Guard My Baby Page 2

  "But I didn't know that. I'm sorry. Oh, God, I'm so sorry," Drayton shrilled.

  "Sorry won't cut it. You must do as I command. Kill the babe. Save your soul," God order with a voice that ricocheted off his bare bedroom walls.

  Nodding, Drayton cowered further under the coverlet. In the silent recesses of his tortured mind, he tried to reason away this horror and make it right. Of course, God and the Devil knew his mind, but in his own conscience, he had to deal with the insanity of killing another child, even if it was the spawn of Satan. "I'll find a way to blame Wayne Hickson now, as I did with the others, including when I killed my parents. I don't want to spend my life in prison for a crime that serves the good of the people."

  God spoke, loud and clear, in a distinct, crisp voice. "Fine. Call out for Wayne's help. He's your inner self anyway. No matter what you think, he's a part of you. He's your dark side. He'll get the blame, but you're as evil as he. All human beings are. He's just an excuse, to make you feel less guilty for taking a life and choosing to do this, utilizing your own free will."

  "I've done this too many times. I assassinated my parents. I thought it was for the best to kill my dad and keep him from suffering the loss of my mom, but my mom deserved to die. She was evil - as evil as Satan himself. She abused me. Am I forgiven that sin?" Drayton cried.

  Clean and clear, in an authoritative voice that rambled through Drayton's head and soothed him, God said, "Of course, my child. All sins are forgiven, if you're truly sorry."

  Drayton nodded vigorously. "I am sorry. I am. I am. I am."

  Lucifer broke in, sounding out his hatred. "I'll stop you, Drayton. I'll find a way to stop you."

  Drayton cringed. "Please, God, stop the Devil from hurting me."

  God sighed. "I can't make that promise, but I can assure you of your place in Heaven, at my side."

  Drayton sobbed and nodded. "That's something, at least. Thank you."

  "Now call up Wayne, and start planning."

  "It'll be like the others. She won't give up her daughter. I'll have to kill them both. I'll try to spare Lainie. I've tried to befriend her. I want to marry her, but I don't think she'll have me. She's very willful," Drayton whined, like his blubbering fool of a father had always done in the presence of his mother's rage.

  "Then you're better off dead. If she won't have you, you're better off killing the spawn of Satan and coming to live in Heaven. Leave your Earthly home behind, and come to your mansion of gold. It'll be waiting for you, as soon as your task is complete," God declared.

  "Drayton..." the Devil began.

  "Enough. Get thee out of this man's head, Lucifer." God howled his interruption.

  With that, the voices quieted. Drayton had his instructions. He had to fulfill his despicable destiny. He'd made a shambles of his own life. He'd donated sperm. As far as he could tell, according to the computer files he'd cracked into, seven women had taken advantage of his frozen, life-giving seed. He'd tracked down and killed five of the women. Only two more of the results of his tainted, possessed sperm remained. Most of the Devil's spawn had been wiped out, according to God's wishes. So far the Devil hadn't made good on his threats to end Drayton's life, but he still might, either before or after Drayton took care of God's final command.

  Seven. It had to be a sign. Seven was a Biblical number. Numbers meant the world to Drayton. He'd studied numerology in college, along with computer graphic design and programming. He had to be right. He had chosen the right path. He couldn't doubt his choices now. He simply couldn't.

  Drayton shook uncontrollably.

  He had a job to do.

  He had no choice.

  He had to get that baby.

  Now.

  Chapter Three

  The eerie feeling returned ten-fold to the back of Lainie's neck, the instant she thought she saw movement through her living room window. Icy fingers of dread choked her. She stood transfixed, tingling, staring at the window giving her little protection from the outside world. Was it he again - her stalker, her nightmare - melting into the early evening shadows?

  No one should be there. Maybe no one was. Maybe Lainie's overactive imagination worked overtime. Or maybe a stray animal ran through her yard, casting an innocent shadow. Or maybe a bird flew over. Or maybe her neighbor's eight-year-old son played outside and accidentally hit his baseball into her yard. Maybe the precocious child had unwittingly crossed the walkway into her space to retrieve it. He sometimes did, blissfully unaware of the turbulence and paranoia bubbling inside Lainie's trembling psyche.

