Explosive Engagement (14 page)

“But you were fourteen then and convinced that your father was the greatest man in the world.” At seventeen, he hadn’t been much older but he’d believed the same thing about his father. “What if we find out it really was your father who killed mine?” Would she be able to handle her father’s guilt?

Her face grew pale again and her eyes widened with horror. “It wasn’t my dad. It couldn’t have been...”

Chapter Fifteen

But what if it had been?

Would Stacy be able to deal with her father not being the man she had always believed him to be? She’d known he was a thief. He had never hidden that from his family.

But a killer?

She couldn’t accept that.

“Are you okay?” Logan asked again.

She nodded. Even if it was true, she would be okay. But
they
would never be okay. She wouldn’t be able to be with him again knowing that her father took his father from him. She would never be able to make up for what he’d lost, never be able to give him enough love to make up for the love he’d lost.

Love?

Did she love Logan Payne?

Panic clutched her heart.
Damn it. Damn him...

She had fallen for her fake fiancé. But those feelings would never be reciprocated—probably not even if they learned that someone else had killed his father. If she hadn’t forced herself on him, would he have made love to her?

She doubted it.

“How much farther?” she asked. They’d been driving for a while on what had seemed like a rather circuitous route. But then through the trees sunshine glimmered off water. They’d been traveling around lakes.

“Not much,” he replied. But despite the curvy roads, Logan had had more attention on the rearview mirror than the windshield.

“Is someone following us again?” she asked. Panic pressed on her lungs, stealing her breath. He’d saved them last night because whoever had been following them hadn’t just wanted to know where they were going, they’d wanted them dead.

He shrugged. “Maybe...”

So that meant yes.

“Did you lose them?” she asked.

He shrugged again. “Maybe...”

But when he stopped the SUV, he kept his hand on his holster when he stepped out of it. He leaned back inside. “You can stay here,” he suggested.

For her protection from whoever had followed them or from whatever his father’s older partner might say about that night?

“I want to hear this, too,” she said. “I want to know why he visited my dad.” She’d looked at the logs and couldn’t believe that the man who’d arrested her father had visited him more than his own brother had.

And even more than his sons had.

But then part of that time, they had been busy serving their own sentences behind bars. Because of her...

And Aunt Marta had never visited her brother-in-law. Which was odd given that before she’d married Uncle Iwan, she had dated Stacy’s dad. But then he’d fallen for her mother or at least for her beauty. There wasn’t much more to her mom than her looks, which she constantly used to find a richer, more successful man. That was why Stacy’s dad had started stealing—to provide for the woman. But it had never been enough.

Too bad the woman hadn’t realized that nothing was more valuable than love. True love.

If only Stacy could find that for herself...with Logan. But he was barely aware of her now, his hand on his weapon and his gaze scanning the trees surrounding the little log cabin where his father’s old partner must have retired. With rough-sawn logs and a wraparound porch, it was rustic but charming.

Birds chirped, and brush and branches rustled from the feet of scurrying squirrels and chipmunks. She’d been a city girl her whole life, but she could see the appeal of such a remote area. The peace...

But then shots rang out, shattering the peace.

* * *

“D
AMN
IT
!” L
OGAN
shouted as he crouched behind the driver’s door he’d left open.

“Duck down!” he yelled at Stacy. But she’d already lain across the front seat as much as the seat belt she still wore allowed her to move.

Had they been followed from the prison as he’d suspected? Or were the shots coming from the house? When he looked back at the cabin, he noticed a gun barrel protruding from an open window.

“It’s me, Cooper!” he yelled. “Don’t shoot!”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me!” the older man said as he hurried out the front door, the shotgun slung over his shoulder. “I thought you were those damn kids...”

“Kids?” Logan asked, wondering why the retired cop would have been shooting at kids, either.

Robert Cooper shoved a shaking hand through gray hair that was standing on end. “They’ve been breaking into the summer cottages around here.”

“So you were going to shoot them?” Logan asked. Had the retired cop lost it? He was older than Logan’s dad would have been; Robert had been the senior officer of their doomed partnership.

“I was shooting up in the air, so I wouldn’t hit anyone. I just wanted to scare ’em,” Robert said.

