Guarding His Witness

“Are you sure there isn’t a bullet in it?” Parker asked him.

“Bullet?” the woman in the pajamas asked, and there was something like eagerness in her voice. “Were you shot?”

“No,” Clint replied. “So don’t start trying to dig a bullet out of me for evidence.”

Apparently, she was the evidence tech who’d been threatened.

So they were all here—all the people Luther Mills intended to kill. Maybe Rosie should have felt better knowing that she was not the only one. But she couldn’t feel good about other people being in danger.

The chief clicked off his cell and stepped back to the table. His brow was furrowed, and it looked as though he had more lines in his face than she remembered him having.

“Is the officer...” Dead? She couldn’t say it. Couldn’t say that word. She’d already said it too many times.

The chief shook his head. “No. He’s alive. But he had been knocked out.”

“Really? He wasn’t in the hall when I arrived,” Clint said. “And he never should have left her door.” He sounded suspicious. He seemed convinced that Luther had already gotten to the officer.

But he was so young, so like Javier, that Rosie didn’t want to believe it. “Maybe he heard something and went to investigate,” she said.

“The detective didn’t say where he’d been found,” the chief said.

Rosie didn’t care. “Is he okay?” she asked. Concussions were serious.

She glanced back at Clint. Had he hit his head as well as his shoulder? She wanted to reach out and run her fingers through his soft-looking golden hair. But just to look for a bump or a cut—that was the only reason. She resisted the urge despite her fingers twitching. When she requested a different bodyguard, she would insist he go to the ER.

Realizing that the chief had hesitated a long time before answering her question, she turned back to him. “Is Officer Maynard okay?”

She remembered his name because he’d reminded her of Javier. But she couldn’t remember the names of all the other officers who’d guarded her since Javier’s murder. There had been too many.

Chief Lynch nodded. “He’ll be fine.”

“Could he be the leak?” Detective Dubridge asked. He must have picked up on Clint’s suspicion.

The chief shook his head. “He doesn’t have access to everything that Luther found out about the upcoming trial. No one in the police department does.”

The detective and the chief turned to the assistant district attorney. Jocelyn Gerber’s pale face flushed. “You’re saying there’s a leak in my department?” She sounded deeply insulted.

“If the leak is there, why do we need a private security company?” The crime scene tech asked the question Rosie had opened her mouth to ask as well. “Why can’t we just have officers protect us?”

“Because the officer at Rosie’s was so effective?” Clint asked the question. “She had no protection when I arrived. She would have been killed for certain.”

She shivered as she realized how true that was—with all those bullets flying, there was no way she would have survived. Despite all the locks on the door, they would have gotten inside her apartment—they would have gotten to her.

Luther Mills had no intention of letting her testify against him.

“I think the private security firm is a great idea,” Jocelyn said. “Because I don’t think the leak is in the DA’s office. A higher-ranking police officer or a detective would be able to get information about the trial.”

Dubridge glared at her. “Are you accusing me of helping out Luther Mills?”

“Not at all,” she assured him. “But you’re not the only detective with the River City PD.”

“He just thinks he is,” the blonde sitting next to him murmured.

Rosie felt like an extreme outsider in this meeting. All these people appeared to know one another much better than she knew any of them except Clint Quarters. And her animosity and resentment for him wasn’t the only animosity and resentment in the room.

Jocelyn ignored the comments and continued, “I just think the witness is the only one we need to worry about protecting at the moment.”

Detective Dubridge nodded in agreement of that. “She’s right. The only assassination attempt was made on the witness.”

The witness. That was all she was to them. Suddenly very cold, she shivered.

The chief shook his head. “You were all threatened,” he said. “You will all have a bodyguard.”

The room erupted with protests, everyone arguing. Even the judge. He argued with his daughter, who clearly didn’t want a bodyguard either.

Detective Dubridge’s deep voice was the loudest. “How the hell is Bodyguard Barbie going to protect me?” he asked disdainfully.

And the blonde sitting next to him bristled with anger over his chauvinism.

