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She just had no idea who or what they were searching for.
TEN
Staring into her brother’s face and seeing the fear and worry for her reflected in his gaze, Piper was forced to admit that her suspicions regarding the attack couldn’t be ignored any longer. There wasn’t so much as a sliver of a chance that the attack in New York had been random, and she knew it.
It hadn’t been an accident that her room was the one a burglar had targeted. She hadn’t been randomly picked out of a crowd and then followed to her room. She wasn’t just a faceless nobody someone had decided to torment.
And the nightmares . . .
Those vague, shadowy horrorscapes she drifted into once she fell asleep couldn’t be ignored either. Just as the unlocked door couldn’t be overlooked. Someone was desperate enough to get to her that they had picked the lock on her patio doors in broad daylight.
Breaking contact with Dawg’s fierce look, she glanced at Jed, and knew he had reached the end of his patience as well. If she didn’t tell her brother now, then he would.
“As you know, I slipped out of town last week. ” She sighed in resignation as she stared back at her brother once again. “A friend drove me to Louisville, where I caught a train to New York City to meet with someone interested in my designs. I was getting ready to leave to come home when I asked the front desk to send up a bellhop to help with my luggage. I had bought lots of materials at the fabric stores. ” She waved her hand toward her worktable. “It wasn’t the bellhop who arrived. When I opened the door, I got a faceful of fist, and if it hadn’t been for the kids in the adjoining room, the damage would have been much worse. ”
Dawg sat down slowly in the chair beside him before wiping his hands carefully over his face.
“I need to get dressed. ” She breathed out roughly. “You can question me when I get back. ”
Gathering her clothes, she strode quickly to the bathroom and snapped the door closed behind her before leaning against it and dragging in a ragged, fear-filled breath.
She knew she had locked that door.
She remembered locking it, just as she remembered Jed checking those locks when he’d risen from the bed after they had caught their breath.
What if she had been alone and Dawg hadn’t shown up?
What if she had been attacked again? Or one of her sisters, or her mother?
God, what had she managed to draw back to Somerset and her family?
* * *
Dawg stared at the closed bathroom door before turning his gaze on Jed.
The other man was playing with one of the little glass gems Piper was so fond of. She’d bought a shitload of stuff, evidently, while she had been in Manhattan. Enough that she’d not wanted to carry it all herself to the cab.
She had instead opened her door to some bastard pretending to be a bellhop.
“What do you know, Jed?” he finally questioned the other man.
Listening to Jed’s account of the night the kid had called him, and his arrival at the hospital, Dawg had to admit that his gratitude toward the other man was overwhelming.
There was no doubt in his mind that Piper would not have called him or one of their cousins. She was so wary of their protective tendencies, and so certain, according to Jed, that the attack had been random, that she would have never watched her back.
Fortunately, Jed had been watching it for her.
“Did you suspect she would be followed?” Dawg asked when he finished.
“If I had suspected it, she would have called you long before now,” Jed informed him.
Jed turned his head as the bathroom door opened and Piper walked slowly from the room.
It was then that Dawg saw the expression that transformed Jed’s face.
Hell, he’d hoped it hadn’t gone that far.
No, he’d known it had gone that far, he amended as he watched Piper’s gaze meet her lover’s and saw the unconscious devotion that filled her face and eyes as well.
