Explosive Engagement by LISA CHILDS

starting up the SUV. “ You didn’t do it. I don’t blame you.”
    Maybe she hadn’t heard him correctly over the rumble of the engine. “Yeah, right. You have definitely blamed me and my brothers.”
    He groaned. “I haven’t blamed you for what your dad did. I’ve blamed you for refusing to admit what he did.”
    She still refused. “That’s because he didn’t do it,” she insisted. “He never would have pulled the trigger.”
    “They struggled over the gun.”
    “He wouldn’t have reached for it,” she insisted. “My father hates—” a twinge of pain struck her heart as she realized she had to correct herself and use past tense “—hated guns. He never would have touched it.”
    “It was just the two of them in that room,” Logan said. “What do you think happened? How did my father wind up dead and yours not?”
    She pointed out what had always been so obvious to her. “There was someone else in that room.”
    “Officer Cooper didn’t see anyone else leaving it,” Logan said.
    “He wasn’t there yet,” she said. She had memorized the officer’s testimony, and despite fifteen years having passed since the trial, she hadn’t forgotten a word. “Your father got to the room first. His partner was slower—too slow to see who really shot your father.”
    A muscle twitched in Logan’s cheek as he turned away from her, his focus on his driving as he steered around the crime scene and police vehicles parked in his driveway. “Your father never said that there was someone else in the room.”
    Her father had never said anything about what had happened that horrible night. He had chosen to not even testify at his own trial. “I know he wouldn’t have done it.”
    “Then why not tell the police who did?” Logan asked. “He had to have witnessed it.”
    “I don’t know why he wouldn’t tell...” Tension throbbed behind her eyes, so she squeezed them shut to relieve some pressure of trying to convince Logan her father was innocent. Why was she even wasting her time? She’d had fifteen years to convince him and had failed. She knew she would never really get through to him. “I don’t know...”
    Instead of laughing at her or calling her naive as she’d suspected he would, Logan offered an explanation. “Maybe he was protecting someone.”
    Hope rushed through her, and she opened her eyes to stare at him in shock. “You believe me? You believe my father was innocent?”
    He shook his head and dashed her hopes.
    If he kept blaming her dad for his father’s death, there was no future for them. That anger and resentment would always remain between them.
    Her breath caught with more shock that she had actually hoped there might be a future for them. Had she become such a good actress that she’d convinced herself their engagement could be real?
    “I don’t know what to believe,” he admitted.
    “About my father?” He had given her doubts about her brothers; it was only fair that she gave him doubts, too.
    “About you,” he said. “I thought you were responsible for the attempts on my life, that you’d put your brothers up to it...”
    His suspicions chilling her, she shivered. She had been a fool to think there would ever be a future between them. He didn’t think the worst of just her family; he thought it of her, too. He always had and that hadn’t changed.
    Only her feelings had begun to change...
    But maybe it was just gratitude that she felt for him since he had saved her life. Twice. But even before that she’d begun to think a little differently about Logan Payne...because of her father’s cryptic last words.
    “I’ve been told you’ve done it before,” Logan said. “That you’ve had your brothers kill for you.”
    Given the way he’d phrased it, she had a pretty good idea who had told him. The jealous female bodyguard might have bent the truth, but she hadn’t outright lied.
    So Stacy admitted it. “They have killed for me.”

Chapter Nine
    Logan hadn’t