Rosie would have preferred the blonde to Clint Quarters. She would have preferred anyone to Clint Quarters. But she doubted her protests would be heard above all the others. So she stood up and turned toward the chief. “May I speak to you alone?”

“Ms. Mendez needs a bodyguard more than anyone else,” Jocelyn Gerber said. “As the eyewitness to the murder, she needs to make it to trial.”

That was all the prosecutor cared about, apparently—getting a conviction. Rosie cared about more than that; she wanted justice for her brother and she wanted Luther Mills to never be able to hurt anyone else. Being in jail wasn’t preventing that, though.

Would being in prison? She hoped so.

“She’s the only one who really needs protection,” Detective Dubridge added. “The rest of us have lives to live, work to do.”

“And I don’t?” she asked, her temper snapping.

He’d been so nice to her when Javier had been shot. But maybe, like Jocelyn Gerber wanted that conviction, he’d only wanted that arrest. Getting Luther was all they seemed to care about.

But she had patients and a job she cared about as well. The hospital was short-staffed. If she didn’t show up to work, people could die. Or she could lose her job. Then how would she support herself after the trial? How would she pay her rent and her bills?

The chief stepped forward and took her elbow. “Of course you may speak to me,” he said as he escorted her from the noisy conference room. “But Parker Payne will join us.”

She didn’t care who joined them as long as it wasn’t Clint Quarters. But he’d stood up when she had, as if he’d needed to shield her from bullets inside the protection agency. She grabbed the chief’s arm. “Not him. I don’t want him to join us.”

Even though he had saved her life, she didn’t want Clint Quarters anywhere near her. Maybe it was partially because he had saved her life that she didn’t want him near her. She didn’t want her feelings for him to change out of gratitude. She wanted to keep hating him. She needed to keep hating him.

* * *

Clint was hurting like hell. And it wasn’t just his shoulder. His entire body ached from hitting whatever the hell had been inside that dumpster. But he’d already been hurting, even before he’d jumped out that window.

Since Javier died, he’d been aching with guilt and regret and loss. He’d really cared about that kid. He couldn’t imagine how badly Rosie hurt.

And he didn’t want her to hurt anymore. He had to be the one to protect her.

“I need to be in that meeting, too,” he said as he followed Parker, the chief and Rosie out into the hallway.

“No!” she protested sharply. “I don’t want him.”

That was no doubt what she was going to tell Parker and the chief. That would she would be okay with any other bodyguard but him.

He’d already warned Parker that was how she would feel, that she would not want him protecting her. But even if for some reason Parker took him off the case, he wouldn’t stop guarding her.

He intended to keep at least that promise he’d made to Javier. He would make sure nothing happened to his sister, even if protecting her caused him more pain.

Even if it cost him his life.

But as he watched her walk away from him, looking so beautiful even as exhausted as she was, it wasn’t just his life he was worried about.

He was worried about his heart, too. He could easily fall for Rosie and not just into a dumpster.

Chapter 4

Just before the door to Parker Payne’s office closed, Rosie caught a glimpse of Clint Quarters’s handsome face. And the look on it jolted her.

There was such an intensity in his deep green eyes. And something else, something she almost suspected was fear.

But she doubted Clint Quarters would care that he got removed from the assignment as her bodyguard. She couldn’t imagine he would choose to protect her, not when he knew how much she hated him.

Maybe he was afraid that his boss wouldn’t remove him and that he would be hurt even more than he’d already been. Rosie had that fear, too.

Parker Payne closed the door, though, and broke the contact between Rosie and Clint. She wished she could put him as easily from her mind. But she thought about him entirely too much. Javier had idolized the former vice cop. His idol had gotten him killed.

She blinked back the tears that stung her eyes at the thought of her brother’s death. That was the only reason she thought about Clint Quarters too much—because she thought about Javier so often.

“Are you okay?” Chief Lynch asked, his deep voice warm with fatherly concern.

Not that she knew much about fathers. She couldn’t remember hers. And Javier’s hadn’t stuck around for long, either, not that she could blame them with the mess her mother had been.

“Were you injured at all during that attempt on your life?” the chief asked.

