Her Dangerous Promise - Part 2: (Romantic Suspense Serial) Read online

  “Don’t you think I want him caught? I just can’t endanger the children.”

  “News flash! They already are in danger. And since I’m not going to play it your way, you better start playing it mine; otherwise anything that happens will be your fault.”

  Mary’s mouth dropped open and she squeaked her shook. “You can’t do that!”

  “Lady, I already have.” He stepped back to wave at the patrol car that approached. “And if you don’t cooperate, I’ll arrest you for obstruction of justice.”

  Chapter Ten

  While Thom logged a report with the patrolman and dealt with the tow truck to collect her car he kept glancing at Mary, who slumped quietly in the passenger seat of his SUV. By the time Thom straightened out the details and the flatbed tow truck hauled off Mary’s disabled vehicle, a persistent drizzly rain veiled everything in a gossamer gray mist. Soaked to the skin, Thom thanked the patrolman and rushed back to his vehicle.

  He climbed into the driver’s seat and slammed the door against the chilling downpour. “I hope you weren’t too attached to your car. You snapped the rear axle.” She didn’t respond. Even though Mary was dry, she hugged herself and shivered as though she’d been out in the autumn rain instead of him. After he turned the engine over, he cranked up the heat. “It is supposed to rain like this the rest of the day, so we might as well take this time to regroup.”

  “Why?” Mary roused from her melancholy silence. “Aren’t you going to look for the kidnapper?”

  Thom drove off the lawn and headed across town. “We are looking, Mary. I’ve updated dispatch on the situation. We just don’t have much to go on… yet.”

  “Did someone check out the area around the school? Maybe he is still lurking around.”

  “I’ve got a team checking the area,” he assured her, “and your house is under surveillance, so don’t worry about Fizgig.”

  Mary’s knee bounced nervously. She crossed her arms and stared out her window. “So what do we do now? Just wait?”

  “Now we go to my place. You’ll be safe there. I can get some dry clothes and we’ll have a bite to eat. Then you’ll give me a complete statement. No more waffling. No more arguments.”

  “I knew this would happen,” Mary mumbled.

  “What’s that?”

  “I knew even if I told you about him it wouldn’t make a difference. I broke my promise, put everyone in danger and only managed to make the situation worse.” She punched the leather seat beside her thigh. “Maybe I should leave town.”

  “Running away won’t solve anything. As a teacher, you should know that. Besides, honey, you only told me about the threat half an hour ago. Before we do anything else, we have to establish security at the school and alert the teachers and parents of the situation.”

  She rubbed her forehead as if to soothe a headache. “What a mess.”

  “We have to take defensive action first, to head him off.” He glanced over at her and could see her shutting down on him. Mary wouldn’t look at him. Her body language, the way she curled in the far side of her seat with her knees and shoulders twisted away from him, told him she would soon withdraw her cooperation if she felt it was useless.

  “Look,” Thom began, “I promise you he won’t get away and he won’t hurt you again. We have every available flatfoot looking for him and we will catch him. He won’t elude us for long. He’s making too many mistakes.” Thom didn’t admit that releasing Mary had probably been the perpetrator’s biggest mistake. Rule number one for professional criminals, never leave a witness. Professionals were predictable but this guy wasn’t a professional and if Mary was right, he wasn’t even clever. While that should make him easier to locate, it also meant he might resist arrest or try something desperate.

  Chapter Eleven

  The city smeared past Mary’s rain streaked window. Somewhere out there a monster stalked her. Somehow a perfect stranger had forced his way into her life and her world had disintegrated. She couldn’t go to work. She couldn’t go home. Now her car would end up in a junkyard and she loved that car. She’d worked all through high school to save up for a brand new Firebird but fell short of the goal. The slightly used Subaru had been sensible, affordable and she’d secretly called her white stead Pegasus. As a young woman stepping out into the world for the first time on her own it represented freedom and now, no matter how indirectly, that crazy man had stolen it from her as well.

  Beyond those physical loses, Mary missed most the intangible things, like confidence and peace of mind. Had he left anything in her life untouched?

  “Don’t close down on me, Mary,” Thom said. He hooked his fingers around her elbow, startling her from her thoughts and sending a spiral of sensation through her. “You’re not alone anymore.”

  Mary leaned away from the cold door and huddled up against Thom’s warm side. He slipped his arm around her shoulder and squeezed her to him. His clothes were wet but she didn’t care. Thom was solid and warm and reassuring.

  “You know, that was some wild driving you did. If you ever went to Hollywood, you could get a job as a stunt driver.”

  Mary snorted but slipped her arm around his stomach and hugged him, soaking up the comfort he offered like an overly dry houseplant absorbing a cup of water. She smiled at that imagery, noticing how her dress soaked up the rainwater from his clothes. When he hugged her to him, Mary nearly moaned her content.

  Thom dropped a kiss on top of her head. “We’ll get through this,” he promised.

  “Why are you being so nice to me? I deceived you. I hindered your investigation. I put everyone at risk. You should put me in jail, not comfort me.”

  “Darling, I can’t stay mad at you. You have a good heart. You just made some bad decisions.”

