In the Line of Fire Read online

  “Late again?”

  “Yep. I’m going to get another lecture from Mean Martha’s African clone.” McKenna shook her head. She was quite convinced the principal at Daisy’s preschool waited at the gate to gripe at her for being late.

  “Some things never change.”

  McKenna rolled her eyes, knowing that Mattie was referring to the hours she’d spent in the office of the lady principal of the exclusive, and pretentious, girls school they both attended back home in New York. She probably still held the record for being the most-suspended girl at St. C’s. She’d been far too curious for school and her boredom had led to...incidents. Of course, her father—a rebel through and through—had thought that her antics were hysterical and only his hefty donations kept her in the exclusive school. God help her if Daisy’s three-year-old mule-headedness translated into one iota of McKenna’s rebellion. She’d been allowed to run wild, and she remembered how unsettling that was, so, with Mattie’s help and encouragement, she’d decided to raise Daisy in as normal an environment as possible. That meant a mother who was consistently available, a modest house, chores, responsibilities. Everything she never had and needed most. McKenna closed her eyes and sent a prayer winging upward. Dear Lord, I really don’t want to raise myself.

  “You are the general’s son,” Mattie stated and McKenna was jerked back to the conversation. Mattie was holding out her hand to Jed, totally unfazed by his sex appeal or his hotty factor. Mattie was far too sensible to let his good-looks impact her. “You have his eyes.”

  “Yes, I’m Jed,” he agreed. Judging by his thinning lips, he didn’t seem happy with the comparison.

  “Who is the gen’ral?” Daisy demanded, her puppy quest temporarily forgotten.

  It was a fair question...if you were a child, McKenna conceded. But anyone with a lick of general knowledge about current affairs would know that Mattie was referring to Thaddius Hamilton, retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the White House and, thanks to his recent autobiography that was ruffling feathers back in the States, Simons Town’s most famous part-time ex-pat. Jed’s father had been pretty far up the US military and political tree. Jed was the living proof that one did get apples from orange trees since he was the most un-military looking man she’d ever seen.

  Of course, if Jed was the general’s oldest son then Leah had to be...a bank bag of pennies dropped in McKenna’s muddled-by-lust brain. Sexy Jed was Leah’s brother and her intended man of honor. Admittedly, she’d only known him for about five seconds but she couldn’t think of anyone less suited to the role.

  Mattie looked around. “Where is Leah? Has she already gone through to the salon?”

  Jed sent a narrow-eyed glance toward the front door to his right. “No, she hasn’t arrived yet.”

  That was standard for Leah Hamilton. There was normal time and then there was Leah time.

  Jed placed his hands on narrow hips. “Where the hell is she and why did I have to meet her here, at a bloody bridal salon? Dammit, I’ve been back in town for an hour and she’s already driving me mad.”

  Daisy looked up at him and grinned. “Hell, dammit...” Daisy tested his words on her tongue.

  “Daisy Dixon!” McKenna snapped her name out, ignoring the smile that appeared on Jed’s face. It transformed him from good-looking to flat-out sexy and she desperately wanted to slap her mouth on his and find out what his smile tasted like.

  Oh, God, she was in such deep trouble. She glared at him and Jed held up his hands in apology. “Sorry,” he murmured but his amused expression didn’t match his apology.

  McKenna felt Mattie’s hand on her shoulder. “I’ll deal with this.” McKenna sent her a grateful look. “Now, Miss Daisy, on the way to school we’ll talk about what language is appropriate for a three-year-old.”

  “It’s not fair! He said them first,” Daisy muttered as she moved into the kitchen with Mattie.

  Moving on to problem number two. McKenna looked at Jed; could Leah, minx that she was, really not have told her brother why they were meeting here, at her salon? McKenna pulled her bottom lip between her teeth and wondered how she could frame the next question without letting Leah’s tiger-sized cat out of the bag. “Uh...what did she say when she asked you to meet her here?”

