The Heiress and Her Bodyguard novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: He Came Back

I ran down the stairs with my hand on the rail and the gun in my other hand, though I had not meant to pick it up.

The kitchen was full of cold air and the smell of rain and broken glass.

"Dorrit!"

"Here," she said, from the floor, in a thread of a voice.

"Don't step."

"Glass."

I knelt anyway.

My palm landed on something sharp, and I hissed, and found her shoulder.

She was shaking.

"Someone pushed me," she said.

"I was washing the cups."

"I heard the garden door."

"I turned around and a man just came through me."

"Did you see him?"

"A coat."

"A big dark coat."

"He knocked me into the window."

"Linnea, he went straight for the stairs."

Feet pounded across the back porch.

The door crashed open, and Jonas was there, breathing.

"I'm here."

"You left," I said.

"I never left."

"I was by the garage the whole time."

"I saw him go over the wall, and I came as fast as I could."

He knelt on my other side.

A big hand pressed Dorrit's wrist, and I heard him say, in a low, level voice, "Mrs. Skaar, can you move your legs?"

"Don't call me Mrs.," she said, and then she started to cry.

The ambulance took twenty minutes.

I rode in it, holding her hand, while Jonas followed in my father's car.

At the hospital they cut her sleeve and said it was a broken hip and a cut on her arm, and she would live, and be furious about it.

She was half asleep on the medicine when she gripped my fingers.

"Linnea."

"On the night."

"I saw..."

Her hand went slack.

The nurse said she would sleep until morning.

I stood in the corridor with my back to the wall, and Jonas stopped three feet away from me and did not come closer.

"Say it," I said.

"Say what?"

"That I should let you stay."

"You should let me stay."

"Why?"

"Because someone just walked into your kitchen and I wasn't in it."

His voice was ragged.

"Because I'd rather be hated by you alive than be forgiven by you dead."

I stood there a long time.

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