Книга - A Cry In The Dark

A Cry In The Dark
Jenna Mills


Danielle Caldwell tried desperately to hide her terror from the FBI special agent whose muscled frame darkened her doorstep just hours after Alex disappeared. Liam Brooks claimed he'd been led to her by Titan, the sinister criminal he'd been tracking. He recognized the fear in her eyes and knew only he could wrest her son from Titan's grasp.Though Danielle told herself she needed Liam's help, her feelings ran deeper. His gaze, his touch, awoke emotions she'd thought long buried, made her want him–body and soul. But all the while, evil was watching, waiting for the right moment….









“I’m not the enemy.”


Liam willed her to believe him, knowing she wouldn’t. “I’m here to help.”

Danielle shoved her hair back from her face. “You can’t. Don’t you get it?”

“Yes, I can. Because I know things you don’t.” About Titan. His handiwork. His trail of devastation. “I have resources you can’t begin to fathom.”

“I don’t want your resources,” Danielle shot back. “Why can’t you understand that?”

“Because you’re scared,” he told her, even though he didn’t understand. Bringing down Titan was all he’d thought about, wanted, for three long years. “Because I stood in the shadows watching you for over an hour.” And had seen her shaking, shivering. “And because I’m your best chance.” He grabbed her arm. “You need me, Danielle. You need me in ways you can’t even begin to imagine.”

And, God help him, he needed her even more.


Dear Reader,

Welcome to another month of excitingly romantic reading from Silhouette Intimate Moments. Ruth Langan starts things off with a bang in Vendetta, the third of her four DEVIL’S COVE titles. Blair Colby came back to town looking for a quiet summer. Instead he found danger, mystery—and love.

Fans of Sara Orwig’s STALLION PASS miniseries will be glad to see it continued in Bring On The Night, part of STALLION PASS: TEXAS KNIGHTS, also a fixture in Silhouette Desire. Mix one tough agent, the ex-wife he’s never forgotten and the son he never knew existed, and you have a recipe for high emotion. Whether you experienced our FAMILY SECRETS continuity or are new to it now, you won’t want to miss our six FAMILY SECRETS: THE NEXT GENERATION titles, starting with Jenna Mills’ A Cry In The Dark. Ana Leigh’s Face of Deception is the first of her BISHOP’S HEROES stories, and your heart will beat faster with every step of Mike Bishop’s mission to rescue Ann Hamilton and her adopted son from danger. Are you a fan of the paranormal? Don’t miss One Eye Open, popular author Karen Whiddon’s first book for the line, which features a shape-shifting heroine and a hero who’s all man. Finally, go To The Limit with new author Virginia Kelly, who really knows how to write heart-pounding romantic adventure.

And come back next month, for more of the best and most exciting romance reading around, right here in Silhouette Intimate Moments.

Yours,






Leslie J. Wainger

Executive Editor




A Cry in the Dark

Jenna Mills







www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)




JENNA MILLS


grew up in south Louisiana, amidst romantic plantation ruins, haunting swamps and timeless legends. It’s not surprising, then, that she wrote her first romance at the ripe old age of six! Three years later, this librarian’s daughter turned to romantic suspense with Jacquie and the Swamp, a harrowing tale of a young woman on the run in the swamp and the dashing hero who helps her find her way home. Since then her stories have grown in complexity, but her affinity for adventurous women and dangerous men has remained constant. She loves writing about strong characters torn between duty and desire, conscious choice and destiny.

When not writing award-winning stories brimming with deep emotion, steamy passion and page-turning suspense, Jenna spends her time with her husband, two cats, two dogs and a menagerie of plants in their Dallas, Texas, home. Jenna loves to hear from her readers. She can be reached via e-mail at writejennamills@aol.com, or via snail mail at P.O. Box 768, Coppell, Texas 75019.










Contents


Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Epilogue




Prologue


The cry ripped through the late-afternoon silence.

Gretchen Miller stopped folding her daughter’s pink-and-white play outfit and looked up abruptly. She held herself very still, listening intently, as only a mother could.

Violet.

Her heart kicked hard. She sprang to her feet and ran across the hardwood floor of her suburban Boston home, toward the staircase leading upstairs, where her daughter napped.

“Sweetheart?”

She heard her husband’s voice but didn’t slow. Couldn’t. Not when her daughter needed her. After years of longing for a child and believing the miracle would never come her way, Gretchen had dedicated herself to motherhood with a ferocity that even she had never imagined. Gone was the woman whose life had once consisted solely of ancient writings and academic pursuits. In her place lived a mother who thrived on art projects and play dates.

“Violet?” she called, reaching the top of the stairs. She tried to strip the concern from her voice, but adrenaline drowned out her effort. The cry had been sudden and intense, drenched in distress and fear. If her little girl was hurt—

Wide blue eyes greeted Gretchen the second she raced into the pink room with the white canopy bed. Sandy-blond hair framed her daughter’s pixie face. She sat in a small chair in front of the art table. In front of her, crayons lay scattered across a sheet of drawing paper.

Gretchen drank in the scene—the beautifully, perfectly normal scene—and tried to regain her equilibrium.

“Whatcha drawing?” she asked, moving to squat beside her little girl. With a hand she fought to steady, she brushed the hair back from Violet’s pale face.

Her little girl gazed up at her, her eyes darker than usual, her pupils dilated, almost trancelike. It took a moment for Gretchen to realize the child was still mostly asleep.

“Come, now,” she cooed, lifting her daughter into her arms and carrying her back to bed. She deposited her among the messy sheets and stretched out beside her. “How about we nap together?”

“Everything okay?”

The soft Texas drawl had her glancing toward the doorway. She and Kurt had been married for three years now, but his rugged handsomeness still stole her breath. “I thought I heard something,” she said. “A cry.”

With a gentle smile he strolled to the bed and leaned down, kissed her softly on the lips. “Looks like everything’s okay now.”

Emotion swarmed the back of her throat. Fighting tears she didn’t understand, she looked at her little girl, sleeping now, her breathing deep and rhythmic, as though five minutes before she’d not sat with crayon in hand. “I hope so,” she whispered.

But deep inside, an innate sense warned otherwise.



The cry drowned out the gentle strains of the lullaby.

Lieutenant Marcus Evans, celebrated U.S. Navy SEAL, man of steel, staggered against the chipped Formica counter. For a brutal, heart-stopping moment he was back on the Navy frigate that had failed miserably trying to tiptoe through a minefield. The impact rocked him hard, jump-started his heart.

Samantha.

On a violent rush of adrenaline he ran from the kitchen of the rented Naples, Florida, beach house, to the sprawling, sun-dappled room beyond, where his wife sat in a rocking chair, their five-month-old daughter, Honor, at her breast, their two-year-old son, Henry, tinkering with a building set at her feet.

The serenity of the scene stopped him cold. Through a curtain of flaming-red hair, Samantha, esteemed ambassador to the small country of Delmonico by day and gloriously creative wife by night, looked up and smiled. “Something wrong?”

His mouth went dry. “That’s what I was going to ask you.”

“Is it time yet?” Little Hank, as they called him, an astonishing combination of his mother’s refined, classic beauty and his father’s rough edges, bounded to his feet and raced across the room. “You promised we could go in the ocean,” he said, sounding far older than most children his age. Enhanced genetics, they’d learned, could be passed from generation to generation. “I want you to teach me how to be a seal, like you.”

Marcus hoisted his son into his arms, all the while his heart threatened to burst out of his chest. His son. His and Samantha’s. Sometimes he still couldn’t believe it. “Give me five, champ,” he said, ruffling the boy’s dark hair. “Why don’t you go put your trunks on.”

The second Hank’s feet hit the sandy tile floor, he was racing toward his room in a flurry of energy that stunned even Marcus.

Samantha shifted Honor from one breast to another. “You’ve got that look,” she observed.

“What look?”

Her mouth twisted into a wry smile. “The superhero look,” she said. “Like you think there’s someone you need to be saving.”

He wanted to laugh. He tried to laugh. He knew that was the right response. But God help him, he could find no laughter, not when his pulse still pounded. A Navy SEAL, he’d learned to trust his sixth sense. Not only trust it, worship it. The tingling at the back of his neck, the churn to his gut—without these warnings Samantha would have died one horrible day three years before, and he would not be standing here staring at her in the rocking chair, with the sun streaming down on her face and his daughter suckling greedily at her breast.

“Just a feeling,” he muttered, trying to scrape away the nasty sense of unease. His family was fine. He could see that for himself. There was no more danger stalking them. No more shadows. No more deception. That had all ended years ago, in what seemed like another lifetime.

But the cry had been so real. So panicked and incessant. A small cry. A child’s cry.

“Reddy?” Hank asked in his two-year-old voice, skidding into the room. He’d stripped off his tattered “Property of the United States Navy” T-shirt and pulled on a pair of khaki swim trunks. No water wings for his boy. His son had inherited his love of, comfort with, water.

“You bet.” Already bare-chested and in trunks himself, Marcus indulged one last, lingering look at his wife and daughter. Then he grinned at his son. “Last one to the water is a rotten egg,” he taunted.

“Hoo-wah!” Grinning, the little boy took off toward the door, threw it open and raced outside. Laughing, Marcus charged after him, into the warm breeze of a lazy, sunny Florida afternoon.

But deep inside, the chill, the uncertainty, lingered.

Something was wrong. Very wrong.