  “She just gave me an address and told me to be here. That I shouldn’t ask any questions and that she’d explain when she saw me.”

  Oh, crap, Leah hadn’t told him a damn thing. That meant he didn’t know about Leah’s engagement and hell, no, she wasn’t about to tell him. Leah could have that pleasure. Or, she looked at Jed’s frowning face, that pain.

  McKenna felt a headache gathering force at the back of her head and silently cursed when her mobile let out a couple of chirrups that stated she had a message. She didn’t want to look; lately all the messages she’d received had been of the “I want to see you suffer” and “I want to show you what happens to women who think they are so damn special” variety.

  She swallowed down the rush of fear and reminded herself to breathe. As much as she wanted to, she couldn’t panic. Or let fear rule her. But, really, what had she done to attract this nutjob?

  And speaking of nutjobs, she sent Jed a cool look. “You can wait for your sister in the salon; she’s normally never more than thirty or forty minutes late.”

  Jed narrowed his topaz-colored eyes. “Wonderful,” he muttered.

  “Aren’t you going to read that?” he demanded when her mobile chirped again.

  McKenna dug the phone out of the side pocket of her skirt and looked down at the number.

  It wasn’t a number she recognized and no, she didn’t need to read it. It would be more of the same vitriol from her stalker and her morning had already been tough enough.

  There was, she realized, only so much she could cope with in a thirty-minute time span.

  Jed was normally one of the fastest bullets on the firing range, but that wasn’t the case today. He wished he could blame his fuzzy thinking on the fact that he hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep in far too long but that was a crock. He’d had the need for a solid eight trained out of him in the military.

  No, the cause of his—temporary—confusion was walking across the hall, slim hips swaying. Black hair, gorgeous, green eyes, slender...stupidly attractive. She wore a fitted, scarlet, long-sleeved dress that ended above very pretty knees. Her calves were covered by knee-high, thin heeled leather boots and he wondered what she’d look like in a brief thong and those boots. Bloody sexy and his jeans instantly became one size smaller at the thought. Jed sighed. If he was getting semi-hard imagining this obviously uptight, dressed-so-appropriately woman naked then he definitely needed to find some action. Since he’d spent the last three months in a conservative Islamic country, willing women—and beer and song—hadn’t been easy to come by. As a result, he’d been celibate for far too damn long and he was way overdue.

  Waaay overdue. And while he had clocked her checking his ass—he was old enough and bad enough to recognize the corresponding attraction in those light, grape-green eyes—he was also old enough to ignore his enthusiastic dick and heed that warning siren, wailing from the far corner of his brain. Bee-baw, trouble ahead.

  He’d, through trial and error, learned to listen to that blaring siren...

  Stop watching her luscious ass and her swaying hips and get your head in the game, Hamilton! She stopped in front of the door to the salon and before she could turn the heavy knob, Jed moved in front of her, his flat hand pushing the door open so that she could precede him. He ignored her surprised expression and looked around the room. His skin prickled at what he saw. It was a large, utterly feminine room, with bay windows and pale walls and racks holding what looked like a million wedding dresses.

  Suddenly spiders were crawling beneath his skin and his chest tightened.

  “Coffee?”

  Across the room, Jed noticed a rack holding corsets and garter belts and he was smacked in the head with a vision of McKe
nna Dixon lying on the silver backless couch, breasts pushed up by that expensive lace and her legs spread, lacy, feminine garters encircling her slim thighs...

  “Mr. Hamilton, would you like some coffee?”

  It took all of his concentration to push that image away and to focus on McKenna’s face. “Uh...no, I’m fine. Thanks.”

  McKenna looked uncertain and then shrugged. “As I said, you’re welcome to wait but Leah might be a while.”

  Jed ran his hand across his forehead and felt the dots of sweat. Well, that was new...no matter what the circumstances he rarely, if ever, broke into a sweat. Maybe he was coming down with something.

  Like wedding induced smallpox.

  “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes or so,” McKenna told him and walked out of the room.

