Read Online Montana D-Force (Brotherhood Protectors Book 3) by Elle James - Free Book Online Page A

found the guy who’d raped Mia, and could potentially have raped Allyson and caused her to commit suicide, he’d kill the bastard, inflicting on him a slow, very painful death.

    A t Mrs. Severs’s home , the older woman invited them to visit Allyson’s room. “The journal is on her desk. I’m going to make a cup of tea and take something for a headache. Can I get anything for you two?”
    “No, thank you,” Mia said, anxious to read Allyson’s last words. She hoped to find a clue as to why the young woman had taken her life.
    “I haven’t changed anything in Allyson’s room since she passed. I can’t bring myself to do it. I keep hoping I’ll wake up from this horrible nightmare and she’ll come dancing into the room, laughing.” Mrs. Severs snorted and turned toward the kitchen. “If you don’t mind, I’ll let you go look. I can’t go into her room.”
    Mia watched as Mrs. Severs walked away. She supposed a mother never got over losing her daughter. Mia wondered if she’d get over losing her parents. Like Mrs. Severs, it was difficult to enter those places that reminded her of them. Coming back to her parents’ home had been one of the hardest things Mia had ever done. She kept expecting her mother to be in the kitchen when she walked through the door. But her mother wasn’t and never would be again.
    As Mia entered Allyson’s room, her heart constricted, and her throat all but closed. A wedding dress, wrapped in clear plastic, hung on the closet door. Bride magazines littered the desk, and what appeared to be the couple’s official engagement picture had been framed and placed on the nightstand, facing Ally’s pillow.
    She found the journal on the desk, lying open across the array of magazines. The page on the left had writing halfway down the lines. The right page was completely empty.
    Mia sat in the chair and turned back to the beginning of the entry for the last day of Allyson’s happiness, if not the last day of her life. What had happened to make her so depressed she’d taken her own life?
    Mia bent to the journal and read from the beginning of that day’s post to the abrupt ending.
    Bear stood behind her, leaning over her shoulder, reading along.
    Just as her mother had said, Allyson posted about her day at work as a kindergarten teacher, how the children had made her laugh. She’d written that she’d barely been able to focus, because she’d been so excited to see her fiancé that night to talk about where they would spend their honeymoon. And the evening had been magical. Phillip had taken her to a nice restaurant in Bozeman where they’d talked about the different places they could go.
    We finally settled on the beach vacation in—
    “It’s as though something interrupted her,” Bear said.
    “I agree.” She turned back several pages and read through a week’s worth of entries. Nothing jumped out. The entries were similar to her last one, all about her days at work and her wedding plans.
    Mia flipped back even farther to two weeks before Allyson’s last entry. She happened to land on a weekend page. Allyson had gone to Bozeman with her bridesmaids for them to try on their dresses. She’d left it up to them to choose the style they preferred as long as the dresses were in the same material and color. They’d made a party of it.
    Though it was a great day, one thing disturbed me. We were supposed to stay the entire day and return late this evening, but one of my bridesmaids had to get back early. She said it was because she needed to bake cookies for her Sunday school class, but I think she didn’t want her husband to get mad if she came back really late. I’m not sure what’s going on with her, but the others were disappointed to leave early.
    The passage didn’t name the bridesmaid, and Mia wasn’t convinced it meant anything, so she moved on, reading the rest of the entries for that week.
    “See anything that stands out?” she asked Bear.
    With Bear hovering over