Protector's Instinct by Janie Crouch

Author:Janie Crouch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2017-01-10T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Zane immediately had his sidearm out again. He’d already checked her small place pretty thoroughly.

“There’s no one in here now, that’s for sure. How do you know someone has been in here?”

She showed him a piece of clear tape she’d put at the bottom of her back door. Immediately he realized how it worked. The tape was unnoticeable when the door was closed, covering both the door and frame. But if the door opened, the tape came unstuck from the door frame.

Very simple but very effective. It was what she had been checking for at each of her windows also.

“I always have this on the back door and windows.” She grimaced. “It’s one of the coping mechanisms Dr. Parker and I came up with.”

He put his gun away. “To know if someone has been in the house?”

“About eight months after the attack I started waking up at night terrified someone was in the house with me. That was the second time I moved into a place that had as few windows as possible.” She shrugged. “The tape was a simple method that allowed me to know for sure, to convince my terrorized mind at three o’clock in the morning that no one could possibly be inside.”

He reached over and yanked her into his arms, thankful when she didn’t stiffen or pull away, as emotion nearly overwhelmed him. Her words broke his heart and yet made him so damn proud of her at the same time.

“I think it’s brilliant if you ask me.”

He felt her good shoulder shrug slightly. “At first I considered myself a coward. I could understand and condone moving out of my parents’ beach house, where the attack happened. But moving to the second place, with less windows, just seemed cowardly.”

“But it wasn’t.”

“No. It took me a while to figure that out. Recovery is not a straight line. It’s sometimes one step forward and half a mile back. Setbacks are part of the process.”

Zane realized he should have been part of her process too. Maybe he could’ve helped her through some of this if he’d chosen to really listen to her needs rather than give her what he thought she needed.

Maybe the tape still would’ve been necessary. But maybe knowing he was there would’ve been enough.

“Hey, in the now, Wales.”

“What?”

“Whatever it is that has you all stiff? Let it go. We can’t change the past. We can only change what we choose to do today.”

She was right. And today, right now, involved the fact that someone had been inside her town house. He reluctantly let her go.

“I assume you didn’t ask anyone to water plants or bring in your mail while you were gone?”

“No. No plants. And I had asked the post office to hold my mail.”

“It could be innocent. Smoke detector malfunctioned and the landlord came in. Something like that.”

But after someone had tried to kill them multiple times, neither of them actually believed that was the case. And since he hadn’t planned on leaving her alone anyway, he might as well take her with him instead.

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