Reckless Hours: a Romantic Suspense novel (Heroes of Providence Book 3)
Read Reckless Hours: a Romantic Suspense novel (Heroes of Providence Book 3) Online
Authors: Lisa Mondello
Tags: #romantic suspense, #thriller, #kidnapping, #romance, #mystery and romance, #clean romance
- RECKLESS HOURS
By Lisa Mondello
- Copyright
Original Book Copyright © 2007 Lisa Mondello
Revised Book Copyright © 2016 Lisa Mondello
Ebook License
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~ ~ ~
Her whole life had been a lie…
It was only supposed to be a random DNA test performed with her class. But it turned Professor Tammie Gardner’s world upside down and proved to her that the tragic death of her parents was no accident. After rummaging through old files, she discovers one clue where it all started and decides to travel across the country to find answers. But is her curiosity more reckless than wise? What she finds is love in the arms of Providence police officer Dylan Montgomery who is searching for his missing brother. They both want to know the truth. But is the truth worth the danger they've put themselves in by uncovering secrets no one wants revealed?
~ ~ ~
This book is dedicated with love to my grandmother, Bessy Mondello.
- Chapter One
“
Take one step closer and I’ll shoot!” Tammie Gardner shouted threateningly, putting her hands up like a shield.
Bill stood in her classroom doorway and frowned. “Tammie, we need to talk.”
“Later, Professor Lewis,” she said, lifting her head only long enough to catch his expression after the formal use of his name, which he hated but she loved to tease him with. “I’ve just spent the last two hours sorting through all these papers. It’s a mess, but it’s an organized mess. I don’t need you sitting on my desk and tossing things around like you always do.”
This being only her second semester at Winchester College, she wasn’t used to how hectic the end of the school year was, and time had gotten away from her. With her full class schedule, she was fi
ghting
time to get all her grades completed by the end of the semester.
As a moment of silence dragged on, she glanced up. Bill was still frowning. “I’m serious. I need to talk to you, Tammie. This is really important.”
She chuckled, even as nerves made her stomach coil just a bit. She’d never seen Bill like this. Still, she waved him off. “Of course it is. It always is. But can it wait until I get these grades into the book?”
To keep the papers from flying around the room, Tammie had turned off the fan that normally bathed her face with a somewhat comfortable breeze in the oppressive June heat. This hundred-year-old university building seemed determined to remain hot, and her second-floor classroom felt like a sauna. Without the fan, sweat bubbled on her forehead and upper lip. She wiped it away as she glanced quickly at the door again.
“Actually…no.”
“What are you doing back on campus so early, anyway? I thought you had some urgent, urgent errand to run.” Not looking at him, she searched her desk for paperclips. When she found half a box, she started clipping and stacking papers until she could see her desk again.
“Tam, we
need
to talk,” Bill said again. This time, his words came out in a rush. It wasn’t like him to be this insistent and it caught her off guard. She recalled the conversation they’d had this morning when he’d mentioned his errand. He never said what it was and she didn’t ask. Bill was too predictable to be someplace other than where he said he’d be. Ever since she’d met him in junior high, she’d been able to anticipate his every move before he made it.
He was the most levelheaded, even-keeled person she’d ever met—not one to get rattled about anything. But he was still standing at the door, his narrow shoulders slumped slightly, his expression drawn. Her blood ran cold.
Bill was the head of the department—her friend, but also her boss. Had the college decided not to renew her contract? Oh, please not that. Not more bad news.
This job is all that’s kept me together this past year.
“Do you really have to make it this scary, Bill?”
He didn’t respond. After a moment of strained silence, save for the janitor whistling “Singing in the Rain” down the hall, Tammie said, “Bill...?”
It was then that she spotted the thick white envelope in Bill’s hand. Somehow, she hadn’t noticed it when he’d walked into the room.
He heaved a heavy sigh. “You’re going to need to sit down for this.”
She did, her heart hammering against her ribs, and the air in the room feeling like a vacuum squeezing the breath from her lungs.
A few quick strides across the room, and Bill handed her the envelope. She glanced at it, momentarily puzzled. The return address was that of the laboratory they’d sent their samples to, as part of their class DNA project. All the students had taken samples from a parent or sibling and matched it with their own DNA to show the genetic makeup of their families. Bill and Tammie had participated in the study with their students as well.
At first, it had been painful for Tammie. As an only child, she could only match her DNA against her parents’. But they’d been killed eighteen months ago, so she’d used hair from a treasured brush set her mother had always kept on her dressing table. Tears welled up in her eyes again, just as they had that day, when she’d carefully plucked the thin blond strands from the bristles and placed them in a plastic bag. It had been the same when she scraped small shavings from her father’s old razor. Why she’d kept it, she didn’t know.
