Harlequin Intrigue, Box Set 2 of 2 Read Online Free PDF Page B

come back. He could still be here—hiding in the trees, lurking on the other side of that door, watching her right now. Waiting for her.
    She glanced back and forth, trying to see into the night beyond the lamplights and the snow. Nothing. No one. She hadn’t seen the man who grabbed her the night she’d been kidnapped, either.
    She was shaking now. Katie didn’t feel safe.
    Her son wasn’t safe.
    â€œTyler.” She whispered his name like a storm cloud in the air as she turned and raced back to the car, banging on the window until Tyler unlocked the door and she could slip inside. She relocked the doors and peeled off her mittens before reaching across the seat and cupping his cheek in her palm again. “I love you, sweetie.”
    His skin was toasty warm from the heater, but she was shivering inside her coat as she shifted into gear and sped across the parking lot to the nearest exit.
    â€œMom? What’s wrong?”
    Tyler’s voice was frightened, unsure. She was supposed to be his rock. She was a horrible mother for worrying him with her paranoid imagination. She was putting him in danger by not thinking straight.
    â€œI’m sorry, sweetie. I’m okay. We’re both okay.” She shook the snowflakes from her dark hair, smiled for him, then pulled out onto the street at a much safer speed. “Why don’t you tell me more about Padre.”
    * * *
    â€œC ONFOUNDED WOMAN .” Trent slowed his pickup to a crawl once he saw that the parking lot outside the Williams College auditorium had nothing but asphalt and snow to greet him after his zip across Kansas City to get to Katie and Tyler.
    As he circled the perimeter of the empty lot, just to make sure he hadn’t misunderstood the location of the distress call, and the tiny Rinaldi family truly wasn’t stranded someplace out in the bitter cold, Trent admitted that Katie Lee Rinaldi knew how to push his buttons—even though she never did it intentionally. It was his own damn fault. If he hadn’t felt especially protective of Katie ever since she’d decided back in high school he was the one friend she could rely on without question, and if all the hours he’d spent with Tyler didn’t make him think he wanted to be a father more than just about anything—more than making sergeant, more than playing for the Chiefs, more than wishing he didn’t have the time bomb of one concussion too many ticking in his head—then he wouldn’t charge off on these fool’s errands to protect a family that wasn’t his.
    He pulled up at the sidewalk near the auditorium’s back entrance and shifted the truck into Park. He’d left before finishing a perfectly good workout to find out what Katie’s phone call had been about when he’d barely been able to work up a polite interest in lingering on Erin Ballard’s doorstep and trading a good-night kiss. Erin was an attractive blonde who could carry on an intelligent conversation, and who’d made it perfectly clear that she’d like Trent to come in out of the cold for some hot coffee and anything else he might want. Erin wasn’t impulsive. Her wardrobe consisted of beiges and browns, and nothing she’d said or done had surprised him. Not once. Cryptic phone calls, leading with her heart and putting loyalty before common sense were probably foreign concepts. If it wasn’t on Erin’s planner in her phone, it probably wouldn’t happen. Erin wasn’t interesting to Trent.
    She wasn’t Katie.
    No woman was.
    The proof was in the follow-up buzz in his pocket. Trent checked his phone again, admitting he was less frustrated to read the Are you mad at me? text from Erin than he was to see that he hadn’t heard boo from Katie since she’d called about witnessing something
weird
and had sounded so afraid.
    No. Busy. With work , he added before sending the text to Erin. Maybe the woman would get a