Read The Bodyguard's Return for Free Online Page A

moment their gazes remained locked. It was a moment of connection, two people mourning for somebody they had both loved. This time he broke the eye contact and gestured to the papers in front of her. “Okay, show me what you’ve got.”
    She cleared her throat, stuffing her emotions for Charlie back deep inside. “I noticed when I was reading back issues of the paper that there seemed to be an unusual number of fatal accidents in the area.”
    “It’s a ranching and farming community, there are always accidents.”
    “True, but Cotter Creek seemed to have more than its share, so two weeks ago I did some statistical analysis, comparing like-size ranching and farming communities. What I discovered was that the incidence of accidental deaths was three hundred times higher in Cotter Creek than anywhere else I compared it with.”
    Joshua raised a dark eyebrow and took the sheet of paper that held her data. She watched him as he studied it. She’d met most of his brothers, each more handsome than the next, but Joshua seemed to have gotten the West good-looking gene in spades.
    Savannah had been raised among the beautiful people of Scottsdale and if they weren’t beautiful by nature, then plastic surgery solved the problem. She’d been the anomaly, a busty redhead with a snub nose covered in freckles, who had no interest in bee-stung lips or liposuction.
    By nature she didn’t particularly trust handsome men. She knew she was the kind of girl handsome men took home only when all the pretty blondes and brunettes had left the party.
    She’d had one relationship with a man who’d been so attractive he’d taken her breath away, but it had turned out to be a cliché. He’d left her for a gorgeous woman who had taken his breath away.
    But she needed to trust Joshua West. She needed him in her corner.
    Her mind flashed with an image of him standing in the bathroom doorway, his chest splendidly naked and tautly muscled. A wave of warmth fluttered through her at the memory. Her last relationship had been almost a year ago, long enough that she’d almost forgotten what it felt like to have a warm naked chest pressed against her own. Almost…but not quite.
    “Okay.” He set the paper back on the desk and looked at her, no trace of humor in his gaze. “You’ve got my attention.”
    “Trust me, that’s just the beginning,” she said. She handed him the next paper she’d printed off. “This is a list of all the deaths that have occurred in Cotter Creek in the past two years.” She focused on her subject and tried to forget the vision of his naked chest that had popped unbidden into her head.
    “If you take each one separately, they don’t seem so ominous…a tractor accident, a fall from a hayloft, a gas heater malfunction. You know Gray Sampson’s death had initially been ruled accidental. SheriffRamsey assumed he’d been thrown from his horse and had hit his head on a rock.”
    She talked faster and faster, needing to get everything out. “It was only when Gray’s daughter and your brother Zack began to investigate that they realized it wasn’t an accident, but instead was murder.”
    Joshua held up a hand to stop her. “Take a breath before you pass out.”
    She felt a blush sweep up her neck. “Sorry, I’ve just been waiting so long for somebody to really listen to me. For the last week and a half I’ve been telling anyone and everyone that something isn’t right here, but nobody is interested in hearing me out.”
    “Right now all you’ve convinced me of is that in the past year and a half the people of Cotter Creek were either more careless or more unlucky than others.”
    “I’m not finished yet,” she replied. “By the time I am, you’ll see that something terrible is happening in this town, and unless somebody does something about it, more people are going to die.”
     
    Joshua had yet to make up his mind about Savannah. He wasn’t sure if she was a drama queen looking for excitement or was