Baby Breakout by Lisa Childs Read Free Book Online Page B

she had insisted on coming along, to stop him from really becoming a killer.
“If he set me up for the reason I think he did, it’s too dangerous for you to go in there with me.” He glanced at the building. “I have a bad feeling about this.”
“Because of the lights?” She wondered herself why so many of them were burning.
“Yeah, what’s he doing up at this hour?” Jed asked, his eyes narrowed in suspicion as he stared up at the building. “It’s almost like he knew I was coming. We could be walking into a trap.”
She sucked in a breath as fear squeezed her lungs. But maybe he was just trying to scare her…
Jed turned back to her, his face still close as he leaned across her, his hand covering hers on the door handle. His eyes were so dark that she couldn’t read the emotions swirling in them. But she almost believed one of them could be genuine concern for her safety.
Then she remembered where they were. “We’re only a couple of blocks from the police department. Surely, no one would be bold enough to set up a trap here—where they could so easily be caught.”
Or where Jed could so easily be caught. Maybe it was a trap.
“Erica…” He lifted his hand from hers to cup her cheek.
His touch had her skin tingling and nerves jangling. She had to get away from him and from all those feelings his touch brought back, so she pushed open the door and jumped out of the minivan. Before he could get around the front of the van, she was at the door to the office. It stood open, as if Marcus really had been expecting them.
Jed cursed beneath his breath as he joined her at the open door. “I don’t have a weapon,” he said, as he reached into his pocket. Instead of a gun, he drew out gloves and pulled them on, stretching the leather taut over his big hands. The gloves obviously weren’t his any more than the wool jacket, which was too tight in the shoulders, was. “So I can’t protect you.”
She doubted that Jed really needed a weapon to protect himself or her. All he needed was his size and his muscle. But then that wouldn’t be very effective against bullets.
“You have to stay out here,” he insisted.
Maybe he was right. She had no protection against bullets, either. And she trusted that he wouldn’t let her get hurt. If he had wanted her dead, he could have killed her at any point in the past few hours. If she went inside with him, though, and he lost control of the rage that boiled within him, she wanted to calm him and prevent the lawyer from getting hurt.
There was no telling what he might do if she let him go inside alone.
And if something had already happened inside, wouldn’t the lights be off? Would a killer wait for them with all the lights burning?
She shook her head, unwilling to be left behind. “Jed—”
But he had his own argument for her to stay outside, one she couldn’t fight. “Our daughter needs her mother.”
She shivered as snow began to whirl around them, a cold wind whipping up the powder that already lay on the ground, and tossing around the falling flakes. She nodded, as if she intended to wait.
But he was inside for only a minute or two when she slipped through that open door and down the hall to where the lights burned on the first floor. She passed through a dark reception area to the open door to what must have been Leighton’s office.
She followed him because their daughter needed her father, too. The little girl had already been denied him too long.
But it wasn’t just for Isobel that Erica had gone after Jed. Like Jed, Erica wanted to know why he had been framed. Actually, she wanted to know if he had been framed. But she didn’t intend to use violence to find the answers to all her questions and doubts.
Her muscles paralyzed with horror, she froze in the doorway—unable to move, unable to believe what she was seeing. She hadn’t seen anything as gruesome since the lawyer had showed her those crime-scene photos.
Marcus Leighton was already dead. He was slumped