The cry stopped him cold.

Outside the temperature soared near one hundred degrees, but the chill went through Jake Ingram like a frozen knife. He held himself very still for all of one punishing heartbeat, then he ran. Through the sunny foyer of his Dallas home, up the stairs, toward the master bedroom.

“Mariah!” Fear gripped him. Just yesterday the doctor had pronounced his wife in perfect health. Their unborn baby was thriving. Jake had seen the image on the sonogram screen, the heart beating strong, the little legs and arms wiggling. It was as though his son or daughter had been waving hello, dancing madly.

But now Mariah was home three hours early.

And he’d heard the cry.

“Honey—” He stopped abruptly, stared.

She emerged from the bathroom with her dark hair streaming down her back and a smile curving her lips. “What do you think? Do I look fat?”

The breath left his body on a painful rush. He told himself to move, to speak, to do something, anything, but all he could do was stare at his wife, standing beneath the skylight in a skimpy red bikini, with the most beautiful pouch in the world just starting to round her belly.

She frowned. “That bad?”

“No.” The word almost shot out of him. And then he was across the room, tugging her into his arms, loving the feel of their child nudging against his abdomen. “You look perfect,” he murmured, burying his face in her hair and drawing in the fresh, clean scent that was Mariah. After all this time, the intensity of his love for her still staggered him. “I just…” How to explain? “I thought I heard you cry out.”

She pulled back and gazed up at him, amusement dancing in her sharp, intelligent eyes. “I think maybe you’re taking this visualization a little too far.”

He forced a smile. “Maybe.” From the moment they’d learned they were finally pregnant, Mariah had teased him incessantly, telling him it was time to start preparing for the sleep deprivation sure to come. She’d suggested he begin visualizing himself with a crying baby in his arms, pacing the dark halls of the house late at night.

“How about a swim?”

Again he let his gaze dip over his wife’s body, more lush now in her fourth month of pregnancy, more feminine. He loved being in the pool with her, slippery flesh sliding, legs twining, especially late at night when she had a fondness for skinny-dipping. “Sounds great.”

She pushed up on her toes and brushed a kiss over his lips. “Hurry down,” she said, then swept out of the room, leaving him staring after her.

She was fine. He’d seen that for himself. Happy. Radiant. Glowing. Nothing was wrong. There was no one or nothing sinister lurking in the shadows. Not anymore. Their lives had returned to normal. The threat to him and his brothers and sisters had long since been neutralized.

Jake walked to the window, looked down through the thick canopies of a cluster of post oaks and saw his wife stepping into the black-bottom, lagoon-shaped pool. She dipped beneath the water, came up seconds later with her hair wet and slicked back from her face, water cascading down her body. Normally the sight fed his soul.

But standing there in his sunny bedroom, next to the big king-size bed that his tough, gutsy, FBI-agent wife insisted upon cluttering with an array of girlie throw-pillows, he couldn’t push back the slippery edge of darkness. He’d heard the cry, damn it. He’d heard it. Loud. Panicked. Urgent. Like a summons, a plea. And deep in his gut, he knew the truth.

Something was very wrong.




Chapter 1


The remnants of the cry echoed, low, soft, deceptively benign, like the distant rumble of thunder from a passing summer storm.

Standing behind the reception desk of one of Chicago’s elite hotels, the Stirling Manor, Danielle Caldwell ignored the unsettling sensation, concentrating instead on the collection of sun-dappled roses and fragrant lilies on the reception desk. Once, she would have been urgently seeking out the source of the disturbance, crafting a way to help. Once, she would have risked everything.

Once, she had.

Now she hummed softly as she slid a yellow and pink-splashed rose into the vase beside the snow-white lilies. Her brother would have accused her of trying to drown out her destiny, but Danielle no longer believed in such nonsense. Destiny, chance, did not rule her world. There were no such things as lucky or unlucky stars. You created your own fate, made your own choices.

Never again would she chase shadows. Never again would she splurge on instinct.

But the disturbance lingered at the back of her mind, dark and unsettling, choppy like the waters of Lake Michigan on a storm-shrouded day.

She knew better than to look. She knew better than to indulge. But she glanced around the richly paneled lobby, anyway, toward the collection of formal sofas and wing chairs situated next to a stone fireplace. A large Aubusson rug stretched leisurely across the hardwood floor. A huge mahogany bookcase held leather-bound books.

The scene was perfectly normal, a few lingering guests, a woman curled up with a book, almost a carbon copy of a hundred other afternoons since she’d joined the hotel’s staff. And yet, something was off. Something was different. It was like a movie playing at the wrong speed, motion slowed just a fraction, elongated, jerky. Not quite real.

Because of the man.

He sat in a wing chair near the fireplace, impeccably dressed. His button-down shirt was dark gray, open at the throat, and his jeans were black. In his hands he held a newspaper—the same section he’d been holding for close to an hour.

She’d never seen someone sit so very, very still for so very, very long.

The disturbing current pulsed deeper. She knew she should look away, quit staring, but the whisper of fascination was too strong. He was tall. Too tall, too broad in the shoulder, to fade into anonymity. She’d noticed him, felt the ripple of his presence, the second he’d walked into the lobby. He carried an aura of authority like so many of the powerful patrons of the hotel, but the shadows were different. They were thick and they were dark, and they swirled around him like flashing warning signs.

Just like they did her brother, Anthony.

Look away, she told herself again, but then the man’s eyes were on hers, and for a fractured second it was all she could do to breathe. They were a deep brown like his hair, yet the darkness eddying in their depths defied color.

His expression never changed. There was no amusement at catching her staring, no quick swell of masculine triumph, no discomfort, no irritation, just the cool, impassive gaze of a man who saw everything but felt nothing.

It was a look she’d never seen before, and it scorched clear to the bone.

Frowning, humming louder, refusing to let the man affect her one second longer, she grabbed another rose, this one a pure deep yellow with a long, dark-green stem, and debated where to place it for maximum impact. Until she’d come to work at the hotel styled after an English manor house, she’d never imagined something as simple as a vase could cost more than she earned in a month. Granted, it was lead crystal and made in Ireland, but still. She’d always found old mason jars and chipped drinking glasses worked just fine.

“The lights are on, but apparently nobody is home.”

Danielle looked up to find Ruth Sun, one of the hotel’s long-time assistant managers, smiling at her. “Pardon?”

The woman’s dark eyes twinkled. “You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you?”

Danielle’s heart beat a little faster. Everyone in the hotel knew Ruth had the boss’s ear. She’d been around forever. One bad word from her, and all Danielle’s hard work could be for nothing.

“You know how I get when the flowers arrive,” she said lightly. “Everything else—”

“—falls to the background,” Ruth finished for her. “I noticed.” Her smile faded abruptly, and she reached out to grab Danielle’s wrist. “Dear, you’re bleeding.”

Danielle stared at the trail of dark-red blood running against the pale skin of her arm. “I…” Focused on the unsettling man, she hadn’t felt a thing. “It’s just a prick.”

Ruth made a maternal clucking noise, one that should have comforted Danielle, but instead unleashed a sharp curl of longing for the mother taken from her life over a quarter of a century before. “You need to get that cleaned up.”

Danielle nodded but didn’t move. “Did you need something?” she asked. “Before?” When she’d been oblivious to everything but the echo of the cry that had ripped the fabric of the quiet June afternoon, and the man with the disturbing eyes.

“Not really.” Ruth reached into a cabinet behind the long reception desk and came up with antiseptic and cotton. “Just thought you’d want to know someone was asking about you.”

“About me?”

Ruth poured antiseptic onto the cotton. “What your name was, how long you’d worked here, if you were married, that kind of thing.”

Danielle went very still. She worked hard to keep her face clear of all emotion, but when Ruth pressed the cotton to her skin, the sharp sting made her wince. God, she’d been so careful, covered her tracks so cleanly. “Who?”

Ruth kept dabbing. “A man.”

The dread circled closer, tighter. No wonder she’d been edgy all afternoon. He’d finally come looking for her, the brother she’d not spoken with in two long years. Her heart leaped at the prospect, then abruptly slowed.

Her brother wouldn’t ask about her marital status—but there had been another man earlier in the week. He’d seemed charming enough, but Danielle had seen through the aristocratic manners to a muddy aura that warned her to keep her distance. “What did he look like?”

The assistant manager looked up from her handiwork. “I’m surprised you didn’t notice him. He’s been sitting in the big leather wing chair most of the afternoon. Dark hair. Tall.” Ruth let out a dreamy sigh. “Very, very tall.”

With eyes like pools of midnight on a cloudless night. “The guy in the gray button-down?” Danielle asked, and her heart beat a little faster. A lot harder.

“That’s him,” Ruth said. “Real good-looking guy.”

Intense, Danielle silently corrected. Striking.

Gone.

“All better,” Ruth pronounced, but the words barely registered. Danielle stared across the lobby, toward the elegant wing chair that now sat empty, the newspaper abandoned on the floor.

The quick slice of unease made no sense. “Where did he go?”

“He’s right—” Ruth’s words broke off. “That’s strange. He was there just a second ago.”

Frowning, Danielle glanced around the lobby, toward the elevator, the sweeping staircase, the elegant front doors. Found nothing. Not the man, anyway. There were other patrons, the businessmen, the elderly couple from Wichita, the honeymooners from Madison, but the tall man with the flat eyes was just…gone.

