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BOOK: Hunted

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“You doing all right?” he asked her, and she nodded.

“You?” she countered, and he nodded, too.

“Dad—” She broke off, unsure of what she wanted to say. Finally she went with a simple, “Thank you.”

“You know, tonight’s the first time you’ve called me Dad since you were a little girl,” he said, and because it was true she didn’t reply. Then he shook his head at her. “You didn’t really think I was going to stand by and let them kill you, did you? As soon as Ware called me, that night after he’d kidnapped you, I realized that there was no way you were coming out of this alive if I didn’t do something. Guthrie wouldn’t have wanted to take the chance on leaving you alive: he had too much to lose. Orders would have gone out, and you would have been caught in the crossfire of a rescue attempt, or something similar. I wasn’t about to let that happen, so I did the only thing I could think of: I contacted the Justice Department and agreed to turn state’s evidence and wear a wire and do whatever I had to do to bring the whole operation down. I’m not coming out of it too badly—I won’t be prosecuted as long as I testify against the others—but I did it for you.”

“To tell you the truth,” she responded, because the time for a little truth was clearly at hand, “I wasn’t sure what you’d do.”

For a moment he simply looked at her.

“I know I haven’t been much of a father to you,” he said heavily. “I know I put you and your mother and sisters through some terrible things. I was under a lot of stress back then, and I was drinking heavily, as I’m sure you remember, and I was out of control. But now, I’m asking you to forgive me. You’re my daughter, and I love you. I’ve always loved you.”

Love, Caroline decided as she looked at him, was a strange thing. Like a persistent weed in a sea of pavement, it could survive in the nooks and crannies of the heart, and just when you thought it had been completely ripped out by the roots, it would shoot right back up.

“I’ve always loved you, too,” she said, and knew that despite everything it was true.

Then she patted his arm and he covered her hand with his. Their equivalent of a hug, she supposed. It wasn’t a whole lot, but it was something. For them, maybe, a new start.

Miracles happened sometimes, didn’t they? It was Christmas, after all.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX

F
OUR DAYS LATER,
Reed was in his house in Bywater. He was in his small kitchen, kicked back in the wheelchair he was relegated to until his leg healed enough for him to graduate to crutches. Dinner was cooking, and the smells of a dozen good things hung in the air. The kitchen was white with touches of blue, with pots bubbling on the stove and the counters crowded with the desserts they would enjoy later, and with everything Caroline needed for baking. Because Ant had been sad about missing Christmas, they were having Christmas today.

Him and Holly and Ant and Caroline. All four of them, together.

It was Holly and Ant’s first Christmas without their mother.

It would be the first Christmas he had actually celebrated since Brandon’s death.

They had him chopping things: bell peppers and garlic and onions for the Shrimp Courtbuillon Holly was making. According to Holly and Ant, that was the dish Magnolia had made for the holiday meal every year, and it meant Christmas to them. Holly swore she’d taught him everything she knew, and Reed had told him to have at it. Caroline, on the other hand, was a big proponent of Christmas ham. She had one baking in the oven at that moment, while she did something that involved braiding bread dough on the counter near where Reed sat with his wheelchair pulled up to the well-scrubbed wooden table that anchored the center of the room. Since he couldn’t stand for longer than a few minutes at a time, the consensus of the other three had been that chopping was all he was good for, and so he had a knife and a cutting board and was chopping away.

“You ain’t doin’ that right, Dick.” Holly eyed Reed’s handiwork critically. He was at the stove, stirring tomatoes into a roux. Ant, who sat on the opposite side of the table busily deveining shrimp, looked over at what Reed had done and nodded agreement with his brother as Holly added, “You got to make it real fine.”

“Nobody likes big ol’ chunks in the sauce,” Ant concurred.

“If I chop it any finer, it’s going to be mush,” Reed retorted, pausing in his work to frown down at the vegetables he’d already reduced to slivers. He had to blink to see them clearly: the onions were making his eyes water.

“Keep on chopping,” Holly directed. “Tiny little pieces. Even-sized.”

Reed started chopping again, more vigorously, blinking with every other stroke of the knife.

“Like Mama used to say, you need to learn to wield your knife with finesse.” Coming from Ant, that pronouncement both touched Reed’s heart and sent his gaze shooting toward Caroline, who made a little choked sound that he saw was her trying to stifle a laugh.

