Under Fire (Love Over Duty #1)(35)

Six reclined on the sofa and placed his hand on Louisa's back, rubbing it up and down until she sat up straighter. Hopefully the forensic team would work fast, because while blood and empty shell casings on the floor meant nothing to him, they meant everything to Lou. The longer they'd stayed in the kitchen while waiting for the police to arrive, the more Louisa had stared at the blood trail. It had taken every ounce of persuasion to get her to step away from the crime scene and up to her living room. Seeing little yellow plastic triangles with numbers on them covering the tile in the kitchen certainly wasn't going to help. The shock would catch up with her eventually, no matter how hard she fought it. And he wanted the police out of her house as quickly as possible because he could pull a plan together way better than they could.



       
         
       
        

"G213, that is a negative to reports of break-in at VNP Laboratory," a voice crackled over the radio. "I also ran checks against the names Vasilii Popov and Ivan Popov and returned nothing."

Louisa turned to face him. "Vasilii never reported it. I knew he wanted to save his reputation, but the sample is too dangerous to be ignored."

Everything about this had him on edge. And somehow he needed to figure out how to best help her. This was just getting more and more out of hand. Six gripped her hands tightly between his. They were chilled, and he was starting to worry about shock setting in. "We'll work through this with Officer Meeks, and then I'm going to stay here tonight. We'll figure this out."

Louisa slumped forward in her seat and placed her head in her hands. "I knew this would happen."

"I'm sorry, ma'am," Officer Meeks said. "We can't find any report of that incident, so why don't you tell me what you know, starting from the top?"

Three hours later, they were all gone, leaving behind a buffet of fingerprint powder around the windows, and lines around the blood on the kitchen floor. Job one was to get Louisa into bed. He saw the police officers out of the house and returned to find her slumped on the chair arm, fast asleep. Her bangs had fallen off to the side, and he could see her long eyelashes resting on her cheeks. She reminded him of the riptide he'd been caught in when he was fifteen. The water had been a little energetic, but the waves had looked amazing. Great swell, a little choppy, but he'd been feeling confident. His third ride of the day had gone a little off course, landing him right in the middle of the rip. He'd lain flat out on his board and tried to paddle in, but the tide kept whipping him out. He imagined that that was what every day felt like for her, an exhausting struggle against a tide that was always pulling her in the opposite direction, and he wanted to help her, keep people away from her.

He carefully slid one arm around her back and his other under her legs and lifted her into the air. She turned her head into his shoulder and wrapped her arms around his neck. "Did everybody leave?" she mumbled.

"Yeah, sweetheart. They did. What's your alarm code?"

"The Fibonacci sequence," she said through a giant yawn. " …  0-1-1-2-3-5-8-13."

As gently as he could, he took the stairs up to her room and quickly decided which bedroom was likeliest to be hers based on which looked most lived in. He laid her down on the bed, and even though she'd pretend to hate him for it in the morning, he slipped her bra off without removing her tank to protect her modesty. It was as important to him as it would be to her that he could look her in the eye and say he hadn't seen anything she'd be embarrassed about. As much as he wanted to be a gentleman, he couldn't resist checking her out a little though. He'd forgotten the charm of natural breasts. His type could usually give Barbie a run for her money in the plastic and silicon stakes. But Louisa's were perfect. 

He slipped the band out of Louisa's hair so she wouldn't have a headache when she woke and tugged the comforter from the other side of the bed over her so she wouldn't get chilled. When he was certain that she was comfortable and sleeping peacefully, he jogged back downstairs and checked every door and window. He found a set of house keys in the hallway and tested them in the front door before he quietly let himself out and ran to his truck, which was thankfully still where he'd left it. With a roar that couldn't be avoided, he started the truck, turned it around, and then drove back down the street to pull it onto her driveway. It wouldn't stop a determined assailant, but it might give someone pause if they thought Louisa had company.

Thankfully his gym bag was always stocked with clothes, as staying in shape was a huge part of his life. At seventeen years old, he'd realized that having a six-pack and biceps ensured he'd spend the summer surrounded by girls in tiny bikinis. Through college, it had been about anything that would give him the fastest swim times. But it was when he'd decided to enlist that he'd gotten serious about complete functional strength. Now he trained every day and felt kind of grumpy if he didn't. He grabbed his bag, hopped out of the truck, locked it up, and let himself back into the house.