Except she still felt him. Deeply. Disturbingly.

“You going to get that?” Ruth asked.

Danielle blinked and brought herself back, heard the low melody of her mobile phone. Through a haze of distraction she reached for the small black device to which only four people had the number—her manager, her sister and her son’s school and day-care center. “Hello, this is Danielle.”

“Turn around.”

She stiffened. “Come again?”

“Paste a smile on that pretty face of yours and turn around, away from the old woman.”

Everything flashed. The motion of the lobby dimmed, slowed, seemed to drag. “I don’t understand—”

“Just do it.”

Her heart started to pound. Hard. Instinct warned her to obey, even as an age-old rebellious streak dared her to lift her chin and defy. She’d done that before, many times. And the cost had been high.

Slowly she turned from the comforting din of the hotel lobby and took a few steps away from Ruth. “Okay.”

“Good girl.” The voice was distorted, genderless.

“Who is this? What do you—”

“I have your son.”

The world stopped. Fast. Violently. She no longer faced the hotel guests, but knew if she turned around, she would see nothing. No movement. No life.

But then the words penetrated even deeper, beyond the fog of shock and the blanket of horror to the logical part of her, the part Jeremy had honed and fine-tuned, sharpened to a gleaming point, and another truth registered.

She was being watched. Someone, someone close, knew her every move.

The man. The man who’d been watching her, asking questions. The one who had vanished but whose presence lingered.

“You what?” she asked, slowly indulging the need to look. To see.

“Don’t move,” the voice intoned, and abruptly she froze. “If you want to see him again, you’ll do exactly what I say.”

The world started moving again, from dead cold to fast forward in one horrible dizzying heartbeat. Everything swirled, blurred. Blindly she reached for the counter. Her son. God, her precious little boy. Her life.

“No cops,” the man continued. It had to be him, she thought. The man from the lobby. The one who’d been watching her, asking about her. The one who’d vanished mere seconds ago. “Call them and negotiations end.”

She wasn’t sure how she stayed standing, not when every cell in her body cried out, louder and harder than the distorted cry she’d picked up an hour earlier. And she knew. God help her, she knew why she’d been on edge. Why she’d been disturbed. Her son. Someone had gotten to her son, and on some intuitive level, she’d known danger pushed close.

But just as with his father, she hadn’t been able to protect.

“What do you want?” she asked with a calm that did not come easy to her Gypsy blood. She’d been in situations like this before, dangerous, confusing, never with her own son, but she’d gone where law enforcement could not go.

“Call the day-care center. Tell them Alex walked home on his own.”

She swallowed hard. That was feasible. The center was only a few blocks from her small Rogers Park home. Alex knew the way. He was an adventurous kid, clever, daring, always in constant motion. It would be just like him to wander off when no one was looking.

“Then what?”

“Wait for instructions.”

Deep inside she started to shake. It was only a sick joke, she wanted to think. A prank. Payback for the sins of her past. But she’d met relatively few people since moving to Chicago and could think of none who would be so cruel.

It was a mistake, she thought next, but even as hope tried to bloom, reality sucked the oxygen from her lungs. She wanted to spin around and run, to shout at the top of her lungs as she searched for the tall man with the dark eyes. But with great effort, she kept herself very still.

“I’m calling them now,” she said with the same forced calm.

“Good girl.” A garbled sound then, something between laughter and scorn. “Do not betray us, my sweet. One word about this call to anyone, and your son will pay the price.”

The line went dead. And for a long, drowning moment Danielle just stood there, breathing hard, praying she wouldn’t throw up.

Then she ran.



“Thank God, Ms. Caldwell. We’ve been looking for him for the past ten minutes. We were about to call the police.”

“Don’t do that.” The words burst out of Danielle like a wild animal released from captivity. Her whole body shook. If the day-care director called the cops, Danielle would have to produce her son. And if she couldn’t, there would be an investigation. An Amber Alert. A full-scale search. In all likelihood, she would become the number-one suspect. She’d be hauled down to the station, detained, questioned.

And the man—the man with the dead-sea gaze, the one from the hotel, who’d sat and watched her for over an hour, who’d coldly issued his threats—would know.

And Alex would be punished.

“Everything’s fine,” she said, clenching the steering wheel with one hand as she raced north along Lakeshore Drive. “We’re headed out of town for a few days and Alex was just excited.” She had to get home. Fast. She needed to be in the small frame house she and her son had picked out, the one littered with his toys. Maybe he was already there. Maybe he’d gotten away, had run and run and run. He could run fast, she knew. He had the same uncanny knack for skirting trouble that she’d had.

Once.

A long time ago.

Before she made the wrong choice, and the wrong person paid the price.

“We’re so sorry,” the director was saying. Fear drenched her voice. The poor woman’s livelihood wobbled at stake. A day-care center that lost children in its care would not stay in business long. “I don’t know how he wandered off. We were watching him the whole time—”

“It’s not your fault, Elaine.” Danielle put on her blinker and zipped around a slow-moving minivan.

“But it is,” Elaine insisted. “This is inexcusable.”

Fear crawled through Danielle, as dark and slimy as an army of the earwigs she’d always hated, but she managed to keep her voice steady as she explained it would be several days before Alex returned to the day-care center. By the time she pulled into the cracked driveway of her little white house, she’d convinced Elaine Myers she wasn’t going to press charges.

“Alex!” She called his name the second she pushed open the car door. “Alex!”

Nothing.

The house looked so still, still and dark and quiet. Too quiet for the house of a six-year-old boy who didn’t even hold still when he slept.

She unlocked the front door, shoved it open and ran into the darkened foyer. “Alex!”

Nothing.

Her whole body started to shake, and this time she didn’t have to pretend. Didn’t have to hold back. She let the tide crash over and around her, let it push her to her knees.

The sobs came next, big, gulping sobs. “Oh, God,” she whispered. “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God.”

Breathe, she told herself. Breathe. Think. But she couldn’t. She’d never felt so helpless in her life, not even the horrible rainy night she’d watched a car spin out of control and crash, then burst into flames. She’d run toward the wreckage, screaming, her brother Anthony trying to hold her back. But there was no one here now. No one to hold her back. No one to hold her, period. No one to help. Her son was missing. Gone.

Images assaulted her then, darker than the fear, the horror, the rage snaking through her. Her little boy. His dark hair and laughing blue eyes. His impish smile. He’d never spent the night away from home. Away from her.

He could be anywhere. His abductors could be doing anything to him. Bile backed up in her throat, and this time she couldn’t stop the churning of her stomach. She gagged, lost what little lunch she’d consumed.

She wasn’t stupid or naive. She watched the news. She knew about child predators. Knew too much.

Anthony.

Her brother’s name came to her on a shattering rush of memory, and with it came more tears. Dear, dear Anthony. So tough and brave, wounded on a level few would ever suspect. He’d taken on a man’s responsibility long before he was able to wear a man’s clothing. And for a long while, he’d succeeded. He’d protected her and her sister, Elizabeth. He’d sheltered them, saved them from the bad man.

But she’d turned her back on Anthony, on them all.

Blindly she staggered to her feet and ran to the kitchen, grabbed the phone. She had to call Anthony. He would know what to do. He wouldn’t turn his back on her. Not now. He would be on the next plane to Chicago and—

One word about this call to anyone, and your son will pay the price.

Danielle sagged against the small white tiles of the counter and let the receiver drop from her hands. She couldn’t make the call, couldn’t take the risk.

The contact came thirty-three minutes later. She was staring at the phone, waiting for it to ring, but the noise resonated from the foyer. A knock. At the door.

She stood there a minute, stunned, before her training kicked in and she calmly dragged a chair to the cabinet and removed a lock box from the top shelf. Inside, the trusty Derringer awaited her. By rote, blindly, she retrieved the clip from a second box and slid it into place, all the while the knocking continued. Louder. Harder.

Sliding the gun into the waistband at the small of her back, she walked to the front door and pulled it open.

Nothing prepared her. Nothing could have. He stood against a wash of late-afternoon sun, the play of shadows and light stealing the details of his face, but not the force of his presence.

Danielle saw what the shadows stole. She saw the aura of danger, the hard, dark eyes, the sharp lines of his cheekbones, the square jaw. And she knew. Instinct urged her to draw the gun, cram it against his jugular and curl her finger around the trigger, while demanding he lead her to her son. But something else, sanity—caution—prompted her to stand very still, with the air-conditioning slapping her back and the hot summer sun blasting her face, not moving other than a slight tilt to her chin.

“You’re awfully bold, aren’t you?” she asked.

The big, tall man who wore confidence like body armor blinked. “Excuse me?”

Her fingers itched for the cool steel of the Derringer she’d received in honor of her sixteenth birthday. “It’s daylight,” she pointed out, glancing beyond his wide shoulders to the quiet suburban street, where Jonah Johnson raced by on his dirt bike. “Someone might see you.”

His lips, ridiculously full and soft for such a grim, hard man, twitched. “And would that be such a bad thing?”

“Not for me,” she said with a cold smile. “You’re the one taking the risk.”

“I see.” Slowly, very slowly, never taking his eyes from hers, he slid a hand into his pocket.

Danielle’s breath slowed to the slide of his fingers. Adrenaline ebbed, flowed, guided her own hand behind her back, to the waistband of her tailored black skirt. She’d stood face-to-face with monsters before. Talked with them. Pretended. Played their game.

