Bodyguard by Melanie Shawn

26

Gage

As Bear’sSUV moved steadily down the highway toward the city Savannah had called home for the last dozen years, my head spun.

Twelve hours. That’s all it would take to drive there.

That wasn’t exactly a short distance by any means, but in some ways it was.

You could drive it in one day.

You could do the entire thing with only one stop for gas.

That’s how close Savannah had been all these years. I could have driven to her and only stopped once for gas. That was how close.

I knew I shouldn’t be thinking about that. It brought up complicated feelings, and those were the last thing I needed clogging up my thought process. I needed to stay sharp.

However, with the endless highway flashing by, the sameness of it all, there was very little to distract me. Normally, I would just discipline myself to mentally set the subject aside. But it seemed like discipline was just one of the many things that flew out the window when Savannah was around.

So, my brain turned it over and over in my head. Twelve hours. A dozen. Half of one day.

My logical brain realized it didn’t mean anything. It’s not like it meant she would have been easier for me to find, if I’d somehow tried. There were a million places she could have been, even if I’d known that a twelve-hour drive radius was the bounding factor.

It wasn’t my head that thought it was significant. It was my heart.

Just the idea that she’d been so close to me. All those years. So fucking close.

It was hard to process.

Bear and I took shifts driving, with the other one napping while not on their shift. It wasn’t that we were tired. It was that, when you were unsure what was ahead of you, you slept when the opportunity presented itself. Just like with eating. You never knew when you were going to get another chance, so you took the chances you got.

I was driving when we pulled into Savannah’s...God, what should I even call it? New hometown? That felt wrong. In fact, I felt a little sick just using the word “home” in connection to her being separated from me.

Not the time to go down that particular rabbit hole. I didn’t know if there ever would be a time. But I did know that now was not it.

I shook my head a little to clear the queasy feeling away and decided to just call it our destination. And we’d arrived.

She gave me directions, quietly, so as not to wake Bear.

The minute we pulled to a stop on the side of the street two blocks away from Savannah’s house, Bear sat up in the backseat, as instantly alert as if he’d been awake twenty minutes and was on his second cup of coffee.

I saw the surprise in Savannah’s eyes and raised brows when she saw this, but I was used to it. Hell, I could do the same thing. It was a learned skill. And being constantly on guard was something I’d learned.

We sat in the car for a moment while Bear and I surveyed our surroundings. Finally, we looked at each other and nodded. We might not have any way to know if it was a hundred percent safe, but it was as safe as we could reasonably determine. And we couldn’t just hang out in the SUV forever. Not only was it something suspicious that could draw the attention of the neighbors, we were sitting ducks if there was danger. Best to be on the move.

We hopped out and quietly closed the doors behind us.

We’d gone over the best approach with Savannah in the car. There’d been plenty of time to hash and rehash it. She’d described the geography of her neighborhood in excruciating detail, and we formulated a plan of attack.

After all, it wasn’t like we could just pull up in her driveway and pile out of the car like we were kids getting dropped off after carpool. Barlowe could have men watching the house. Hell, he could have shooters watching the house for all I knew. We could be dead before we hit the front porch, our heads reduced to nothing but red mist.

So, instead, we figured out the most inconspicuous place to park, which would still be relatively easy and fast to get back to if things went sideways. And we figured out the approach to her house that would be least likely to be surveilled—through her neighbor’s backyard. Savannah knew that the family would be visiting friends in Florida for at least a few more days, so that lowered the risk further.

When we stepped up to her back door, she pulled out her key and opened it, then disarmed the alarm.

The timing was perfect. We’d arrived in the early dawn hours—still dark enough outside to give us a little cover as we made our way to the door, but light enough that we could just make out the interior of the house, and didn’t have to worry about lights or flashlight beams giving us away.

As soon as she had closed and locked the door behind us, I turned to her. “Did your father have an office?”

She nodded and pointed to a door that led off the kitchen. “A small one, over there. Originally built as a den, I think.”

I looked at Bear. “I’ll take the office. You take the bedroom upstairs. We’ll meet back here, and if neither of us found anything, we’ll tackle the rest of the house together.”

He nodded and headed upstairs. Savannah looked at me. “I still don’t understand what we’re looking for.”

“I don’t know, exactly. But it will be something that could hold information. Probably in a secure or encrypted way. So, a flash drive or external hard drive. Or maybe he went analog. Maybe it’s a notebook filled with code. Something like that.”

