Bridal Jeopardy

* * *

FOR THE PAST FEW DAYS, Craig had been following Stephanie around. Now it was more important than ever for him to keep up the surveillance—not just for himself but for her. But as he rounded the corner at the end of her block, he saw John Reynard leaving her house.

He stopped short, ducking back around the corner, fighting a spurt of jealousy that stabbed through him. That bastard had access to Stephanie, and Craig did not. She was engaged to the man, but she was never going to marry him. Craig would make sure of that. The depth of his emotions shocked him. He hadn’t felt this strongly about anything since Sam’s death. Then he’d been filled with despair. But also determination, he acknowledged.

The determination was just as strong now, along with an excitement that coursed through his veins and made his heart pound.

He had to pry Stephanie away from John Reynard, but he couldn’t exactly pull out a gun and shoot the man. He had to get something on him—something that would stop him in his tracks. Evidence from Sam’s murder? He’d been prepared to play a long game getting that kind of information. But now the time frame had changed. It would be much better if it was something more recent that they could take to the cops.

They? Was he already thinking Stephanie was on his side?

He pulled himself up short. Take it a step at a time, he warned himself. You just met her. You can’t change her world in a couple of hours.

Still, he did feel a small measure of victory. Reynard had come running over to Stephanie’s house after the incident. Probably he’d thought he could comfort her—like in the bedroom. But now he was on his way out the front door. Hopefully because Stephanie hadn’t wanted him there.

How could she, after the connection she and Craig had made in the shop?

John left the house, but before he drove away, he glanced toward two men sitting in a car across the street from her house.

The men who had attacked her in the shop?

What would it mean that Reynard knew they were here?

Craig waited with his heart pounding until Reynard had finished his conversation with Stephanie and driven away. He ached to stride down the block and confront the watchers, but caution made him walk back in the other direction, then take the alley in back of the houses across the street from Stephanie’s. They were typical French Quarter dwellings, many of them built butting up against one another or with enclosed courtyards, but there were passageways between some, and he took one that would bring him almost up to the car where the men were sitting.

He stayed in the shadows, noting that they were both turned toward Stephanie’s house. He recognized them. They weren’t the thugs who had come into her shop. They were the men who had followed him around at the charity reception. John Reynard’s bodyguards. Apparently, after the disturbing incident in the shop, he’d assigned them to watch over his fiancée.

In a way, that was a good move on Reynard’s part. And it argued that Reynard had nothing to do with the attack at the dress shop, but it created a problem for Craig. He needed to get close to her again, and he’d have to make sure the men didn’t spot him. For a couple of reasons—chief of which was that it would put Stephanie at risk.

He cursed under his breath, feeling as if Reynard was beating him in a chess game. Craig was going to have to rethink his strategy.

* * *

STEPHANIE STOOD, too restless to simply sit and do nothing. Instead she went to the window and lifted one of the venetian-blind slats. She spotted the men in the car across the street immediately. As promised, they were keeping watch on her house. But she saw something else, as well. A flicker of movement drew her attention to a passageway between two houses near the bodyguards’ car. A man was standing in the shadows, watching the watchers. For a moment she thought it might be one of the men who had come to the shop. But that was only until she saw his face.

It was Craig Branson. He must have followed her home, and now he was watching the two men in the car.

Were there more of John’s men guarding the rear of her house? She’d have to assume that was true, since she could leave that way and not be spotted from the street.

Feeling like a prisoner in her own home, she gritted her teeth. But maybe that was the way John wanted her to feel. He’d said he’d arranged protection, but knowing him, that probably wasn’t his only reason. He wanted her to understand that if she stepped out of line, he would know it.

She let the slat slip back into place, glad that the men out there couldn’t see through the walls of her house. Crossing to the kitchen, she got out a box of English breakfast tea. After filling a mug with water, she set it in the microwave and pressed the beverage button.

When the water was hot, she added a tea bag and let it steep while she paced back and forth along the length of the kitchen, waiting for the tea to be ready. After removing the tea bag, she carried the mug to the office, where she sat down at the computer and thought back over the details of her encounter with Craig Branson. From the mind-to-mind contact, she knew a lot about him already. Or maybe none of that was true.

She made a dismissive sound. How would it be possible to lie when you communicated mind to mind with someone? Maybe if you rehearsed a story and fixed it firmly in your thoughts. But if you weren’t expecting the contact, you’d be taken by surprise. That had been true of her and true of Branson, as well. But there was one more possibility she had to consider. What if he was a lunatic who believed the story he’d given her?

