Colton Showdown Read online

  It was enough to jar Tate back to his senses. Annoyed, he upbraided himself for being lax enough to temporarily let his guard down.

  Pulling back, he picked up the shopping bags again and murmured, “I’m sorry,” to Hannah. Turning, he resumed walking toward his destination.

  Stunned at the abrupt, sudden change in Tate, Hannah quickly fell into step beside him, though it was somewhat difficult, given how very crowded the streets were.

  Where were all these people coming from? she couldn’t help wondering. Or, for that matter, where were they going? It felt as if they belonged to some sort of a parade—except that she didn’t see one underway in either direction.

  “I’m not,” she told him with more assertive confidence than she had displayed up to this point.

  Her voice had partially been swallowed up by the din around them. He wasn’t sure what she’d said. Tate glanced at her for a second. “What?”

  “I’m not,” she repeated, raising her voice. They stopped at the corner, waiting for the light to change. Then, just in case he didn’t understand what she was referring to, Hannah raised her voice and said, “I’m not sorry that you kissed me.”

  “That shouldn’t have happened,” he told her with feeling.

  The light turned green and the sea of people on both sides of the crosswalk moved to navigate their way to the opposite side.

  “Why not?” she wanted to know.

  He was impatient, but with himself, not her. He knew the rules and he was supposed to abide by them, not give in to unexpected surges of emotion. Granted, he was attracted to her, but that was his problem to deal with, not hers.

  “Because I’m supposed to be protecting you.”

  She was fairly trotting beside him now, determined to keep up. And trying very hard to make sense of his reasoning.

  “And you can’t protect me if you kiss me?”

  She wasn’t making this any easier, she really wasn’t, he thought. “I’m supposed to protect you, not take advantage of you.”

  “But you didn’t take advantage of me,” Hannah insisted, not understanding why he was being so hard on himself. “You are a good man, Tate. And I like you.” She didn’t know how to put it any better than that.

  That was to be expected, given the unique circumstances. “I rescued you from a horrible situation,” he said. “It’s only natural for you to think you have feelings for me. But that’s just gratitude, Hannah—nothing more.”

  The next moment, he breathed a sigh of relief. They’d gotten to their new destination without any incident. Well, without any further incident, he amended ruefully. He was going to have to be more careful, he warned himself.

  Tate stopped for a second. Hannah had fallen half a step behind him. When she reached the canopied entrance to the high-rise building, she looked at him quizzically. Before he could say anything, a doorman dressed in navy blue livery quickly approached from the other side of the building’s ornate glass door and opened it for them.

  “Mr. Colton, welcome back. It’s been a long time,” the man said warmly, all but beaming at Tate. “Will you be staying with us long?”

  “That remains to be seen, Langdon,” Tate told the jovial-looking man. He wasn’t about to comment on something so specific where he could be overheard by anyone. He trusted the doorman—Albert Langdon had been a fixture at the high-rise for more than the past fifteen years—but they were out in the open and any passerby could be listening to their conversation.

  The doorman followed them into the marble-tiled lobby and politely relieved Hannah of the two shopping bags she was carrying.

  She glanced at Tate before surrendering them and only did so after he nodded.

  “I could take a few of yours, too, sir,” Langdon offered. The man looked capable of easily carrying all eight of the shopping bags, as well as a couple of suitcases at the same time.

  Tate crossed to the elevator. The moment he pressed the up button, the doors slid open. “That’s all right, Langdon,” he said, getting on. Hannah was beside him instantly. “We’ll manage from here. Take the bags back, Hannah,” he instructed.

  She did so quickly.

  Relieved of the shopping bags, the doorman retreated, tipping the brim of his hat to them as he stepped back into the lobby.

  “As you wish, sir. Miss,” Langdon added, nodding at Hannah.

  She offered the man a shy smile, then looked at Tate the second the elevator doors closed. “This isn’t the hotel.”

  A teasing comment about her powers of observation was on the tip of his tongue, but he had a feeling that she might think he was laughing at her. So he refrained, and responded to her statement seriously.

  “No, it’s not. My parents had an apartment here that they used whenever they were in New York. They left it to my brothers and sisters and me,” he told her. “Now we use it when we’re in town,” he explained. “I thought this would be a safer place to stay than the hotel.”

  The elevator arrived on the twelfth floor—their floor. She had seen the button he’d pressed when they got on and knew this was the floor he wanted so when the doors opened, Hannah stepped out. She tried to ignore the queasy way her stomach felt—she didn’t think she would ever get used to riding in an elevator.

  She looked around for a moment, trying to get her bearings. The walls were all carefully textured, adding a dignified richness to the surroundings.

  People actually lived like this?

  It just seemed far too grand to her for an everyday existence. But it did appeal to the artist in her.

  “This is not another hotel?” she asked, unable to fathom that it might not be. She’d never seen walls quite like these.

  “No, it’s a high-rise apartment building.”

  She nodded, as if she was absorbing what he was saying, along with her surroundings. She could come to only one conclusion. “Is everyone in New York rich?” she wanted to know.

  He stifled a laugh at the last minute. “No, not by a long shot,” he assured her. Where had she heard that? “What makes you ask?”

