reminded him of the man who had made him a marine. Sarge... “I served two tours.”
“That’s how you knew Sarge,” Maggie said, softly enough that the older man probably didn’t even hear her. “He was your drill sergeant?”
Blaine nodded. As a drill instructor, Sarge had been tough but fair. And he’d been a good and loyal friend.
“Glad you made it home, boy,” Mr. Simmons said and reached out to pat Blaine’s shoulder. “Too bad her fiancé didn’t...”
“Andy,” Blaine murmured, and the older man nodded again. Shocked and full of sympathy for her, Blaine turned toward Maggie. Earlier she’d told him that she was single, but she hadn’t told him why. She hadn’t said that her fiancé died before they could marry.
Her lashes fluttered furiously as she fought back tears over the loss of her baby’s father. The hand she held out for the key began to tremble slightly. “Thank you for letting me use your spare, Mr. Simmons.”
Finally the old man handed over the key she’d been waiting for. The second she closed her fingers around it, she rushed off toward the other end of the complex.
With a nod at the older man, Blaine hurried after her, careful to keep looking around to make sure nobody had followed them—the way someone must have followed the ambulance to the hospital.
But why?
If Maggie really had no idea who the robbers were, why had they wanted to kidnap her so desperately that they hadn’t tried just once but twice?
Blaine stopped at the door where Maggie had stopped, her hand with the key outstretched toward the lock. She gasped. Hearing the fear in her voice, Blaine reached for his gun and pulled it from the holster.
Then he closed his free hand around Maggie’s shoulder. She tensed and gasped again. Peering around her, he saw what she had—that the door to her apartment stood ajar. Since Maggie had said she lived alone now, someone must have broken in.
A thud emanated from the crack in the door. Whoever had broken in was still there. Waiting for Maggie...
Like a rowboat riding on high waves, Maggie’s stomach pitched as fear and nerves overwhelmed her. It was bad enough that the zombie robbers had tracked her down at the new bank branch where she worked and at the hospital where she’d been treated after the robbery. But had they now found out where she lived?
“Someone’s inside,” she whispered in horror.
But Blaine Campbell had already figured that out since he held his gun, the barrel pointing toward that crack in the door. He stood between her and her apartment. Between her and danger. “Go back to Mr. Simmons’s apartment,” he told her. “And stay there until I come for you.”
She would have asked where he was going. But she knew. He had already walked into one robbery in progress today. So why wouldn’t he walk into another?
Because he could get killed. Her hand automatically reached out with the impulse to hold him back—to protect him. But he was already pushing open the door a little farther and turning sideways as if to squeeze through. He turned back to her, his green gaze intense. “Go back to Mr. Simmons and call the police.”
“Call them now,” she urged him. “Don’t go in there alone.” As he had earlier...
He’d been lucky that the robbers hadn’t killed him. If they hadn’t been intent on getting away, they may have killed him just the way they had killed poor Sarge. If they’d kept shooting at him, they would have hit him where the vest wouldn’t have protected him.
Dismissing her concern, he replied, “I’ll be fine.”
That was probably what Sarge had thought, too, when he showed up for work that morning. That he would be fine. But he hadn’t. And she worried that neither would Agent Campbell.
“I’ll be fine as long as you get out of here,” he continued. “Now.”
She had noticed and admired his commanding presence earlier. Now that it was directed at her, she resented it a bit. And she resented even more that she hurried to obey his command, turning away to head back to Mr. Simmons’s apartment.
The minute the nearly deaf super let her inside, she would call the police. But they wouldn’t arrive in time to help Agent Campbell. He was already stepping inside her apartment, already facing down danger.
Alone.
As Maggie lifted her hand to knock on the super’s door, she heard the scream. It was high-pitched and full of fear.
* * *
THE WOMAN’S SCREAM caught Blaine off guard. He’d expected a masked robber. Or at least an armed threat. Instead he walked inside to find a woman—dressed like Maggie in a dark suit—rifling through the drawers of the dresser in what must have been Maggie’s bedroom. Instead of being a peaceful oasis, it was full of color—oranges and greens and yellows. It was lively and vibrant, like her personality, except for those times when she’d been too scared to speak. It was also messy, but that might have been because of this woman rifling through Maggie’s things.
“Who are you?” he asked, even though the blond-haired woman looked vaguely familiar. Where had he seen her before? The security footage from the hospital?
Could it have been a woman who had tried to abduct Maggie earlier? He doubted that a woman could have hurled the locker room bench with enough force to knock him down, but maybe that was just his ego talking. At the bank there had been one robber smaller than the others. He hadn’t given it any thought then, because it could have been a short man. But it could have been a woman.
She just stared at him—her eyes wide with fear and guilt. She didn’t hold a gun this time, though. Instead she held a velvet jewelry case in her hand.
“Who are you?” he repeated.
“It’s Susan Iverson,” another woman answered for her.
Wearing those damn slippers had made Maggie’s footsteps silent—so silent that she would have been able to get the jump on him had she been one of the robbers. Hell, he had only her word that she wasn’t one of them.
“Susan works at the bank, too. She’s a teller,” Maggie said, explaining how she knew the woman. “What are you doing here?”
“You left your purse at the bank,” Susan replied. “I was bringing it back for you.”
“And going through my stuff?”
Maggie was asking the questions he should have been asking. But her sudden nearness had distracted him—not so much that he had lowered the gun, though. He kept it trained on the obvious intruder.
“You used Ms. Jenkins’s key to let yourself inside her apartment?” he asked now. “That’s still breaking and entering, you know.”
“I used to live with her,” Susan replied. She stared up at Blaine through her lashes, as if trying to flirt with him. “You’re the FBI agent who rescued us
