Harlequin Romantic Suspense April 2021 Karen Whiddon (best fiction books to read TXT) 📖

the evil eye. Instead she watched his familiar poker face. The only hint of his passion lay in his laser-blue eyes. She swore she saw white-hot sparks in their depths as he considered her.

“I know I’m the last person you want to have to spend any time with, but your father was convincing in his arguments that your life was in danger. I owed it to him, to your family, to take the job.”

“Whatever you needed to do, I understand, but I don’t have to like it. My sister is the one really responsible for Dad’s involvement. I talked to her this morning and I had a feeling she was going to call him.”

“Unless you spoke to her about your interview’s location before ten o’clock last night, Rigo was ahead of it.” Stanton’s declaration cut through her wanting to blame Soledad, or Stanton, for her father’s overprotective ways. “He told me to start this morning.”

“Of course he was on to me sooner. He always is.” She sipped her latte, relishing the creaminess of the oat milk, but it did little to soothe her fraught nerves. In all her years as an investigative reporter she’d never faced a life-threatening situation. Criminals, sure. Menacing notes sent to the Gazette, meant for her. But not a direct physical assault. That had to be why her hands were still slightly shaking. “And it turns out he was correct. More fool me.” Appreciation flowed through her veins as she realized her father had in all likelihood saved her life. As had Stanton.

“You were focused on your job, is all. Getting the story. It’s normal for you to dig deep.”

She looked at him, ready to see the sarcastic expression on his face. Instead a soft smile played on—

Stop.

“You understand that much, don’t you? That my job is my entire focus. It has to be. You never allowed our, um, your personal life to interfere with your job. It’s no different for me, Stanton. It has to be all about the story.” As her safety would be his single focus as long as she was his assignment. A prescient shiver traveled down her spine and she didn’t want to examine the cause. Because the part of her that had never let go of Stanton, of what they’d shared, was jumping up and down in giddy anticipation.

“I do understand.” He didn’t elaborate, for which she was grateful. The last thing she needed was any more reminders of how well he’d once known her.

They sat in companionable, or rather, bodyguard-and-person-in-danger silence for several minutes. Stanton had chosen the small bistro table in the corner, away from most of the customers who frequented the busy café. Her eyes took in the familiar surroundings and she tried to allow herself to relax. When her gaze passed over the barista station and she saw the same man staring at her, her back stiffened.

“What is it?” Stanton missed nothing. She wanted to believe it was all about her, but it was why he was such a great security professional. Stanton was an observer and had superb intuition.

“There’s a man sitting at the counter, at the far right, who I noticed when we came in. He hasn’t moved and has kept his eyes on me the entire time. It could be nothing—”

“There are no coincidences when you’re being targeted by a drug kingpin, Dominique.” At least he didn’t add in the part about how she’d attracted the unwanted scrutiny with her provocative social media posts. And she had the sense that Stanton knew a lot more about why she was a target than he let on.

“Is it the cartel I should be concerned about, or Len Davison the serial killer? What do you know about Charlie Hamm, Stanton? About Randall Bowe’s habit of mishandling evidence? Or the drug cartel that’s run rampant in Grave Gulch?”

He straightened in his seat, leaned in toward her. It’d be so easy to think he was about to tell her how much he wanted to make love to her again instead of preparing to fill her in on who wanted her dead.

CHAPTER 3

Stanton avoided giving Dominique an answer right away by checking out the man she was concerned about. He sat at the counter, his eyes on his phone, not looking like he cared an iota about them, or her. But Dominique wasn’t about drama or paranoia. If she thought something was odd about the person, he trusted her instincts, even though he knew Dominique was testing him. Or maybe baiting.

She thought he was so busy doing personal protection that he was out of touch with what mattered to her, to the Grave Gulch community. He held back his defensive retorts, reminded himself he had to remain detached. Keeping his peripheral vision on the man of interest, he met her gaze.

“Charlie Hamm was imprisoned two years ago for dealing opioids, as part of a ten-year sentence. He was killed during a prison fight in the county jail last month. There’s been speculation that his death wasn’t a result of a random fight but instead a murder. Many in the local community think it’s all a big conspiracy theory, though. Several people have been accused of crimes that didn’t make sense, and the evidence against them all points back to GGPD’s forensic scientist, Randall Bowe. There’s a serial killer on the loose, Len Davison. If that’s not enough, to swing back to Hamm, Grave Gulch has been slammed by the opioid epidemic, and with so many young victims, scores of families are still grieving. The last thing they want to hear is that a convicted dealer was wrongly incarcerated.”

“You’ve been reading my work.” Her eyes sparked and he reminded himself it was from professional pride and not from pleasure that he’d sought out her story. That she wasn’t happy about being so close to him.

“I regularly read the local paper, among others. You know that much about me. Like most folks around here, I read the Grave Gulch Gazette