  Jed just managed to swallow down the plea not to leave him alone in this version of hell.

  McKenna Dixon loved her open plan kitchen and sitting room. She loved its cherry-red walls, its black-and-white harlequin floor, the fact that she could cook supper and watch Daisy in her play area, and sneak glances at the crime programs she loved on the flat screen on the far wall.

  McKenna looked up when Mattie walked through the friends-and-family entrance, the kitchen door. Fifteen minutes had passed since Mattie had left to take Daisy to preschool and Leah had yet to arrive. She needed the restorative properties of coffee, stat. But coffee would have to wait because Mattie was carrying garment bags, which meant that she’d finished the sample dresses McKenna had designed and which would now complete her collection of vintage, new and designer gowns for the brides of Simons Town. McKenna clapped her hands in delight and reached for the zip of the dress bag which Mattie laid across the back of her black-and-white checked couch.

  Mattie slapped her hands away. “Wash your hands first,” she ordered.

  McKenna did as she was told and, when she turned away from the sink to dry her hands, she saw Mattie standing over her computer, open on the granite kitchen counter, and that she was frowning. “He’s still sending you emails?”

  “Mattie, you can’t just scroll through my inbox!”

  “Why not? It’s not like you have a life,” Mattie retorted.

  True. “He’s still sending me text messages and calling me on the half hour between ten and one in the morning.”

  “No wonder you look like a raccoon,” Mattie said. Mattie slapped her hands on her hips. “He’s escalating. He started with a couple of emails begging you to give him another chance but—” she gestured to the screen “—these are nastier. How he’d like to get you alone, what he’d like to do to you...”

  “Are you still convinced that the person doing this is Craig?” Mattie asked, tapping her fingernail on the edge of the laptop.

  “Who else could it be?” McKenna dried her hands on a kitchen towel. “Imagine how bad he’d be if we’d gone on more than two dates. Isn’t it ironic that one of the blandest, most unassuming...slightly boring men I’ve met in a long time is a closet crazy?” Humor, she’d found, was a solid way to control the soul sucking fear.

  “Only you.” Mattie shook her head at her. “You are like a bad man magnet...if there’s an unsuitable guy in fifty miles you’ll end up dating him. It’s a hell of a talent, my friend.”

  She didn’t want to and she didn’t mean to but she did exactly that, McKenna admitted. When she finally resolved to start dating again—she thought she’d like someone to share a meal with, some conversation, and, if she was really lucky, some sex—she’d decided to only accept dates from good, nice men. Men who were kind and pleasant and...normal. She wasn’t looking for a relationship but on the off, off chance that she met someone who could change her mind—that notion had the same odds of Daisy receiving a much wished for unicorn for Christmas—then it would be with a reliable someone, someone who wouldn’t let her down, who she wouldn’t have to worry about. She’d dated enough of them—loved two of them—to be very convinced that bad, exciting, pulse jumping boys made terrible boyfriends. She had the experience to prove it.

  She’d pulled bad boyfriend #1, Darren, from bar fights and bailed him out of jail; she’d loaned him money and her car. She’d caught him cheating. Yet her nineteen-year-old self had worshipped the ground he walked on and, admittedly, the sex had been brilliant. Then he’d fallen ill and instead of sticking around to help him through it, she bailed. He recovered, she—stupidly—begged him to take her back and he did. Full of remorse and still madly in love, she’d pandered to his every whim and he’d let her. Three months later, on the day of her twenty-first birthday, he dumped her by moving in with an eighteen-year-old tattoo artist with a daddy richer than hers.

  Cue heartbreak.

  A few years later, and another bad boy; this one was smarter and wilder and crazier than Darren and she’d fallen as hard and as fast. A couple of months of madness, too much champagne, and a broken condom led to Daisy’s conception. Zoo had wanted her to have a quick abortion, blithely telling her she had to choose between him or the baby. She’d, not so blithely, chosen Daisy and, hours after she informed Zoo that she was going solo, he wrapped his Ferrari, and himself, around a tree.

