Blake was on the same wavelength.
“What are they waiting for?” she whispered.
No sooner had the question came out, than an answer followed.
It wasn’t at all what they wanted.
A sound echoed from the back of the house. Metal clinking. Cracking? Had they been asleep, it might not have woken them, but now it was like a gunshot in the night.
Blake’s hand slid around his forearm.
“That’s the back door,” she breathed out. “Someone’s trying to come in.”
Those words would be the last before the chaos of the next several minutes, but before his legs got ahead of him, Liam glanced back through the kitchen window. The men were no longer standing around chatting. All three were looking at the house now.
Liam realized it then.
They weren’t waiting to cause trouble. They were waiting for someone else to start it.
PRESSUREMADEDIAMONDS.
Blake didn’t talk about or even think about her mother all that often, but her telling Blake this while growing up had firmly stuck into place. If anything was hard or tiring or brought on waves of stress, it was a necessary part of life. In fact, it was almost a good luck of sorts. Without pressure, there would be no diamonds after all.
That had been a soothing saying for Blake as a kid because it had made the most sense. It wasn’t a promise of a stress-free life or a guarantee that life would always go the way you wanted it to. It was practical. It was an if-and-when situation. Not a what-if situation.
Whenlife became hard, endure.
Notiflife became hard.
That’s how you became a diamond.
That saying, however, lost some of its shine when their mother left the family behind. Apparently, Blake’s mom could be a diamond. Just not with them.
Years and years had passed since the Bennet matriarch had gone her own way, and yet Blake had found that out of everything she learned—good and bad—from her mother, this sentiment was the loudest. The second the back door started breaking, Blake heard her mother’s words as if she were standing next to her.
“Pressure makes diamonds, Blakey. All you have to do is endure the squirmy parts first.”
There were four people in the house who absolutely couldn’t get hurt.
Bruce, Clem, Lola and Liam.
But one of those took the lead quick. It made Blake’s heart skip a little beat.
“Get the kids,” Liam said, words and movements hurrying. “We don’t know how many are coming in. Hide until backup gets here.”
He was already moving, gun raised and ready. For a split second Blake was torn. She wasn’t used to taking the back seat in situations like this. She was the one who ran in, gun raised and ready to take on the trouble. Then again, she wasn’t in her old life. She was in charge of protecting two little ones. From the known and unknown.
And she had no idea how many armed men were coming.
Endure the squirmy parts first, she thought.
Then all thoughts went on autopilot.
Liam outstepped her, pinpoint focus on the back of the house and the continued sound of someone trying to get the door open. He was a wall of strength and grit. Blake wouldn’t have known that ten minutes prior, he was fast asleep with a four-year-old had she not seen it herself.
He didn’t even have shoes on at the moment.
Yet somehow that made him more intimidating. A man in his home, ready to defend it.