“It’s a good thing I like risks, then, isn’t it?” His question was casual, as unexpected as the dimple that flashed with his smile. He stepped closer, lowered his voice. “I have to say, though, this is hardly the greeting I expected.”

“No?” Her fingers curled around the cool metal. “Did you expect to find me quivering in the dark? On my knees? In a puddle waiting to be mopped up and pushed aside?” If so, the man was sadly mistaken. Danielle had learned at an obscenely early age that the best defense was a strong offense. If she let this man see the stark fear slicing her to thin painful ribbons, gave him one clue how hard it was to stand there and face him, to keep her voice calm, then his power over her would grow.

“Look,” he said, “I’m afraid—”

“You should be.” Slowly, calmly, she pulled the gun and pointed it at his chest. “Very, very afraid.”

The man went still. She saw his eyes flare in surprise, then narrow in confusion. His mouth thinned to a flat line. His body, straining against the dark-gray of his wrinkled button-down and black jeans, froze.

“Doesn’t feel very good, does it?” she asked, enjoying the brief upper hand. Pray God she wasn’t making the biggest mistake of her life. “Now get inside and tell me what the hell is going on.”



In another lifetime Liam might have laughed. In another lifetime he might have quickly and efficiently knocked the gun from her shaking hands, jammed her arm up behind her back and shoved her against the faded siding of her little house. In another lifetime he might have felt a flicker of fear or compassion or…or something.

But he felt nothing now, only the cold certainty that, once again, his informant had been right.

She was the one.

He saw it in the stark fear in her eyes, a fear she tried hard not to show behind the defiance and bravado, but which glimmered bright like the fire of highly polished opals. He saw it in the red rim around her eyes, the tracks of the tears down her pale face, a face that had been lively and vibrant only hours before, when he’d watched her at the hotel. He saw it in the mouth he was quite sure she didn’t realize trembled.

A trickle of admiration leaked through, but he quickly stanched the flow. He was not here to admire this woman, no matter how appealing she’d looked earlier in the day, all snug and tidy in her chic little crimson jacket and tight-fitting black skirt. He’d watched her for the better part of an hour, observing her mannerisms, her movements, watching the way she artfully arranged the roses and lilies, learning all that he could before making his move.

A man in his line of work could never be too prepared, and this woman did not fit the profile. She worked an average job and lived in an average house. She had no visible ties to anyone in the spotlight. According to the assistant manager, she didn’t even date.

But she didn’t hesitate to pull again, when she felt threatened.

Slowly, he lifted his hands. “Whoa,” he said in a low, soothing voice, one that was rusty and scraped his throat on the way out. How long since he’d last soothed someone? How long since he’d last cared?

Not cared, he amended. He didn’t care about her, only about the hunt.

“Do you have a permit for that?” Liam asked.

“You really think a permit matters?”

“Yeah,” he said slowly, confidently. “I do.”

She angled her chin, jabbed the gun closer. “You don’t need a permit where you’re going.”

No, he didn’t. That much was true. But he didn’t need a bullet hole through his heart, either. He looked at her standing there and wondered if she had any idea how provocative she looked, a tall, beautiful woman with streaks of dark hair slipping from her barrette and falling against her tear-streaked face, her pale lips trembling, a damn fine gun in her shaking hands. Her body screamed fear, but her eyes glittered with a fierce determination he recognized too well.

Deep in his gut, the truth sunk like a deadweight. “Jesus, I’m too late.”

She blinked. It was the first chink in her armor. But then she rallied, narrowed her eyes. “That depends upon what you have in mind.”

The words were tough, gutsy, but they hid a pain he didn’t want to hear. Didn’t want to know about. He was too late. Again.

Frustration lashed at him. He’d left New York the second he’d received the scribbled note, used all his resources to find her. But just as he’d been for the past three years, he was one step behind.

The senator lying cold and dead in a New York morgue bore silent testimony to that.

“Look, Danielle.” It was his voice that wanted to shake now, his hands that wanted to tremble, his past that wanted to leak through. “You don’t need to be afraid,” he said, and for a change, he didn’t strip away the emotion. He changed it. Glossed over the hard edges, sanded down the splinters. “I’m here to help.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I suppose that’s why you were asking questions about me this afternoon at work? Watching me? Because you want to help?”

“That’s right.” Slowly, he released the edge of the black wallet he’d been holding in his hand, allowing one side to fall open and reveal the tarnished badge. “Special Agent Liam Brooks,” he said very slowly, very deliberately. “FBI.” He paused, watched the shock, the disbelief, the horror, wash over her face. “Now lower the damn gun before I do it myself.”




Chapter 2


Danielle was a smart woman. Not the learned, book smart that came from school and study, but street smart, the kind that came from hard knocks and foster homes. She’d learned how to read between the lines. She knew how to recognize trouble, how to know when to stay and when to go, how to take care of herself. Her sister had insisted Danielle could make a nice living setting up at carnivals, charging a fee for the intuition that came to her naturally.

There wasn’t much that got by her, wasn’t much she didn’t understand.

But standing there with a gun pointed at this grim-faced stranger, with her heart racing and her knees trying not to knock, she watched his mouth move, heard the deep tenor of his voice, but didn’t understand. She didn’t understand what he was saying. She didn’t understand why his badge looked so real. Didn’t understand how her life could shatter in the space of only an hour, not after all the measures she’d taken to protect her son. He was just a little boy. Only six. Innocent.

But worst of all, most damning of all, she didn’t understand the dizzying desire to believe this man, to trust him, to think that the badge was real, that somehow he could help.

One word about this to anyone, and your son will pay the price.

“You’re lying.” That had to be it. He was fabricating a story to gain her trust, her cooperation. Or maybe he was testing her, trying to trick her into disobeying his instructions.

His eyes locked onto hers, dark, commanding. “Why would I lie?”

The gun grew heavier, like a weight on her heart, but she kept her hands steady. “You tell me.”

He answered not as she’d expected, as she’d hoped, but with a low stream of curse words. “I’m too late,” he said again, and this time his voice cracked on a hard edge of frustration and disgust and remorse.

Danielle wanted to step back from him, from the crazy way he made her feel, the confusion, the hope. But she forced herself to stand very still, even as he took a step closer, so close that the barrel of the gun jammed against his chest.

“What has he done to you, Danielle?” The question was soft, laced with a vehemence that chilled her blood. “Tell me what that bastard has done to hurt you.”

The walls, the certainty, started to crumble. “No one has hurt me.”

His face hardened. “Don’t lie to me, damn it.” The words were hard, not at all preparing her for the way he lifted a hand to skim a finger beneath her lashes. “I see it in your eyes.”

Naked. She suddenly felt completely exposed, as though she stood before this man without a stitch of clothing on. The way he looked at her, with that dark, penetrating gaze, made her feel as though he could see beyond the fabric of her uniform, deeper than the flesh, to the fear snaking through her like cold slime.

“You don’t need to be afraid,” he said in a voice that no longer resonated with anger but soothed like a warm summer breeze. “Not anymore. Not of me.”

Her throat tightened. For almost two hours she’d been holding all the jagged pieces together, the fear, the uncertainty, the desperation, willing herself to be strong, to stay in control. For Alex. But now, in the face of this man with the hard eyes but soft words, who offered her a gift she couldn’t accept, the gift of help, everything started to slip, and it sliced to the bone.

“What do you want?” she asked with a valiance she no longer felt.

His dark eyes narrowed. “Right now,” he said very slowly, very softly, “I want you to put that gun down.” The hand at her face, the fingers that feathered along her cheekbone, lowered, dropping to the Derringer.

No! someplace deep inside screamed. Fight him. Don’t let him have his way with you. But she could no more move, no more look away from him, than she could push time backward and bring Alex home.

“I’m going to help you,” he murmured, uncurling her fingers and taking the weight of the gun from her hand.

She watched him, saw his square palm, his long fingers, the bronze of his tan against her pale wrist, but just like earlier at the hotel, when she’d stared at the patrons milling about the lobby, she couldn’t bring the moment into focus.

“See?” His voice was low, soothing. “We’re putting the gun down.” In a svelte move he removed the clip and shoved the barrel into the waistband of his jeans. “Good.”

A trap, she told herself. A trick.

No, came the voice deep inside, the voice she’d once staked her life on but could no longer trust.

“Now we’re going to go inside,” the man was saying, and before she could pull away, he had a hand at her waist and was guiding her into the cool confines of her small foyer. She knew she should fight him, stop him, but lethargy stole through her, numbing like a sweet, forgotten drug.

The man, Liam he said his name was, an FBI agent, led her into the cluttered family room, where the puzzle of the United States she and her son had been working lay unfinished on the old pine coffee table. He guided her to the denim sofa, the one Alex had picked out, and encouraged her to sit.

She did.

He sat beside her, didn’t release her hand. She hadn’t realized how cold she was, hadn’t known she could be so cold while the sun still blazed outside and blood still pumped through her body.

Ty.

Ty had been this cold. But then, her son’s father had been dead. She’d stared at him in his casket, a tall, lanky man in dark gray trousers and a black dress shirt, sandy-blond hair combed obscenely neatly for such a perpetually unkempt man, the soft lines of his face, the whiskers she’d begged them not to shave. Ty wouldn’t be Ty without his scruffy jaw.

