Baby Breakout by Lisa Childs Read Free Book Online Page A

truly tell what Jed had been thinking or feeling. So it wasn’t fair if he could read her that easily…
“I figured you would start doubting my innocence again,” Jed said. “After all, it would be easier for you if I was guilty.”
“Easier?” Then she had willingly gone off alone with a killer. At least she had drawn him away from Isobel, though. At least she had kept her daughter safe…
But she remembered the look on Jed’s face as he had stared down at their sleeping daughter. His jaw hadn’t been rigid then. His dark eyes hadn’t been hard. They had been soft and warm with awe and affection. He would never hurt Isobel.
“If I was really the killer, your conscience would be clear,” he replied. “You wouldn’t feel guilty for doing nothing while I was sent to prison.”
“I explained why I did nothing.” Except for the reasons she’d kept to herself, except for her personal baggage. She had never admitted to him that her parents had abandoned her with her great aunt. He had probably assumed she’d been an orphan—not unwanted.
A muscle twitched along his cheek. “Because of Marcus’s lies.”
He turned the van onto a cobblestone street and parked at the curb. At this hour there was no fight to get a meter. Every one of the metal meters stood guard over an empty parking spot.
“Are you sure this is the place?” he asked as he gazed up at the brick building, which was sandwiched between a restaurant and a bookstore.
“Yes,” she confirmed, as she located the address on the building. The numbers on the brass plate matched the address she had found online.
A couple of lights glowed in the two stories above the ground-floor office. But lights glowed in the office windows, as well. At three o’clock in the morning, it was the only building with more illumination than just security lights.
“He was even written up in the Grand Rapids magazine about his renovation of this historic building,” she said, remembering the article she had found online when looking for his address.
“He must have been more successful with other cases than he was mine,” Jed murmured, “because it seems that since my incarceration, he certainly moved up in the world.”
Erica hadn’t found much else online about Marcus Leighton except his address and articles about his representing the cop killer, Jedidiah Kleyn. “I don’t think he had any other high-profile cases, or they would have come up when I searched for his name on Google.”
“If losing my case or, hell, just representing me, hurt his career, he didn’t pay for this place with what I paid him.” That look was back on Jed’s handsome face, the intense rage that he was barely managing to control with a clenched jaw and flared nostrils.
Afghanistan may not have made him a violent man, but surely surviving three years in a prison as dangerous as Blackwoods Penitentiary had. If she hadn’t insisted on coming along with him, she could not imagine what Jed might have done to Marcus Leighton to get the answers he wanted.
Erica wanted those answers, too. She reached for the door handle, but he leaned over and covered her hand with his. His skin was rough and warm against hers. Since it was spring, she had already packed away her gloves and winter gear. She wished she was wearing gloves now, not because of the unseasonable cold but because of how Jed’s touch affected her. It brought all those images—of the two of them making love—rushing back to her.
“You should stay in the van,” he said, leaning closer to her—so close that only inches separated his head from hers.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t come with you to just sit in the van.”
She wasn’t sure she would mind if he stayed in it with her, sitting so close that she could feel the heat of his heavily muscled body. But he didn’t intend to stay with her; he was going to leave to go after his lawyer. She wasn’t certain what his intentions were when confronting Marcus Leighton. And that was why