Dynamiting Daddy's Dream House Read online

  He shrugged again, then turned away. Liz had taught him at least one lesson. He'd never understand women.

  "Come and visit me some time, Annie," Jill called out as he moved to close the trailer door behind him.

  Annie yanked herself free from his grip and ran to Jill. "Don't make me go. I want to stay here with you."

  Chapter 6

  Troy looked around the hotel room. In an attempt to cheer Annie, he'd paid for the largest suite--complete with a built-in hot tub.

  It hadn't worked. His daughter still complained about being separated from Jill.

  Thoughts of Jill stirred up memories of a mischievous smile, a quick wit, and a body to die for.

  He wasn't a lot happier than Annie about being parted from the woman, but still, he had to look out for his daughter and Jill was dangerous.

  Troy flipped on the television and surfed through the channels looking for a game. He'd never had problems getting a woman out of his mind before and he was way too old to start now.

  "I don't feel so well." Annie rubbed her abdomen and gave him a beseeching look.

  "I'll call a doctor." He reached for the telephone near his bed.

  Annie shook her head. "It's just a tummy ache. I get these all the time. Do you think you could get me some medicine? That pink stuff always makes me feel better."

  He looked her over. If she was really sick, he intended to take her to a doctor whether she wanted one or not. She stared back at him, her eyes clear.

  "I can pick some up in the hotel shop. I wanted to grab a paperback anyway. Do you want me to get you some cookies or something while I'm out?"

  Annie shook her head. "That would really make me sick."

  "Right. Sorry."

  He paused at the door. "Will you be all right if I leave you for a few minutes? I can get one of the maids to come up if you'd like." He hated the idea of leaving Annie alone but couldn't see dragging her behind him with her feeling poorly.

  "I want to sleep. Somebody here would just make me nervous. Then I'd feel worse."

  "Okay. When I leave, bolt the door. No matter who knocks, don't open it unless it's me." He showed her how to flip the dead-bolt shut, then open.

  Annie nodded soberly. "All right." She locked, then unlocked the bolt.

  "I mean it. Be careful."

  "Don't worry, Troy. I'm going to be fine."

  He nodded slowly. It wouldn't take him longer than five minutes to take the elevator down to the gift shop, buy something for Annie's stomach, and pick up a couple of mysteries to distract his mind from thoughts of Jill. Surely Annie would be safe for a couple of minutes. After all, he'd checked into hotel under an assumed name. Nobody in the world knew they were here.

  He closed the door behind him and waited to hear Annie throw the bolt. "See you in five."

  ***

  It turned out his shopping trip took only about three minutes. The girl behind the counter practically forced a couple of paperbacks on him, telling him she read mysteries herself. And for once in his hotel experience, the elevators all seemed to be running at the same time.

  He knocked on the door. "Annie."

  Silence.

  Things could get ugly if she'd gone to sleep with the door bolted. "It's me. Open the door, Annie."

  Again, nothing.

  He pushed his ear against the door hoping to hear something, although if Annie was asleep, he could never hope to hear her breathing over the sound of the TV he'd left on.

  To his surprise, he heard nothing at all.

  He pounded on the door, the force of his hammering shaking the hall. Annie wasn't that sound a sleeper. She would surely hear this.

  When even loud hammering didn't do the trick, he pulled out the electronic pass-key and slipped it into the reader. It shouldn't work. He'd heard Annie throw the deadbolt.

  The lock's lights turned green and a soft click sounded.

  His heart in his mouth, he pushed against the door. It opened. Maybe it was overkill but he rolled through the entryway and came up ready to fight. He didn’t want to believe Annie had been kidnapped, but something was very wrong.

  Inside, he found everything in order. No signs of a struggle. No indication that the door had been forced. No open windows or tampered seals.

  Against his instructions and her solemn agreement, Annie must have unbolted the door.

  Fighting back a sense of dread, Troy ran through the suite, throwing open closet doors, bathroom doors, and even the door to the minibar.