She clenched her fists so hard that her nails dug into her palms. Deliberately, she relaxed. The encounter had knocked her off-kilter, but if she was trying to say he was insane, she was grasping at straws, probably because she didn’t want to deal with the shock of what happened when they’d touched each other.

That observation gave her pause. She’d been alone all her life, and wasn’t this what she’d been longing for—a soul mate?

But just at the wrong time. She had already committed herself to another man—a man who considered her his property. What could she hope for with Craig Branson? Was this going to be like that old movie, The Graduate, where the guy comes charging down from San Francisco to stop the woman he loves from marrying the wrong guy? He’s too late to prevent the ceremony, but he takes the bride away anyway.

Was that the fantasy she was hoping for?

Unable to cope with her own muddled thoughts, she put the name Craig Branson into Google and got several hits. There was more than one man by that name, but she quickly zeroed in on the right one.

He owned a private security company, which meant he thought he could go up against John Reynard. But he didn’t know Reynard.

She’d assumed she knew the man, but she was becoming more and more shocked by the things she found out. Not dark facts, but his attitude of owning her—and having her father enslaved to his will.

With a shudder, she put Reynard out of her mind and went back to the information on Craig Branson.

Searching back, she found a newspaper article that made her chest go tight. It was an account of the incident that had killed Craig’s brother. There was a picture of a smiling little boy, obviously a school portrait. He was what she’d imagine Craig would have looked like at the age of eight.

So it was true. He hadn’t made up the story. Her heart was pounding as she scanned the text, reading about the murder of a mob boss in a restaurant and how some of the innocent diners had gotten shot. Most had been wounded. The only fatality was Sam Branson.

The article told her something else. The target in the restaurant had been a mob boss. If John Reynard had something to do with his death, what did that make him? She pushed that question out of her mind because it was more than she could cope with. Which left her contemplating the tragedy.

She sat for a moment, imagining Craig’s reaction to the loss of his brother—and imagining what it must have been like for him to touch her and get back that kind of closeness. Lord, what would her life have been like if she’d had a brother or a sister she could communicate with that way? And what if she’d lost them?

But she’d never had a brother or a sister. She’d once heard her parents talking in whispers about her mom having trouble getting pregnant. She’d gathered that they’d gone to a fertility clinic, but she’d never directly asked about it, because it had seemed like something they wanted to keep quiet.

As she thought about it, long-ago memories came back to her. She remembered being in a waiting room with a lot of other children. Could that have had something to do with the clinic?

It didn’t seem likely because she hadn’t been a baby. Maybe she’d had some illness and her parents had taken her to a specialist?

She wasn’t sure, and probably it wasn’t important. Or maybe it was. She was getting married. Would she have trouble getting pregnant?

A shudder went through her. She wanted children. Maybe she could be close to her own children, the way she’d never been close to her parents. But did she want to have children with John Reynard?

The idea sent another frisson through her. She’d felt trapped the moment she’d agreed to the marriage with Reynard, but meeting Craig Branson had made it worse. Unfortunately, she was drawn to him as she’d never been to her fiancé.

She closed her eyes, willing those thoughts out of her mind. Thoughts of Reynard and of Branson. She had a more immediate problem. Men had come to her shop and threatened her, and she’d better talk to her father about it.

She turned off her computer and looked out the window, seeing the men in the car across the street. They were supposed to be protecting her, but her impulse was to slip away without their knowing it. Because she didn’t trust John? Or because she didn’t like the idea of his having her followed? And she had the feeling that would only get worse if they married.

Chapter Five

Instead of walking out the front door, Stephanie slipped into the courtyard at the side of her house. From there, she went into the alley where her car was parked. Before she’d gotten two blocks from home, she looked in the rearview mirror and saw that she was being followed—by the men who had been sitting out front.

How did they even know she’d left the house? Apparently there was some mechanism for spying on her that she didn’t know about and didn’t understand.

As she drove to her father’s Garden District mansion, she kept glancing in the rearview mirror, checking the men behind her who were making no attempt to hide the fact that they were following. She drove around the block, partly to make the men wonder what she was doing and partly to have a look at the house. Once it had been painted in shades of cream, purple and green to create the classic “painted lady” effect that was so popular in the Garden District, with different colors used to accent different parts of the trim. But the paint had faded, making the house look sad instead of distinctive.

And the shrubbery was overgrown, contributing to the general air of neglect. She hadn’t really looked at the exterior in ages, and it was a shock to see how much the property had gone downhill in the past few years.

When she finally pulled into the driveway, the men stopped on the street in front of the house, watching her through the screen of shrubbery as she walked to the wide front porch. She knocked to let her father know that she was there, then used her key to let herself in.