Yuletide Protector - Julie Miller Mills & Boon Intrigue

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She leaned toward the glass and splayed her fingers there, wishing she could physically touch him and reassure him. “A jury can’t convict you for being angry and having these revenge fantasies. But it won’t help public perception if word gets out that you...enjoy the violence.”

      “I’m sitting in a jail cell. My bail hearing isn’t until tomorrow. Public opinion doesn’t matter in here.”

      “You talk as though you don’t believe you’re getting out.”

      She was pleased when he flattened his larger hand close to his side of the reinforced glass, touching her in the only way he could. For now. As long as he needed her, as long as he loved her, she’d find a way to make it work so they could both get what they wanted. “Do you really think we can fix this and make it go away?”

      “Yes. But you have to trust me.” She pulled her hand away, getting down to business. Brian had always appreciated her practical sense about how to get things done. It was one of the things that had drawn them together in the first place, even though the arguments often drove them apart. “I would have taken care of that issue with Miss Lockhart, too, if I had known how upset you were. If you had listened to me before, if you had let me handle the situation, you wouldn’t be sitting where you are now.”

      “Let you handle it? I can’t tolerate a betrayal like that. She needed to understand that I—”

      “Hush.” She quieted him before his agitation drew the guard’s attention to their conversation. “Your emotions are your Achilles heel, Brian. I can think rationally, for the both of us. Let me do this for you. I’ve saved your gorgeous hide more than once. That was our agreement, remember? I take care of you. I know you’re sick. I can live with that. As long as you love me. But you have to trust—”

      “Sick?” He shook his head and leaned back, the boardroom glare that had intimidated many an adversary directed squarely at her. “Trusting a woman is what got me into this mess in the first place.”

      She smiled. Poor thing. Didn’t he know by now she couldn’t be intimidated? “Trusting a woman is what will get you out of it, too.”

      She waited, displaying far more patience than he had ever shown her. At last, his broad shoulders lifted with a heavy breath and he nodded, accepting her promise. Accepting her.

      “I love you.” Pursing her lips together, she blew him a kiss. “Oh, and Brian, darling?” There were rules to this relationship, and he needed to understand them. “I’m willing to do whatever is necessary to save you. But if you betray who I am to anyone—a cell mate, a police officer or even a fly on the wall—I will destroy you.” She smiled again. “Now, say you love me.”

      She held the defiant challenge in his dark eyes until, with a nod of understanding, he lowered his gaze. “I love you.”

      She hung up the phone and walked away.

      Chapter One

      December

      “That’s him. I recognize his voice. The build’s right and the eyes are the same. He’s the man who raped me.”

      Bailey Austin braced her hand against the chilly window that separated her from the suspect and decoys lined up in the adjoining room at KCPD’s Fourth Precinct headquarters and closed her eyes. They all wore black clothes and surgical masks over the lower half of their faces. But she didn’t need a visual to relive the sounds and smells and every violent, humiliating touch that had changed her life more than a year ago.

      “Shut up!” A fist smashed across her cheekbone when she’d dared to beg him to stop. Pain pulsed through her fractured skull, swirling her plastic-covered surroundings into a dizzying vertigo that made her nauseous. Her stomach was already churning from the stingingly bitter smell of vinegar and soap on the washcloth he was bathing her with. As if he could simply wash away the pain and shock and violation of what he had done to her. Bound and battered, helpless to struggle against him, she tried to blank her mind against the unspeakable things he was doing to her. “I’m the one in charge here, you filthy thing,” he needlessly reminded her.

      Dark eyes swam in and out of focus from the grotesque black-and-white mask he wore. “Please...”

      “Close your eyes and that mouth, or I’ll put the hood on you again.” She squeezed her eyes shut, dutifully doing what she could to save herself more punishment. “Do exactly what I tell you,” he warned her, scrubbing away any evidentiary trace of himself or the crime scene from her body, “and maybe I’ll let you live.”

      Bailey had been one of the lucky ones. She’d survived.

      But she hadn’t been able to erase the memory that night, and she couldn’t now. Even with a simple recitation from a Kansas City travel brochure, she recognized his voice—so bitter and devoid of caring. “That’s him,” she repeated, opening her eyes to see a uniformed officer stop and cuff the black-haired man she’d identified. When he peeled off his mask, she recognized his face from the business and society pages of the Kansas City papers. “Brian Elliott is the man who... He’s the Rose Red Rapist.”

      District Attorney Dwight Powers stood beside her at the one-way window. “You’ll testify to that in court? You’ll point him out to the jury?”

      She swallowed the emotions that rose in her throat. Despite all logic that told her she was invisible to him here in the look-at room, Bailey hugged her orange wool coat tighter in her arms and backed away from the glass when her attacker turned and looked in her direction. She nodded, transfixed by the cruel eyes, warm with color and yet so cold. There was something wrong with that man, something sick or disconnected inside his head. A brilliantly successful businessman, charming on the surface, yet twisted, damaged, inside. And he’d taken all that rage, all that self-loathing out on her. As if she’d been the cause of his pain. Even through the glass she felt his hatred aimed squarely at her.

      She could feel his hands on her all over again, her arms pinned above her head, his body on top of hers, and she shuddered.

      “This is a dubious identification at best, Powers, and you know it.” Shaking off the nightmare crawling over her skin, Bailey turned away from the glass as Kenna Parker, Brian Elliott’s articulate defense attorney, started earning her expensive fee. The taller woman clutched her leather attaché in her fist and looked down with sympathy. “I’m sorry for what you’ve gone through, Miss Austin. But if the district attorney here puts you on the stand, I can promise you that my cross-examination won’t be pleasant. If you’re certain my client is your attacker, then why didn’t you identify him sooner? He’s a known figure in Kansas City society.”

      “I didn’t know him. Not personally.” Bailey’s gaze darted up to meet the blond woman’s faintly accusatory question. “I identified him by voice. And I did recognize his eyes as soon as I saw them again. Once he was arrested, I picked out his mug shot from a group of several suspects.”

      “You had a head injury, didn’t you? Perhaps your memory isn’t as clear as you’d like it to be.”

      Before Bailey could form the appropriate words to defend her competence as the prosecution’s star witness, Harper Pierce, the family attorney her parents had insisted accompany them down to Precinct headquarters this morning, interrupted.

      “Is that a threat, Kenna?” he challenged.

      The woman smiled up at the attorney in the three-piece suit. “Of course not. I’m good enough I don’t need to make threats.” With a polite nod to everyone in the room, she turned on her Italian leather pumps and headed out the door. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go talk to my client. Chief Taylor?”

      Mitch Taylor, the Precinct commander who blocked the door, folded his arms across his barrel-chest. “My people made a good arrest, Ms. Parker. They pulled a dangerous man off the streets.”

      “Did they?” She waited until he stepped aside to let her pass. “Or did they just find a convenient scapegoat so you could close

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