AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Your kids?” And Jericho wondered just how many she could have had in the five years since— “My kids?” he blurted.
Hell’s frickin’ bells. Had he gotten her pregnant with twins and she hadn’t told him?
She chuckled and waved that off. The chuckle didn’t last long though. “No. The five girls in the group home I manage. Ages twelve to fifteen. All have troubled pasts that make it hard for them to cope in traditional living arrangements.”
Jericho’s throat had snapped shut. Hell, a lot of things had snapped, and it took him a moment or two just to get enough breath to speak. He liked kids, he really did, but he hadn’t wanted to be a surprise father.
“Your kids are safe,” Jericho said, recapping what she’d just told them. “Where and why?”
She nodded, clearly expecting those questions and a whole lot more. Good. Because Jericho had more. “Where,” she repeated. “They’re in a shelter for battered families with the other social workers who also work at the group home. Tight security and a guard on duty.” She paused. “And the why is the reason I’m here.”
Maybe because he hadn’t sat, Rachel stood, walked closer to him and looked him straight in the eyes. “Jericho, I need you to kill me.”
Chapter Three
----- ??? -----
After she saw the shock wash over Jericho’s face, Rachel realized she should have practiced what to say to him. She could have done that on the one-hour drive out to his place instead of allowing the fear to consume her.
It was the fear that had brought her here.
Fear tinged with hope that Jericho could stop someone else from being murdered.
Thankfully, his shock didn’t last long, and it ended with him smiling and leveling one of his looks on her. Not a raised eyebrow, not a furrowed forehead. Just a sort of sparkle in his gray eyes that, even in a normal situation, had more than their share of sparkle. Bedroom eyes, some called them.
Rachel called them foreplay.
And Jericho knew how to use that particular form of foreplay, too. He knew how to look at you in just that way to make you believe you were everything he’d ever wanted.
Mostly, the eye look thing was BS.
Unless everything you ever wanted was a great kiss. Or great sex. That, he could deliver. Mercy, could he ever. But the “everything you ever wanted” would have some huge asterisks attached to it. Once it had anyway. The fact he was back and living in central Texas meant…
Well, she didn’t know.
Maybe he’d come home in the general sense of the word. But he sure as heck hadn’t come back to her.
Had she wanted him to do that?
Probably not, Rachel assured herself.
Probably.
They weren’t kids now. They both had very complicated lives. And the only reason she could think of for them to reunite was this snap, crackle, pop of heat that was still around. But lust could complicate. Lust could distract. In this case, lust could end up getting her killed the hard way.
It was too bad that even now Jericho was a master at generating lust. Not just in her either. Women noticed him. And wanted him. Maybe because of that dark and dangerous vibe. Or it could be just his hot looks. The black hair, the face of a fallen angel, and the body to go along with it.
“I don’t usually have exes show up at my house to deliver a joke,” Jericho stated, yanking her attention away from his looks. “But I’m going to tie that kill me request into what you said about the kids, about them being at a shelter.” He paused a heartbeat. “Now would be a good time for you to start explaining.”
“It would,” she verified. And again, she wished she’d rehearsed this. “Someone wants me dead, and if the person doesn’t get me, the pattern has been to go after someone close to the target.”
Yeah, practice needed, and she huffed, expecting Jericho to go with a blanket “Huh?” He didn’t.
“And you think if I make it look as if you’re dead,” he said, “that if I kill you…” He put those last two words in quotes. “That you can protect the someone close to you, AKA the kids, from dying at the hands of this killer.”
All right. So, he’d gotten it all in one. If the killer believed she was dead, then the kids were safe. Of course, if she was fake dead, that would create a whole bunch of other concerns, but none of those was anywhere in the playing field of five kids losing their lives.
Because of her.