“Mission accomplished.” Logan glanced at Stacy, who was still crouched below the dash. “It’s okay,” he assured her. But he wasn’t certain of that—if the old man had lost it...

“I wouldn’t have fired if I’d realized it was you,” Cooper said. “But you’ve never been here before—not like your brothers have.”

His brothers were more forgiving than he was; Stacy could vouch to that.

“They’ve come up to fish on the lake with me,” Robert continued. “Have you come up to fish, Logan?”

He had, but for information instead of actual fish. He replied, “I’m not the sportsmen my brothers are.” He walked around the car and opened the passenger’s door for Stacy.

“You didn’t come alone?” Robert asked.

Stacy stepped out, and the older man uttered a loud gasp. “Is that the Kozminski girl?”

“Yes,” she answered for herself.

The older man chuckled gruffly, awkwardly. “I never thought I would see the two of you together. Since you were kids, you’ve been sniping at each other.”

But they weren’t sniping at each other anymore. “Someone else is sniping at us,” Logan said. “With guns—”

“I wouldn’t have shot if I’d known it was you,” the older man said again.

“I’m not talking about today,” Logan explained. “We’ve been getting shot at the past couple of days and someone even set a bomb in Stacy’s apartment.”

The retired cop turned to her. “But you’re all right? It didn’t go off?”

She shook her head. “Logan defused it.”

“He was with you then, too?”

“We’re together now,” Logan said. “We’re actually engaged.” Whether the engagement was real or not didn’t matter...because the feelings between them—the complicated, messy feelings—were real.

The older man gasped again and pushed his knuckles against his chest, as if the news had shocked him so much he was having chest pains.

Logan started toward him. “Are you all right?”

He nodded. “I—I just can’t believe you two could ever overcome your differences.”

Logan wasn’t certain how that had happened, either—except that he had finally stopped blaming Stacy for supporting her father and had begun to admire her fierce loyalty. “I’m not sure we’re all that different,” he admitted. “We both love our families. Our fathers...”

She turned toward him, her gray eyes showing her surprise and appreciation.

But the retired cop expressed his surprise with a coarse curse before adding, “Her father killed yours. I didn’t think that was something you’d ever get over, Logan.”

“My father didn’t pull the trigger,” she said.

“He told you that?” Robert asked. “He told you that he didn’t do it?”

She shook her head. “He would never talk to me about that night. But I know he didn’t do it—that he couldn’t take another man’s life.”

“What did he tell you?” Logan asked the former officer.

The older man glared in annoyance. “You know what he told me. You read the report. You were in court for my testimony. Your father caught him stealing and they struggled over the gun.”

“I’m not talking about what he told you that night,” Logan clarified. “I’m talking about what he told you all the times you visited him in prison.”

The retired cop’s already ruddy face flushed deep red. “What are you talking about?”

Stacy held up the visitor logs that the warden had printed out for her. “It’s on here—all your visits to my father.”

“Several over the years,” Logan said. “Almost regular visits. If you knew everything you needed to about the night my father died, why did you keep going back to talk to his killer—unless you knew that he wasn’t the killer.”

His face flushed an even deeper shade of red until he was nearly purple. But his voice was gruff with disappointment when he replied, “You let her get to you, Logan.”

“She’s convinced that her father didn’t pull the trigger,” Logan said, “that someone else was there that night.”

“There was,” Stacy insisted.

Logan stepped closer to the porch, careful to stay between the loaded shotgun and Stacy. The ex-cop might not have been as forgiving as Logan had found himself to be regarding the daughter of the man convicted of killing his father.

“Did you see someone else?” Logan asked Robert. “Is that why you kept going to see Kozminski? To find out who was with him that night?”

The older man sighed. “There could have been someone else...”

“Why didn’t that get into your report?” Logan asked. “Or your testimony?”

“There
may
have been someone else,” he said. “But there was
definitely
Kozminski. He was there robbing the place. I wasn’t going to let him get away with murder because of reasonable doubt.”

Logan had it now. Reasonable doubt. And Robert Cooper must have, too, because he’d kept visiting Kozminski.