  Annie had disappeared.

  His hands fumbled with the phone as he called the front desk. The manager checked out by the pool, but with no luck. Annie wasn't there or in the video-game room.

  He took a deep breath. If he called the police, Liz's parents would eventually find out about it. Their lawyers would be over him like a sergeant on a raw recruit. He might lose Annie.

  His worries didn’t make a spot of difference. Annie's safety was the only thing that mattered. He dialed 9-1-1.

  Two hours later, he ushered the cops out of his room. He couldn't blame them for their tough questions. He was the one who'd left a four-year-old alone in a hotel room. He'd suspected that her grandparents might do something crazy. Hell, he'd attacked Jill the previous night when he'd thought she was a kidnapper. What had he been thinking?

  ***

  Jill rubbed her eyes and took another sip of coffee. The coffee had gone cold in her mug but she barely noticed. Something had to be wrong with the engineering drawing. If it was right, Troy's house would still be standing and she'd be a lot closer to collecting a badly needed completion payment for the swimming pool. Instead of dealing with an insurance company desperately looking to duck its responsibilities.

  For the twentieth time that night, her phone rang. For the twentieth time, she ignored it. Blowing up Troy's house had rated an inch and a half in the Los Angeles Times. That had been enough to have lawyers swarming like mosquitoes. She'd talked to the first two, then lost it. She didn't need a lawyer. She needed to find out why carefully placed dynamite charges had resulted in such total destruction.

  Her trailer shook with a loud series of knocks on her door. "Great," she muttered. Phone calls were bad enough. Lawyers dropping by in the middle of the night was over the limit.

  "Go away or I'll call the police," she shouted at her door.

  "I need to talk to you."

  The door muffled the voice but her body responded with a liquid thrill to her core. "Who is it?"

  "Have you seen Annie?"

  They weren't the most romantic possible words. At least, though, it was no lawyer. Jill threw open the door and admitted a tired looking Troy.

  "What happened?"

  Troy stomped into her house, brushing past her without a word. He threw open her bedroom door, stared in, then spun on the balls of his feet.

  She'd been following, protesting, and walked right into his rock-hard chest.

  "Where is she?" There was no laughter in Troy's eyes now. Nothing but anger and concern.

  "What are you talking about?"

  Anger transformed to a weary defeat. Jill would never have imagined that look on Troy's face. "When I found this, I thought. . ." He held out a torn slip of paper.

  She took it and stared. It wasn't anything particularly special. A bit of paper ripped from an architecture magazine. The piece with her address label stuck to it.

  "So?"

  "I found this in Annie's stuff. I thought she might have come here."

  As if she'd found the key to a secret code, everything fell into place for Jill. No wonder Troy was acting so strangely. His daughter had gone missing. "Do you think it's Liz's parents?"

  He shrugged, defeated. "Right now I hope so. At least I know they won't hurt her."

  "But it would be so unfair if they were to take her."

  Troy's grin was only a shadow of his rare but beautiful bright smile. "Wouldn't it be strange if everything didn't work out fairly?"

  "All right, so
I like happy endings. Do you want to tell me what happened? What do you want to do? How can I help?"

  Troy held up a hand to stop her before she really started babbling. Despite everything Annie had thrown at her, she'd actually started to like the kid. Just as she'd started liking Annie's father.

  "When I found this in Annie's suitcase, I figured she might have come out here."

  "I've been working in here pretty much since you left."

  "I guess finding her safe and sound eating your ‘from-scratch’ soup would have been too easy."

  She wanted to comfort him, cradle his head against her breast and tell him everything would work out for the best. "Do you want a cup of coffee or anything." It wasn't much but her mother had been from the south and had raised Jill to offer sustenance when everything else failed.

  "No. Yes. Hell, I don't know."

  "When was the last time you ate?"

  "I can't think about food. I have to find Annie."

  "You'll think better if you get something in your stomach. I'll zap a couple of pizzas."

  Troy nodded glumly and collapsed into her sofa.

