Free Bridegroom Bodyguard by LISA CHILDS Page B

Foster was thinking or what she was involved in. You will need to investigate her life to find out who killed her. Not mine.” Because Sharon had never really had much of a life. She had studied and she had worked. “So unless you’re going to press charges, I’m leaving, Detective.”
    She stood up and walked to the door. She tried to turn the knob, but it was locked in place. He had locked her inside the interrogation room, the small, windowless room. All those memories that had already rushed over her once that evening rushed back again, overwhelming her.
    Her legs weakened, and her shaking body dropped to the floor. She briefly registered the hardness of the concrete beneath her before she passed out.
    * * *
    P ARKER ’ S HEART BEAT a frantic pace as he watched the paramedics wheel Sharon’s unconscious body into the hospital, where he had been pacing the emergency room while he waited for her arrival. “You were supposed to protect her!” he yelled at his sister as soon as she ran in behind the paramedics.
    As Cooper followed Nikki inside, he shook his head. “Back off. She couldn’t go into the interrogation room with her.”
    “She was hurt in the interrogation room?” he asked. “Who the hell was interrogating her?”
    “Sharpe,” Nikki reminded him.
    Parker’s temper flared with frustration with himself and with the detective. That little weasel wouldn’t have made detective if his mother wasn’t the chief’s little sister. “I’ll kill him.”
    The jerk already thought Parker was a killer. He had actually had a police officer following him from the judge’s house to the bodyguard’s apartment. Parker had nearly shot the damn kid who’d been too scared at Chuck Horowitz’s crime scene to identify himself as a police officer. If not for Logan showing up behind the kid...
    “Don’t go making any threats,” Logan advised as he showed up behind Parker now.
    “But what the hell did he do to her?”
    Nikki and Cooper both shrugged. His younger brother replied, “He had her in the interrogation room for a long time.”
    “And she was already in shock from the crime scene,” Nikki added, her dark eyes flashing with frustration. “She should have gone from the judge’s house to the hospital, not to the police station.”
    Detective Sharpe stepped through the doors behind Nikki and Cooper. But before Parker could reach for his scrawny little neck, Logan pulled him back. “No threats. Calm down,” his older brother advised. “Or he will have the authority to arrest you this time.”
    “Let him,” Parker growled. Then he whirled on Sharpe. “What the hell did you do to her?”
    The man’s eyes widened. “What did I do? It’s what you did—bringing Sharon Wells to a murder scene!”
    “I didn’t know it was a murder scene,” he said. “Any more than I knew that there was a murder scene at Chuck Horowitz’s house.”
    The man nodded with a patronizing smile pasted on his pallid face. “That’s what all the criminals say....”
    “Okay, maybe you should hit him,” Logan remarked. “You’re way out of line here, Sharpe.”
    Parker didn’t care what the jerk said about him. He cared about Sharon. “What did you mean about Sharon? What do you know about her?”
    “You don’t know who she is?” Sharpe asked smugly.
    Parker really wanted to hit him. “Just tell me what you know...” He bit off the insult he wanted to add; it wouldn’t get him anywhere when the man thought so highly of himself. “...about Sharon.”
    “She’s Judge Wells’s granddaughter....”
    Judge Wells? The name sounded vaguely familiar. Maybe Parker had testified before him in a drug-arrest case back in the days when he’d worked undercover vice for River City P.D. He shrugged. “I don’t remember much about him.”
    “Guess you only pay attention to the female judges.”
    He really, really wanted to hit him now, but he restrained himself. “How old is this Judge Wells?” After all, he was her