  Maybe. And maybe not. Regardless of all the possibilities, odd things had definitely been happening lately. Paranoia had nothing to do with them. The reality was all too terrifying.

  Lainie cringed and wrapped her arms around her engorged middle. Whether this turned out to be just a figment of her vivid imagination, or not, the other - the more foreboding, concrete and proven things - had been real and horrifying. The ominous box she'd received last week with a doll's severed head in it - and a typed note stuffed inside the sawed off neck - had been the scariest. The correspondence had warned, "I want my baby. Or else."

  Shuddering, Lainie swallowed the bile rising in her tight throat. She forced down the nausea churning in her turbulent intestines and tried to push the disturbing memory out of her mangled mind. Her unsteady hands moved with a mind of their own, to caress her swollen womb.

  Lainie tiptoed - okay, really she waddled - her very pregnant body to the window and stood to the side of it. She pulled back the paisley curtain - hopefully imperceptibly - and tried to peer out to see if someone watched her.

  Nothing.

  At least, nothing out of the ordinary. The normal, innocuous scenery seemed serene and safe. Her neighbors' elaborate brick wall loomed before her and encompassed the sprawling acreage adjoining hers. That massive partition made the adjacent family's home secluded and private. The divided wall was pretty much all she could see from the side view of her living room window, except for her own narrow yard leading up to the massive concrete barricade next door.

  Lainie frowned. She wouldn't see anyone or anything peculiar, of course. The crazy bastard knew how to make himself invisible. Worse, he knew how to make her squirm. He enjoyed toying with her and frightening her out of her ever-lovin' mind. Whoever the sick freak is.

  Her tremulous heart pounded out an erratic rhythm. Fear bubbled up inside her like a geyser and fluttered along her nerve endings. Fear prickled and burrowed under her skin, tickling and making it crawl and pop out in goose pimples the size of mosquitoes bites on their way to growing into goose eggs.

  Lainie didn't feel secure and protected. She had installed a top-of-the-line, high-powered security system, including cameras and more electronic gadgets than she could operate. The hand-held alarm encoder she could use to both enable and disable the alarm from outside her house. The other items drove her mad. For convenience and safety, the installer from Winston Securities had told her. She scowled. What about ease to go along with convenience and safety? That would've been a nice, practical addition for a pregnant woman.

  Lainie held her back and stretched. She ached all over today. She blew out a breath and smiled, rubbing her tummy. Eli was on her way, tonight. Her baby girl was about to make her entrance into the world.

  Lainie's smiled drooped. Would Eli survive? Or would the insane idiot threatening her destroy her fragile little life succeed in squashing it before she had a chance to live it?

  Shuddering, Lainie studied the elaborate security system. She hoped she'd done the right thing. She'd taken her paranoia one step further. She'd hired herself a bodyguard from the same company that had installed the complicated technology confounding her. Her best friend, Dr. Trish Gordon, had recommended the company. She used their services and swore by their standards. Lainie trusted Trish, not only as a friend, but also as her OB-GYN. Trish wouldn't steer her wrong. Lainie had to believe that the owner of Winston Securities, Chuck Winston, had her best intere
sts in mind and would send the right guy to do the job of temporary, live-in bodyguard.

  Lainie drew her brows together. She hated the idea of being in such close confines with a perfect stranger. She sighed. She had no choice. The added precautions weren't for her. They were there to protect her precious, innocent, unborn baby - Eli, the one truly being threatened with kidnapping and murder. Lainie trembled at the thought of losing her child - the child she already loved with all her terrified heart. Eli grew inside her, moved inside her, and lived inside her. How could she not love her? How could anyone, even someone crazy, think she'd hand over her baby and let him snuff her out?

  Lainie peeked out at the supposedly serene and falsely sedate scenery. The world outside called to her, but she dared not step out into it alone and unprotected. She narrowed her eyes. She hadn't ventured into public in quite a while without company - usually Trish - as a necessary precaution against any harm that could be done to her or her child. Fear made her a prisoner in her own home, and that circumstance irked her to no end. She suffered and hid out like prey from a predator. The creep who had decided to plague her, victimize her, horrify her, and hound her to death should be the one in hiding, or stuffed in a jail cell to rot.