  She popped two individual pizzas into her microwave, glad to be even a few steps from him. Right now the last thing he needed was a female in heat. Despite all logic, Jill could sense she was exactly that. If Troy even hinted that a night of lovemaking would help, she didn't think she'd have the strength to say no.

  "Have you called the police?"

  He looked at her as if she'd gone crazy. "Of course. Oh, can I use your phone? I haven’t replaced the one in the Pacific."

  She nodded, then passed him the landline handset.

  Troy punched in a number. "It's Troy Garrett. I'm with Ms. Villars." He rattled off her phone number. "If you hear anything, call me here."

  Jill headed back to the kitchen to see if she had any lettuce fresh enough to be cajoled into a salad.

  "Let me do that." He took the lettuce without a word, ripping it into bite-sized morsels with savage energy Jill figured he would rather be using to rip off a kidnapper's head.

  "Thanks."

  "I need to be doing something. I feel so damned helpless."

  A scratching sound outside the trailer caught Jill's attention. "There's someone--" she broke off. Troy must have heard. He held a kitchen knife in a strange, sideways grip.

  He followed her gaze to his hand. "Just being careful."

  "How come you hold it like that?" She wouldn't have a clue how to handle a knife. Then again, she'd never imagined the need.

  "Keep the blade horizontal and it slides through their ribs so much more easily. Hold the blade back and it's harder to see, harder to stop. It's simple, really."

  With a nod, Troy disappeared out her back door.

  Jill shuddered at the idea of wanting to slide a knife between someone's ribs. Could she do it? Cowering in her kitchen might be wiser, she considered. Ever since Troy had come into her life, everything had gotten too exciting. It only made sense that it had started when she'd blown his house off the cliff.

  She took a deep breath. She'd already cost Troy his house. If she let him get hurt now, defending her house, she'd never forgive herself. Of course it was a lot more likely that some harmless lawyer was snooping around looking to file a lawsuit against her. She picked up a hammer and strode to her front door and flung it open. "Who's out here?"

  "Jill. I thought I'd never get here."

  Annie ran across her yard and threw herself into Jill's arms.

  Jill had just enough sense to drop the hammer on the ground before hugging Annie against herself. "Annie. What are you doing? What happened?"

  "I ran away. I took the bus. It took me all day to get here. I was so scared."

  "Come on in out of the cold." Annie wore a cute shorts outfit that would have been perfect six hours earlier. By two in the morning, California's desert-like climate had gone from hot to plain chilly.

  "You won't tell Troy I'm here, will you?"

  ***

  Annie's words hurt more than if he'd turned his knife on himself. Troy had thought it would take a while to really get to know his daughter but he'd never imagine she'd run away from him. "Too late," he said.

  Annie screamed, clinging to Jill as if she was some sort of holy sanctuary.

  "You might put down the knife," Jill suggested calmly. "Troy came here looking for you, Annie. Good thing I was just making pizza."

  With that, she held the door open for both of them, shutting the cold and dark out as soon as they'd entered.

  She did that a lot, Troy realized. When he was with her, the cold darkness of his life seemed less unbearable. Jill radiated warmth and light as naturally as she seemed to do everything--everything domestic, at any rate. He certainly wouldn't want her doing any demolition around him. He'd come back to the states to keep Annie safe, not to get both of them blown up.

  "The pizza's almost ready, Annie" Jill promised. "Wrap this blanket around yourself and I'll make some cocoa."

  Before the CIA had approached him, let him know how he could make serious money fighting for his country, Troy had dreamed of coming home from the wars and finding a perfect woman. A woman who would stand behind him, help him raise a family, laugh at the jokes he'd dreamed of making, and help him battle against the darkness of his soul. He'd given up those dreams when he'd chosen the profession that made him a pariah. Watching Jill with Annie reminded him of how much he'd sacrificed.

  Annie huddled under her blanket looking like a cautious turtle. "I don't want to go back to that hotel, Troy. It's yucky."