“Who was it?” Stacy asked. “Who did you see?”

The older man shook his head. “Just a shadow fleeing the building. I would have given chase, but I wanted to make sure my partner was all right. I’d already fallen too far behind him during pursuit, and he wasn’t answering his radio call.”

Logan shuddered as he realized why: because his father had been lying dead on the jewelry store floor with Patek Kozminski standing over him. That was the image he’d always had in his head—the image Robert Cooper had put there with his report and his testimony. And that was why Logan had stayed so angry at Stacy’s father.

“So you just decided to pin a murder on my father that he didn’t commit?” Stacy asked, her voice rising with anger.

“He never denied it,” Robert pointed out. “He never proclaimed his innocence.”

No. He hadn’t. And there was only one reason for that. “He was protecting someone,” Logan said. “You must have suspected that, too.”

Robert nodded. “That is why I kept visiting him. I wanted him to tell me. But he never admitted anything to me.” The retired cop turned toward Stacy. “Did he ever tell you anything?”

She shook her head. “I already told you that he refused to talk to me about that night.”

“Even the last time you saw him?” Robert asked. “He didn’t even tell you on his deathbed?”

“No,” she said. “He still wouldn’t talk about what happened.”

“He didn’t say anything about my father at all?” Logan asked. If Patek Kozminski really had killed a man and was about to die himself, wouldn’t he want to make amends? Penance? Beg for forgiveness? But an innocent man had no reason to ask for forgiveness...

Could Stacy have been right all this time? Her father had been stuck in prison for a crime he hadn’t committed. Logan had wondered before if he could forgive her for what her father had done. But could she forgive him for helping keep an innocent man in prison?

“He didn’t talk about your father,” she said.

And he was grateful that she’d at least revealed that much about the words over which she had been so secretive.

“So he didn’t say anything about who else was there that night?” the ex-cop persisted.

“No.”

“He died protecting whoever else had been there,” Logan said. So it had to have been someone close to him. Someone he’d loved...

Stacy must have come to the same realization because the color left her face, leaving her skin translucent except for the dark circles beneath her smoky-gray eyes. Because if her father had loved that person enough to protect him, she probably loved that person, too.

“He didn’t say anything. But did he leave you anything?” Robert asked. The cop had retired a few years ago, but apparently he had not forgotten how to interrogate a suspect.

But Stacy wasn’t a suspect. There was no way that she had been there that night. She would not have let her father go to prison for something she’d done.

“Was there anything in his personal effects?” Robert probed. “A letter? A journal?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t gone through his stuff.”

“Did the bomb destroy his things?” Robert asked.

She shook her head. “No. I didn’t bring his effects home with me.”

She hadn’t gone home from the prison. She’d gone straight to a friend. And she must have brought her father’s stuff with her.

Her eyes widened again, as if she’d followed Logan’s train of thought, too. If there was something in her father’s stuff, some kind of confession or evidence, then whoever had that stuff was in danger. She grasped Logan’s arm and murmured, “We need to leave.”

“Where are his things?” Robert asked.

Logan covered Stacy’s hand with his and squeezed. He didn’t want her to say anything else in front of the old cop. “It’s okay,” he told the man. “We’ve got it from here.”

The retired cop stepped forward so abruptly that he nearly stumbled down the porch stairs. “No. You can’t cut me out of this investigation. I’ve been working this case for fifteen years.”

“No, you haven’t,” Logan said.

Robert pointed toward the log printouts in Stacy’s hand. “You saw my visits. You know I have been trying to get to the truth.”

“No,” Logan repeated. “A real cop would have included everything he’d seen in his report and his testimony.”

“And then Patek Kozminski wouldn’t have gone to prison.”

Stacy gasped.

“No,” Logan said. “He’d still been caught in the commission of a felony. A man had died during that felony. He would have gone to prison for those charges, but the real killer wouldn’t have been free the past fifteen years.”

“You think Kozminski would have given him up in some kind of plea deal?” Robert asked.

Logan shook his head. “No. But I would have been looking for the killer. And I wouldn’t have stopped until he was brought to justice.” And he wouldn’t stop now.