  “The hotel, this place, the stores—they all look so beautiful and have so much in them. I’ve never seen anything like this before,” she confided.

  She’d found herself longing for her sketchbook back home, the one she secretly kept beneath her bed and took out whenever she had a free moment to daydream. The book was filled with sketches, both drawings of nature and drawings of clothing. The latter were a product of things she’d conjured up in her head.

  “This is the real paradise,” not her village, she added silently, despite its name.

  Waiting for Tate to unlock the door to the apartment he’d brought her to, Hannah set down one of the shopping bags and lightly ran her fingertips along the swirls of the textured walls.

  “Beautiful,” she repeated under her breath, clearly impressed by everything around her.

  Tate shrugged as he pushed the door farther open with his shoulder. He had nothing to do with either the apartment’s selection or the way the hallway was decorated. Even what was inside had been decided on by his parents, or, more specifically, his mother, who had a knack for that sort of thing.

  “The maid used to complain that it was a dust catcher.”

  Hannah’s mouth curved almost wistfully as she ran her fingers along the wall again. “Still beautiful,” she insisted.

  Her opinion didn’t change when she walked in. If anything, it just became stronger. The apartment had high ceilings and arched doorways and appeared to be completely spotless.

  That kind of thing didn’t just happen. Someone had been cleaning.

  “Who else lives here?” she asked Tate, wondering if that person would mind her coming here unannounced like this.

  For a second, he shed the bags, slipping the loops from around his wrists. He leaned the shopping bags against the wall. “No one at the moment. We all crash here when we need a place for a few days,” he explained.

  Hannah’s expression turned to one
of concern. “Crash?”

  It was hard for him not to laugh. Hannah was so adorably literal-minded. He tried to put himself in her place. Tate supposed, to someone unaccustomed to slang, what he’d just said might sound confusing.

  “It’s an expression,” he told her, then elaborated, “Crashing means someone coming in and staying somewhere for a few days.”

  Hannah was doing her best to follow what he was saying. “Ah, like a visit.”

  “Something like that,” he allowed, then recalled a so-called friend who’d overstayed his welcome. “Except not always very pleasant.”

  “Not all visits are,” she agreed. She remembered when Solomon Miller had attempted to return to Paradise Ridge, only to have his family turn their backs on him because he’d forsaken them for life with the Englischers. Solomon had been shunned. Helping those awful men kidnap her and her friends had been his way of taking revenge on his former people.

  She was remembering something, Tate thought. Something disturbing. Trying to get her mind off it, he said, “C’mon, I’ll show you your room.”

  Hannah looked at him in surprise. “I have a room here?”

  He picked up the shopping bags again. All of them this time, taking four in each hand.

  “Technically,” he admitted, “it’s one of the guest bedrooms—my parents did a lot of entertaining and they liked having people stay over.”

  There was warmth in his voice when he mentioned his parents, she thought. “They sound like lovely people.”

  “They were.” And, after eleven years, he still missed them terribly.

  Sympathy, as well as empathy, flooded through her. “And they are both gone now?” They had that in common, she thought.

  Tate nodded. “They were in the second tower when it went down on 9/11.” It occurred to him that this, too, might be conspicuously missing from her education. “Nine-Eleven, that was when—”

  She stopped him by raising her hand, as if to physically halt the terrible words. “I am aware of what nine-eleven is. Paradise Ridge is not that isolated,” she told him.

  His mouth curved in a rueful smile. “Didn’t mean to insult you.”

  “You didn’t,” she answered cheerfully, then, looking at him, her own mouth curved in a shy smile. “You couldn’t.”

  He laughed then as he led the way down the hall to the bedrooms. “You’re giving me entirely too much credit, Hannah.”

  “I think you do not give yourself enough,” Hannah countered. And then she gasped as Tate pushed open the door to the room where she would be staying. “I am to stay in this room?” she asked in a hushed, almost reverent voice.

  The room was most definitely decorated with a woman in mind—an exceedingly feminine woman who had a weakness for frills and throw pillows. The queen-size bed was a four-poster, complete with a white canopy and a white eyelet comforter whose edge had a pink ribbon woven through it.

  It was like standing in the middle of a fairy tale, she couldn’t help thinking.

  Her face was the very picture of awe. He found it hard to look away. “I take it you like it.”

  “Like it?” she echoed. The small word didn’t begin to describe how she felt. “If it were possible to be in love with something that did not breathe, then I would be in love with this room,” she admitted.

  Tate had absolutely no idea how to respond to that without running the risk of making her think he was making fun of her, so he directed the conversation in another, more practical direction.

  “I’ll just put all your things here,” he told her, setting all eight shopping bags down in the corner.

  She turned abruptly to face him, afraid that he was leaving. “Where will you be staying?”

  “Just next door.” He pointed to the bedroom next to hers. She was still afraid, he thought. And who could blame her? She’d be lucky if she didn’t have nightmares about being abducted for the rest of her life. “You don’t have to worry,” he assured her. “I’ll be right here if you need me.”

