his mother admonished him as if he were a little boy who’d cussed in church.
“Mom!” he retorted. “You’ve been pushing me to attend this wedding since you first talked to Tanya about planning it—either as a guest or the best man. You are not pushing me to the altar as her groom.”
She could have opened the door; it was the bride’s room, after all. But she was no longer going to be a bride. Her groom was missing and the only other man she would want to take his place had flat-out refused. Not that she really wanted Cooper as her groom or anything else...
She turned away from the door. Instead of revealing that she’d been eavesdropping, she would leave her purse and just walk home. Her apartment was on the third floor of a home in the same area of town as Mrs. Payne’s Little White Wedding Chapel, so it wasn’t far. And her landlord on the ground floor had a spare key to her place.
But as soon as she stepped outside the heavy oak doors, the night air chilled her blood and she shivered. Stephen was out here somewhere. With whoever had hurt him.
Why hurt Stephen? Why not just hurt her as the threats she’d been receiving for the past ten years had promised?
As she descended the steep stairs to the sidewalk, she shivered again and wished she would have agreed to ride along with Nikki and Rochelle. But she hadn’t wanted to be in the same room—let alone the same car—with her sister. Since Rochelle was six years younger than she was, they had never been particularly close, but they had gotten along well enough. Until Tanya had become officially engaged...
She should have asked someone else to be her maid of honor. But she’d thought that maybe including Rochelle would bring her around, would bring them closer.
Instead, they were more at odds than they had ever been. At least the cold air felt good on Tanya’s still-stinging cheek. She lifted her face to the breeze and let it caress her skin. Maybe walking home wouldn’t be so bad after all.
It was dark. But streetlamps, the ones not covered with overhanging branches, illuminated the sidewalk. Despite the light, she tripped over a crack and remembered the velvet runner. Stephen had been dragged down the aisle so that he couldn’t become her groom.
Cooper Payne would have to be dragged down the aisle in order to become her groom. It wasn’t going to happen. She was going to lose her inheritance, but far worse, she was going to lose her friend.
A car drove slowly past her, its windows tinted so she couldn’t see inside it. Whoever the driver was, he or she was traveling well below the speed limit—nearly at the speed with which Tanya was walking. She shivered again—this time with a sense of foreboding instead of from the cold.
And she remembered those threats—all those promises that she would lose her life before she would ever inherit her money. Had Stephen’s disappearance just been a diversion, a way to distract her from protecting herself?
Not only had she left her keys in her purse, but she’d left her cell phone, rape whistle, inhaler, EpiPen and pepper spray, too.
* * *
“COME ON,” COOPER urged his brother. “Tell her it’s a crazy idea.”
But Logan didn’t even glance at their mother. He just continued to stare at him, as if considering.
“It’s crazy,” Coop insisted.
His mother glared at him. “I thought the Marines would teach you some respect.”
“I didn’t call you crazy,” he pointed out. “Just your idea...” It was ridiculous. Tanya had obviously thought it so ridiculous that she hadn’t said a thing, as if she’d gone back into shock. So they’d just left her sitting there in the church—alone—as Stephen had been in that now-blood-spattered room. A frisson of unease trickled down his spine like a drop of ice water.
Tanya had been alone in this room earlier, but she’d been left unharmed. Probably so she could pay the ransom to recover her groom. She would be safe out there—especially as there had been an officer or two hanging around yet to finish processing the crime scene.
“But it’s not crazy,” Logan said. “It’s brilliant.”
“Br-brilliant?” Cooper choked on the word and coughed.
And his mother slapped his shoulder. “Of course it is.” But she seemed surprised, too, that her oldest would agree with her. She had always said that although Logan was a twin, he definitely had a mind of his own.
“Can’t you see that?” Logan asked with concern, as if Cooper was more dim-witted than he’d remembered.
So Cooper mentally stepped back, as he often had had to during his deployments, and he assessed the situation. “Stephen’s missing. Maybe he just got cold feet.” Even as he said it, he doubted his words. The Stephen he’d known had been an honorable guy; he wouldn’t have just run away—especially not from Tanya.
Cooper had been the only man he knew of who had run from her—back when they’d been kids and his new feelings for his friend had overwhelmed him and also because her grandfather had made him see that it would never work out between them. It didn’t matter that the old man was dead now; Benedict Bradford was still right.
“Then why all the blood?” Logan persisted.
Cooper visualized the crime scene that may not have been a crime scene at all. There was a small hammered-copper sink in the room with a mirror above it. He could have been shaving his neck and slipped with the blade, nicking his artery. “Maybe he accidentally hurt himself.”
But there had been no razor or anything else sharp left at the scene...
“If that was the case, he would have gotten help,” Logan pointed out. “Mom and Tanya and even Reverend James were all in the building, too.”
“But we didn’t hear anything,” his mother reminded him.
Desperate to believe that Stephen would return, Cooper persisted in his argument, “Maybe, when you guys didn’t hear him calling, he left and got help somewhere else.”
“His car is still in the lot,” his mother pointed out.
“He could have called a damn cab,” Cooper remarked.
“But then he would have showed up at an E.R. by now,” Logan argued. “Parker and a team of Payne employees are checking every emergency room and med station, and Stephen hasn’t shown up anywhere yet.”
Cooper begrudgingly admitted, “Maybe he has been abducted.”
“Why?” Logan fired the question at him even though the answer was obvious.
Conceding his loss of this argument, he groaned before replying, “For Tanya’s money.”
“Which she can’t access until she’s married,” his mother chimed in again. “She won’t be able to pay the ransom when the demands are made.”
His mother was right. Unfortunately.
But there was another possibility, one he hated to even voice, but he forced out the words, “He