  Anger swept through Lainie, hot and fast. She hated the sick, twisted bastard. She wanted him dead. She didn't want to have to fear him for the rest of her and her child's lives. The unfairness of it all pissed her off and made her want to commit murder herself.

  Taking a deep breath, Lainie attempted to reel in her outrage. Her fierce bout of protectiveness would do her no good. She needed to keep a calm demeanor and not allow her blood pressure to fly off the charts. Hadn't Trish told her that about a hundred times, or maybe more? Lainie shook her head. It was hard to keep calm when the very life she'd helped create was threatened.

  Lainie glanced out the peep hole. Where is that security guard? I could've left for the hospital long ago. How trustworthy, protective and dependable can he be, if he's late for even this?

  Heaving a sigh, Lainie headed for her front door to take her overnight bag to the car. She could put her things in her vehicle, come back in, and wait for the tardy man to show up. Tardiness didn't sit well with her. She'd almost been a teacher. Some of her favorite people were teachers. The disrespectfulness of his being late bugged her.

  Lainie flung the door open and stopped dead in her swollen-ankled tracks. She dropped her bag with a loud thud to the floor, and a startled gasp escaped her open lips. Her hand flew to the radical pulse in her clogged throat, flopped down to cover her fluttering heart, and then slid further down to shield her flittering tummy and the baby harbored inside. All semblance of warmth fled her face, and her eyes threatened to pop out of their wide-eyed sockets. A shiver of... something... ran down her stiff spine.

  Good Lord in Heaven Above. There, right there, on her own front porch, stood the very man she'd thought she'd never see again: The father of her baby: Cade Wainwright.

  Chapter Four

  "Oh, my, God," Lainie whispered and nearly passed out cold.

  Cade looked... beautiful. It was the only way to describe his handsome features. She stared at him, speechless. He stared back. A blank mask settled across his very male face. He didn't even blink. Did he recognize her?

  "Lainie?" Well, that answered that. Cade spoke her name like as accusation. His coal-black eyes narrowed to menacing slits. So much for a blank mask. Fury took over.

  Lainie blinked but remained silent, and as close to numb as she'd ever been in her life, except for her burgeoning heart lurching and then racing in her now-constricting chest. The speeding drumbeat raged, and her heart promised to burst like a balloon. The fluttering sensations within her torso fought for acknowledgement by her dumbstruck brain.

  "Cade." Lainie finally found her voice again and mumbled his name in return. Her brain had definitely drained of any coherent thought. She stared into Cade's piercing dark eyes, stunned. She held her breath and let her gaze lift to his cropped, military-style black hair, tapered and combed back slick. She allowed her gape to fall to his upper body. He was clothed simply, in a black cotton T-shirt. Every fiber of the taut material stretched to its strained limits across the wide expanse of his massive, muscled chest, and plastered against his bulging, sculpted biceps. Nothing ever looked simple on Cade Wainwright.

  Not his simple hair style, not the simple T-shirt, and certainly not those simple, clinging black jeans that covered long, sinewy legs topped off with brawny thighs that had invaded her space, touched her intimately, and spread her legs, once upon a time...

  Cade stepped back and demanded in a raspy bass tone, "What the hell?"

  Lainie shivered at his deep voice. Lord help me. She nearly drooled at his masculinity. Memories pummeled her and need filled her in an instant. She remembered with distinct clarity the feel of his hard, pressing thighs, sliding against her femininity, insisting that she make room, opening her legs with the aggression of a lion with his lioness, and...

  All this she felt after one fast sweep of her gawking eyes down his gorgeous body, all the way to his black-leather boots, just before she blanched with the realization she resembled a fat, round Charlie-Brown-He's-a-Clown pumpkin, or maybe the Goodyear Blimp in a hefty-pink-elephant disguise, ready to waddle to the maternity ward to give birth to...

  "Oh, God." Bombarded with emotion, her reaction turned physical. Her hands gripped her protruding belly more encompassing. She attempted, unsuccessfully, to conceal the truth. She enfolded and shielded her baby behind her still-small hands and forearms, a useless barrier to Cade's astute perusal. Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.