“No,” she said. “I’m fine.”

But she wasn’t. She was shaken, and not just because she’d been shot at. She was shaken because of Clint Quarters, because he’d been the one who’d saved her.

“Clint Quarters is the one who needs to go to the ER,” she insisted.

Parker nodded his dark head in agreement. “I’ll make sure he goes.”

“So you’ll give me another bodyguard?” she asked. Maybe it would be easier than she’d thought it would be to get rid of Clint.

Parker sighed. But before he could say anything, she spoke again.

“Actually I don’t want any bodyguard,” Rosie insisted. “I have a job.” One that she loved. “I have to go to work. I can’t put my life on hold for this trial.”

The chief uttered a weary-sounding sigh. “You have to,” he told her, “if you want your brother’s killer to be brought to justice.”

Her eyes stung again, so she blinked harder. “Of course I want that. I have every intention of testifying against Luther Mills.”

“You won’t be able to if you’re dead,” Parker said.

She flinched at his brutal honesty.

“Parker,” the chief admonished him. “You don’t need to be so blunt.”

“It’s the truth,” Parker said. “And she needs to hear it. She cannot refuse protection.”

“Protection, fine,” she agreed. “Just any bodyguard but Clint Quarters.”

Parker sighed. “Clint said you wouldn’t want him as your bodyguard.”

He must have already tried to pass off the assignment to someone else. She felt a twinge at that, but it couldn’t have been disappointment. She was relieved that he had, because it bolstered her argument against his being her bodyguard. “He knows I hate him.”

“Why do you hate him?” the chief asked, his brow furrowed with confusion. “Clint Quarters was a highly decorated police officer with an exemplary record before Parker stole him from the force for his team.”

She snorted. Exemplary record. She wouldn’t call it that, not when a twenty-year-old had lost his life because of him. That should have put a hell of a black mark on his exemplary record.

“How do you even know each other?” the chief asked. “Did you have a personal relationship?”

Did he think she was a jilted lover or something?

“No!” she hotly denied. “He’s the one who got my brother killed.”

The chief shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“Javier Mendez was Clint’s informant on Luther Mills’s organization,” Parker explained to the chief.

“He forced him to become an informant,” Rosie said. “He arrested my brother and planted drugs on him and threatened to have him sent to prison for years if he didn’t help him get Luther Mills.”

Parker’s brow furrowed now. “Is that what your brother told you?” he asked. “Because there’s no way in hell that Clint Quarters framed anyone for anything! He was one of the best damn officers I ever worked with.”

“His record is exemplary.” The chief repeated his earlier praise.

And Rosie’s face heated as her temper boiled over. “My brother was no drug dealer!” Especially not for Luther Mills. She’d worked too hard to keep Javier away from him. “So Clint had to have framed him.”

“Did your brother tell you that?” Parker persisted.

Rosie had to shake her head. “No. But he idolized Clint Quarters. He wouldn’t have said a bad word about him.”

“He wouldn’t have idolized a man who framed him and forced him to do something he hadn’t wanted to do,” the chief said, and again his voice was all warm and fatherly.

Or at least what she figured a father probably sounded like. But she understood why her and Javier’s fathers hadn’t stuck around after getting their mom pregnant. Their mother, a drug addict, had been a difficult person to love. That was why Javier wouldn’t have started selling drugs for anyone—least of all Luther.

He wouldn’t have wanted to help anyone become what their mother had. He wouldn’t have.

She blinked hard again, fighting against a new rush of tears.

“You know the truth,” Parker told her, but more gently now, his voice almost sounding fatherly as well. “About your brother and about Clint. You just can’t face it.”

“No...” she murmured.

“And you know no one else will protect you like Clint will,” Parker continued. “He feels guilty as hell over what happened to Javier. That’s why he quit the force and finally joined my team.”

“Is that why?” the chief asked. “I would have thought he’d want that arrest for himself.”

Parker stared at Rosie as he replied, “If arresting Mills was all he cared about, he definitely would have.”

Her head felt light, making her dizzy as she realized that Parker was right, maybe about everything. But that wasn’t possible.