Anthony had been by her side, strong and protective as always. He’d stood to her left with a steadying arm around her waist, Elizabeth to her right, also lending an arm in support. They’d held her up, tried to stop her when she stepped forward with a picture of her son in her hand. She’d meant only to lay it on Ty’s chest, but she’d lifted her hand higher, skimmed it over his mouth, his cheek.

Cold. So horribly cold.

But there was no cold now, not from the man seated next to her. The heat of his body blanketed her, soaked through her palm and into her blood, fighting with memory and reality.

The desire—the need—to lean into him stunned her. It would be so easy. There wasn’t that much space between them. She had only to let go, lean against his chest.

She pulled back abruptly, putting as much space between them as she could while he still held her hand.

“Talk to me,” he said in that darkly magical voice of his, the one that both threatened and coerced. “Tell me what’s going on. Tell me what he’s done to you.”

She wanted to. God, against every scrap of sanity and caution, she wanted to. The forgotten force of need burst through her like a punch. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes,” Liam said, never releasing her hand, her eyes, “you do.”

She watched him, much as he’d watched her earlier, noting the lines at the corners of his eyes, laugh lines on some men, but not this man. These lines carved deeper, screamed of life and lessons that had nothing to do with humor. His face was tanned, not quite leathery, but not smooth like Alex’s. At his jaw she saw the gathering of whiskers and wondered when was the last time he’d shaved.

He wasn’t her friend. He wasn’t her ally. No matter how strong the temptation to lean on him, trust him, the possible consequences screamed through her. She didn’t know who he really was or what he really wanted. Badges could be faked. Compassion forced. He could be involved.

Or he really could be FBI. Which would almost be worse. The caller had made it clear what would happen if the authorities got involved.

“It’s just been a long day,” she hedged.

“And that’s why you pulled a gun on me?”

The question landed with unerring accuracy. Pulling a gun on a stranger was not the mark of a calm, content, rational woman. “I…I thought you were someone else.”

“Who?”

She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”

He let out a rough breath and looked away from her, staring at the half-finished puzzle on the coffee table. Just beyond, a pair of dirty sneakers lay near the back door. “You have a kid?”

Her heart jumped. “A son,” she admitted, because she knew the safest lies grew from the truth.

“Where is he?”

“At day care,” she lied automatically.

“Are you sure?”

“I talked to them less than an hour ago.” The truth.

“Why didn’t you pick him up on the way home?”

The questions just kept coming, one after another. “I was hoping to rest for a few minutes, get rid of my headache.” Hoping the phone would ring and she would receive her next set of instructions.

Before Liam could fire off another query, she launched one of her own. “Maybe you should tell me what’s going on,” she suggested. “You say you’re with the FBI. What could you possibly want with me?”

From the time she’d pulled the gun on him, something had changed. His stony expression had softened, the hard edges to his voice had vanished. He’d been almost human. But that all changed now. The man from the lobby returned, and with his arrival, the oxygen fled the small family room.

“I—” He hesitated, swore softly, rolled to his feet. He paced to the window overlooking her shady backyard and just stood there, with his hand braced against the frame. The sinking sun cut in around him, casting him in silhouette, forcing Danielle to wonder what he saw. She didn’t need her intuitive Gypsy blood to realize it wasn’t her son’s deserted jungle gym.

“Look,” she said, standing. Part of her wanted to take his wrist and drag him to the front door, just as he’d led her to the sofa. Another part of her wanted to step closer, put a hand to the wrinkled cotton shirt stretched across his wide shoulders.

She did neither. “I really need to start dinner—”

He swung toward her. “Three days ago Senator Gregory of New York was found dead in his hotel room.”

Danielle went very still. She wasn’t a news junkie, but she’d have to be a hermit to have missed the story that had dominated the media for the past several days. Gregory was a young man, a political golden boy lauded as the next great hope for the country. And he’d been in prime health.

Until he turned up dead.

The hotel room had been locked from the inside, Danielle recalled. They’d had to break down the door to get to him, after he failed to answer the phone. The coroner estimated he’d been dead for several hours before they found him. There were no marks on his body, no signs of trauma or physical distress. The autopsy had revealed nothing.

The man’s heart, strong and healthy, with valves not the least bit blocked, had simply stopped beating.

Her own heart kicked up a notch. “What does that have to do with me?”

Liam scrubbed a hand over his face. “I— Christ, I don’t know.”

It wasn’t the answer she was expecting. Somehow, she hadn’t figured Liam Brooks, allegedly special agent of the FBI, was a man to admit he didn’t know everything. “Then why are you here?”

He closed the distance between them, making the room shrink with each step he took. She stood fascinated, wondering how he could cover in three steps the same territory that took her at least six.

“A note,” he said roughly. “I received a handwritten note with your name on it.”

Her breath caught. “My name?”

“Your name, and the mention of Chicago.”

And now her son was gone. “I don’t understand.” She’d never met the senator from New York, had no idea how her son’s disappearance could be connected to his alleged murder.

Liam’s expression hardened. “Neither do I,” he admitted. “Neither do I.”

The dark clouds she’d sensed all afternoon rolled closer. She swallowed against a horrible sense of inevitability and reminded herself nothing had changed. This man’s story didn’t change the instructions she’d received, instructions she intended to follow.

“You can see everything is fine,” she said, overriding the voice inside, the one that scraped against her throat, screaming for her to tell him what she knew. Let him help. She’d never been one to play by the rules, after all. She’d always preferred following her own path. Finding a loophole or a workaround.

But with her son’s life on the line, this time she had no choice. “If anything happens, I’ll—”

“Damn it.” He moved so fast she never had a chance to back away. He took her shoulders in his hands, his big, strong, surprisingly gentle hands, and held on tight. “If anything happens, it will already be too late, don’t you understand that?”

She swallowed hard. “I’m sure it’s all just some misunderstanding,” she forced herself to say. She needed him to leave, damn it. “Maybe there are two Danielle Caldwells in Chicago.”

His mouth flattened into a hard line. “You can hope.” He put her Derringer onto the table, then flipped open the wallet with his badge and handed her a small embossed card. “I’m staying at the Manor. Call me if something changes.”

She ran the tip of her index finger along the raised, blue letters of his name. “I will.” The words hurt, because she knew they were not true. She would not call him, would not ask for his help. “Thanks for checking on me,” she said with a casualness at complete odds with the tension arcing between them. Forcing a smile, she led him to the front of the house and opened the door.

He stepped into the hazy shades of early evening. A warm breeze blew in from the lake several miles away. “You’d better go get your son.”

They were simple words. Easy. Casual. And yet they destroyed the tenuous hold on her emotions. “Yes.”

He held her gaze a moment longer than was comfortable, his dark, penetrating eyes lingering on her face, much the way he’d held her hand longer than necessary. “Just be careful,” he said at last, then turned and walked away.

Come back! The words vaulted from deep inside her, but Danielle refused to give them voice. She stood there in the open door of her small home, watching Alex’s neighborhood buddies across the street shoot hoops, as FBI Special Agent Liam Brooks, and any help he might be able to offer, drove away.



She was hiding something. That much Liam knew. She put up a good front, played a good game, but Liam was too well trained to miss the clues. He’d spent years watching people, studying them, analyzing them. He knew how to read between the lines, the lies. And even though Danielle Caldwell pretended valiantly that her life was in perfect order, he’d seen the truth in the way those startling green eyes had glittered, the way her fine-boned hands had trembled.

Liam pushed away from the window of his fourteenth-floor suite at the Stirling Manor and stalked toward the bottle of scotch he’d ordered from room service. He poured the single malt into a tumbler and lifted it to his mouth but didn’t throw the warm liquid back. He wasn’t ready to numb himself. Wasn’t ready to take a short cut and stop thinking.

Wasn’t ready to turn his back on Danielle.

She didn’t trust him, didn’t want his help. She’d made that abundantly clear; he just didn’t understand why. He was one of the good guys, but she’d looked at him with abject horror, as though she’d expected him to suddenly grow horns and do horrible, lewd things to her.

Or her son.

The thought stopped him cold. Her son.

A child changed everything, introduced vulnerabilities sick and sinister and powerful enough to turn even his stomach. When someone became a parent, their personal welfare fell to the background, replaced by that of the child. There was no better way to hurt a parent than to hurt his or her child.

That, Liam knew too well.

Frowning, he picked up the tumbler and tossed back the liquid, savoring the burn clear down to his gut. He was still savoring when his mobile phone rang five minutes later.

He grabbed it from the bed. “Brooks.”

“Tell me you’re not in Chicago.”

The voice was soft but strong, friendly yet concerned, and Liam couldn’t help but smile. Mariah Ingram, fellow FBI agent and longtime friend, didn’t pull any punches. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

“Liam,” she said in that way of hers, a soft voice that registered like a quick smack to the side of his head.

“Don’t start with me, okay?” He sank down to the bed and leaned against the headboard. It was the first time he’d allowed himself to sit since charging out of the cab from the airport that morning.

Mariah sighed. “Bankston said you took a few days’ leave. But that’s not what you’re doing, is it? You’re not on vacation. You’re chasing shadows again, aren’t you? You’re on another wild-goose chase.”

He stared at the blank television screen, wishing the woman didn’t know him so damn well. They’d worked together off and on over the years, more closely after he’d lost his partner, Paul Lennox, during the investigation into the theft of hundreds of billions of dollars from the World Bank.