  Cade's glare struck her full force. He stepped up to her, within mere inches of her belly, her baby. "You lied to me. What the hell is your real last name?"

  "Blanford." What did that matter in the big scheme of things when her world and baby were being threatened, and she might die of shock any second now?

  He growled. Apparently he didn't believe her. She couldn't blame him. She didn't believe herself. The blood rushed back into her blazing hot face with a whoosh. Cade stood frozen, locked in position, his jaw working, the muscles jumping like mad. The disbelief he wore on his stunningly-male, oh-so-handsome, sharply-angular, hard-edged, stone-cold-at-the-moment face must have matched the incredulity of her features. His voice was frigid as hell frozen over when he asked, "Do you live here?"

  She gulped. "Yes."

  The disturbance built in his incredible eyes - eyes that left her face and trailed downward, drifting over her breasts and landing smack dab on her bloated belly. His measuring gaze swung back up to her heated face. He glared at her, hard, pinning her to the floor with a look of outrage. She wanted to run and hide, but she was too big to run, or hide, unless she had the broad side of a barn to duck behind.

  The color in Cade's face changed drastically in a heartbeat, going from white-as-a-sheet to red-as-a-beet in one second flat. He stood, immobilized. Inside he must have been in pure turmoil, judging by the confusion dawning in his flashing, ebony eyes and masking his gorgeous, dark facial features. He dropped his glare to her stomach. Lainie shivered. Her erratic heart pounded mercilessly in her tightening, heaving chest cavity. "Blanford? Since when? You were Blanchet last summer."

  "I changed it." Did he have the need to know? Should she tell him why she'd changed her name? Hell, no. Certainly not yet. Maybe later. If there was a later. Maybe when he had visitation rights and...

  Good God. Would it go that far? Had he reentered her life, after leaving it so abruptly last summer? Lainie shuddered. Would he interfere with her plans? Her child's life? Lainie's heart skittered to an abrupt stop. Would he try to take her baby? She shook herself mentally. No, he wouldn't. He couldn't. He had no rights here. No grounds to mess with her as a mother. He hadn't even contacted her over the past nine months. Not once.

  Out of instinct and self-defense, she tried to take a distancing step back, but she couldn't move. Stiff as a board and too terrified t
o move, she feared falling on her extra-large, maternity-sized derriere. Not that she'd gained that much weight - only twenty-one pounds, she thought in defense of her own quickly shrinking self-esteem. Still, her locked and swollen knees were wobbly and much too puny to hold up the additional weight of her unborn baby girl, under the circumstances and in the face of such...

  No way could she even think of a description for the plethora of jumbled and baffled thoughts and feelings pulsating through her befuddled brain and attacking her defenseless torso at the moment. At any rate, she didn't dare budge from her stationary position, or she'd topple right on over onto her well-rounded rump.

  Then, the sexiest man on the face of the earth would either have to help her up, or run for his own dear life, while she rolled herself over and locked herself back inside the safety of her own home - at least as safe and secure in her private sanctuary as she could be with a madman trying to invade her private domain and come after her baby.

  Good Lord. The father of her threatened-with-death baby stood on her doorstep, unexpectedly and definitely uninvited. Dazed, she wondered if maybe she should've kept her door closed a little while longer, like maybe for all eternity. Or maybe she should've tried harder to find Cade last year and tell him about her child, before she took off and moved half way across the country to escape the hounds of hell, badgering her for crumbs and...

  Cade spoke again. Lainie jumped half out of her maternity outfit and her stretched-tight skin.

  "Is it mine?" he asked, his lips thinned and pressed together, his voice firm and accusing, his eyes sparking with danger lurking in their devastating depths.

  The out-of-the-blue question slammed into Lainie's bewildered brain and brought forth the sudden reaction so quickly she couldn't stop herself. Tears ran down her face in a stream, hot and unstoppable, embarrassing and confusing.

  Why on earth was she crying? Lainie had no idea. Her brain had shut down, and emotion had taken over her bodily functions. Emotion could do that, if it was intense enough, she'd discovered over the past year. Mental could turn into physical. At this moment, she had no control over her senseless sobbing.