Baby Breakout Page 9

Chapter Eight

  Trying not to imagine who she had entertained here, Jed ignored the red walls and white lace curtains of Erica’s bedroom. His attention was focused on the tiny female tucked under the red-and-white quilt. She slept deeply. Peacefully. He would probably never sleep again.

  But then it was already morning. Sunshine radiated through those lace curtains, warming the hardwood floor and enveloping the bed and the sleeping child in a circle of ethereal light.

  Voices emanated from the living room. The old woman had left a while ago. Who the hell…

  He spared one last glance at his sleeping daughter, assuring himself that she was safe in Erica’s room. There was no fire escape so that someone could break the window and quickly grab her without being noticed. Isobel was much safer in her mother’s room.

  But what about her mother?

  He didn’t hear her voice. As he crept down the hall toward the living room, he realized the voices came from the television set. Erica stood before it, the remote clasped in her slightly trembling hand.

  “Isn’t that too loud?” he asked, then remembered that their daughter was a sound sleeper.

  Erica didn’t bother reminding him. She just gestured at the screen. “They’re running your story again.”

  He didn’t even glance at the TV. “That’s not my story.”

  Someone else had concocted the story that had sent him to prison for crimes he hadn’t committed.

  “The part about breaking out of prison and being an escaped convict is your story,” she said. “And that’s what Mrs. Osborn will see when she watches this. She’ll recognize you. You have to leave before she calls the police.”

  She tossed the remote onto the couch and moved toward the door, as if to see him out. But he didn’t follow her. Instead he headed to where he’d brawled with the intruder. She had righted the lamp that had fallen to the floor, but the shade was dented from where it had struck the hardwood.

  He would have had Rowe check it for prints, but the man had worn gloves. What had he been looking for? The lamp sat atop a bureau crowded with picture frames. Isobel’s face, so much like his sister Macy’s, smiled out of most of them from infancy to her current age. The drawers were shut, no papers disturbed.

  Jed doubted the man had been looking for files like those taken from Marcus Leighton’s office. Jed was afraid that what he’d been looking for had been across the hall with Mrs. Osborn…

  “I’m sure your neighbor is asleep in her bed after her late night,” Jed assured her. The woman was very old, her eyes foggy as if she had cataracts. He doubted she had been able to see much more than his shadowy outline, let alone enough of his features to recognize his face.

  Instead of worrying about her neighbor, Erica should be in her bed with their daughter. Dark circles rimmed her pale blue eyes. But she trembled with anxiety.

  “You need to leave,” she insisted. “Now. Before it’s too late.”

  “You really think I should leave?” he asked. “After what happened last night?”

  Her breath shuddered out as her mind followed a different path into the past. “A man died.”

  “I didn’t kill Marcus.” He’d thought he had convinced her of that, but obviously she still had her doubts about him.

  “I know.” She pointed toward the TV again. “But the authorities won’t. They’ll think you’re even more dangerous than they already do.”

  They were already going to shoot him on sight; now maybe they wouldn’t even wait to make sure it was him before they started firing. Would sticking close to Erica and Isobel keep them safe or put them in more danger?

  “If I leave, that man might come back,” he warned her.

  “And if you stay, and Mrs. Osborn recognizes you, he won’t be the only one breaking into my home.” She glanced toward her door, her eyes widening as if she could imagine a battering ram breaking apart the wood and a SWAT team bursting into her living room.

  He could imagine the same thing, but he could also imagine that man coming back…for her and Isobel. And his gut told him that man would prove much more dangerous than any lawman with a shoot-on-sight order. “I can’t just leave you…”

  “Why not?” she asked. “You didn’t come here to protect me. You came here to force me to provide you with an alibi and clear your name. I can’t do that. I can’t perjure myself and swear that you never left me that night.”

  “I didn’t want you to perjure yourself,” he said. “I wanted you to tell the truth.”

  “I have,” she said.

  He wished he could be certain that she told the truth. But after learning that yet another friend had betrayed him, he dared not trust a woman he really hadn’t known very well at all. She hadn’t just kept his possible alibi from the police; she’d kept his daughter from him, too.

  “So why are you still here?” Erica asked with such intensity that the question must have been nagging at her for a while.

  He gestured toward her bedroom, to where their daughter lay sleeping. He couldn’t put into words what he already felt for his child—the protectiveness, the affection, the devotion…

  “Until a few hours ago, you didn’t even know Isobel existed,” Erica reminded him.

  “Whose fault was that?” he asked, the question slipping out with his bitterness. She could have gone to his trial or visited him in prison to at least let him know that he had become a father.

  Her delicately featured face flushed, but she shook her head in rejection of any culpability. “It was Marcus Leighton’s fault for convincing me of your guilt. If there was any chance that you were the killer your own lawyer thought you were, I didn’t want you to have anything to do with my baby.”