The case had gripped the nation in panic, forcing the Bureau to allocate every available resource to hunting the perpetrator. Other casework, unless there was a clear and present danger, fell to the background. They’d worked tirelessly, sifting through bizarre allegations of conspiracy and treason, corruption that reached into all echelons of the government and, ultimately, allegations of genetic engineering—which had turned out to be true. Gutsy Mariah had plowed in headfirst and proven instrumental in wrapping up the case. In the process, she’d fallen in love and married one of the men at the center of the circus, renowned financier Jake Ingram.

Frowning, Liam reached across the bed to the antique nightstand and pulled open the drawer, retrieved a small plastic bag. Inside, a stack of three postcards taunted him. The first had been in his possession for three long years, since the week before the World Bank case stole headlines and resources. The second had been found stashed in Senator Gregory’s day planner. The third had shown up in Liam’s New York hotel room only the day before, waiting like a pal beneath a little piece of gold-foil-wrapped dark chocolate.

“I received a tip,” he said. The handwriting on the first two was identical, but someone else had penned the third. Someone desperate.

“A tip,” Mariah repeated skeptically.

He fingered the back of the postcard, stared at the image of the obscenely quaint pastoral farmhouse. “He’s back, Mariah.” He didn’t give a damn if no one believed him, if they all thought he was crazy. The truth hummed through him like a chill to the bone. “That bastard is back.” And this time, if it was the last thing Liam did, he was going to stop the man and the syndicate he headed, before more lives were destroyed. “Titan.”

Just saying the name of the reputed but elusive European crime lord turned his stomach.

“You think he’s connected to the senator’s death?”

Liam ran his fingers over the three neatly printed words that had eaten away at him for what seemed like a lifetime.

My deepest sympathy.

He’d never known three little years could drag so slowly.

“Without a doubt.” The fact that the senator’s death mirrored a string of deaths across Europe was indication enough, but the presence of the postcard sealed the deal.

“But why?” Mariah hesitated. “What possible motive could there be?”

Liam shoved the baggie back into the drawer, pushed it closed and stood. “That’s what I’m going to find out.”

“Then what in the world are you doing in Chicago?”

The bottle of scotch called to him, with its sleek lines and smooth edges, smoky amber liquid, but Liam refused to let himself move. Refused to let himself take the easy way out. To be like his father. “There’s a woman—”

“A woman.” Weariness and concern thickened Mariah’s voice. “Do you hear yourself, Lee? Your job is to bring down Titan,” she reminded softly. “Not play protector to every damsel in distress.”

Images of Danielle fired through him, standing in the doorway of her small frame house with her thick hair falling from the barrette behind her head, slumberous eyes drenched with courage and fear and determination, shadows and secrets and pain he understood all too easily, the gun in her shaking hands.

“That’s not what I’m doing,” he gritted out. He didn’t do rescues. His skill set ran toward the other extreme.

Across the phone line, from her beautiful home in Dallas, Mariah sighed. It was a weary sound, that of a friend’s concern. “You can’t bring her back.” The words were soft but they landed hard. “You have to let it go.” She hesitated before adding, “Let her go.”

This time Liam did cross the room and grab the bottle. He poured, not a full glass like his old man had done, over and over and over, but just enough to take away the sting of the truth.

“I have,” he muttered, throwing back the liquid. He waited for the sweet burn, but the liquid streaked through him like acid.

The urge to run, to pound his feet against the pavement and suck in deep gulps of acrid air, like he’d done that long-ago night, burned through him. He had moved on. He’d had no choice. Time never stood still.

But he would never let go, not so long as the loose ends lingered like smoke after a fire, thick and pungent, oppressive. Damning.

He barely even remembered those first few days and weeks and months. He’d existed on autopilot, behaving like a good little agent, when all the while the memories he tried to scrub away followed him like a starving, rabid animal from case to case, town to town. He learned how to answer his supervisors’ questions, how to feed the division shrink exactly what she wanted to hear, but the truth was never far away. It festered like polluted ground water just beneath the surface, making its presence known during the long dark hours of the night when he would go to extreme measures to find sleep, only to see her as she’d been in the predawn darkness of that last morning. His wife, standing in the doorway of the bathroom, with a sleek ivory negligee draping her newly rounded curves and with devastation in her eyes.

Twenty hours later she’d been dead.

Liam slammed the tumbler down on the elegant cherry sidebar and turned his back on escape. Tomorrow morning would not be one of countless sunrises he’d once greeted with bleary eyes and an empty bottle cradled against his chest. He’d waited too long for Titan to return to lose his edge now.

“What about you?” he asked, shoving the conversation in a different direction as he headed toward the window. Subtlety had never been his calling card. “You’re feeling okay?”

Mariah hesitated before letting him off the hook. She knew what he saw in the darkness. She knew the images that invaded his dreams. “Wonderful,” she finally said. “Hungry as a horse and bone tired, but absolutely, gloriously wonderful.”

Liam stared out over the city, the twinkling lights down below, the glimmer of the moon over Lake Michigan, the high, thin clouds whispering across the darkness. “That’s so great,” he said, and meant it. Once he, too, had wanted a family. Not immediately, but someday.

Titan had made sure that would never happen.

“And Jake?” he asked of her husband. Ingram was a good man, loyal and honorable, surprisingly normal considering the strange circumstances of his birth. Genetic engineering. When the first news stories had broken about the birth of superbabies in the 1960s, Liam had laughed them off, much like Elvis sightings. But then facts replaced rumors and reality overrode science fiction. The government really had experimented with altering genetic makeup—and in a handful of cases they had succeeded. Jake Ingram and his siblings were living, breathing proof of that. “You letting him take care of you?”

Mariah laughed. “He’s doing great,” she said. “Busy, as always. He’s out for a run now, trying to clear his head.”

Liam breathed easier, welcoming the benign, normal conversation. “Something up?”

“Just his imagination,” Mariah said wryly. “I think the prospect of becoming a father is starting to spook him. He came home today convinced he’d heard me crying out in pain.”

“You? Cry out?” Not in this lifetime. Not Mariah.

She snorted her agreement. “Exactly.” Then she sobered. “It really rattled him, though. He’s been acting weird all evening. Worried. He even called his brothers and sisters to make sure they were okay, convinced that if it wasn’t me, it must have been one of them.”

“Sounds like that man needs a vacation,” Liam said, then wished he hadn’t. The last time he’d planned a vacation—

He broke the thought off. His last planned vacation no longer mattered. He’d never taken it, never wanted another since, never taken time off from the Bureau.

Until now.

Frowning, he let his thoughts return to the woman with the wild hair and slumberous green eyes, the one who’d angled her chin and insisted everything was fine, even after pulling a gun.

She was so lying.



The wind whipped off the lake and sent sand dancing in a frenzy of motion. High, thin clouds played hide-and-seek with the stars and the nearly full moon. A strawberry moon, she knew. In just a few days the June full moon would ride high in the sky, its rosy hue pulling tides and disturbing sleep, filling emergency rooms and keeping the cops on their toes.

Danielle shivered. She’d been born under a full moon, the cold moon of December. The winter equinox. Full-moon babies are special, she remembered someone telling her once, a voice from a distant past, a life she remembered only in shadowy fragments and horrifying splinters. The life before she and her sister had crouched in a closet, hidden among their mother’s clothes, breathing in her scent of fresh gardenia, while in another room, Deanna Payne screamed and begged, cried, then went horribly silent.

Danielle swallowed hard, forced back the memory. She didn’t want to think of her mother’s murder tonight, didn’t want to think of any death. Not while Alex’s life hung in the balance.

The chill needled deeper, despite the warm, muggy air blowing off Lake Michigan. She wrapped her arms around her middle and glanced at her car, parked in a deserted lot a hundred yards away. Uncertainty stabbed her throat. She’d feel better there, secure in the small front seat, with locked doors on either side of her, much as she’d felt that night in her mother’s closet.

But the caller had been clear.

“Midnight,” the mechanical voice had intoned shortly after sundown. “Come alone, walk to the water’s edge and wait.”

So she stood, and she waited. Beyond, waves swished and crashed against the rocky shore, sending an occasional spray of cool water against the back of her arms and legs. All the while she scanned the beach, watching, waiting, fighting memories that grew stronger with every gust of the wind. A storm was pushing close.

Just like the memory.

“Sailboats!” The moment Danielle released a four-year-old Alex from his child seat, he bolted from the car and ran across the dirty sand. His little legs moved with an uncanny grace, much like his father, carrying him closer to the edge of the lake—and the small drop-off.

“Alex!” Danielle raced after him, her heart pounding so hard it hurt. He was so like his father, in so many ways. Bold, daring, fun-loving. Except Alex was alive, whereas Ty was dead. “Alex, stop!”

Her son kept running, right up until the last minute, when laughing, he skidded to a halt and spun toward her. “Can I have a sailboat, too?”

Breathless, she caught up with him and pulled him to her, hugged his little body to her legs and fought a stinging wave of emotion. “Someday,” she promised thickly, because she knew if it was something Alex wanted, he, like his father, would find a way to make it happen. Even if it proved to be the death of him. “When you’re older.”

He pulled back and gazed up at her through his father’s crystal-blue eyes, uncannily wise for a boy so young. “Mommy, why are you crying?”

The question, pure and innocent and impossible to answer, pierced her heart. “It’s just the sand,” she said, blinking against the moisture, the truth. “I got some in my eyes.”

