“I’m not asking you to lie to him,” Xavier said with a cagey grin. “Maybe you can just withhold some information so that he’ll accept the job.”
Cooper shook his head and ran his hand over his military-short black hair. He was not going to do that again. The last time he’d sent off one of his bodyguards without briefing him fully on the assignment he had nearly lost him—for good. It wasn’t a risk he was willing to take again, especially as all the bodyguards who worked for Cooper’s franchise of the Payne Protection Agency were his friends and—in the case of Nikki Payne—family.
Hell, after what he’d gone through with his friends, who had all served in the same Marine Corps unit that he had, they were family, too.
“I can’t do that,” Cooper said. He wouldn’t betray a friend...again.
Of course last time it had been more of a joke. But there had been nothing funny about nearly losing Jordan “Manny” Mannes. And this time the danger was even greater.
“You said that a man already died,” Cooper reminded the older man.
Xavier Bentler uttered a weary-sounding sigh. “That was most unfortunate. But what’s more unfortunate is that his won’t be the last death. I am certain that someone else is going to die.”
And Cooper was afraid that person would be his friend if he assigned this job to Cole. He narrowed his eyes as he studied the old man, suspicious of how he could be so certain someone else was going to die. He doubted the guy had what Cooper’s mother did—her uncanny ability to just know that something was going to happen. Everybody had pretty much envied that ability until now. At least Cooper didn’t envy it since he sometimes possessed the ability himself.
Like now...
“Cole can prevent that murder, though,” Xavier Bentler continued, “if he protects her.”
Cooper had that feeling again—a bad feeling—that he knew who that person was. But still he had to ask, “Shawna?”
The older man nodded and grinned, obviously delighted that Cooper knew who she was. But that was not a good thing. He also knew what she’d already put Cole through. If she died...
Cole would be devastated, no matter what he felt for her yet.
“So you understand,” Xavier said, as if he’d successfully argued his case, even though the old guy was a businessman, not a lawyer. “And you will make Cole take this assignment.”
Cooper sighed before bobbing his head in a reluctant nod of acquiescence. He did understand that if something happened to Shawna, no matter how badly she’d hurt him, Cole would never forgive himself. Even if Cole didn’t want to personally protect her, Cooper had to make sure that nothing happened to her. He just hoped that he wouldn’t lose his friend. Either Cole would refuse to take the job and resign from the Payne Protection Agency. Or he would accept the assignment and...
Cole would be the next person to lose his life.
Seeing Shawna Rolfe like this, dressed all in black with tears streaming down her face, was why Cole had ended their engagement. He’d worried that one day she would wind up mourning him like this. Instead she was mourning another man, the one who had become her husband. There was a hollow feeling in Cole’s chest as if he’d lost something, as well.
But he had never had it, not for real. If Shawna had ever loved him, she wouldn’t have fallen so quickly for someone else. She wouldn’t have let another man put a ring on her finger within months of taking off Cole’s. And that hadn’t been just another engagement ring. It had been the wedding band that she still wore. The yellow gold reflected the sunshine glinting through the stained-glass windows of the church as she lifted her hand to wipe away the tears streaking from beneath her dark glasses. She didn’t need the glasses inside the church, so she was probably using them to hide her swollen eyes. But they couldn’t hide the fact that she’d been crying and still was.
And that hollowness inside Cole turned to an intense ache. He had never been able to handle Shawna’s tears, even when they were just kids in elementary school. He had always beaten up the boys who’d made her cry.
But he couldn’t beat up her husband. There was nothing left of him except the ashes in the urn sitting on a podium at the front of the church. There hadn’t been much left of him to cremate. A car bomb had blown him to bits.
Why? What reason would anyone have to murder a high school band teacher? Many of those students now played a medley of what they’d claimed had been their beloved teacher’s favorite songs. The arrangement was rough as several of them stopped to dissolve into sobs. If Cole believed what he was seeing, then he had to accept that everyone had loved Emery Little. But Cole had grown up knowing how deceptive appearances could be.
Grandfather didn’t think the car bomb had been meant for Little. He thought it had been meant for Shawna. It made no more sense to kill a nurse than it did to kill a band teacher. Just a short while ago—as he’d been getting pressed into this assignment—Cole had asked that question. “What reason would anyone have for wanting either of them dead?”
All the Payne Protection bodyguards had been gathered around the conference room table. Cooper had probably called them all in for reinforcements as he’d told Cole what his next assignment would be: protecting his former fiancée.
Thinking it was some sick joke like they sometimes played on each other, Cole had laughed.
But his laughter had evaporated when Cooper had informed him what had happened—and that Cole’s grandfather had flown from his estate in northern California out to River City, Michigan, to request their protection services.
“What reason?” Cole had asked again because none of it made sense. It must have been a horrible mistake. “What’s the murderer’s motive?”
“Jealousy,” Nikki Payne had offered, and her auburn brows had arched over her brown eyes as she’d studied him.
He was the only one who would have a reason to be jealous. But maybe Lars Ecklund, Nikki’s fiancé and Cole’s friend, hadn’t shared his history with her. So Cole told her, “I broke my engagement to Shawna a long time ago.”
They had been engaged a long time as well—first with the promise ring he’d given her when they’d graduated high school and then with the engagement ring he’d given her when he’d returned from boot camp. When he’d broken up with her six years ago, before his unit’s most dangerous mission, Shawna had tried to give back the engagement ring—a two-karat solitaire he’d bought after he’d inherited his father’s estate. But he hadn’t wanted it back. He hadn’t even thought he’d make it back from that mission. But he had—to find her already married to another man.
“I have no reason to be jealous,” he’d insisted.
But he was.
As he stood there and watched Shawna weep over another man, jealousy churned his stomach into an acidic pool of bile. No. Everyone hadn’t loved Emery Little. He hated the man, for making Shawna cry. Most of all he hated him for making Shawna love him, the way she hadn’t really loved Cole.
He shouldn’t have lied in that meeting—because his boss had used that lie against him. “If you have no reason for jealousy, then you have no reason to refuse this assignment,” Cooper had pointed out. “You
