Untraceable

UNTRACEABLE

(Book Three in the Untouchable
Trilogy)

by

Lindsay Delagair

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 by Lindsay
Delagair

All rights reserved

Published by Lindsay Delagair at
Smashwords

Smashwords Edition License
Notes

This ebook is licensed for your
personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be reproduced, copied,
sold or distributed. If you would like to share this book with
another person, please direct them Smashwords.com and have them
purchase their own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of
this author.

This ebook is a work of fiction. Names,
characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual
events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is
coincidental.

DEDICATION

This has to be dedicated to Micah and Leese’s
fans

(okay, Ryan’s fan’s too…lol). I wasn’t sure I
would finish

this book. I wrote half of it a year ago and
then stopped.

I loved their story, but (perhaps as many
writers do)

I became discouraged.

Then something wonderful happened.

Notes from fans started coming in for
Untouchable,

and then for Unforgivable. I realized I
wasn’t

the only one who cared about their love for
each other.

Thank you for your notes and words of
encouragement

—
they mean more to me than
you will ever know.

The depth of true love is not
discovered

until we come to the point when we
realize

we are willing to go

to whatever depth it takes
us.

Lindsay Delagair

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Editing Assistance: Jan
Ayola,

Bobbie Burtard, and Linda
Elkin

Italian language: Luigia
Tella

Weapons Assistance: Jim
Johnson

Prepublication Readers: Lori
Francis,

Monica Delesline, and Julie
Tillett

Fast forward

The Aero was moving at tremendous
speed, like the wind from a hurricane, as it wove around cars and
trucks. No one who lived in the area had any doubts about the
beautiful blonde behind the wheel. She was a Palm Beach native and
excessively famous. She wore a perpetual smile when she was in the
driver’s seat of that car, and who could blame her? If you could
afford a half million dollar vehicle, you’d be smiling,
too.

A stretch of open interstate appeared
and the Aero shot forward like its previous speed had been a Sunday
drive. The interstate cameras clicked off shots, but the car was
moving so fast that it wasn’t much more than a blur on the computer
screen. The car quickly came up behind the next group of vehicles
that appeared to be standing still when approached upon so rapidly.
Fast lane, center lane, fast lane, center to far right lane, and
back to the fast lane and she was around the grouping with barely a
break in speed.

One more vacant stretch of interstate
was one more chance to let the car prove that what was under its
hood was superior to anything that had ever burned across this
driver cursed, multi-laned menace known as I-95. The radar detector
was silent as the speed climbed well into the triple
digits.

Suddenly, the driver’s front tire
exploded into fine shrapnel and the car began its violent tumble
through the air; over and over as pieces of it flew hundreds of
feet. Seventeen revolutions, and then it smashed into a stand of
trees in the median. Good Samaritans were pulling over and running
toward the wreckage, but they would never reach the trapped driver
in time as a tremendous explosion went up like a fire-ball from the
splitting of an atom. It was too late to save her; all that was
left was to watch in horror as the car became an unrecognizable,
molten mass.

Photographers and reporters somehow
managed to arrive on the scene even before the emergency crews and
state troopers. The troopers dispatched someone immediately to her
home before the news broke. There was only one Aero in Palm Beach;
locating her family wasn’t going to be difficult, but telling them
about the young, expectant mother’s last moments would
be.

REWIND

CHAPTER one

I reached in the darkness to feel for
Micah’s arm, but it wasn’t there. I rolled to my back and let my
hand slip across the smooth, cool sheet. He had been out of the bed
for quite some time for the space he should have occupied to be so
cold. “Micah?” I whispered, sitting up slowly. The muscle I’d
pulled a few days earlier was tolerable, but I made sure to move
carefully now. It was painful enough when I did it while trying to
injure my best friend with a knee to his groin.

I smiled in the darkness, considering
that poor Ryan tended to get beat up by the women in his life. The
problem was that he made women so comfortable around him they felt
no compulsion to restrain themselves. This could lead to him
getting everything from slugged to goosed, from kissed to slapped.
He was just so dog-gone touchable—well, that and because he was
very good natured about it all.

I wiggled my toes into my bedroom
slippers and then picked up my silk robe and wrapped it around my
somewhat ill fitting baby doll nightwear. I really needed to go
ahead and buy some maternity clothes. The baby seemed to expand my
form with every passing day, and I couldn’t imagine what I would
finally look like at nine months. My disturbed sleep had now
disturbed the baby and I could feel him stretching inside me. That
was another thing that increased with each passing day; the baby
grew more and more active—it was the most unique sensation of my
life, and I loved every push of the tiny hands, feet, knees, and
elbows. I rubbed my tummy in response to the nudges and continued
to search for my handsome husband.

