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The doorbell rang.
She flinched so hard he reached out a hand toward her.
“I’ll get it.” Liam strode to the door. She rushed after him in time to see him fling the door open so hard it hit the stopper. “It’s just a package.” He bent to pick it up.
“Don’t!” She ran over and grabbed his belt, tugging him back.
Liam stumbled, caught himself, and straightened. “What? What is this?”
Her breath came hard now, each inhale and exhale. Sharp and fast so her head spun.
He set his hands on her shoulders. “Roxie, hold your breath for a second. Slow it down.” All she could do was exactly what he asked. “Good, now tell me what this is.”
A tear slid from the corner of her eye. “Don’t open it.”
NINE
Liam realized he was touching her and dropped his hands. This woman could always get behind whatever walls he put up, whatever guard he tried to use to protect the soft parts inside him that she’d bruised and torn apart when she walked away. When she’d tossed him aside. “What makes you think that is anything other than a regular delivery?”
Could be something from that megastore online for all they knew. Completely harmless. And yet, she acted like it could be a bomb about to explode.
“Do I need to call the bomb squad?”
She winced. “I don’t know.”
The scar on the side of her face wasn’t from her time as a marine. “Has it happened before?”
She inhaled a long, shuddering breath.
“That’s it.” He pulled his phone out. “I’m making the call.” They didn’t have a designated bomb squad full-time—part of the reason the commissioner was disbanding SWAT for a collateral duty team that worked on call was so they could be cross-trained. But there were officers and firefighters who formed a group with the skill and the equipment to do this.
“No!” She pretty much yelled in his face, more fear than he’d ever seen in her, and they’d been in some scary situations. “Don’t.” She sucked in a breath. “I’ll check it.”
“I will. Or both of us.” There were things they could do. He had a few things in his truck, but equipment that would sense an explosive device wasn’t something he kept on hand—nor was a bomb-sniffing dog.
She headed for the door. “It’s unlikely that it’s an explosive.”
And yet, she’d protected him like he might die and apparently she couldn’t stand that. An entirely confusing thought, considering he otherwise believed she didn’t care one whit about him. But then, he’d never understood women, and that wasn’t likely to suddenly occur now.
“Even so…”
“We don’t have hours to wait.”
“Unless you have a bomb dog in your room, we’ll have to deal with it.”
She glanced back over her shoulder, all that bravado gone. “I would never put a dog in danger like that. It could get hurt—or die!”
So he was as valuable to her as an animal? Oddly, that took some of the pressure off figuring out her minor freak-out. “Back up. Let me see it.”
Was it worth the risk? Maybe not. But she was right that they didn’t need to spend hours wasting people’s time if there was no reason to believe this was an explosive. He pulled his pen flashlight out. The four sides of the box were overlapped, folded into each other. This wasn’t a package delivery.
He clicked the flashlight on and aimed it at the open slit.
The box shifted.
“Whoa.” Liam caught himself before he toppled back. “Let’s take a look.”
He hooked the flashlight in the open slot and flipped it up. A snake hissed, then lifted its head so that it rose slowly toward the opening. Uncurling. Beady eyes, taking in its surroundings.