  Mary relaxed against Thom. Everything outside the SUV was a mess but in this moment with Thom, she felt oddly reassured. He seemed to possess some kind of force field around him that made everything all right as long as she held close to him.

  Mary wasn’t sure where she expected Thom to live but the run down old shotgun house in the middle of the historical district pseudo-slum certainly hadn’t been it. Evidence of recent repair work, like the unfinished spindles staggered at intervals between their freshly sanded older counterparts on the porch railing and the new screen door that still bore the manufacture’s sticker, rescued the property from complete despondency. After they hurried through the rain to the front porch, Mary jokingly said, “Nice place you have here, Inspector.”

  Thom answered seriously, “It will be when I’m done with it.” He unlocked the door and then surveyed the property with a critical eye. “This is the fourth house I’ve bought in this neighborhood. I fix them up and rent them out. I’m a member of the historical society and we have plans to reclaim this grand old neighborhood and restore it to its former glory.”

  “Very ambitious.” She smiled up at him.

  “I’m an ambitious guy.” His eyes softened. The warmth of his gaze melted her insides and shifted her brain into “befuddled”. When she opened her mouth to utter anything to release the moment, his focus zeroed in on her lips. He leaned closer and her hands automatically rose to rest against his chest. He paused at the gesture, searching her expression for encouragement or rejection. She wasn’t exactly sure why she’d done that, whether to hold him off or pull him in, but now that her hands pressed against the firm wall of his chest she didn’t know how to withdraw them without making the moment more awkward. What she was all too sharply aware of was how solid, how real, Thom felt under her palms. His breath ceased as her fingers flexed to trace the bulge of his muscles. Unsure what to say, she stammered, “You’re wet.”

  Thom peeled the shirt off and tossed it over the porch railing.

  While he moved, Mary reclaimed her hands. She tucked them behind her back and sandwiched
them between her body and the siding next to the front door, just to make sure they didn’t get any ideas and go wondering to Thom’s bare chest.

  “Is that better?”

  Biting her lower lip, she nodded. For some reason her mind couldn’t formulate a verbal response while it memorized the glistening movements of his muscled chest. Thom obviously worked out to get so cut and Mary leaned back harder to keep her hands from exploring what she couldn’t stop staring at. His badge glittered on his belt, drawing her gaze to his extraordinary physique hidden by his soaked, body-hugging slacks. The gun secured at his hip reminded her of Thom—confident and dangerous.

  Thom bent forward, pressing that perfect chest against her, pinning her arms for real. His hands, large but gentle, cupped her face. His eyes fixed on her mouth and he rubbed his thumb across her bottom lip so she would stop biting it. She managed one unsteady breath before Thom bent down and caught her lower lip between his teeth. As he eased back, he let it slip free. “It looked like you were having so much fun,” he purred. “I thought I’d try it.”

  “And?”

  He cocked his eyebrow thoughtfully. “Not bad. But let me try something else.”

  Thom kissed her soundly. His hands cradled the back of her head and prevented her from slipping away from the intensity of it. His tongue parried past her lips and she surrendered to him. He tasted warm and mellow. Mary hungered for more. Her every breath seemed to come from him, filling her mind with his scent and flavor and texture. Thom’s embrace slipped lower, pressing her breasts into his torso, then lower still framing her hips as they ground into his. When he withdrew, Mary couldn’t inhale for a full second.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. His smoldering look tinged with concern.

  “What? Yeah, uh-huh.” Mary nodded as if her neck muscles consisted of wet construction paper. “I’m good.”

  The rhythm of her breathing returned and she could maintain it almost without conscious effort. Each breath forced her breasts against his chest, sending pulsing vitality through the points of contact and corkscrewing to places lower.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Good,” he repeated. His hands released her hips and slid up and down her arms. She felt delicate under his touch, breakable.

  He forced himself to take a full step back. What on Earth was he thinking? He could protect her, bring her justice but never open his heart to her. Never love her. Not the way she deserved to be loved. More than that, the way she wrecked her car in a panic earlier that day proved her fragile emotional state. And now he’d gone and let his libido compromise the tenuous trust he’d established with her. The last thing Mary needed was a man coming on strong to trigger some post traumatic stress reaction. After pulling a stupid stunt like this, he’d be lucky if she didn’t shut down on him completely. With her kidnapper still on the loose and sending her threatening messages, he couldn’t afford to lose her cooperation. Her life depended on him.

  Mary stared up at him with her big rescue-me eyes and he wanted to scoop her into his arms and carry her off to his bed. Since he’d plundered her mouth she hadn’t even moved, like some vulnerable rabbit too stunned and afraid to bolt.

  Idiot. Damned idiot.

  “Come on,” he said, pushing open the door. She slipped past him into the dark interior. Thom grabbed his shirt off the railing, followed her inside and flipped on the lights.

  Sheets covered the jumble of furniture in the center of the living room like a snow covered model of a mountain. Half the room gleamed with a fresh coat of bluebell high gloss, leaving the other half with the flat, stained original white walls. A brush carelessly left in an old plastic butter bowl of paint had hardened into a concrete piece of modern art. Thom heard the call about Mary’s abduction over his scanner in the middle of the job and he hadn’t bothered to stop and clean it up.

