Protecting His Pregnant Lover - Leslie North Page 0,44

ever get it right? He had thought she might want this time alone, especially after having him constantly restricting her activities and breathing down her neck all the time—could it be he had gotten it wrong? “I’m tired, anyway,” she continued. “I think I’ll go lie down.”

“Olive.”

She turned back to him as he said her name, and Levon pulled her into his arms. She buried her face in his shoulder, and he cupped the silky back of her head; he breathed in the perfume of his own shampoo, which she had been using. Why did it smell sweeter on her? Why was he suddenly unable to get enough of it?

Their lips were on a collision course before he even knew he was kissing her. It was gravity that pulled him down to her. It was a force that he couldn’t put a name to, even though the startling shape of it was welling up inside him. If he hadn’t known how he felt about Olive—or if he had avoided acknowledging it—there was no more skirting around it now. Not after he had found her on the floor of her classroom; had seen the blood; had experienced a stark vision of what it would be to lose her...

“What’s wrong?” he rasped. She was pulling back, and pulling away from him. Those warm brown eyes of hers held a strange curiosity; they seemed to be brimming with an unasked, and consequently unanswered, question. She must have sensed his mind was elsewhere.

He tried to pull her in again, but Olive stopped him. “I’m tired, Levon,” she repeated. The sting of rejection flared in his chest, but he took her hand—her bandaged hand—and the reality of her long day came crashing back over him. He was being selfish.

“Go lie down,” he told her. “I’m going to head back to the school, then to the police.”

Olive nodded. He hated seeing her looking so numb, but felt helpless to come up with a resolution at the moment. He watched her break away from him, and shuffle slowly into the bedroom. He waited until the door was closed.

Then he went to the kitchen island where Olive graded her quizzes, and he took them. She said she hadn’t recognized the handwriting, but he wondered if it was more that she didn’t want to recognize it—didn’t want to acknowledge that the person who wrecked her classroom could be one of her students.

He didn’t head back to the school straightaway. He sat in the armchair beneath the golden glow of the lamp and read. He pulled the piece of paper from his pocket, the one containing the threat against Olive, and read it again. And again. He compared handwriting until it seemed like the words would wriggle free of their sentences and leap off the page, but he fought back against his inability to concentrate. He made the words sit still—just long enough for him to find what he was looking for.

“Franklin.”

He should have known. Of course the villain responsible for the day’s trauma would be the one person most capable of hurting Olive. He didn’t want it to be true, but there was no denying that handwriting—even though Franklin had obviously tried to conceal that it was him by inverting letters and throwing in random capitalization. Maybe Levon owed it to his dyslexia that he could look beyond the message of the words to the superficial shape of them.

He needed to check the new security footage at the school, but he was already certain of what he would find: Franklin, breaking into Olive’s classroom, and likely not alone. This would have been a test, Levon thought. The Reapers wanted Franklin to prove his loyalty by betraying Olive—and, if the boy had any of the affection for Olive that Levon thought he did, Franklin had likely agreed in an effort to scare Olive into ending all interference with the gang—interference that could get her hurt, or worse.

But Levon was getting ahead of himself. He was giving the boy a noble motive, when the reality was that his opinion of Franklin had been colored all along by Olive’s high regard for the boy. Levon needed to focus now, and treat this as he would any other crime scene.

And any other threat.

Levon pocketed the note and rose. Coupled with the footage Clint had sent him earlier, it should be enough for the cops to issue a warrant for Franklin Monroe. He replaced Olive’s assignments where he had found them. Then he placed