Alex nodded sagely. “Here,” he said, shoving his little hand into the pockets of his baggy denim shorts and pulling out the pair of Spider-Man sunglasses she’d bought him the week before. “Maybe these will help.”

They had. Much to a laughing Alex’s delight, she’d slipped his small sunglasses onto her face, and the two had settled down for a picnic.

Swallowing hard, Danielle refused to indulge the surge of emotion. Now was not the time for memories. Now was not the time to fall apart. She had to be strong now, for Alex, even if that meant going against every instinct she had and standing alone on the beach in the middle of the night. The clouds had grown thicker, blotting out much of the moon’s gauzy light. If she turned, she knew she would no longer see it playing on the surface of the lake.

But she didn’t turn, wasn’t about to look away, not for one fraction of one second. Her brother thrived on wide-open spaces, couldn’t stand being confined. But Dani—

She heard it then, just a soft sound, a slight disturbance to the cadence of the warm breeze. Footsteps.

Finally.

Her heart slammed hard against her ribs. Once, she’d hidden from her nightmares. Once, she’d run from her fears. But now she didn’t hesitate. She slid a hand to the gun at the small of her back and pivoted to her left.

Nothing. Just shadows shimmying across the sand and rock that locals called a beach.

“Who’s there?” She stripped every ounce of emotion, every ounce of fear, from her voice, but not her body. Jeremy had taught her how to use both.

The wind whipped up, sending sand and whispery raindrops against her face. She blinked against the sting but didn’t look away. “I did what you asked, damn it.” She squinted, seeing nothing but sensing the presence. Shaking, she stepped toward it. “What do you want with me?”

She realized her mistake too late.

“Well, well, well,” came a low voice from behind her.

She spun, but he was too close, too fast. He caught her before she could lift the gun, knocked it from her hands. She lunged after it, but his foot came down on the Derringer before she could make contact. Panic backed up in her throat. She tried to dance out of his way, but before she could move, before her heart could so much as beat, he snagged her wrist and dragged her toward him.

For a cruel moment time stood still. The gently falling rain, the gusty wind, the fury of the waves against the shore all faded into a void of nothingness. She struggled to breathe, to think, to formulate a plan, but intuitively she knew this was not a man she could outrun.

“Where is he?” she bit out with a bravado she didn’t come close to feeling. Refusing to cower, she forced herself to look up and felt the breath leave her lungs on a painful rush.

A grim smile curved FBI Special Agent Liam Brooks’s mouth. “Is this how you greet everyone, Danielle, or is it just me?”




Chapter 3


No. Denial screamed through her. Her throat knotted. Her stomach clenched. Danielle stared up at him, his big body blotting out the lingering light of the moon, reducing the world, the night, the beach, to just the two of them. One man. One woman.

She’d forgotten how tall he was. Or maybe, safe and secure inside the four walls of her house, she hadn’t realized the threat. But here on the beach, with the dark lake gaping on one side and the deserted strip of Lakeshore Drive stretching along the other, over a hundred yards away, awareness hit like a swift blow to the gut. Liam Brooks, or whoever he was, had taken her son.

Her mistake burned.

This man had been in her house. She’d had him in her grasp, but instead of leveraging her advantage, she’d let him disarm her. She hadn’t even put up a fight when he’d put his hands to her body. She’d let him touch her, hold her hand. Worse, far worse, she’d let the warmth of his body seep into hers, let it dull her senses, her defenses, as she’d wondered for a few crazy minutes what it would feel like to lean closer, to accept his lies as truth and—

“I’m here,” she said, lifting her chin. The wind whipped harder, blowing long strands of tangled dark hair into her face. She made no move to push them back. “I’m here just like you instructed. Now where the hell is he?”

The man from the hotel, the one who’d come to her house, who’d touched her and lied to her, who claimed to be with the FBI but who knew things there was no way he could know, lifted a hand and eased the hair behind her ear. “It’s your little boy, isn’t it? He’s in trouble. Someone’s taken him.”

It was the gentleness that got her. It was the gentleness that pushed her over the edge. “Is this how you get your kicks?” she asked hoarsely. “By playing twisted mind games?”

Through the darkness, she would have sworn the hard lines of his face gathered into a wince. “I’m not playing, Danielle.”

The words, so soft and grave and ominous, chilled. “Then what do you want?” The question ripped out of her, followed by a sobering truth. She would do anything—anything—to bring her son home safe and sound. There was no price she wouldn’t pay. No sacrifice too great. Nothing she could lose that mattered more than Alex.

But Liam—if that was really his name—said nothing. He just looked down at her through those dark, somber eyes of his.

“Is it me?” she asked, ripping at the buttons of her shirt. “Do you want me? Because you can have me, right here and right now.”

He caught her hand before she bared her breasts. “Danielle, stop it.”

She stared up at him, into those dark, dark eyes, not at all understanding what she saw. The shadows and secrets were there, yes, but something else glistened like the little pings of rain against his cheeks. “Then what?” she asked, and God help her, this time her voice broke. “What do you want?”

“To help,” he said quietly, transferring both her wrists into one of his hands. Then he shrugged out of his black jacket and draped it around her shoulders. “Why didn’t you call me? Why did you come here alone?”

The breath sawed in and out of her. She fought his voice, the concern softening the rough edges, the same concern she lavished on Alex when she sat on the side of his bed, easing him from a nightmare.

“Come on,” he said softly, then slid his hand to clasp one of hers. “We need to get you in your car before the storm hits. Then we can talk.”

The rain fell harder, cool and wet, but she didn’t move.

“He’s not coming,” he said even more quietly. And his eyes, hard and penetrating before, gentled. “Whoever it is you thought you were meeting tonight, he’s not coming.” He tugged her toward the parking area. “Now, come on. Let’s get you out of the rain.”

Deep inside she started to shake. There was no lightning with the storm, no thunder, but the truth flashed as garishly as though shards of light split the sky.

She’d always been a woman to trust her instinct. Luck, her brother and sister had called it, a byproduct of the Gypsy blood that flowed through them all. Creepy, Ty had always said.

Regardless of the label, Danielle had learned to listen to, to trust, the voice inside of her, the intuition that served as sentinel for them all. Over the years the whispering had warned of trivial things, like thunderstorms and blizzards, of impending accidents like the time she’d slammed on the brakes at a green light seconds before a drunk driver had careened through the intersection and mowed down the car next to her.

Later, her knowledge of events before they happened had helped them know when to stay and when to go, which door to open and which to leave closed, who to trust, where danger lay hidden. Her Gypsy intuition had never let her down, not until that hot summer night when she’d watched in horror as Ty’s car wrapped around a tree, and exploded.

In the days and months and years since then, she’d quit listening to the voice. She no longer trusted the gentle prodding she’d once considered a gift, not when it had failed her in the most fundamental way imaginable. Eventually the whisperings had gone quiet. Or maybe she’d just trained herself not to hear them.

But now from that place she’d tried valiantly to wall off, the Gypsy instinct on which she’d once relied screamed, much as it had been doing since the moment she’d looked up to find the impossibly tall man with the dark eyes in the hotel lobby. At first she’d interpreted the uneasy hum as paranoia, maybe even a primal attraction she had no interest in exploring. Then, when Alex turned up missing, it had been so easy to blame him.

But now as she stared up at him, at his hard face and shadow-drenched eyes, at the lingering shards of a pain she recognized all too well, a sobering truth drilled through her.

He wasn’t the one who had taken Alex.

He wasn’t the one who wanted to hurt her.

He wasn’t the one she’d come here to meet.

Which could only mean one thing. He really was FBI.

“No,” she whispered, fighting the truth, the implication. The warning had been explicit. Tell no one. Come alone. But here she stood, on an open expanse of beach where anyone could see her with a federal agent.

Horror convulsed through her. She hadn’t meant to, she’d been willing to play the nasty little game, but in the end she’d disobeyed the cardinal rule, and now her son was the one who’d suffer the consequences.

“No,” she said again, this time louder, and before Liam could react, she twisted from him and ran.



Liam had seen a lot of ugliness in his life. He’d prowled crime scenes, studied photographs of grisly murders, listened while a child molester recounted how a five-year-old boy from Kansas City had ended up dead in a Mississippi canal. He’d walked among the wreckage of downed airliners and bombed buildings. He’d seen the shell-shocked faces of the survivors, listened to desperate descriptions of relatives searching for their loved ones. He’d seen the grim determination of rescue workers. He’d seen and touched, smelled and tasted. And through it all he’d learned.

He knew the masks people wore to hide their pain. He knew the bravado that concealed sheer desperation. He knew how to recognize the tattered fabric of someone just barely holding on.

He knew, and he hated, but he never felt. He never felt the pain, the desperation. He never felt the fear. He’d walked like an automaton from crime scene to crime scene, investigation to investigation, wearing the same masks as those he encountered, because, God help him, he was one of them.

Until tonight.

For three years he’d suppressed everything, biding his time, waiting for a day he knew would come. Now the day he’d craved, the one he’d lived for, planned for, was here. But he’d never counted on Danielle.

She didn’t fit. She didn’t belong. Titan’s trail of destruction was littered with wealthy, influential, often political figures. He dabbled with the worst of them, piped drugs into elite circles all over the world. His name had even turned up during the World Bank investigation, linked to the reputed General DeBruzkya of Rebelia, who’d had deep ties to the Coalition.

