Love Inspired Suspense April 2021--Box Set 2 of 2 Laura Scott (speed reading book .txt) 📖

they hoofed it the rest of the way to S&J. Inside, Paige directed Liam to a men’s room.

“There’re some men’s clothes here that we keep just for these occasions. I’ll bring them to you.”

“Thanks.”

He found a spacious bathroom, complete with shower.

A half hour later, he met her in her office. “I thought I’d never get the mud off me. Or the stink.”

“Same here. There’s something about the swamp smell that sticks to you.” She sniffed. “I’m going to be smelling like it for the next week.”

Liam arranged for another rental car to be delivered to the S&J office. “My insurance agent is going to hit the roof. This is the second claim I’ve made in a week.”

“It’s a good thing you got total coverage,” Paige said, sharing a smile with him. Then her smile faded. “I still say what’s happening goes back to the day of the accident. There’s something there, something that would make sense of everything if we could only identify it.”

“I’ve racked my brain trying to come up with something. Anything. Nothing stands out, except for what I told you about Sam, and I’m not even sure that that’s real.”

“Describe Sam on the way home. You said he got real still, but did he say anything?”

“I tried talking with him, and he said he was trying to figure something out. Then he leaned back against the seat, closed his eyes. He didn’t say anything else. I waited to see if he wanted to talk, hung around, just there. But he didn’t open his eyes. After a while, I backed off and left him alone. The rest of the guys were celebrating, telling stories about how great we’d played, making plans for how we’d party when we got back. The best I know, I was the last person he talked to before the accident.”

“That’s all?”

“All that I can remember.”

Why did the thing with Sam stick out? It was a throw-away incident, yet it stuck in Liam’s mind with surprising tenacity.

Was it because he didn’t want to remember how he’d left his friends behind? Was it because he could still hear Danny’s and Brett’s voices in his mind urging him to go ahead? Was it because he couldn’t bear knowing that he had left five friends to die?

Paige understood that Liam was caught up in the past. She didn’t want to disturb him, but spending too much time thinking of what might have been didn’t do anyone any good. Nor did beating yourself up for what couldn’t be changed.

She ought to know.

After Ethan’s death, she’d blamed herself and had refused to listen to calmer voices, all saying that no one could have foreseen what had happened.

Blood rushed to her ears as she was suddenly plunged into the past. Memories, harsh snapshots in black and white, hit her with such force that if she’d been standing, her knees would have buckled.

As it was, she gripped the edge of her desk, trying to hold on to the here and now, but the past reached out and grabbed hold of her. In an effort to keep from crying out, she bit her lower lip, the physical pain helping to ebb her panic.

It had been a routine operation, one that should have gone off smoothly. She and Ethan were undercover, posing as a couple looking to buy arms to sell overseas. Expensive clothes, designer bag and flashy jewelry had sold the look while a briefcase full of cash had cemented their introduction to one of the top arms dealers on the East Coast.

They’d met their mark in an abandoned factory where shadows cast by a harsh overhead light vied with the dank darkness that permeated the corners of the huge room. Well aware that the boss’s men were no doubt hidden in the corners had her subtly checking them out, trying to identify the location of the tangos.

Everything was going by the book right up until the meeting with the big man. He rarely came out of hiding to conduct business, but they’d made the deal too sweet to pass up and had insisted upon doing business with the head of the organization.

But the boss’s second in command had taken one look at Ethan and drawn his gun. “He’s a fed.”

A sting operation that Ethan had spearheaded eight years ago had rounded up a dozen or more foot soldiers, one of whom was now the boss’s right-hand man. For keeping his mouth shut upon his arrest, he’d been rewarded with a high-level position in the organization.

Instantly weapons were drawn, and though Ethan and Paige had tried to brazen their way out, they knew they were in trouble. Fortunately, she’d had a mini-transistor hidden in the ostentatious jewel pinned to the lapel of her $3,000 suit.

Backup arrived and, for a few moments, she’d thought she and Ethan were home free, but the henchman who had identified him had wanted revenge and, at the last minute, had shot him.

As soon as Paige had seen the dark blood—death blood—gushing from the gut wound, she knew it was too late. Still, she did her best to stanch the flow, yelling for paramedics, praying with all her might.

Ethan had been given a hero’s funeral and she had packed up her bags and moved from the home she’d planned to share with him.

“Guilt is an equal-opportunity taskmaster,” she said now. “It exacts a price from anyone trapped in its snare.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

Paige told Liam about Ethan, recalling her earlier thoughts. She continued, “Everything should have been all right, even at the end when Ethan was pegged as a fed. Our backup arrived and I turned my back, just for a minute, to talk to the supervisory agent. I thought the man was out of commission—I shot him myself—but he had enough hate in him to make sure he took Ethan down with him.

“If I’d had my partner’s back, maybe he’d still be here.”

“If is a dangerous word,” Liam remarked. “I’ve used it myself. If I’d