to the principal’s office, Parker Payne settled nervously onto the chair in front of the desk of the new chief of the River City Police Department. The fact that Woodrow Lynch was also his new stepfather didn’t help his anxiety.

Even though it had been some years since he’d been in school, Parker remembered all too well the feeling of being called to the principal’s office. The anxiety that gathered low in his stomach, twisting it into knots.

He’d spent a lot of time in this office, too, when he’d worked for the River City PD’s vice unit. But he’d quit the job a long time ago when his twin, Logan Payne, had resigned from being a detective in order to launch the Payne Protection Agency. Now Parker had his own franchise of the family business. He was a boss. But something about Woodrow Lynch and this office made him feel like the troublemaking kid he’d once been. Or at least like the rule-breaking vice cop he’d been.

“You’re probably wondering why I asked you to meet me here,” Woodrow began. The guy was family now, but the former FBI bureau chief was still intimidating as hell with his big build, iron-gray hair and stone face that revealed none of what he was thinking or feeling.

Parker, who was usually never without words, just nodded in response.

“It’s because I want to hire you.”

Parker’s jaw dropped. “But I already have a job.” His own damn business, actually—one that he loved and wasn’t about to abandon to go back to a place with too many rules.

Woodrow’s lips curved into a slight smile. “I know. That’s what I meant. I want to hire your agency.”

Panic struck Parker’s heart. “Why? Is Mom in danger? Are you?” His mom, widowed for nearly two decades, had just found happiness again. Parker hated the thought of anyone putting her life or her newfound happiness at risk.

“No, not at all,” Woodrow assured him. “She’s fine. This is strictly business.”

Parker narrowed his eyes and futilely tried to read his stepfather’s unreadable face. “Why me?” he asked. “Why my agency?”

His brothers, Cooper and Logan, had their own agencies. And Logan’s agency employed two of Woodrow’s former special agents, one of whom, Gage Huxton, was now his son-in-law.

“It’s business for me,” Woodrow said. “It might be personal for you.”

A chill chased down Parker’s spine. He hated when things got personal, which happened all too often with the Payne Protection Agency. “How’s that?”

“Luther Mills.”

That was all Parker had to hear, and the heat of anger and frustration burned away that chill of foreboding. For years he’d tried to bring down the biggest drug dealer in River City—maybe in Michigan—but he’d never succeeded. Fortunately, some members of his team, before they’d left the River City PD to become bodyguards, had been more successful. Or so he’d thought. “What about him?”

“He’s going to trial soon.”

Parker nodded again. He knew the story; it was how one of his bodyguards had finally left the force to join his agency. Clint Quarters had quit the vice unit after Luther Mills personally killed Clint’s informant. While Luther was responsible for many, many deaths in River City, he usually didn’t do his own dirty work, but he’d wanted to send a message.

“Some of his phone calls from jail indicate that he’s going to make sure that doesn’t happen,” the chief said.

“How?”

“He’s put a plan into motion to take out everyone involved with the prosecution, from the eyewitness to the CSI tech and even the judge’s daughter.”

“How does he know...?”

“There’s a mole somewhere,” Woodrow replied with a heavy sigh. “I don’t know if it’s in my department or the district attorney’s office. But because I can’t trust anyone in the department, I need the help of you and your team.”

“But that hit list could include some members of my team,” Parker pointed out. Probably Clint...

But Clint wasn’t the one who’d arrested Luther. A detective had had that honor.

Woodrow shrugged. “I don’t know. He must have found another way to communicate. We just know that he wants the witness taken out first and then the rest of the people associated with the trial. There could be others...”

Parker had taken longer than his brothers to assemble his team. He’d known whom he wanted because he’d worked with them before—in the vice unit. But he’d had to work at convincing them to leave the River City PD. He didn’t want to lose any of them. But if he took this assignment, he was very afraid that he would.

Luther Mills was the most dangerous criminal Parker had ever crossed paths with. And that was something, considering the number of criminals he’d dealt with in his lifetime.

Because of that, he knew he couldn’t say no to the chief. Luther Mills could not get away with murder again. He had to be stopped.

* * *

He will not be stopped. Your life is in danger...