  Actually, he was the one who was worried, he thought. But for a completely different reason than the one he assumed she had. The proximity to Hannah’s room—and Hannah—was much too close for him to be able to get a decent night’s sleep and he knew it.

  But again, that was his problem, not hers.

  Well, he thought philosophically, he hadn’t joined the Philadelphia P.D. because he’d been in search of a decent night’s sleep. He had joined to make a difference and keeping Hannah safe until they caught Maddox and she testified against him was definitely going to be making a difference.

  Hannah stared at the wall that separated her room from his. Envisioning Tate on the other side. Without realizing it, she ran her fingers along the outline of her lips, reliving the unexpected kiss they had shared. A kiss that made everything inside of her feel as if...as if it was waking from a deep sleep. As if she was suddenly alive in ways she couldn’t have even imagined before he had kissed her.

  Would he sleep peacefully? she wondered. Or would he yearn for her? Would he stare at the wall just the way she was staring at it now?

  Would he kiss her again, now that they were alone here?

  Her whole body tingled from the very thought of his lips touching hers again.

  * * *

  And what about after? he caught himself wondering several hours later as he lay—true to his premonition—sleepless in his bed. What about after Maddox was captured, brought to trial and then put away in state prison where he belonged? Was Hannah going to be safe, going back to her own little world? Or would she need protection, just in case a member of Maddox’s inner circle was still out, scot-free and biding his time until he could exact revenge on Hannah?

  Would there be anyone in that village who could protect her? Could they even protect her, given their sheltered way of life and their feelings about violence?

  One step at a time, Colton, Tate counseled himself. He needed to take this just one step at a time. If he jumped ahead of himself, he would just be needlessly driving himself crazy.

  * * *

  He was driving himself crazy.

  There was no other way to describe it. Three days had passed and Seth Maddox was still out there somewhere, still at large and capable of moving in for the kill at any time.

  So that meant he had to continue being Hannah’s bodyguard a little longer.

  And, God help him, he really liked the role. Really liked that his days and evenings were filled with Hannah and revolved entirely around her and nothing else—except for perhaps the occasional phone call he had to make, calling his supervisor, Hugo Villanueva, on a paid burner phone to find out the latest intel. He’d picked up several burner phones for just this purpose during his drive from Philadelphia to New York City.

  This, as it turned out, was the closest thing he’d had to a vacation since before he began working as a detective.

  Moreover, being with Hannah, day in and day out like this, forced him to view the world in softer shades and, incredibly enough, he found the more positive outlook to his liking.

  He also liked that he was getting to know her better, that she was sharing things with him, such as her flair for fashion design, something that really surprised him. She did a few sketches from memory for him, showing him things she’d created “just for the fun of it.” In her way of life, fashion design had no place. But her face had lit up when he’d encouraged her to keep it up.

  The light in her eyes had stirred his soul long after she’d gone to bed.

  He had to force himself to focus on his prime—his only—directive.

  But being anything but constantly alert was definitely in direct conflict with the scope of his duties as her bodyguard.

  She was most assuredly having an effect on him, he thought—and he liked it.

  It was wrong to feel this way and he knew it. There was no denying that she was affecting his work, but there was no getting around it, he enjoyed being with her.

  What he didn’t enjoy wer
e the nights when he lay on his bed, alone with his thoughts, and they tormented him. Like thinking about what his life was going to be like once she was home again.

  How quickly everything had changed for him, he couldn’t help but marvel. Rather than Tate making Hannah more jaded—or, in her case, just jaded—in her outlook of the world and her own future, Hannah was turning him into an optimist—and all in an astounding record three days.

  Now he caught himself looking for the upside in situations rather than the downside because down situations did not generate positive outcomes.

  And more than anything, Tate knew he needed a positive outcome.

  Was that why he found himself wishing, fervently, that he was free, just for a little while, to act on all these incredibly urgent demands that were forever eating away at him?

  Well, he couldn’t act on them, he told himself sternly. He couldn’t compromise her—or himself, for that matter. Since that one slip in front of the store window, he’d been trying to slowly brace himself for the inevitable future—thinking slow and steady might just be the ticket to actually winning this race.

  Somehow, he was going to have to find a way to adjust to a world without her in it.

  He knew it wouldn’t be easy, especially since he’d backslide again. This morning, because he still hadn’t made good on his promise, he finally took Hannah to see the tree in Rockefeller Center.

  And her expression when she was finally able to look up at the enormous, gaily decorated Christmas tree was a sight to warm his heart. She appeared to be so captivated by it, she became almost giddy. Once she’d recovered from her sense of awe, she bombarded him with all sorts of questions about the tree and the tradition of bringing it there. She wanted to know when it had started and looked very, very impressed when he managed to answer all her questions.

  He surprised himself with the amount of information he had locked away in his mind. Somewhere along the line, he reasoned, someone must have told him about this and he’d retained it.

  Too bad that same someone hadn’t told him what to do in order to resist the soft, compelling—and totally unwitting—allure of someone like Hannah. She came across to him as innocence personified. He knew that her captors had placed a high price on her virginity. The bidders—himself included as his other persona, he thought ruefully—were all vying for the excitement of being her “first.”