  Cue more heartbreak; deeper and harder and more vicious than before.

  Nearly four years had passed since his death, and she still wasn’t ready to risk having any type of a relationship with a man. Her two primary, adult relationships had been of the toss-tranquilizers down-her-throat variety and she didn’t have the time or the energy to cope with another crazy, man related situation. Frankly, it was safer, and a great deal less messy—in every way possible—to go solo. And the fact that her one date since Zoo’s death had turned out to be a stalker was, she believed, a big hint from the universe that dating was a bad idea and to stay far, far away from men.

  And that definitely included Leah’s hot brother...

  She glanced down at the computer and the vitriol spouted there and her lips thinned in annoyance.

  “I should report this to the police,” McKenna said, closing the lid to her laptop.

  “You can but there’s little they can do. I checked.” Mattie shrugged her shoulders. “The police force is small and they are already overworked. They won’t be able to do anything since it’s just emails and calls. Hopefully he’ll get bored and stop soon.”

  “Hopefully.” God, please. Anytime soon would be good. She didn’t know how much longer she could keep putting on a brave face and she was thoroughly sick of constantly looking over her shoulder.

  “On a happier note, take a look at the dresses,” Mattie said impatiently, reaching past her to slide down the zip of the first garment bag.

  McKenna gasped as she caught her first glimpse of the gorgeous, hand-beaded, ivory chiffon wedding dress. It was romantic and whimsical and her heart stuttered when she remembered that she’d designed this. She flung an arm around Mattie’s shoulders and squeezed her to her side. “Oh, it’s fantastic.”

  “That’s the most detailed and intricate but the others are wonderful, too,” Mattie said, reaching for another bag. They looked at the dresses and sighed some more before Mattie told her that she had two more dresses in her car.

  “Go get them!” McKenna urged her. “I can’t wait to see them. God, you are so talented, Mat. They are fantastic.”

  Mattie shrugged and efficiently zipped up the garment bags. “I just sewed them together, I don’t have the vision to design them.”

  “That’s why we’re a great team, we complement each other,” McKenna told her as she walked away.

  And Mattie was one of the reasons why she was still designing and selling wedding dresses as opposed to...well, raising llamas had at some point recently sounded like a fun thing to do. From the moment she announced her pregnancy, Mattie, though she was so very practical and sensible, had become her biggest cheerleader and helped her keep her eye on the ball.

  She had enough money, Zoo’s family insisted on paying maintenance for Daisy, and McKenna’s father had left h
er a nice trust fund, but she’d soon realized that she couldn’t keep chasing adventure, not with a baby in tow. Daisy needed stability, responsibility, consistency, for McKenna to finish what she started, as Mattie had insisted. McKenna still believed Daisy needed love above everything else, but she had listened to her cousin—nobody loved Daisy like McKenna did, but Mattie came a close second—and looked for a city she could settled down in. When Daisy was six months old, the three of them made the move to Cape Town, partly because she adored the city and also because Zoo’s parents, siblings, and extended family called this city home. With both her parents dead and having no family she was close to—Mattie being the only exception—she wanted Daisy to grow up in the same city as her surviving grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins whom she saw on a regular basis. And she adored this eclectic village on the east side of the Peninsular, not far from Cape Town itself, and she now had a proper home, a proper business and everyone was happy. Well, mostly. It was her little secret that she still, quite frequently, got itchy feet...

  Itchy feet and curiosity and a sense of adventure...it was no shocker that was why she was, fatally, attracted to bad boys. They were interesting and exciting and usually too damn sexy for her to resist. But she was older and wiser now and she was going to give them, Jed Hamilton, and all men a very wide berth.

  For sure.

  The doorbell rang and McKenna sighed. Leah was only twenty-five minutes late she noticed as she picked up the sample dresses. Her time keeping skills were definitely improving.

  Find out what happens next...

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