Rosie Mendez shivered as she read the message someone had slipped under the door of her apartment. She didn’t need the warning to know she was in danger. But she appreciated that one of Javier’s old friends must have risked his safety to deliver the message to her.

Maybe she wasn’t the only one who missed her brother. Sometimes she felt as if she was. She felt so alone now that he was gone. Too soon at just twenty years old.

Eight years older than he was, Rosie had felt more like his mother than his sister most of their lives. But that hadn’t been just because of the age difference. It had been because she’d been more of a mother than their mother had ever been capable of being—to either of them. So when Javier had died, she’d felt like she had lost a part of herself. The best part...

Tears stung her eyes, but she blinked them back. She’d already wept herself out over Javier’s death. All the crying in the world wouldn’t bring him back. But he deserved justice. So Luther Mills wasn’t going to scare her off.

And maybe that was what the note was. Maybe it wasn’t a well-meant warning at all. Maybe it was a threat intended to get her to run. Or at least to tell the prosecutor that she would not testify. But there was no chance in hell that she was going to let her brother’s killer go free.

He wasn’t the only one responsible for Javier’s death. If only that other man could be brought to justice, too...

But he was even more untouchable than Luther Mills.

She glanced at the note again. She hadn’t noticed it when she’d come home from work, and she would have walked right over it when she’d entered the apartment. The white slip of paper stood out against the dark hardwood floor. That was how she’d seen it when she stepped out of the kitchen. Someone must have slipped it beneath her door when she’d been getting a snack from the galley kitchen of her tiny apartment.

A breeze wafted through the open living room window. But it was eerily quiet for a night in this building. Where was the rumble of voices from the alley that window overlooked? People were usually hanging out back there. She couldn’t even hear voices or movement from the other apartments, and the walls were paper thin.

Where was everyone? She walked up to the door and peered through the peephole—at an empty hallway.

Where was the young officer who’d escorted her home from her second shift at the hospital? Usually he was posted at her door until another officer took his place in the morning. Had he seen whoever had left that note and chased after him?

That left her completely unprotected. Not that one officer was much protection against the army that worked for Luther Mills. The drug lord could probably have had her taken out any time that he’d wanted.

What was he waiting for?

The trial was due to start soon. She wasn’t the only witness, though. If she had been, the prosecutor wouldn’t have even brought the case against Mills. Eyewitness testimony was too often discounted as unreliable.

Rosie would never forget what she’d seen, how her brother had been gunned down in cold blood right in front of her. Even as she’d screamed and dropped to her knees next to his bleeding body, she’d braced herself for the bullets she’d been certain would be fired into her body as well.

Instead of killing her, Luther had leaned close and whispered into her ear, “You have Clint Quarters to thank for this...”

Thank him? She’d wanted to kill him—just like she’d wanted to kill Luther. Like the drug lord had said, Quarters was almost as responsible as if he’d pulled the trigger himself. He’d certainly been the one who’d put the target on Javier. Yet there were no repercussions for him.

He hadn’t lost anything—while Rosie had lost everything. She had nothing else to lose now but her life.

She shivered again.

Where had that officer gone?

Had he been injured?

As a nurse, it was her duty to try to treat him if he was. The peephole offered only a limited view of the hallway, with its dirty beige walls and dim lights. Maybe the officer was lying on the worn vinyl floor, bleeding out just like Javier had. Despite her training as an ER nurse, she hadn’t been able to save her brother. He had died in her arms.

She blinked against another rush of tears. The last thing Javier had done before he’d died was reach up and wipe away her tears. “Don’t cry for me, Rosie,” he’d told her.

But that wasn’t all he’d said.

She couldn’t think about the rest of it, though—not without getting furious. He’d wasted his dying breath on Clint Quarters. She hated the man for that almost as much as she hated him for causing her brother’s death.

Despite her efforts, that fury rushed back, and the sheer force of it quashed her fears. She was not going to cower in her apartment while someone might be hurt and in need of her help. Her hand trembled slightly as she fumbled with the row of dead bolts on her battered door, but she managed to turn them all. Then she grasped the knob and pulled open the door.

And she gasped as she stared up into the unfairly good-looking face of the man she hated most—even more than she hated Luther Mills. Was she just imagining him there? Surely after she’d thrown him out of her brother’s funeral he wouldn’t have had the guts to seek her out again.