  Jed couldn’t fault her for that. She was a good mother. Instead he cursed the man whom he’d once considered a friend.

  Macy had wanted to get him a better lawyer, one with more experience with criminal cases, but he had been loyal. Why hadn’t Marcus? The man had promised that no one else would work as hard at proving Jed’s innocence than he would, and Jed had trusted him.

  Now he knew better than to ever trust again.

  “Go,” Erica urged him. “Find out who bribed him to betray you. Find out who wanted you to spend the rest of your life in prison.”

  “I intend to,” he said. That hadn’t changed, but it was no longer his first priority. “Proving my innocence was my whole reason for leaving during the riot at Blackwoods.”

  “So go,” she urged him again—almost desperately. She had been afraid of him earlier—when he’d tricked her into opening the door. But this fear, haunting her blue eyes, was even greater. She wasn’t afraid of him anymore, but she was afraid of the danger he’d brought into her life.

  “I can’t leave without you and Isobel,” he said. Chances were good her intruder would return. Soon.

  She shook her head. “We can’t go with you. We can’t live on the run. You can’t ask that of us…”

  “I don’t want you living on the run,” he said. “I just want you living. I want you safe.”

  But he wanted more than that. He wanted her in every way. He stepped closer to her, and she must have seen desire in his eyes because her breath audibly caught.

  And maybe she wanted him, too, because she leaned toward him. He lowered his head to hers. She gasped at his nearness, and her breath warmed his lips. Then he covered her mouth with his.

  A man on the run from authorities and a killer, he had no time for kisses. But, in this moment, there was nothing he would rather be doing than kissing Erica Towsley.

  * * *

  ERICA LIFTED HER HANDS, pressing her palms against his chest. She needed to push him away—to push him out of the door and out of her and Isobel’s lives.

  But instead, her fingers curled into his shirt, and she clutched him closer. Rising up on tiptoe, she pressed her mouth tighter to his. He parted her lips, deepening the kiss.

  His tongue touched hers and ignited a fire within her. Her legs trembled as des
ire rushed through her. Her nipples tightened, and heat filled her stomach. And all those disjointed memories from that night—the night they conceived their daughter—flitted through her mind.

  As if he felt her trembling, he swung her up in his arms—clasping her tight to his chest. And he kissed her more deeply, his tongue sliding in and out of her mouth until she moaned.

  She ran her hands up the back of his neck to clasp his head, and his closely cropped hair tickled her palms. She tingled all over as passion pulsed inside her.

  He groaned and moved, carrying her over to the couch. He lowered her to the cushions and followed her down, covering her body with his.

  He was so big. So muscular. So heavy, even though he balanced most of his weight on his bulging arms. She wrapped her arms around him and pulled him closer. Then she wrapped her legs around his waist and arched into him—wanting, needing, more.

  He lifted his mouth from hers and stared into her eyes; his were dark and hot with desire. “Erica…?”

  How could she have ever thought that he had drugged and taken her choice away from her? Even though he’d been locked up for three years, he was giving her a choice now—instead of just taking what she was freely willing to give.

  Why was she so willing? Maybe she had been locked up, too, for the past few years—afraid to trust because of what she had considered such a betrayal of her love. But Jed hadn’t betrayed her.

  If anyone had betrayed anyone, she had betrayed him when she had let Marcus Leighton make her doubt him. She’d already apologized, but she had to say it again. “I’m sorry…”

  With a shudder, he rose up—pulling away as if she’d rejected him. “No, I’m sorry,” he said. “This is crazy. We can’t do this—”

  “We shouldn’t,” she said.

  For so many reasons. The most pressing was that he couldn’t stay. He was a man on the run who had already brought her nothing but heartbreak and danger.

  “But we can,” she continued. It wouldn’t make up to him the three years of his life that he’d lost, but it might help them regain some of the closeness and promise they’d had before he had gone off to Afghanistan and broken off their relationship.

  “And I want to.” She grasped his shirt in both fists and tugged him down toward her.

  His hands covered hers, and he stared at her, his gaze dark with a breath-stealing intensity. Then he pulled her fingers from his shirt.

  At least one of them had the sense to realize this was neither the time nor the place for making love. But still she had to blink back tears of disappointment. Then she was blinking to clear her eyes as he pulled off his shirt and tossed it onto the floor next to the couch. All rippling, sinewy muscle, he was so damn sexy.

  Her breath caught as desire overwhelmed her. She touched him, sliding her fingertips across the hair-dusted silky skin. Then she lifted up to press her lips to his chest. His heart thudded against her mouth.

  “Erica…”

  He lowered his head and kissed her—deeply. And she kissed him back with all the passion she felt for him. It pulsed low in her body, winding a pressure tight inside her. It filled her ears with the sound of her own blood rushing through her veins.

