“Like hell.” Rick’s tone was gentle but firm. “You can’t stay here, Hannah, and you know it. You can come back tomorrow, do what you have to do. Tonight, you can stay at my place.”
She didn’t want to leave.
“I have to clean . . .” She could feel the tears building in her voice.
She wanted to wipe away the embarrassment. She needed to hide her personal items, needed to get them out of sight.
“It can wait until tomorrow.” His voice lowered. “The police officers will secure the doors for tonight and tomorrow I can come over with you and replace the doors.”
“But . . .”
“No buts. It can wait till tomorrow.”
She felt like a child, uncertain, frightened. She couldn’t believe someone had done this to her. She couldn’t understand why they would want to.
She let Rick draw her away from the bedroom, her eyes going once again to the toys that were laid out for the world to see.
“This is so humiliating,” she whispered as they left the house, his hand at her back as he led her down the steps. “Why would anyone do that?”
She wrapped her arms around herself, staring at the crowd outside her home, wondering how many of them knew what her room displayed. There were no secrets on a street with neighbors like hers. They were good people, kind, caring, and nosy as hell.
Everyone probably knew she had toys and were speculating about them. Poor Miss Brookes. She couldn’t get a man so she bought toys instead.
Shame flooded her face once again.
And who would call her a whore? She had toys for a reason. She hadn’t even had a date in forever, let alone actual sex. Tonight was the closest she had come in years.
“Come on.” Rick bundled her back into the truck before loping to the driver’s side and stepping in. Slamming the door behind him, he was pulling from the street within seconds and reaching across the console to grip her hand with his. “It’s going to be okay, Hannah.”
She rubbed at her forehead with her free hand before staring out the window in confusion.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she said again. “Why do that?” She turned to stare at him, unable to comprehend the reason behind such maliciousness.
“We’ll find out why,” he stated, and she actually believed he might do it. He seemed more angry than she was. Anger hadn’t hit her yet, though. She was still in shock, uncertain and confused.
Rick continued to stare out the windshield, glaring into the night. He had a feeling that what had happened tonight had nothing to do with Hannah, and everything to do with him.
He should have stayed away from her last summer. Some instinct had warned him last summer that he was making a mistake. What if those two dates, seemingly innocent and going nowhere, had made her a target because of him?
“We’ll figure it out, Hannah,” he promised her, feeling her hand tremble beneath his as he drove through the night to his ranch. “Until we do, I promise you’ll be safe.”
He couldn’t let anything happen to her. Sienna had done enough to destroy his life; he wasn’t going to allow her ghost to finish him off.
Making the turn up the paved road to his home several miles from the main road, he kept his gaze roving through the night, searching for anomalies, or anything out of the ordinary.
He knew his home like the back of his hand. For several months after the militia had been disbanded he’d had a few problems on the ranch. Cattle that were killed senselessly, a few attempted break-ins, nothing serious. Harassments, little else.
This wasn’t harassment. He would consider this war, and he would let the few remaining members of the terrorist group who hadn’t been arrested know it. Hannah wasn’t going to be a target for their revenge.
“Here we are.” Using the automatic garage door opener, he pulled the truck inside and turned it off. Closing the doors from the control inside the truck, he opened his door and stepped out quickly to open Hannah’s.
She already had her door open. Gripping her waist he helped her from the truck, realizing how small she was, how delicate, as he set her on her feet before him.
He deactivated his alarm with the control on his key ring before opening the door and leading her into the kitchen.
His security system was more advanced than most, installed by a team of agents so deep cover that most in the government didn’t know they existed. The men who had helped round up the militia two years before; one of them was still a resident of Alpine and married to the wife he’d had before his “death.”
That one still amazed him.