Formula for Danger

He pulled up to the front door and reached over to touch her arm before she climbed out of the truck. “I have something to talk to you about.”

Her smooth skin contrasted with the callouses of his fingers. They were too different. He had good reason to keep his emotions in check.

She rubbed at her eyes. “Sure, but could I take my contacts out first? They’re killing me.”

“I’ll walk you to the house.”

“I’ll stay in the truck,” Alex said from the backseat.

“Don’t be silly, Aunt Becca would love to stuff you with whatever our housekeeper baked today.” Rachel shut the truck door and headed inside the Grants’ large home with Edward and Alex following her.

While Rachel hurried up the wide staircase to the second story, Edward and Alex waited in the foyer.

Augustus Grant emerged from one of the doorways flanking the foyer, his wheelchair rolling smoothly on the marble tile. “Edward, Alex. How are you boys doing?”

Alex shook the man’s hand first, then Edward reached out to do the same.

And jumped when he heard the scream.

The house alarm blared a half second after the scream and persisted thereafter.

Edward took the stairs three at a time. He’d never been upstairs to Rachel’s room, so he hoped it was easy to find in this huge house.

It was. She stood in the hallway outside her room, frozen. She turned when she saw him, and seemed to snap out of her shock. She pointed into her room. “A man! He’s escaping out my window!”

Edward glanced inside in time to see a man’s booted foot disappear below her bedroom’s window ledge. The intruder was diving off the sloping roof from the second story to the ground.

“What’s going on?” Alex shouted over the alarm.

“An intruder.” Edward ran back through the hallway, leaped down the stairs in three bounds and pelted out the front door, aware of Alex close behind him.

They rounded the front corner of the house, but Edward lost precious seconds fumbling for the latch in the wooden gate that led to the backyard.

“Never mind that,” Alex said, tugging at him. “He won’t stay in the garden—he’ll be headed for the woods out back.”

Cursing himself for not thinking, Edward followed Alex along the wooden fence that hemmed in the Grants’ extensive rose garden, toward the grove of apple trees that stood on the back end of the property. Sure enough, the man had run through the rose garden and leaped over the fence and was now hurrying toward the grove. He was only a blur—medium height, not large, but quick.

“Hurry!” Edward shouted to his taller brother, who had a longer stride. “There’s a road on the other side of the grove!” Little used and perfect for parking a getaway car.

Alex obeyed and picked up speed, inching away from Edward, although he tried to keep up. They lost time weaving in between the apple trees. Edward stepped on a fallen apple and stumbled, slamming a hand against a tree to right himself, but kept going.

He emerged from the grove seconds behind Alex, just in time to see taillights heading down the road in a cloud of dead leaves and debris.

Her entire bedroom was in shambles.

Rachel had to sag against the door frame to keep herself upright. Her entire body was shaking. She felt violated.

“Oh, my goodness.” Aunt Becca’s voice floated to her. “Rachel, your room…”

“What happened?” roared her father from downstairs, panic and frustration in his tone.

She felt rather than saw her sisters on either side of her. Monica grabbed her arm as if to keep her standing.

“I’ll turn off the alarm,” Naomi said. “Aunt Becca, call the police.”

Rachel rolled around and leaned against the wall outside her bedroom. She didn’t want to see it. No one said anything—they could barely hear over the ear-piercing alarm.

Where was Edward? Did he capture the intruder?

Finally, the alarm shut off. The silence was almost louder.

“How did someone get in the house?” Monica demanded.

“The window’s open,” said Aunt Becca.

The man had pivoted and thrown it open just as Rachel entered her bedroom. She hadn’t seen his face. In her first shocked glimpse of her room, she’d only seen the mess—clothes scattered, mattress upturned and slashed, drawers in splinters, book pages littering the room. She shuddered.

“Rachel!” Edward called.

She reached for Edward automatically, wrapping her arms around him and burying her face in his shoulder. He was warm from running, musky with the scent of pine and a thread of orchid. The smell wrapped around her, a shelter in the midst of the chaos she’d seen.

His embrace was tight, protective. She just wanted him to keep holding her. She wanted him to take the ugliness away and make everything okay again.

Except that nothing would ever be okay again.

“Dad! How did you…?” Monica’s shocked voice made Rachel look up.

Her father wheeled toward them, with Alex, Naomi and the housekeeper following. He hadn’t been upstairs since his stroke. “Alex carried me up the stairs, and Evita and Naomi carried my wheelchair,” he said. Then he saw Rachel’s room and paled.

It was the only thing that could have made Rachel move away from Edward. Her father wasn’t going to have a relapse, was he?

“You shouldn’t be here,” Monica said fiercely, reaching her father at the same time as Rachel and Naomi.

He took a few deep breaths. “I’m fine. Just surprised.” He looked at Rachel then, and she thought he might have said something more to her, or maybe might have even embraced her, but then he cleared his throat and the moment was gone.

She straightened and turned away. She shouldn’t have hoped for his comfort. Her father had never been very affectionate.

Evita gasped as she looked in the room. “How could this have happened?”

“We chased a man.” Edward explained what had happened when he took off after the intruder who exited her room. “No one heard him ransacking her room?”

The housekeeper wrung her hands. “I was in the kitchen all afternoon. It’s too far away—I wouldn’t have heard anyone in her room.”

“I was with Evita,” Monica added. “I didn’t hear anything, either.”

“Me, too.” Dad pounded a fist against his wheelchair. “I was in my bedroom for a few hours, then my study. The bedroom’s on the opposite side of the house, and the study’s on the first floor near the kitchen.”

“If you keep the house alarm on, how did he get in?” Edward asked.