The Baby's Bodyguard. Jacqueline Diamond

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      “Your nose wrinkled as if something smelled bad,” she challenged.

      “Do you always have to try to read my mind?”

      “I hope you weren’t disapproving of my teaching Sunday school. Maybe you should join the class,” Casey returned. “We learn valuable lessons from the Bible.”

      “I know a valuable lesson. Mind thy own business.” He shook his head apologetically. “I don’t mean that. Casey, I think it’s great that you teach Bible school, okay?”

      She nodded. “I’m sorry. I should respect your right to keep your thoughts private. It’s just that you’re so closemouthed and I care what you think.”

      “Have a good time,” he said.

      Casey sighed, gave a little wave and went out through the living room. A short time later, Jack heard her key turn in the front lock.

      Gone. His hand tightened on the coffee cup.

      He had to let her go, even though it was tearing him apart. She’d made her choice to send him away. His ability and desire to protect were all he had to offer, and she didn’t want them.

      He wished things could be different, but her pregnancy had wiped out any chance of the two of them returning to their old life in LA. Maybe they should have spent more time discussing the implications of having a child—financial and otherwise—but he had a feeling Casey would shut him out as she’d done when he offered to pay the doctor’s bills.

      He wasn’t the only one who kept his most complicated feelings to himself. Sometimes she did, too.

      It was time to put useless hopes behind him. In a few days, he’d call and inform her that he was signing the divorce papers. If she refused to accept money to help support their daughter, he’d open a trust fund for the little girl’s college expenses. Just because he couldn’t be a real father didn’t mean he intended to abandon his responsibilities.

      From the carport attached to the house, he heard a car start. His ear marked Casey’s progress as she backed out and headed down the driveway.

      The motor stopped just beyond the house, still humming. What was she waiting for?

      He didn’t know her routine. Maybe she gave one of the tenants a ride. Curious, Jack got up and went to the porch.

      From the front, he saw that she’d stopped next to the parking area and exited the car. A cloud of dogwood blossoms obscured his view of the lot.

      “Casey?” he called, and stepped down from the porch. Receiving no answer, he shouted louder. Still nothing.

      Jack hurried down the driveway. The car sat idling, with the driver’s door ajar. No sign of Casey.

      He shouldn’t have let her go out until he’d checked the premises. Why did he let himself get distracted? If some guy was stalking her, the arrival of another male might have roused him to further action.

      Surveying the surroundings for suspicious movement, Jack noticed a squirrel dart across some sunny rocks but nothing more troubling. “Casey?” he called again. The name echoed faintly.

      The crunch of footsteps straight ahead brought him up short. From behind a screen of branches, his wife appeared on the blacktop.

      “Jack!” She hurried forward.

      “I’ve been calling you.” That wasn’t the issue, of course. “What’s going on?”

      “You’d better take a look.”

      He moved closer, keeping a lookout all the while. These unfenced, heavily wooded premises provided too much cover for his taste.

      His attention turned to the parking area. The other vehicles from last night had vanished, leaving his blue rental sedan sitting isolated. Isolated, but not undisturbed.

      A large, leafy tree limb half obscured the windshield, where it had apparently fallen. Then he noticed a broken side window.

      The damage also included a bent antenna and windshield wiper, both possibly attributable to the fallen branch. The broken window and the scratches on the hood, however, didn’t correlate, and neither did the angle of the branch compared to the locations of nearby trees.

      There’d been no storm last night and no winds to carry tree limbs any distance. This had to be intentional.

      Jack circled the car without touching it. When Casey reached for the branch, he waved her away. “Don’t disturb anything. I need to get the whole picture.”

      She withdrew her hand. “These trees are kind of overgrown. I’ve been meaning to have them trimmed.”

      He noted a rock on the pavement below the broken window. Dried soil clung to one side as if it had been wrenched from the ground. On the hood, the depth and straightness of the score marks reminded him of key scrapes.

      “I don’t think the branch fell by itself,” he said. “I don’t think it caused all this damage, either.”

      “That’s what I was trying to figure out,” she admitted. “It seemed accidental but it doesn’t look right.”

      It ticked him off to see the vandalism. Jack didn’t doubt for a minute that he’d been personally targeted. What outraged him even more was the sense that someone felt possessive toward his wife. “This is definitely vandalism, and I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that my car was chosen.”

      “Wait a minute.” Casey peered through the window. “You left food inside.”

      He followed her gaze to the empty wrapper from his beef jerky, lying on the passenger seat where he’d tossed it. “So?”

      “An animal might have tried to get in,” she pointed out.

      “Would that be the same bear that squirted you with the hose?”

      She wrinkled her nose. “I was thinking of a raccoon. They can do amazing things with their hands.”

      “Ever see one throw a rock?”

      She admitted she hadn’t.

      Jack returned to his line of thought. “Whoever did this was lashing out at me. He probably acted first on impulse, breaking the window and scratching my hood, then decided to try to make it appear like an accident. He either pulled the branch down or found it in the woods and arranged it to try to fool us.”

      “Jack, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean for you to become a target. This could be expensive.”

      He shrugged. “I’ve got insurance. It’ll just cost me the deductible, and the car’s still drivable.”

      Those were deep scratches, though. And the rock had been thrown with force. Whoever had done this carried a lot of anger.

      Yet until now, he reminded himself, there’d been no indication that Casey was the stalker’s primary concern. He’d been heard or seen near two tenants’ cabins, not her house.

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