“You need to leave. Now.”
“I can’t just leave you …” he said.
“Why not?” she asked. “You didn’t come here to protect me. You came here to force me to provide you with an alibi. I can’t do that. I can’t perjure myself and swear you never left me that night.”
“I didn’t want you to perjure yourself,” he said. “I wanted you to tell the truth.”
“I have,” she said.
He wished he could be certain that he believed her.
“So why are you still here?” she asked.
He gestured toward her bedroom, to where their daughter lay sleeping. He couldn’t put into words what he already felt for his daughter—the protectiveness, the affection, the devotion …
“Until a few hours ago you didn’t even know she existed,” she reminded him.
“Whose fault was that?” he asked, the question slipping out with his bitterness.
About the Author
Bestselling, award-winning author LISA CHILDS writes paranormal and contemporary romance for Mills & Boon. She lives on thirty acres in west Michigan with her husband, two daughters, a talkative Siamese and a long-haired Chihuahua who thinks she’s a rottweiler. Lisa loves hearing from readers, who can contact her through her website, www.lisachilds.com, or snail mail address, PO Box 139, Marne, MI 49435, USA.
Baby Breakout
Lisa Childs
To my babies, who are now amazing young women.
Ashley and Chloe, I am so proud and blessed to be
your mother. There is nothing the two of you can’t
accomplish with your intelligence and determination.
Prologue
The high-pitched beep of a breaking-news bulletin drew Erica Towsley’s attention to the television screen. “During a prison riot tonight at Blackwoods Penitentiary in northern Michigan, cop killer Jedidiah Kleyn was among several prisoners to escape.”
Jedidiah Kleyn.
Legs shaking, Erica dropped onto the edge of her sofa. She grabbed a pillow and clasped it against her chest as she struggled to breathe.
No. No. No. Not Jedidiah …
The report continued, “He is considered extremely dangerous.”
Goose bumps lifted on her skin. Dangerous was an understatement for Jedidiah Kleyn’s capacity for violence. Images flitted through her mind, as she recalled the graphic photographs she had been shown of the scene of the horrific crimes Jedidiah had been convicted of committing.
“If anyone believes they have seen this man or any of the other escaped …”
Ears buzzing with her pounding pulse, Erica could catch only snatches of what the serious-faced anchor-woman said.
“… contact authorities immediately. Do not approach these men …”
What if one of these men approached her? Would she have time to contact authorities before he killed her?
Chapter One
“Jed, let me bring you in,” DEA agent Rowe Cusack’s voice crackled in the beat-up pay-phone receiver.
Because everyone had cell phones nowadays, Jed had been lucky to find a pay phone, let alone one that was still working. But then this small mid-Michigan town was a throwback to about fifty years ago. With bright-colored awnings on its storefronts that faced out onto cobblestone streets, Miller’s Valley might as well have been called Mayberry.
“You’re not safe out there,” Rowe continued.
Even at night, with the antique street lamps barely burning holes into the darkness, it was hard to imagine any danger here. Despite the cold and blowing snow, in any other city, people would have still been out—selling or buying things or services that shouldn’t be commodities. Jedidiah Kleyn would like to believe that there was actually a place where no crime happened, where no evil existed, but he’d learned the hard way that nothing and nobody were ever as innocent as they might appear. And at times, some things and some people weren’t as guilty, either.
“Is that because I’m a cop killer?” Jed asked quietly with a quick glance around him to make sure nobody overheard. But the cobblestone street was really deserted. No one lurked in the shadows here, as they had at Blackwoods.
This town, on the outskirts of Grand Rapids, Michigan, was so rural that everyone was early to bed, early to rise. So hopefully no one, inside their little houses behind their picket fences, was awake yet to notice the stranger in the borrowed dark wool jacket with the knit cap pulled low over his face, walking the snow-dusted streets of their town.
“You’re not a killer.” The certainty in the lawman’s voice eased some of Jed’s anxiety.
“That’s not what a jury of my peers and a judge decided three years ago.” He had been convicted of killing his business partner and a police officer who must have happened upon the murder.
“I’ve been going through the case file and the court transcripts,” the agent said.
For the past three years he’d wanted to get his hands on those files, but his lawyer hadn’t been able to get the records past the guards at Blackwoods Penitentiary. The maximum security prison had had no law library, no way for prisoners to learn about their legal rights.
The warden hadn’t cared that even convicted killers had the right to aid in their own appeals. Jefferson James hadn’t been just the prison warden. He’d been the judge, at least the appeals court judge, the jury and, more often than not, the executioner.
But Jed was no longer in any danger from Warden James. The warden was the one behind bars now. So Jed focused on what was truly important—on what had kept him going for the past three years.
“Did you find anything that will prove I was framed?”
And who the hell had done it?
A sigh rattled the already crackling connection. “Not yet. But I will.”
Jed appreciated the agent’s support but there was only so much the man could do. “You don’t even know where to start.”
“You do,” Rowe surmised. “That’s why you broke out of prison.”
“The prison broke,”
