Sworn To Protect. Shirlee McCoy

tracked her here earlier. Walked right into the clinic, donned a lab coat and fooled everyone he’d passed. He could do it again. Had he managed to circle back to the building? Was he inside right now?

      Breathe, she told herself. An officer is stationed outside your room. Martin can’t get you. Or, hurt the baby.

      She wanted the thought to be comforting, but Jordan had been tough, strong and smart. Somehow Martin had managed to get to him. If that could happen, anything seemed possible.

      She had not heard anything from her father-or brothers-in-law since she had insisted they stay by Ivy’s side. They had left reluctantly, but they had left. Katie hadn’t expected or wanted anything else.

      That didn’t mean she liked being alone.

      For the first hour, regular contractions had distracted her.

      Now, with the pain gone, her mind was spinning, her thoughts jumping from one thing to the next. She had spent nearly nine months preparing to give birth without Jordan, but the threat of an early labor, even just by a couple of weeks, had made her realize how desperately she still wanted him there.

      He’d promised her a lot of things before they had married.

      He had promised her even more when they’d stood in front of friends and family and spoken their vows. He had said he would love her always, that she would be first in his life after God, that he would put her needs in front of his own and be the family she longed for. That he would always be there for her.

      She had believed him. But, even in the first few months of their marriage, she had known that her needs were secondary to the needs of the K-9 unit and the community. Jordan had taken his responsibilities to both seriously. He had worked long hours and devoted himself to justice. She had admired that more than she had resented it, but there had been a tiny bit of jealousy—a small part of herself that had wondered how they would both feel in a decade or two, after his job had pulled him away from anniversaries and holidays and birthdays a few too many times.

      She frowned, shoved aside the blanket that covered her legs and got to her feet. She unhooked the monitor and set it on a table near the bed.

      Lately, she had spent too much time looking at the past through a microscopic lens. As if, somehow, that could change all of the things that had happened.

      But, of course, no amount of dwelling on her decisions, on the things she had believed and expected, could change the fact that Jordan was dead, that she was alone, that a man who had seemed as innocuous as a buttercup in a field of daisies had killed her husband and nearly kidnapped her.

      Martin was deranged.

      A dangerous man with a twisted obsession.

      And, she was the target of that obsession.

      She was the reason Jordan had been murdered.

      No matter how much she wanted to, she couldn’t forget that, and she couldn’t forgive herself.

      If she could go back to the days before she and Jordan had met, she would. Instead of being open to all of the new people in her life, she would have ignored Martin when she saw him at the church they had both attended. She wouldn’t have chatted with him when they ran into each other in the parking lot after service. She certainly wouldn’t have accepted his invitation to coffee the following Sunday morning. Nor would she have had lunch with him the week after that.

      To Katie, those had not been real dates. They had been opportunities to get to know a nice guy in her new church community. Martin had been charming. He had also been a Sunday school teacher, a deacon, a man who quoted Scripture and lived a seemingly upright life. Katie hadn’t seen any harm in saying yes to his invitations.

      If she could go back, she would have known the truth about what lurked beneath Martin’s charming exterior. She wouldn’t have spoken to him. She wouldn’t have gone out with him. She wouldn’t have unwittingly sparked the obsession that had cost Jordan his life.

      She swallowed a hard lump of grief.

      Her clothes were folded neatly and set on a chair near the door. Her purse had been retrieved from Dr. Ritter’s office and was sitting on top of them. She grabbed the purse and her clothes and ducked into the bathroom to dress. She wanted to be quick, but pregnancy made her once-athletic body cumbersome and clumsy. By the time she managed to get out of the hospital gown and back into her clothes, a nurse was knocking on the bathroom door.

      “Katie? Is everything okay?”

      “Fine.” She opened the door and smiled as she sidled past the nurse and slid her feet into her shoes.

      “We were worried when the fetal monitor stopped reading your baby’s heartbeat.” There was an unmistakable note of censure in the nurse’s tone.

      “I haven’t had a contraction in a couple of hours. The doctor said the baby’s heart rate is great, so I thought I’d go see how my mother-in-law is doing.”

      And, then, she was going to ask one of her brothers-in-law to arrange for an escort home. She would call Tony on the way there and make sure he and Rusty were all right. She hoped they were. The last thing she wanted or needed was more blood on her hands.

      She frowned, hiking her purse up on her shoulder and trying to shove the thought and the guilt away.

      Maybe one day she would stop feeling as if she were responsible for the horrible things Martin had done.

      Today was apparently not that day.

      “We need to clear that with the doctor and with...” The nurse’s voice trailed off, her gaze darting to the now-open door.

      “The police?” Katie offered. “I know they’re standing guard, but I’m not a criminal and I can go where I want.”

      “We still need to clear things with the doctor,” the nurse argued. “You had quite a scare this morning, and Dr. Ritter wants to be certain you and the baby are healthy.”

      “I’m as concerned as he is, but he has already assured me the baby looks great,” Katie responded, anxious to get back to the quiet home she and Jordan had shared. Sometimes, if she allowed herself, she could still hear him walking up the steps and sliding his key into the lock.

      Despite the long hours he’d spent on the job and the weekends she had often spent alone, she had always run into his arms when he returned home.

      She missed that.

      She missed him.

      “Is everything okay in here?” A uniformed officer peered into the room.

      “Everything is fine, but I would like to visit my mother-in-law. If you wouldn’t mind escorting me there, I would appreciate it.”

      “I’ll have to check with the chief,” he responded. She recognized most of the men and women in the NYC K-9 Command Unit. He wasn’t one of them.

      “Noah Jameson is my brother-in-law,” she said. “I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.”

      “Currently the chief is out in the field.” Another officer stepped into the room, a yellow Lab on a lead beside her. Katie recognized her immediately. Brianne Hayes was new to the K-9 team. One of the few female officers in the unit, she had proved herself to be a top-notch handler when she had helped apprehend a bombing suspect a few months back.

      “Can you contact him? I’m anxious to see Ivy.”

      “I can try, but...” Brianne hesitated, the look in her eyes reminding Katie of the one she had seen in the faces of the officers who had informed her of Jordan’s death.

      “What’s going on?” she asked. “Did something else happen to Ivy? Is she...worse than they originally thought?”

      “She’s fine,” Brianne answered hurriedly.

      “Did something happen to Tony?” Katie asked, her mind rushing in a direction she had been trying not to allow it to