on him, her expression fierce. Everything about her was so rigid, she looked as though she might shatter. He was hanging onto his own control by a thread, sucker-punched by Kelmen’s unexpected change in tactics and buried alive by Rachel’s belief that he had lied to her again. Of course, she believed it. Every revelation of the last few minutes confirmed it.
Except that he hadn’t lied.
A lifetime ago when he had gone into law enforcement and then become a DEA agent, his reasons had been clear-cut. Simple. Put away the bad guys, like the one who had sold drugs to his best friend who had killed himself while hallucinating. Micah had seen his work as a DEA agent as a calling, God’s hand guiding him as surely as any minister of faith. But things had stopped being simple the day he had met Rachel. Get the bad guy…and look like one himself. Get the bad guy…and destroy everything good for a woman whose only crime was to be a friend.
He held her gaze a long time, drowning in the knowledge that the second chance he had hoped for had disappeared with her trust.
“Come on, McLeod,” Kelmen said, heading for the front of the house and calling up the stairs, “Asher, let’s get going.”
Finally, Rachel met Micah’s gaze. He said, “I’m sorry.”
She turned her back, her silence more telling than words.
Feeling like a man on the way to the gallows, Micah followed Erin Asher and Kelmen out the front door. Kelmen got in the sedan he and Erin had arrived in and drove away, leaving her to ride with Micah.
“I take it things didn’t go real well,” Erin said as they got into his Jeep Wrangler.
“And the sky is blue,” Micah returned, jamming the key into the ignition and starting the vehicle. He cast one last look at the house. Andy was framed by the front door, his small face far too serious for a five-year-old. He gave a tiny wave, and Micah, his heart aching, waved back.
He’d been so sure Kelmen would agree to his plan. Get Rachel and her kids to safety, then close in on Graden. The threats to Rachel were enough probable cause to get a warrant to search Graden’s house and office. Kelmen’s objection had been they’d have the man on an extortion charge rather than the bigger charges required to topple his distribution network.
Micah understood the logic, but for the first time in his professional career, his concern was for the victims of the crime, not the perpetrators.
“Rachel Neesham wasn’t quite what I expected,” Erin was saying. “The woman looks as though a breeze could topple her over.”
“She’s stronger than she looks.” There’d been nothing weak about her steely resolve when she had kicked them out of the house, and Micah admired her for it even as he worried about her being alone without any protection. His quick prayer for her safety was as automatic as driving a car.
“You gonna tell me what happened, or do I have to play twenty questions?”
Micah shot Erin a look, then grinned in spite of his sour mood. The frustration in her voice and the echo of his question to Rachel last night—had it only been last night?—brought home to him how thwarted he’d felt at every turn. He related the bare bones of the conversation, ending with “Kelmen has changed his mind about the safe house. He wants to use Rachel as bait.”
“Really? Then what in the world am I doing here?”
Micah had no answer for that. His plan had called for Erin to act as a decoy for Rachel. Another agent, Nico Martinez, was supposed to escort the whole family to the safe house and stay with them. As far as Micah knew, Nico was on his way here. Micah knew from working with Kelmen on other cases that the man was a brilliant strategist, so knew he had a plan, even if he hadn’t shared the details yet. But that didn’t keep Micah from being furious over his treatment of Rachel.
Erin’s cell phone rang, and her answer indicated Kelmen was on the other end of the line. The call ended in less than ten seconds. “He wants to meet us at Victorian Rose.”
“Rachel’s old shop,” Micah murmured.
Ten minutes later, he drove to the rear of the store, which had a small dock. In his mind’s eye, he saw it as it had been when he first came here last spring, the double doors wide open and Rachel supervising the careful unpacking of a seventeenth-century Italian credenza, which had eventually ended up in a celebrity’s study in Aspen.
Micah parked next to Kelmen’s car, then climbed the stairs next to the dock. Erin followed him into the building, where their footsteps echoed as they made their way through the gloomy workroom toward the front of the empty, bleak store.
Kelmen stood just inside the shadow line in front of the plate-glass window that looked out to the street. “How long do you think it will be before Graden makes his move on her?”
“We both know the answer to that,” Micah said. “Any minute. And now she’s there to deal with it alone.”
“Nico’s keeping an eye out,” Kelmen said.
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