She sighed, placing a hand over her rapidly beating heart, then laughed nervously. “Is this what you’re all riled up about? I thought you were going to tell me I was fired.”
“Tammie, wait—”
“I was getting worried we wouldn’t have the results of the study before the end of the semester. I would have had to completely restructure the final exam.”
Bill swallowed and shook his head. It was barely perceptible, but that small movement brought the dread she’d felt earlier rushing back.
She slapped the envelope on her cluttered desk, bringing both hands up to her face. “Oh, don’t tell me they messed up the test. They didn’t lose someone’s sample, did they?”
“Dammit, Tammie, stop!”
Bill reached across the desk to where Tammie had dropped the envelope and grabbed it. He opened it and pulled out a small piece of paper. He took a deep breath as he handed the paper to her.
“These results came in a week ago. But I had to make sure they were correct before I showed them to you.”
Irritation stirred inside her. “A week? Bill, the entire class project hinges on these results. You know that. I’ve had to be very creative these last few days, thinking up ways the students could work around the results, and all this time you already had them? Why did you keep this from me?”
“Just... sit down, Tammie. You need to read your report.”
“Mine? Why mine?”
Her eyes went to his, then down to the page he’d handed her.
There were no names on the page, only numbers. She’d done that to protect the privacy of her students when the results were examined by the class. Since she’d personally numbered the samples for both classes, she knew which results belonged to each student, and she’d shared that list with Bill. She scanned the graph and then read the report associated with the data for her sample. Her breath caught in her throat, and her knees buckled.
“No! This has to be some kind of sick joke!”
Easing back against the hard cushion of her desk chair, she forced herself to breathe.
In and out. In and out.
It didn’t help. The room was spinning.
“Bill?” she said, pleading with him. “This has to be a mistake!”
He looked down at her with sympathetic pale blue eyes. “I know this is a blow—”
“Are you kidding me?” she snapped, crumpling the paper in her hand as she fisted her palm. “A blow is when you’ve got your heart set on getting a promotion and they pass you over for someone else with half your experience. A blow is when you’ve planned a trip to a five-star hotel in Bali only to end up in a cockroach-infested dive with no running water. This paper is saying my whole life is a lie. That isn’t a blow, Bill, it’s...it’s insanity!”
She stared at her friend, searching for some sign that he was teasing her. She’d forgive him if he were. But the spindly man she’d become close to had never been good at jokes. Oh, he tried to make her laugh, but it always fell flat.
But he was a good listener. And he was her friend. That was what had drawn them together when they met in junior high, and why she’d taken this teaching position at the college he worked at a year ago. After her parents were killed, in a Labor Day boating accident, she’d shut herself off from the world. If she hadn’t been late getting to the marina, she would have died, as well.
She’d spent the first few months numb. Then the next few months angry at everything and everyone because the most precious people in her life had been taken from her and she’d been spared. Bill had methodically pulled her back into the land of the living, convincing her to come back to Winchester, and even pulling some strings to get her a job at the college. Tammie had never felt any desire to make their friendship into something romantic, although she suspected Bill had other ideas.
They’d talk for hours, mostly about her parents and her suspicions that their accident was anything but. Even though the local investigators were still looking into the possibility that the boat’s engine had been tampered with, Bill wouldn’t allow her dwell on it, reminding her that finding the truth, either way, wouldn’t bring her parents back.
Although it had taken some doing, Bill had convinced Tammie that her suspicions were merely a figment of her imagination; holding on to them was only keeping her grief alive. Then, one rainy day, she’d closed the door on her grief.
“Don’t you think I wish it were wrong, Tammie?” Bill said, his eyes filling as he dropped the folder that defended all the untruths about her life on the desk in front of her. “It took you so long to move on after your parents died.”
She looked at him sharply. “Don’t you mean to get over the idea that they were murdered?”
“You’re a totally different woman than you were then.”
“Yeah. And this report says that, doesn’t it? How could you not tell me this? How could you have held on to this report for a whole week and not said a word?”
“I had to be sure.”
Her eyes rested on the torn seal of the white paper. She didn’t want to look at the contents of this envelope. But as if they had a will of their own, her hands were snatching up the thick white envelope and spilling the contents all over her already cluttered desk.
“They’re wrong sometimes, right?”
Oh, please, they have to be wrong this time. Don’t take what I have left of them away from me
.