Would he?

The man certainly looked like Clint Quarters with his golden-blond hair and square jaw with stubble a few shades darker than his hair. He stared down at her with those deep green eyes of his.

And she trembled with the fury rushing through her body. That was all it was. After what he’d done to Javier, she couldn’t feel anything else for him but anger and hatred. Her first instinct was to slam the door in his face, but before she could swing it shut he caught it and no matter how much she struggled, she couldn’t move the door or him. Maybe he was made of granite.

She’d thought that before—that he couldn’t be human. That he had no heart. No soul.

* * *

This is a bad idea. Clint had told Parker that the minute he’d given him this assignment. But yet he hadn’t turned down his boss. Clint knew no one else would protect Rosie Mendez like he would. The only thing he’d been worried about was that she would refuse to let him protect her.

He hadn’t been worried about himself. But maybe he should have been, since she was trying really hard to slam the door in his face.

Then she shoved at his chest, trying to push him back from her door. But he didn’t budge. And it wasn’t just because he had an assignment to carry out.

He’d made her brother a promise a long time ago. And if anything happened to her, he would be breaking that promise. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be the first promise he’d broken that he’d made to Javier.

“Go away!” she screamed at him, and her curly brown hair tangled around her flushed face. “Get the hell out of here!”

He shook his head. “I’m not going anywhere,” he told her. “Not without you...”

“Have you lost your mind?” she asked, her brown eyes wide with shock. “I am not going anywhere with you. Ever!”

“You’re going to die if you don’t,” he warned her.

“Are you threatening me?” She stepped out of her apartment and looked around him, calling out, “Officer! Officer!”

The hallway was empty but for him. The building felt empty—which only confirmed what Clint had heard.

“What did you do with him?” she demanded to know. “Where is he?”

“Who?” he asked.

“The police officer who brought me home from the hospital,” she replied. She was wearing her scrubs still. They were a deep blue that complemented her naturally tan skin. But hell, Rosie Mendez would look beautiful in anything. She had—even in the somber black dress she’d worn for her brother’s funeral.

“Where is he?” she asked again.

Clint shrugged. But he felt a niggling sensation between his shoulder blades. Had something happened to the police officer? Or had Luther Mills gotten to him, paying him off to look the other way or worse?

Parker had warned Clint and the other members of their team that they could trust no one but one another. The River City PD and the DA’s office had been compromised. Because they weren’t sure who the moles were, they couldn’t place confidence in anyone.

That wasn’t hard. Clint trusted few people. The hard part would be getting Rosie to trust him. Hell, that wouldn’t just be hard; it would probably prove impossible.

But he wouldn’t let that stop him from keeping his last promise to her brother. The buzz on the street and from the jail was that something was going down tonight to get rid of the witness.

Javier hadn’t been Clint’s only informant. But he’d been his best.

“We need to get out of here,” Clint said, and he reached for her arm.

She jerked back. “Don’t touch me!” she said, her voice shaky with fury or maybe fear.

He would never hurt her. At least, not physically. He couldn’t help how he’d already hurt her. It was too late to change that, though.

Javier was gone.

She would not be next.

“Come on,” he said, his patience with her wearing thin.

She had to know that she was in danger, especially since her police detail had mysteriously disappeared.

“We need to get out of here!”

The eerie silence had been broken by the sound of footsteps—a lot of footsteps—heading up the stairwell at the end of the hall. That niggling sensation he’d had turned to a cold sweat that chilled his skin and his blood. He didn’t need Parker Payne’s mom’s notorious sixth sense to know that something bad was about to happen.

“I’d rather die than go anywhere with you!” she told him. And just as she said the words, gunfire began to ring out in the hallway behind Clint.

He shoved her inside the apartment with such force that he knocked her to the floor. Then he dived in behind her, slamming the door shut.

No matter how the hell many dead bolts she had on it, turning them wasn’t going to keep out the firepower coming after her. He turned only a couple before he dragged her up from the floor and tugged her toward the window.

And as bullets began to strike and penetrate the old wooden door, he wrapped his arms around her and hurled them both through that open window.

He knew it was their only hope of escape—if they could survive the fall...