Her eyes twinkled at him as she said, in the tone of someone who was stoutly defending him, “I think he wields his knife with a great deal of finesse.”

To Reed—although thankfully not to Holly or Ant, who appeared oblivious to the double entendre that suddenly made his blood as steamy hot as the kitchen—that was so suggestive that he barely missed cutting off his own thumb with the knife. What he did, instead, was hit a particularly large chunk of onion in such a way that it sent a spray of juice directly into his eye.

He yelped, clapped a hand to his eye, and immediately made a bad situation worse.

“Here, use this.” Caroline was beside him, thrusting a damp cloth into his hand. Reed pressed it to his burning eye.

“That’s good enough, Dick,” Holly said. Through the blur of his watering eyes, Reed watched him head for the table. “I need to put them in now, anyway.”

“Yeah, they don’t look too bad,” Ant agreed.

As Holly scooped up the vegetables, Reed said to Caroline, “Wheel me out of here for a minute, would you? I need some fresh air.”

“I’ll be right back,” Caroline said to the boys. Then she wheeled him into the small hall that connected the living room.

The moment they were out of sight of the kitchen, Reed dropped the rag, tilted a look up at her, and growled, “Just wait till later. I’ll show you some finesse.”

As Caroline gurgled with laughter, he caught her hand and dragged her down for a kiss. His hand slid beneath her hair to cup her head, his fingers threading through the silken fall with sensuous pleasure. Her mouth was hot and luscious and sexy as hell, just what he’d always wanted. In fact, she was just what he’d always wanted. The best Christmas present ever.

He was just about to tell her so when Holly yelled from the kitchen, “Caroline! Timer’s going off on the oven! You want me to do something?”

As he vaguely became aware of a tinny beeping that he recognized as the oven timer, Caroline pulled her mouth from his to yell back, “No, I’m coming.” Then she looked down at him.

Her eyes had that green gleam that he loved and her cheeks were flushed and her mouth looked like it had just been thoroughly kissed, which it had.

“I’ve got to go cook,” she said, and dropped another quick kiss on his mouth. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” he answered. She gave him a dazzling smile and then was on her way back to the kitchen.

Luckily he didn’t actually need her to push his chair: he could manage just fine on his own. Making the executive decision that he needed to give his eyes time to recover from the onion assault before he returned to grunt duty in the kitchen, he rolled on out to his living room, stopping just over the threshold to look at the scraggly Christmas tree that Holly had hauled in from somewhere (Reed didn’t want to know) and decorated because Ant had been sad about missing Christmas. There were piles of presents under the tree, including the engagement ring he’d wrapped that morning and meant to give Caroline later. Well, actually he hadn’t wrapped it. He had swaddled the small velvet box in tissue paper and stuck it into a red gift bag, but the idea was the same. Getting away from her for long enough to buy it had been a trick—they had been practically inseparable since he’d woken up from surgery in the hospital—but he’d managed it. Later, when they had some time alone, he meant to propose.

Maybe she would think it was too soon. If so, then he was willing to wait. For however long it took her to make up her mind. But as for himself, he didn’t want to waste a minute. One thing he’d learned through all this was that no one knew what would happen in the next hour, let alone the next year. Unexpectedly, against all the odds, he had found love, and hope, and happiness, and he was grabbing on to them with both hands. He meant to hold on to them for as long as he could.

He had his job back. He was getting his life back.

His boy was tucked away in his heart, and would be there forever.

But there was room in there, too, for Holly and Ant. He’d already been talking to Holly about finishing school and maybe someday considering becoming a cop. Given Holly’s sleuthing skills, that career path seemed like a no-brainer. And he meant to do his best by Ant, helping to see him through his teen years with some degree of stability.

And Caroline? Caroline was his to love, and, he hoped, to keep. To build a future with. To build a life with.

The three of them were his family now.

Thanks to them, he’d found the road home again.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to thank Elana Cohen, Faren Bachelis, Steve Breslin, Liz Psaltis, Ellen Chan, and Jean Anne Rose, for all their great work on this book. Your contributions were invaluable.

I’d also like to thank my agent, Robert Gottlieb, for being so supportive, and Mark Gottlieb for doing such a good job with my ebooks.

KAREN ROBARDS
is the
New York Times
bestselling author of more than forty books, including the romantic thrillers
Justice
and
Sleepwalker,
and the historical romance trilogy
Scandalous, Irresistible,
and
Shameless.
She lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with her family.