She nodded, but didn’t look convinced. “How will you know it when you see it?”

“I won’t. Not for sure. But we’ll take all the likely suspects with us. Basically, if it can hold information and it seemed to be hidden, it’s coming with us.”

She still looked defeated, and I continued, “Savannah, this is the process. It’s not always a straight path from A to B.”

She tried to muster a smile. “No, I know. I get that. It’s not about finding the drive. I just…it’s not easy being back here. You know, with my father…” she trailed off, then said, “with what happened to my father.”

Fuck. I was an idiot. Of course it was heart-wrenching for her to be back in this house she’d shared with her father. That would have been true even if she had gotten the opportunity to grieve properly—or even grieve at all. The fact that she hadn’t must have made it all the more excruciating.

I should have told her that. I should have taken her in my arms, or at least laid a hand on her shoulder. But I couldn’t. Just like continuing to touch her after seeing that tattoo of my handwriting—I just couldn’t bring myself to do it, to let myself be vulnerable.

And just like in bed, she was the one who paid the price for me protecting my heart.

I nodded curtly, then walked into her father’s office without a word.

I walked around behind the desk and started looking through papers that were sitting on top of it. I didn’t think that he would have left a super-secret hard drive that he was trying to hide from the mob just sitting out on his desk, obviously—but I knew that sometimes answers are in places that seem too obvious, and so they get missed. I never made that mistake, because I searched everywhere. I never overlooked anything because it was too ridiculous.

That was how important pieces of lifesaving information got overlooked, so I had made that a part of my protocol from day one. And I never deviated from my protocol.

The papers out on the desk seemed to be regular household management paperwork—bank statements, invoices, bills.

I picked up a stack of mail, both opened and unopened, and started looking through it.

I stopped cold, staring at one envelope. It didn’t have anything to do with what I was looking for. That wasn’t what had stopped me in my tracks.

It was the name of the addressee.

Samantha Long.

Shit.

That must have been Savannah’s name the entire time she’d lived here. I hadn’t thought about that enough to wonder what her new name had been. There had been so many other things to think about.

Samantha Long.

I turned the name over and over in my head, trying to make it seem real. It didn’t. There wasn’t anything about it that screamed pseudonym or anything. No one else would have thought it sounded fake. It was a perfectly normal name.

It just wasn’t Savannah’s. And it never would be.

“They try to keep it as close to your own name as possible. Even the same initials. They think it makes for an easier transition.”

I looked up at the sound of her voice. She was standing in the doorway, watching me stare at the piece of mail. I wasn’t even sure how long I’d been standing there, holding it, frozen.

I nodded and set it aside, then got back to searching.

After tearing apart everything in the office, looking in every single place that something could be hidden, I was as certain as I could possibly be that there was nothing to find in the office.

I went back out to the kitchen to connect up with Bear, who said there had also been nothing to find in the bedroom.

Savannah, who was sitting at the kitchen table and fidgeting, said, “What does that mean?”

I didn’t answer right away, and Bear interjected, “You know, there’s something else I noticed. Something that doesn’t sit right.”

“Yeah,” I nodded. “I’m pretty sure I noticed the same thing.”

“What?” Savannah asked, tension in her voice. “What did you notice?”

I looked down at her. “This place is pristine.”

Her brows drew together and she tilted her head to the side. “I mean…yeah. I keep a neat house…”

“That’s not what I mean. Barlowe’s men haven’t been here. Whatever they’re looking for, they didn’t come look for it here.”

Savannah looked from me to Bear, who nodded. She shook her head. “But…I mean…how do you know that? They might have been here.”

“They weren’t,” Bear confirmed.

Savannah looked back to me. “But, at the cabin, you said that they would send a cleaning crew. You said that by the time night fell, no one would ever be able to tell someone was there.”

“Right. Because they care about bodies being found. Murder investigations draw too much attention. They wouldn’t give a shit about tossing your house. No one would care about that. And they wouldn’t clean it up. Especially not this well.”

Savannah nodded. “Oh. That makes sense.”

Bear added, “And you know who else hasn’t been here.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “The police. The Marshals.”

“Right.”

Savannah ran her hands through her long, dark hair. “I don’t get it,” she said, frustration in her voice so thick it almost verged on tears. “What does that mean?”

Bear and I looked at each other for a long moment, until finally I said, “I don’t know, Savannah. But it means something.”