  He shook his head. "We'll look for another hotel tomorrow. I'll let you choose."

  "I want to stay here with Jill. You can live in the hotel if you want."

  He counted to ten, then asked Jill to borrow her phone. The police definitely needed to be notified before they tore the entire city apart.

  Five minutes later, he set down the phone. "Looks like you get your wish Annie."

  Both women looked at him curiously. "What?" Jill asked.

  "The police are on their way here. If they're as thorough as they were this afternoon when Annie disappeared, they'll keep us here all night."

  "But--"

  He couldn't blame Jill for objecting. "I know. You've got things you want to do and we're in your way."

  "I wasn't going to say that."

  He shook his head angrily. "You don't have to. You've got your own life to live and we've been taking it over."

  The microwave buzzed and Jill bustled to find a plate for the pizza. She chopped each of the individual pizza pies into four chunks, then put all of them on a serving plate. "Do you guys mind using your fingers?"

  "I love pizza," Annie announced.

  "Me too," Jill admitted. "That's why I'm always trying to lose five pounds."

  He had no idea in the world where Jill might want to lose five ounces from, let alone five pounds. Every curve on her slender body looked exactly right to him.

  "Do you want to model?" Annie leaned forward with obvious interest.

  "Huh? Of course not. I'm in the construction business."

  "Because models need to be super-thin."

  "I don't have to worry about that," Jill laughed. She bit into her pizza slice. "I just don't want to be a total lardo."

  "If you don't want to model, I think you're about right," Annie pronounced.

  For a four-year old, Annie seemed to know an awful lot, Troy realized. According to all of his books, Annie should be at an age where she was asking questions about everything, not lecturing adults on career choices and diet secrets.

  "We're not here to talk about Jill's figure," Troy observed. "I'd like to know what you're doing here. I'm pretty sure you said you had an upset stomach and wanted me to get you some medicine."

  Jill put her hand on his arm. "She's had a tough day, Troy. Why don't you let her rest for a while and eat her pizza? She can tell us all about it in the morning."

  Annie brought her full attention t
o bear on the small slice of pizza she'd snagged, chewing every so carefully and wiping her lips daintily with the paper towel Jill had supplied by way of being a napkin.

  "If you'd had to sit through two hours of police interrogation while you wanted to be out looking for your daughter, you wouldn't ask me that question. I think I deserve some answers.

  "I want to be with Jill," Annie replied. "She's a woman. Like me. We can talk about boys and things. You don't know how to do that."

  Damn right, he didn't. "You're too young to talk about boys," Troy said. In about fifteen, or maybe fifty, years, he might be ready to face up to the idea of young men calling on his daughter. At four, she should be playing with dolls or little plastic soldiers like the ones he'd bought her the day before they'd met Jill.

  "You can come and see me whenever you'd like," Jill told Annie. "After all, you're my friend. We can talk about boys, or clothes, or whatever you want. But you can't run away. You should have seen how worried your father was."

  The seed of an idea started working at the back of Troy's brain. Maybe he had been going about this wrong. He wasn't blind enough to deny that his efforts to be both father and mother to Annie had failed miserably. Failed and seemed to keep getting worse. And while he'd told Jill he looked forward to the life of a full time father, he knew he needed more to keep himself active. If Jill was serious about her offer to be Annie's friend, maybe he could figure out a way to make her more than a friend.

  ***

  Troy looked like he'd had both pizzas shoved down his throat and was trying to digest them without chewing. He opened his mouth three times, then snapped it shut before saying anything. A tight muscle on the side of his jaw quivered.

  "How about it, Troy?" Jill asked. "You'll bring Annie over to talk sometimes, won't you?"

  "He won't," Annie predicted. "He won't let me out of his sight for five minutes."

  Troy surprised both of them. "I think I have a better idea." He grabbed another piece of the pizza and popped it into his mouth.

  "What idea?" Annie demanded, beating Jill to the question.

  "How would you like it if you got to spend as much time with Jill as you wanted? If she came to live with us?"