That could not be possible.

* * *

He was off the assignment. Clint knew it even before the door opened to Parker’s private office. He’d warned his boss. There was no way Rosie would let him protect her. So if she’d given them an ultimatum—no protection or another bodyguard—they would have had to choose to assign her another bodyguard.

They had no choice, really.

It was clear from how Jocelyn Gerber had acted that her case, and a conviction of Luther Mills, hinged on Rosie’s eyewitness testimony. Without it and her, the killer would walk to kill again.

Clint didn’t want that any more than the others did. But he didn’t believe any other bodyguard in that room would protect Rosie like he would. Sure, they were all good.

Even Bodyguard Barbie, as Spencer Dubridge had dubbed Keeli Abbott, was damn good. She’d held her own in the vice unit. She was far tougher than she looked. But none of the other bodyguards had the incentive Clint had to make sure Rosie stayed safe.

They hadn’t made a promise to her brother like he had.

That was his only incentive.

It wasn’t because he had personal feelings for Rosie. Hell, if he did—if he really did—that might prove more a hindrance than a help. A distraction and a detriment over an incentive.

No. He did not. He could not have feelings for Rosie Mendez. Sure, she was beautiful—inside and out. And strong and brave and smart.

But she was also stubborn and hateful and...

The door opened, and she stepped out into the hall. And all his negative thoughts left as he gasped again at her beauty. Even the dark circles beneath her big brown eyes didn’t detract from her appearance. She was exhausted but beautiful.

Maybe that exhaustion was why Parker told him, “Take her to the safe house now.”

She must have been too tired to fight hard enough to get him fired. That wasn’t like her. She was so strong, such a fighter.

And now he looked at her with concern. When he’d jumped out that window with her in his arms, he’d been careful so that he would take the brunt of the fall. And his throbbing shoulder attested to the fact that he had.

But had she been hurt as well? Despite his efforts?

“Are you okay?” he asked her.

She nodded, but she didn’t look at him. Then she brushed past him as she headed toward the exit. Clearly, she was ready to leave.

She definitely had to be exhausted.

But before Clint could head out with her, Parker caught his arm.

He suppressed a wince as the movement jarred his injured shoulder and turned toward his boss.

“Are you sure you’re up to this?” Parker asked.

And Clint knew the other man wasn’t talking about his shoulder. He was talking about Rosie.

No doubt she’d made it very clear to him, and to the chief who was studying him as well, how much she hated Clint. They confirmed this when Parker said, “Luther Mills might not be the only one you’re in danger from.”

If Rosie really wanted him dead, she would have killed him when he’d shown up for Javier’s funeral. And she certainly wouldn’t have been as concerned as she’d been in the SUV about his injury. No, Rosie Mendez was no killer.

And Clint had to make certain she didn’t become the next victim of one.

“I’m fine,” he assured his boss and the chief. “I’ve got this.”

But because she’d already made it across the lobby to the front doors, he had to rush after her. Not that any of the perimeter guards would have let her step outside without protection.

Hell, they followed both of them to the SUV. While he opened the passenger door for her, one of Cooper Payne’s team had already opened the driver’s door and checked inside and underneath the vehicle. Cooper’s guys were all highly trained former Marines.

They knew to check for explosives and other potential deadly threats. Luther Mills was probably quite a bit like the terrorists they’d faced on their missions. Crazy and determined with no conscience.

So it was good the former Marines were his backup. But as soon as he closed the driver’s door, Rosie turned toward him and asked, “Can you lose them?”

“Who?” He glanced around the lot. Had someone followed him or the others? Was the area not as secure as he thought?

“Those guards,” she said. “They’re going to follow us, right?”

Given how everyone had been the most concerned about her—and after the shooting attempt, with good reason—Clint had no doubt the Marines were his reinforcements. “Probably.”

“Then can you lose them?” she asked.

“If I wanted to,” he said, and he wasn’t trying to impress her, he was just stating a fact when he added, “I could.” But he didn’t want to. He wasn’t exactly a hundred percent after diving out that window into the dumpster.

