Read Online Bridegroom Bodyguard by LISA CHILDS - Free Book Online Page A

glint of something in the enveloping darkness. Either a glint of eyes...or perhaps of metal...like a gun. “You don’t have Candace tailing me?”
    “Not since you left the judge’s mansion.”
    So he had had the female bodyguard protecting him and Sharon. If only he had known that, he could have left her outside so the poor woman wouldn’t have had to see her employer’s corpse....
    Parker cursed his twin.
    “Hey, it was for your protection.”
    “It would have been better protection if I had known....” Like now. “Is there anyone following me now?”
    “I don’t know,” Logan said. “You’ve been driving to make sure you wouldn’t have a tail....”
    Apparently that hadn’t worked with Candace. But then, she had a lot of experience as a security expert and, before then, police and military experience. Someone else would have had more trouble following him...unless...
    “But you know where I am,” Parker pointed out. So Logan could have sent someone ahead of him—someone who watched him now from the darkness.
    “And I’m almost there,” Logan said. “So wait for me...”
    What if Chuck Horowitz was the judge’s killer? Then he probably hadn’t just killed the judge; he had been trying to kill Sharon and Parker, too, which meant he had mistaken Logan and Cooper for Parker more than once already. That wasn’t a risk Parker was willing to take. He didn’t want Logan taking a bullet meant for him.
    So he clicked off his cell and slid it back into his pocket. Then he gripped the gun with both hands and kicked open the door to Chuck Horowitz’s office/apartment. Better to take the man by surprise than give him a chance to react or arm himself.
    Using the flashlight on the barrel, Parker swung it around the tiny apartment. The place was trashed—really trashed. The couch was overturned and gutted, stuffing strewn across the dirty carpet. Holes had been smashed through the drywall. There had been a hell of a struggle within those walls. If this was what Chuck had done to his own place, maybe Parker should have waited for backup.
    But then the beam of his flashlight glanced across a pair of glazed-over eyes. Dead eyes. Parker trained the light on the man tied to the chair behind his desk. From the bloating and the stench, which Parker only noticed now as it overwhelmed the stale odor of cigarette smoke, it was obvious this corpse had been here awhile.
    Chuck Horowitz had been tied up and beaten. But Parker noticed something else about him—the scratches on his hands and arms and the side of his face. The mercenary bodyguard hadn’t gotten those scratches from whoever had beaten him to death.
    He had probably gotten those from the woman he had killed. Brenda had fought him even though she would have known that she couldn’t have overpowered him. What she had done was get his DNA under her nails; she had been smart and resourceful as she had provided evidence for police to arrest her killer and for prosecutors to win the trial against him.
    But they wouldn’t be able to prosecute a dead man. Shortly after he had killed the judge, someone had killed Chuck Horowitz. But before they’d done that, they had torn his place apart looking for something—and they had tortured him to find out where that something was.
    What had his killer wanted? Chuck had already killed the judge—undoubtedly for money. Hadn’t that been enough?
    From the destruction of the apartment and the corpse, Parker suspected that Chuck’s killer hadn’t found whatever he had been looking for. Maybe that killer thought he or Sharon had whatever they wanted. Did they have something in their possession that they weren’t aware they had? Or did they know something that somebody didn’t want them knowing? Was that why someone had put out a hit on them, too?
    He heard the click of a gun cocking, and then another light, on high beam, flashed in his face—blinding him so that he couldn’t see whoever had sneaked into the apartment