I went downstairs to the kitchen, but
he wasn’t there, then the dining room, the living room, and media
room. Where could he be? I checked the garage and found, to my
relief, his car was there. But where was he? It finally dawned on
me where he might be if he was having a restless night. I strained
to see across the shadowy pool deck. A dark, hulking form resided
on one of the loungers. I took in a big sigh of relief—I didn’t
like him disappearing, even if only to another room in the
house.

My hand came to softly rest on his
shoulder, but he never flinched. “You know I can’t sleep if you
aren’t in the bed,” I whispered.

“
Sorry,” he stated lower
than my whisper.

I moved around the lounger to stand in
front of him and lifted his heavy hands to rest under my open robe
and top. As soon as his hands came in contact with my active flesh,
he re-animated; life filled him and he was suddenly engrossed in
the movement taking place within me.

He lifted my top and placed his hot
cheek against my skin. “Ah, little guy,” he crooned. “It’s way past
your bedtime. I need to tuck your mommy in and help you both get
some rest.” He kissed my stomach slowly, over and over.

“
Why did you get up?” I
finally asked. “I thought I was your sleeping pill,
too.”

“
Trust me, baby, you are,”
he said, rising from the lounger and wrapping me in his
arms.

My cheek tucked against his chest as I
listened to the beating of his heart. “What’s wrong? You didn’t get
up without reason; something is bothering you.”

“
You need to go back to
bed,” he dodged. “This baby is going to have his days and night so
confused that—”

“
Tell me what’s wrong,” I
begged. “I won’t be able to go back to sleep if I know you’re
upset.”

I could tell he didn’t want to talk
about it, but he knew I’d never give up until I got an answer from
him that satisfied my insatiable appetite for knowing his
thoughts.

“
Tomorrow is what’s wrong,
baby. I—I don’t think I should go to church with you in the
morning.”

“
Why? We have a lot to be
thankful for.”

“
It’s not that I’m not
thankful, but I—I don’t… It’s what I’ve been doing since, I…” his
voice had become thicker with each uttered word until the emotions
strangled off the end of his sentence.

I placed my hands on either side of
his cheeks, letting my thumbs gently wipe away the pain-filled
tears that washed down his face. “Micah, the day you went forward,
if you meant it, all your sins were forgiven; that included the
future. God knows everything about us, beginning to
end.”

“
Leese, do you remember
the first time you invited me to church?”

“
Of course I do. It was in
French class, at the end of the period.”

“
Do you remember what I
said?”

“
Yes, I even remember how
you acted when I mentioned church, but you said it had been a long
time since you’d been in church. I’m thinking now, given your—your,
well, the way you were raised, it was probably a lie. Am I
right?”

“
No, it wasn’t a lie,
baby. When I was very young, we attended a Catholic church. I was
about seven when we stopped going. It was the one time in my life
that I knew there was a force in this world bigger than all of us,
including my dad, and that was unsettling to me. But what had been
an eye-opening to the existence of God for me was simply business
for my parents. There were several members of the family who
attended and deals were often made in quiet whispers right there on
church grounds.”

“
What does this have to do
with tomorrow?”

“
I remember asking my
mother once as I watched people going in and out of the
confessional booths what were they doing. She explained they were
confessing to the priest the bad things they had done. I asked her
if I could go inside one, and she told me no—she said our family
was different and someday I would understand.”

I could picture Micah as a little boy
wondering about the practice of unburdening his soul only to
discover that in his world he would simply learn not to let
whatever he did get anywhere near his soul or even his conscience
for that matter. He learned to be an empty vessel—empty like the
look that washed away his emotions when he had to kill someone. I
wanted so badly to turn back the clock and return to that place and
time. To take that little boy who was still fresh and beautiful
aside and tell him how much God really, truly loved him. I wanted
to shelter him from the hell that would mold him several years
later into becoming a methodical, mechanical, and heartless killer.
But God doesn’t give us an opportunity to move backward, only
forward. That was when I realized if he hadn’t been trained into
becoming the untouchable Micah Gavarreen, he and I would have never
met. God has an unusual way of working out the most impossible
feats in our lives.

“
I need to—”

His voice broke me from my deep
thoughts. “Tell me what you need,” I begged, wanting nothing more
than to end the discomfort he felt.

“
I need to confess. Baby,
I’ve been so bad since you’ve been out of my life. I’ve got to talk
to someone about…” his words choked again. “I’ve never, and I mean
never, cared about the people I’ve killed and now it’s eating
inside me so hard that I literally feel sick.”

That was when I noticed he had begun
to tremble softly; I knew this was serious for him. He had a
lifetime of hurt to deal with and it was assaulting him all at
once.

“
I guess I need to talk
with Pastor Anderson.”

My heart skipped a beat. The Baptist
Church wasn’t the Catholic Church, and confessing to murder wasn’t
something that would be kept in confidence—at least I was pretty
sure it wouldn’t.