“If you really want to protect me, you need to,” she advised him.

“Why?” he asked as he started the SUV and shifted into drive. “Don’t you trust them?”

Had she recognized one of them from Luther’s crew? Clint didn’t know any of the ex-Marines very well. He didn’t even know if they were from River City or not. They could have once worked for Luther. Pretty much everyone in her neighborhood had except for Rosie.

Luther didn’t give his workers any choice. Just like he hadn’t given Javier a choice.

But the young man had made one of his own. He’d chosen to stop the dangerous drug dealer. But that choice had cost him his life.

“I don’t trust you,” she said.

He flinched even though this wasn’t news to him. Of course she didn’t trust him, not after what had happened to her brother.

“I’m going to keep you safe,” he promised as he drove the SUV out of the parking lot of the Payne Protection Agency.

“How?” she asked. “If that shoulder wound doesn’t get treated, you’re going to develop an infection or you’ll just eventually bleed out. You need medical attention.”

She was probably right—after all, she was the one with the medical experience. And Clint couldn’t deny that he felt like hell.

But he shook his head. “I need to take you to the safe house first.” Just like Parker had ordered. “Then I’ll go once I know you’ll be okay.”

“You’ll spend hours waiting to get seen at the ER,” she said. “Unless I go with you.”

He narrowed his eyes and glanced across at her face. Was she up to something? Did she intend to shake off his protection at the hospital?

She wouldn’t lose him as easily as Clint had lost those shooters, as easily as he could lose the Marines if he chose to. “Why can’t they come along?” he asked with a jerk of his head toward the SUV following them.

“Because I don’t want everyone at the hospital to know that I’m in danger,” she said.

“Don’t they know about the trial?” he asked. “That you’re going to testify against your brother’s killer?”

“No,” she said. “I haven’t told anyone.”

That had probably been a damn good idea, given that anyone could be affiliated with Luther and his crew. Rosie hadn’t survived growing up in her neighborhood by luck. She was street-smart.

But as smart as she’d been to keep everything to herself, it must have been lonely as well. Had she had no one to support her through the loss of her brother?

“You didn’t tell anyone?” he asked. “Not a friend? Or a boyfriend?”

She snorted. “With the hours I work I barely have time to sleep, let alone have a relationship of any kind.”

So she needed the people she worked with to be her friends, like Clint felt the people he worked with were his. But unlike him, she felt like she couldn’t trust her coworkers.

Clint glanced into his rearview mirror, at the lights shining in it. Parker would give him hell if he purposely lost his backup.

But Rosie was right. If she walked in with an entourage, everyone would know that something was wrong, that she was in danger. But even if she walked in with him...

“How are you going to explain me?” he asked.

Her eyes widened as she stared at him. “I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Guess you’ll have to claim I’m your boyfriend,” he told her.

A gasp slipped through her lips, and he didn’t think it was because he suddenly jerked the wheel to the right. The tires squealed at the sharp turn.

And Rosie’s dark eyes widened even more. But she didn’t protest claiming him as hers.

Clint glanced away from her to study the rearview mirror. The lights were gone. The driver of the Payne agency SUV that had been following them hadn’t expected Clint’s sharp and sudden turn, so he missed it.

Clint made a few more hairpin turns in the circuitous route he traveled to the hospital. He hadn’t tried really hard to lose his tail, though—just to make it look as though he had to Rosie.

For some reason she hadn’t forced Parker to remove him from this assignment. And for that reason, he didn’t want to piss her off. So he would go along with what she wanted.

He just hoped like hell that complying with her wishes wouldn’t get them both killed.

* * *

Luther stared down at the cell phone in his hand, willing it to ring. Where the hell was she? She couldn’t have just disappeared, and his crew had looked all around her building for her body.

For hers and Clint Quarters’s.

They were both gone.

Damn Quarters!

The former vice cop hadn’t killed her when he’d tossed her out that window. He’d saved her. How the hell was that man so damn lucky?

How could they have fallen three stories and not been hurt? They had to be at the hospital. At least that was what Luther was counting on...