Seal of Honor(94)

She heard him come in the back door just as she was straightening the sex-rumpled quilt on the bed. He paused in the kitchen for so long she finally gave up waiting and opened the bedroom door.

“Gabe?”

Footsteps.

Except, no, those couldn’t belong to Gabe. It sounded like a Clydesdale stomping through the kitchen and as big as he was, he never walked with heavy boots, always ghosted about even in the comfort of his own home. He’d more than once frightened her today, sneaking up behind her with his barely-there footfalls.

A shadow appeared at the end of the short hallway, backlit by the lamp she always left burning in the living room. Definitely not Gabe. Too short. Too scrawny.

Oh God.

As silently as she could, she closed and locked the bedroom door. She had no way of knowing if the intruder had seen her—the interior hallway was always dark, and the way the door was set into the wall with a slight indentation provided a little protection—but from the sounds of his footsteps, it didn’t matter. He knew the layout of her house and bypassed the laundry room, the guest bath, and the extra bedroom, moving with unerring accuracy toward the master bedroom.

Toward her.

…

Something was not right.

Everything looked normal. The nearly full moon floating over the ocean in the inky sky provided a good view of the house and yard, and Gabe saw nothing out of place. No odd shadows that shouldn’t be there, no movement except for the sway of the palms, no sound but the soft lapping of the ocean against the dock.

Still. He couldn’t shake the gut feeling that something was way off, and he knew better than to argue with his gut—it had saved his ass in more near-fatal situations than any one man should survive. So he walked the grounds again, still found nothing, and his instincts still told him it didn’t matter. He strode to the end of the drive and looked both ways on the narrow, empty road.

Maybe he should take Audrey to a hotel for the night. She had next-to-nil for security—something he planned to fix if he was going to live here—and the crappy system she did have had so many holes it would work better as a colander than a security system.

Actually, that sounded like a damn good idea. He’d sleep better tonight knowing they were secure. Tomorrow, he’d make some calls and pull some strings to have a security specialist out here by noon. Maybe Jean-Luc’s brother-in-law would want the job.

He turned to go back to the house, and out of the corner of his eye, caught a glint of moonlight off something down the street. A car, a blue sedan, parked in the foliage alongside the road. Given that Audrey had no immediate neighbors and lived on a twisty, rarely used road that fought a constant losing battle with the encroaching jungle, it was not normal to have a car just sitting in the street. That was probably the cause of his unease. He’d bet his good foot it was Chloe’s car, and he was not a betting man. People don’t just pop up for random personal visits in the middle of the night unless there was a problem. Especially not wealthy, pampered people like Chloe Van Amee. He could only come up with a couple reasons why she’d leave the car here in this specific spot, hidden from view, and none of them were good.

Weapon aimed, he melted into the jungle shadows alongside the road and moved toward the car, keeping down and to the right so he’d come up in the driver’s blind spot.

And what do you know, it wasn’t abandoned. Chloe still sat in the driver’s seat. She jumped when he opened the passenger side door and pointed his gun at her forehead.

“Hi,” he said. “Mind if I join you? No? Great.”

Her eyes flicked from his gun to his face then skipped away. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Could say the same of you, Mrs. Van Amee.”

Her hands tightened on the steering wheel until her manicured nails dug into the braided leather. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“What don’t I understand?”

She pressed those grotesque, collagen-injected lips together, refusing to answer.

“Chloe.” He made her name into the verbal equivalent of a dagger, all edges, and she flinched.

“I’m sorry.” She turned in the seat, brown eyes wide and wild as tears spilled over. “God, I am so sorry. I-I love my husband, and I didn’t think anyone would get hurt. Rorro—” She said his name with a Spanish inflection, rolling the Rs, and Gabe held up a hand to stop her.

Average American women from Kansas couldn’t roll their Rs like that.

“Your real name isn’t Chloe,” he said. “Who are you?”

“Claudia.” Just like that, she dropped the perfect Midwestern accent, and the lilting sounds of Colombian Spanish weaved through her words. “My name is Claudia Rivera.”