To Trust Her Heart Read Free Page A

then shoved that under the bed and walked calmly to the door, opening it only about four inches. “May I see your hotel security ID, please?”
    He took the proffered documentation and perused it so carefully that Maddie’s goose bumps returned. Something was definitely up.
    Handing it back, he opened the door and let the poor man in, closing the door behind him. “My name is Mr. Phipps,” he said in a deep baritone as he looked every inch of Ty and as much as he could see of Maddie over as if they were already suspects of something. “We had reports of a woman screaming and I came up to check it out. Is everything all right, Ma’am?” He deliberately directed the question to her, she noticed, obviously having taken Ty’s size and none- too-welcoming demeanor into consideration.
    Maddie realized that this was her chance. If she truly wanted to leave, this was a way to do it, just by mentioning that he was holding her against her will. But despite the fact that he was annoying as hell, as usual, she didn’t want to get him into trouble. And, she wanted to know what was going on that he found it necessary to draw his gun in a seemingly innocuous hotel room.
    Ty wasn’t about to wait for her to get herself, and him, into even more trouble with this rent-a-cop. So, he offered, “It was my fault. I…”
    Mr. Phipps kept an eye on Maddie, but spent most of his time eyeing Ty suspiciously. Smart man, Ty though wryly. Maddie wouldn’t, hurt a flea. He, on the other hand . . .
     
    Maddie interrupted loudly. “He startled me. I was in the bathroom and I didn’t know he’d awakened, and he came into the bathroom. I was just startled by him.”
    Ty was suitably impressed. She’d told him essentially what he would have if he had been her and as close to the truth as possible without giving anything away. That would make it easier to remember the story if need be.
    The older gentleman looked from the pretty, as far as he could see unbruised woman in the bed to the combat ready man who had never strayed far from the door, and sized the situation up fairly accurately, realizing that the version of the story they’d given him was partially true, although it obviously wasn’t all of it. There didn’t seem to be any problem here. He could only do so much, and if she was unwilling to come clean, then there was nothing he could do about it.
    “Well, then I’ll be going. I thank you for your cooperation.”
    Ty grunted an answer for the both of them, and let him out the door, then turned to glare at Maddie as he carefully relocked every lock on the door. “You nearly got us into a lot of trouble, young lady.”
    Maddie hugged her knees to her, but met his eyes and didn’t back down, pointing out sharply, “And if you’d let me go when I wanted to, then I wouldn’t have had to scream, now would I?”
    She often made him want to tear his hair out, but she wasn’t afraid of him when most women were. When they were married, she’d have her women friends over sometimes when he was home, and they would all look at him google-eyed, tittering nervously around him as if he was some sort of bomb that might explode all over them. Most women had some sort of a sixth sense about him.  Somehow they knew that he was inherently dangerous and that is was an extremely accurate description. He’d always been a loner, and even the girls in high school had had a healthy fear of him, even though he’d never done anything to support or deny their perception. He just kept almost completely to himself and managed to grow bigger and taller than most of their teachers, rarely smiling, rarely even speaking. His father had never wanted anything from his only child but hard work and obedience.
    Those two traits had helped him enormously when he’d enlisted in the military right out of high school, and he had excelled at pretty much anything they’d thrown at him, especially marksmanship and covert surveillance techniques. He’d gotten his