  The scanner, pushed in the corner of the room, chattered loudly and Thom snapped it off. “Sorry about the mess. Renovations.”

  Thom snapped off the sheets covering the television set and leather sofa and tossed them in a pile next to the paint cans. He rearranged the furniture quickly. “Have a seat. I’m just going to clean up.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Mary stared at the dance of muscles on Thom’s beautifully nude back as he headed for the stairs in the back of the kitchen and mused how he possessed the physique of an Olympic diver. Her palms tingled with regret. If she hadn’t kept her arms behind her back, she could have indulged her growing desire to explore those planes and bulges. As Thom disappeared up the steps Mary blew out a breath that puffed her bangs off her forehead and barely cooled the sweltering longing that burned her skin.

  And that kiss—Mary tugged the front of her dress repeatedly to fan herself—that kiss did wicked things to her nether regions. The voltage in that brief encounter surged through her like a zap from a defibrillator that brought to life parts of her body and yes, possibly parts of her heart, she hadn’t realized were dormant. A man who could kiss like that should come with a medical warning label. But who was this person who wielded such power over her? What kind of man was Thom Brady?

  She strolled around the living room, taking in the environment, wondering what it could tell her about the man who awoke her on such an unexpected level. The lingering odor of paint tinged the air. As she circled the room, the thin carpet muffled her footfalls and the creaking of the floorboards, which Mary could feel flexing beneath the balls of her feet.

  Thom said he reclaimed old homes like this one. Brought them back to life seemed more like it, reinvigorating them as he had her. Mary smiled at herself at such a poetic thought. He’d curled her toes and she had to admit an electric buzz still hummed in her tissues but that merely indicated her infatuation with him. With the excess of emotion from the past few days, naturally she’d be inclined to ascribe more significance to… Mary shrugged to herself. To whatever the effects of over-stimulation did to her.

  But, then again, Thom had kissed her. He’d looked at her with desire—she smiled to herself—with hunger, as if he didn’t see a simple school teacher but a vibrant, sexual woman. Could he be developing feelings for her similar to the ones she felt for him? Or did his attraction stem from some protective instinct?

  Mary examined the furniture in the living room. Supple suede covered the sofa and easy chair. Sensuous, Mary thought, enjoying the soft texture with the light stroke of her fingertip and knowing with some flutter of excitement that Thom also fondled this fabric with pleasure.

  A half bookshelf, only two shelves tall, crouched against the back of the sofa. Tucked among the criminology texts and true crime books was a single photo album with a well-worn spine. Mary slipped the album from the shelf and brought it with her as she settled into the deep cushions of the couch.

  She wondered what family memories captured in photos Thom would value enough to store in an album. Would it contain contemporary pictures of Thom and his extended family, or had he inherited a family album full of old browning and fading snapshots? Mary flipped open the cover.

  A nine by eleven portrait of a teenage girl smiled on the first page. With her narrow features, Mary was surprised the girl wore her blond hair in a plain, straight style cut only slightly longer than shoulder length. Some time in the sun might have added a healthier color to her skin. The smile didn’t reach the girl’s eyes, which held a deep well of sadness. Mary wanted to ask her what could make someone so young so sad.

  On the second and third pages a four snapshot spread began on the upper left, with a boy and a girl of maybe eight, both dressed in red striped softball uniforms, posing together, arms wrapped behind each other’s necks in true camaraderie.

  Mary recognized the girl as a younger version of the teenager on the previous page. In the startling green eyes, dark hair and precursors of the handsome features he’d grow into, Mary saw Thom in the
boy.

  Both Thom and the girl appeared in the other three pictures. The pair, probably about thirteen, waved to the camera in the next shot from the front seat of a roller coaster moments before the ride would begin. In the third photo the young teens sipped from two straws poking out of a single root beer float. The candid shot caught them holding hands under the table and gazing deeply at each other.

  The last picture was a formal photo taken under the arbor at a high school dance. Thom’s Irish green cummerbund and bow tie matched the girl’s dress exactly. His arm hooked around the girl’s waist and she leaned her head back against his shoulder. High school sweethearts, Mary mused, wondering why Thom hadn’t married the girl.

  On the next two pages, two family portraits faced each other. On the first, a young version of the blond girl posed between an older couple, probably her parents Mary guessed based on the family resemblance. The other picture showed an older version of the girl, this time standing behind a couple. The woman in both pictures remained the same but the man switched from a slender and intelligent looking blond fellow to a heavyset dark haired man. The first one was the girl’s father, Mary guessed and the second her step-father. The girl’s smile in the second photo seemed almost a grimace.

  Mary turned to the next page. A smaller version of the portrait from the first page of the album appeared in the newspaper article that spanned both pages. Beneath the picture, the caption read, “Tammy Jo Resnick, sixteen.” The headline splashed across the top declared in large type, “Local Girl Murdered.” Mary gasped, feeling the sting of tragedy for the lovely lost child.