LITMIR.BIZ

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see something! Something’s happening up there!”

      Logan’s gaze rose toward the third floor, too. “I don’t see anything...”

      But he must have been concerned, too, because he pulled out his cell phone. He pressed a button for what must have been a two-way feature and then he called out, “Cooper?”

      Not even a crackle of static emanated from his phone, it remained dead.

      She shuddered as the horrible thought occurred to her that Cooper might have been dead, too. She hadn’t heard any shots, but some guns had silencers. She knew that from watching TV. The person who might have been waiting in her apartment could have had one.

      She tugged on the sleeve of Logan’s wool overcoat. “You need to go upstairs and check on him!”

      “He needs to stay with you,” a deep voice coming out of the darkness corrected her. “Like someone should have stayed with you at the church so you didn’t go running off on your own.”

      She hadn’t started running until the car had jumped the curb to chase her down. But she didn’t bother pointing that out since the sharpness of his voice showed he was already angry with her.

      And Logan was already asking, “Did you clear the apartment, Cooper?”

      “No.”

      Logan snorted derisively. “Why not? It doesn’t look that big.”

      The studio apartment had formerly been a ballroom, so it was bigger than it looked—with a bathroom tucked into a wide dormer. If the attic space didn’t have issues with being too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter, the rent wouldn’t have been affordable enough for her.

      “I cleared it for intruders, but there were other threats,” Cooper explained.

      Logan tensed and held up his phone, his fingers ready to press buttons. “What do we need? Bomb squad?”

      “If it was a bomb, I would have taken care of it,” he assured his brother. “No, it was literally other threats.” He passed his brother the desecrated engagement announcement.

      While Tanya sucked in a breath of indignation that Cooper had gone through her things, his brother released a ragged breath of relief.

      But Cooper wasn’t relaxed. His jaw was clenched so tightly that a muscle twitched in his cheek. He was obviously mad as hell, his dark gaze intense as he stared at Tanya.

      She glared back at him. He was only supposed to make sure her place was safe. The thought of him going through her boxes and drawers and closets reminded her of all the things he might have found, like her weakness for silk and lace underwear.

      “There are more of those,” he told his brother. “Did you know about the threats?”

      “No,” Logan replied.

      “Now you know,” Cooper said. “Get on it. Check out her ex-boyfriends, her cases at work—”

      Logan grinned. “Are you forgetting which one of us is the boss, little brother? I’ve been doing this for a while. I need to talk to the client first to get the names of those ex-boyfriends and difficult cases.”

      Cooper shook his head. “I’ll do that.”

      If she were actually a client, she would rather talk to Logan. She could be more honest with him because she suspected he would be less judgmental. But she wasn’t actually a client and needed to remind the protective Payne brothers of that. “I haven’t hired—”

      Cooper interrupted her as he spoke to his brother. “Tanya and I need to talk.”

      As if Logan, too, had forgotten he was the boss, he nodded his agreement. “I need to touch base with Parker...”

      Probably to see if he had found Stephen. But if he had, he would have called. Even if he’d found him dead, he would have called. She shuddered now, so forcefully that she couldn’t stop trembling.

      “If you completely cleared her place, get her inside,” Logan, as the boss again, ordered. “She’s freezing. Or in shock...”

      “Or getting pissed off that she’s being ignored,” Tanya suggested. “Yes,” she continued, ignoring them as they had been ignoring her, “she’s definitely pissed off.”

      Logan patted his brother’s shoulder before heading toward his car parked at the curb. “Good luck. You may be the one needing protection now.”

      As if Tanya could take out a Marine, no matter how angry she was. And she actually wasn’t as angry as she was scared. For Stephen. For herself. For Cooper...

      “I won’t hurt you,” she assured him.

      He uttered one of his brother’s derisive snorts as if he didn’t believe her. “Did you tell Stephen that, too?”

      Her palm itched to slap him as her sister had slapped her. Her cheek throbbed at just the memory of that blow—or maybe because she’d hit it again when she’d done the nosedive running away from the car. Bristling with anger and with guilt over Stephen’s disappearance, she said nothing as they climbed the stairs to her apartment.

      Since he had the keys he’d gotten from her landlord, he unlocked the door and stepped inside first, as if checking again for an intruder. Then he flipped on the lights.

      A banker’s box had been knocked over, the contents spilled across the library table that also served as her dining table and desk. She gasped. “Someone was in here?”

      He shook his head. “Not that I could tell.”

      “You did this?” He must have gone through her things in a hurry. Maybe he hadn’t had time to look through her closet and drawers. She glanced around, but it appeared nothing else had been disturbed. So she focused again on the contents of the box. All those threats...

      She had packed them away—hoping to forget them but not foolish enough to throw them all out.

      “You haven’t exactly been forthcoming with information,” he bitterly reminded her. “If we’re going to find Stephen, we need to know everything.”

      If...

      She wasn’t naive. She knew it was very likely that they would never find Stephen...either alive or dead. But she wasn’t ready to face that possibility. She would have preferred Cooper offer assurances and promises. But she knew him better than that. He would never give her what she wanted from him—at least he hadn’t when they were teenagers.

      “There isn’t much to tell you,” she said, especially when it came to exes. “I haven’t really dated much.” Because of the threats. And maybe because of him, but she didn’t want him to suspect that she’d hung on to an old crush. “I’ve been too busy with work.”

      “How long have you been a social worker?” he asked. “Since you graduated college? You must have handled a lot of cases.”

      She sighed as faces jumbled in her mind. “A lot,” she agreed, “but none recently. At least not personally. I became a supervisor four years ago. I delegate now.” Which meant giving too much work to too few employees.

      “Now,” he said. “But four years ago there must have been cases you handled that hadn’t gone well.”

      She flinched, remembering the losses. The people she hadn’t been able to help. If she had Grandfather’s money, she could do so much more than she was able to do now. “Of course there were cases that went badly. Children I had to remove from neglectful or abusive parents.” She shuddered at the painful memories. “But that was years ago...”

      “Some people have a hard time forgiving the person they perceive tore their family apart,” he said with a glance out toward the street. “Mom says Logan has never missed a parole hearing for the man who shot my father. He’s determined to make sure that the guy never gets out of prison—at least not alive.”

      “What

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