  But a rapid beep, beep, beep broke the grip of desire, clearing her head, so that she heard the broadcast announcement:

  “Early this morning the governor has issued a special press release. In order to apprehend the convicts who escaped during the prison riot at Blackwoods Penitentiary in northern Michigan, he has put a bounty on the head of each of the prisoners. These bounties will be paid either to the person who actually apprehends these escapees or to the person who provides information leading to their apprehension.”

  His voice quavering with excitement, the reporter stated the amount on each convict. “But the highest bounty will be paid for the apprehension of cop killer Jedidiah Kleyn.”

  A pithy curse escaped Jed’s lips with a hiss of breath. “That’s not a bounty,” he murmured. “It’s a death warrant…”

  He hadn’t been lying about the shoot-on-sight order. In light of the bounty, he’d probably actually downplayed how much danger he was really in.

  “You have to leave,” she urged him as panic gripped her.

  Mrs. Osborn might have believed that Jed was Erica’s friend, but that wouldn’t matter if she recognized his photo and thought she could collect that kind of money for reporting his location.

  And she would recognize the photo that filled the television screen. It wasn’t his mug shot, with his full head of dark hair and clean-shaven square jaw, that they had previously shown. This was his prison ID that must have finally been retrieved from the ruins that was all that was left of Blackwoods Penitentiary. In this picture, there was more stubble on his jaw than his shaved head. And he looked hard and dangerous—like he did now.

  He swore again. Then he grabbed up his shirt from the floor and dragged it over his head. “Erica—”

  “Go,” she said, the panic stealing away her breath as it pressed heavily on her lungs. “You have to get out of here before it’s too late.”

  But then a noise penetrated the thin window panes of her home. Sirens.

  It was already too late.

  The authorities were coming for him with orders to shoot on sight.

  * * *

  “YOU MANIPULATIVE MONSTER,” Drake Ketchum shouted through the bars of the Blackwoods County jail.

  A smile tugged at Jefferson’s lips. “Are you supposed to be talking to me without my lawyer present?” he goaded the ambitious, young Blackwoods County district attorney.

  “I’m going to trace this back to you and add it to the other charges you’re going down for,” Ketchum threatened.

  “Trace what back to me?”

  “You’re behind the bounty,” Ketchum said. “You talked the governor into it!”

  Jefferson chuckled. “You give me entirely too much credit. Do you really think I’d still be in here if the governor was taking my calls?”

  Ketchum was the real master of manipulation; at the arraignment, he’d talked the judge into denying bail for Jefferson.

  “Then you put your sleazy attorney up to it.”

  Jefferson shrugged. “Prove it,” he challenged the man. “You won’t be able to do that any easier than you’ll be able to prove I ordered the murder of an undercover DEA agent, since your star witness is dead.”

  Sheriff York stood beside Ketchum—two young men who were stupid and idealistic enough to believe they ruled this county. Jefferson nearly laughed again, but it was York who chuckled this time.

  “Kleyn isn’t dead,” the sheriff said.

  He shrugged again—unconcerned because they were entirely too concerned. “You have him in protective custody then?”

  “Not yet,” York admitted.

  “Then you better get him there soon,” he spoke to Ketchum, “or you’re going to lose that star witness for sure—what with every law-enforcement officer and bounty hunter in this state and probably most of the surrounding ones gunning for him.”

  Ketchum’s gaze slid from his to the sheriff. “He’s right. You better find him first.”

  Jefferson was enjoying this visit immensely. It was good for these young fools to know who really had all the power. “And, since you don’t know where he is, I feel compelled to point out that you don’t know for certain if he’s still alive.”

  “Thanks to that bounty we know,” Ketchum replied. “If he was dead, someone would have tried to claim it.”

  Jefferson nodded. “True. Unless the person Kleyn’s in the most danger from has no use for the bounty. If that convict is actually as innocent as he claims and the DEA agent believes he is, then there’s someone who wants him dead even more…”

  “Than you do?”

  He chuckled at Ketchum’s weak attempt to trap him. “You’re going to have to do better than that,” he warned the man. Then he turned to the sheriff. “And so are you if you want to bring that escapee back alive.�
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  “You should have figured out by now that the man isn’t easy to kill,” York reminded him. “Your fellow guards have already told us that you ordered his murder after the prison doctor’s. But then the riot broke out.”

  And everything had gone to hell. Because of Jedidiah Kleyn. Now it was his turn to go to hell.

  Chapter Nine

  In tight fists, Jed gripped the steering wheel of Erica’s van. He had to stay in control. For so many reasons…

  The most important one slept in her car seat in the back. He glanced into the rearview mirror at the reflection of her peaceful face. Since he’d met her, he had spent a lot of time watching Isobel sleep.