The Baby's Bodyguard Read Free

bottom of it.
    His phone buzzed. He reached for it and felt Kelsey’s soft hand on his arm. It felt like a lifeline.
    He opened the phone to read the message.
    Your son is alive.

TWO
    K elsey gripped Ethan’s arm tighter as he swayed. “Ethan?”
    He stared at the phone. She eased it from his cramped fingers and looked at the message.
Your son is alive.
    What in the world was going on? “Ethan, why don’t we sit and you can tell me what happened to your son?”
    He allowed Kelsey to lead him to the table. As he sat, the baby in her arms reached for him. With only a brief hesitation and something like deep pain settling in lines on his face, he took her. As Janie squirmed, he shifted her until she could lay her head on his shoulder.
    Kelsey pushed the Coke toward him. “Okay, talk.”
    He met her eyes and to her surprise, she saw a hint of a smile there. “I think you’re the only person who would have the nerve to ask me that. My family won’t. I think they’re afraid I’ll go off the deep end.”
    “Is there danger of that?”
    He rubbed a slow circle on the baby’s back while heseemed to be considering the question, and Kelsey’s heart did a lazy flip in her chest.
    “I don’t think so.” A rueful smile, then.
    She smiled back at him, even though she wanted to cry, because there was courage, and then there was
courage.
He had the real thing. “Why don’t you tell me about Charlie?”
    Kelsey watched emotions—anger, fear, grief—travel across his face as he struggled to find the right words.
    “I was undercover with the FBI. We were closing the deal with … some really bad people. All we needed was for the money to exchange hands and we could arrest them.” He closed his eyes, almost as if he shut them tight enough he could shut out the memory of that night. “They shouldn’t have been there. They shouldn’t have known the place even existed. I wasn’t anywhere near our hometown.”
    “Wait—your wife and son were at the place where the sting was set to happen?”
    “Yes.” The pain in that one word was enough to take her breath away.
    “She walked across the street, right in front of me, and the restaurant where I was supposed to meet the people I’d been working to bring down … it just blew up. Amy and Charlie were killed in the explosion.” He licked dry lips and took a sip of the Coke she’d opened for him.
    “How did she get there?”
    “No one was ever able to figure it out. There were some unexplained phone calls on the call log of her cellphone, but the numbers traced back to burn phones. I left the FBI, but if there were new leads, I’m sure they would have let me know.” The toddler whimpered and roused. Ethan passed her to Kelsey, who lowered her into the crook of her arm and shushed her gently to sleep.
    “You must feel like you’ve been living a nightmare that you can’t wake up from.”
    His eyes took on a distant stare. The toll the last couple of years had taken on him had definitely been harsh. “You have no idea.”
    She did have an idea—not what it was like to lose a wife and child, but she had a very good idea what it was like to lose people you love. Family.
    Living nightmares? That she had experienced.
    “Ethan, how can you know if the message you got is for real? Is it possible that your son could’ve survived without you knowing?”
    It wasn’t possible. He’d watched as the explosion took his wife and child. And the small sliver of hope this message birthed in him only made the pain worse.
    “No.” He glanced at her, her question reminding him of her presence. “And I think I might know a way to prove it.”
    Ethan strode out the door of the marina shop with the photo in hand, Kelsey trailing behind with the toddler in her arms. The month before Amy and Charlie died, Ethan had been in Mobile for the weekend. A prearranged “business trip,” which really meant a visit home for him.
    He’d taken Charlie out for the afternoon to give Amya break.