After her father became a widower, he had needed a fresh start, and so she’d moved into the town house and he’d come out here permanently.

As her father approached from the garage where he’d docked that huge sedan of his, his loafers crunched over the little shell fragments. When she’d been young, she’d thought that drives like this were covered with a special kind of Rice Krispies. Instead of milk poured into a bowl, all you needed were feet to get the chattering sound going.

He was cautious as he came up to her. “Would you like me to get your things?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“And perhaps we should have dinner?”

Even though she wasn’t hungry, she nodded. “That would be lovely.”

God, they were like people at some cocktail party. Well, a cocktail party that involved dead bodies, guns, and running from killers—fashionably late, in this case, meant you were dead, not just the victim of a hair catastrophe or bad traffic on one-twenty-eight.

Which reminded her . . .

Grier looked around and felt the back of her neck tingle. They were being watched. She could feel it. But she wasn’t anxious; she was calmed by whatever it was she sensed.

It was Jim’s men, she was willing to bet. She hadn’t seen them drive up, but they were here.

After her father got her suitcase out and shut her trunk, she locked the car—and tried not to think about the fact that the man with the eye patch had been inside the damn thing. Frankly, it made her want to sell the Audi, even though it only had thirty thousand miles on it and ran like a top.

“Shall we?” her father asked, indicating the front walk with an elegant hand.

Nodding, she stepped forward and led the way up the brick path to the door. Before opening the way in, her father turned off the security system, which was just like hers, and then unlocked the dead bolts one by one. The moment they’d both cleared the jambs, he shut them in, reengaged the system and relocked everything.

No one was going to get at them here: This place made the one in town look like a papier-mâché pup tent when it came to security.

After Daniel’s death, this house had been prepared for a siege—something she hadn’t understood until now. All the clapboards had been stripped off and microthin fire-retardant panels put in place on the interior and exterior; all the leaded glass had been replaced with bulletproof panes that were an inch thick; the antique doors had been swapped out for ones that had reinforced lead frames; oxygen-monitoring equipment and heavy-duty HVAC systems had been installed; and there were no doubt other improvements that she wasn’t aware of.

It had cost more than the house was worth, and at the time Grier had questioned her father’s mental health.