Anonymous women in the heartland of America did not match his profile. Hurting kids wasn’t his style. He always aimed higher.

But now here was Danielle, this woman who teetered on the edge of a dark abyss Liam recognized too well but who refused his help. Hell, maybe Mariah was right. Maybe he really was chasing shadows. Maybe there was no connection between the woman with the wild green eyes and thick dark hair, the woman who now ran down the rain-soaked beach.

But somehow that possibility didn’t seem to matter. Whoever the hell she was, she was in trouble, and she needed help, and there was no way Liam could stand in the shadows and watch her fall apart.

So he ran.

“Danielle!” His strides were long, powerful, determined. The tight fit of his dark jeans didn’t slow him. Nor did the damp, clinging sand. “Wait!”

She didn’t. She ran with the grace of a wild gazelle with a predator hot on her heels, down the beach, away from him and her car. The rain whipped harder, merging with the wind to slap her in thick horizontal sheets. And still she ran.

“Danielle, please,” he called to her, gaining ground.

She glanced over her shoulder, saw him, staggered forward.

“This isn’t the answer,” he said, surprised by how hard he was breathing. He ran ten miles every day. A short sprint down the beach should have been little more than a warm-up.

He caught her from behind and realized he had two choices. He could tackle her and ensure she didn’t get away from him or he could snag her by the arm.

The image of Danielle sprawled in the sand, beneath his body, with her chest heaving and her eyes flashing, dark hair spilled around her face as she glared up at him, appealed in ways that almost made him lose his step.

“It’s over,” he said, reaching out to close his hand around her arm.

She had no choice but to stop, but she didn’t turn around, just stood with her back to him, gulping in deep breaths of air and rain.

“Hey, now,” he said, trying not to spook her. “I’m not letting you go, not until you tell me what’s going on.”

Nothing prepared him. Nothing could have. Slowly she turned and looked up at him with those big horror-filled green eyes. “Why?” she asked, and God help him there were tears in her eyes. “Why won’t you just leave me alone?”

There was water all around him, the lake to his right, the rain pouring from the sky, but it was in her eyes that he almost drowned.

“Because I can’t,” he ground out. He tried to grab hold of the rough edges cutting through all those walls he’d tacked up after Kelly’s death, but they were too sharp, and he was too tired. “Because I know,” he added, pulling her closer.

He knew he shouldn’t do it. He knew better than to put his arms around her, anchoring her to his body, but he could no more stop himself than he could stop the intensifying storm.

“I know,” he said again, as time turned backward and accelerated. Everything blurred: the days, the weeks, the months, the investigations, the people whose lives he’d walked through, carrying him back to the cold night he’d run down the quiet suburban street, clogged and congested with fire engines and police cars.

“I know what it’s like to be afraid,” he told her, his voice pitched low. “I know what terror tastes like and smells like.” The primal instinct it unleashed. “I know what it’s like to be willing to trade anything.” It sickened him that this proud, brave woman had been willing to strip for him, to give herself to him, in exchange for her son.

It sickened even more the way his body had reacted, the jolt of lust that had fired through him at the sight of the soft, creamy swell of her breasts.

He stared down at her now, at the way she gazed up at him, the wet, tangled hair in her face and clinging to her slightly parted mouth, the noncomprehension in her eyes.

“I know what it’s like to beg and plead.” He forced himself to go on, ignoring the ridiculous desire to ease the hair from her face, not with his hand as he’d done before but with his mouth. “To be willing to do anything, only to realize in the end there’s no option but to run.”

As she had done.

As he had done.

But there’d been no one there to catch him. No one there to stop him. He’d run and run, during the day, the night, toward the house, then away from the charred ruins, but no matter where he went, no matter the time of day, the truth was always there waiting.

He’d killed his wife.

“Let me help,” he said quietly, lifting a hand to wipe the rain from her face. “I can.”

Her eyes, wide and dark and utterly exhausted, locked on to his. “Don’t.”

The urge to pull her closer blindsided him. “Don’t what?” he asked, skimming his fingers along her cheek. “Don’t help you?” He’d forgotten how soft female flesh could be, forgotten the way a simple touch could make him want so much more. Forgotten what it was like to want something that had nothing to do with bringing down Titan. “Or don’t touch you?”

She twisted from him, but this time she didn’t run. She just sucked in another deep breath and angled her chin in an endearingly defiant gesture.

“I don’t know who you really are or what you want, but you shouldn’t be here right now. You shouldn’t have followed me.”

Like he’d had a choice. After hanging up with Mariah, he’d returned to his rental car and retraced his path to her little house north of the city, where he’d sat waiting in the quiet suburban street. He’d watched the single light glowing from a window in her house, wondering, like some deranged pervert, if it was her bedroom and what she was doing inside. A hundred times he’d told himself to go home, to quit playing Peeping Tom. But instinct had hummed too loudly. There was no way he could have slipped beneath the cool, soft cotton sheets of his hotel bed when he knew this woman was in trouble.

“I wouldn’t have needed to,” he said very slowly, very quietly, “if you hadn’t lied.”

Her eyes flashed. She glanced desperately around the beach, toward the parking area, the road beyond, then back at him. “My God, do you have any idea what you’ve just done?”

He was starting to. “Tell me.”

“If anything happens to him…”

Her words trailed off, but he heard what she didn’t say. “I’m not the enemy,” he told her, willing her to believe him, yet knowing she wouldn’t. “I’m here to help.”

She shoved the hair back from her face. “You can’t, don’t you get it?”

“Yes, I can, honey.” Because the endearment flowed from him with alarming ease, he cleared his throat and let the roughness return. “I know things you don’t know.” About Titan. His handiwork. The trail of devastation in his wake. “I have resources you can’t even begin to fathom.”

“I don’t want your resources,” she shot back. “Why is that so hard for you to understand?”

A fresh surge of fury shot through him. What had Titan done to her? Taken her son, to be sure. But it didn’t take years of investigative training to realize that he himself had done more. Worse. That he’d threatened her, as well, pinned her against a wall without so much as laying a finger on her.

God help him, Liam wanted to lay far more than a finger on her.

“Because you’re scared,” he told her, even though he didn’t understand. Bringing down Titan was the only thing he’d thought about, dreamed about, wanted, for the past three years.

“Because I stood in the shadows watching you for over an hour.” Because he’d seen her shaking, shivering. Because he’d stood there with his hands shoved deep in his pockets, fighting the urge to go to her, pull her into his arms and promise her he would find her son.

“Because I’m your best chance,” he added, even though the reality, the hypocrisy, of that statement terrified him. “You need me, Danielle.” Just as he needed her. To lead him to Titan, he amended. That was all. “And whether you want to admit it or not, we both know it.”

Slowly, her eyes met his, but in them he no longer saw the stark fear or punishing desperation, only the soft glow of a resolve he saw every morning when he looked into the foggy bathroom mirror and lifted a razor to his face.

“I don’t need you.”

Her words shouldn’t have stung. She was right, after all. There were those at the Bureau who swore playing chicken with an oncoming freight train was smarter than putting your faith and your future—your son’s life—in Liam Brooks’s scarred hands.

He looked at her standing there, sleek and drenched and vulnerable in ways he knew she hated, and once again shoved his hands in his pockets. It was harder this time, because the thick denim was drenched and sticking to his body. Not because the urge was stronger. It was only human compassion, he assured himself, even if he hadn’t felt any in years. Hadn’t felt a woman, either. Hadn’t touched, hadn’t tasted.

Hadn’t wanted.

Until tonight.

“Yes, you do,” he said, and the words scraped on the way out. “You do.” He stepped toward her, again lifted a hand to her face. “You need me in ways you can’t even begin to imagine.” And he needed her even more. “That’s why I can’t leave you alone.”

Stopping the rain falling from the darkened sky or the wind lashing waves against the shore would have been easier.

Then, because he wanted to step closer, because he knew he’d pushed hard enough for one night, he turned and walked away.



He didn’t belong here.

That was her first thought. It was too dark, too quiet and spooky. Too far from home.

He was awfully brave. That was her second thought. The little boy with the sandy hair and skinned knees lay curled on a narrow white bed, staring into the darkness. He wasn’t crying, like she wanted to, wasn’t calling for his mommy, like she tried to do but couldn’t.

The small room was cold, not like the winter in Boston when big fat fluffy snowflakes fell for hours and hours and she wanted to go play but Daddy wanted her to stay inside by the warmth of the fireplace, but like the dark corner of the basement. And it was so still and quiet. Too quiet.

“Who are you?” she wanted to ask, but her voice didn’t work here.

The boy looked up anyway, looked directly at her, startled her with wide, red-rimmed eyes.

“I’m Alex.”

His name echoed through the quiet, strangely smelling room, even though she never saw his mouth move. “Are—are you okay?”

He didn’t look hurt, just scared.

She didn’t really expect him to answer, because her voice still wasn’t working. But his little mouth puckered, and he nodded. “I wanna go home.”

So did she. She wanted to be back in her safe little pink and white room, in her cozy house with her mommy and daddy just a few doors down the hall. She wanted to open her eyes and see her favorite pink teddy bear, to hug it close to her body, to breathe deeply and smell the soft scent of powder and lotion, not this nasty smell that reminded her of mud puddles several days after it rained. She couldn’t remember the word her mommy used to describe that icky smell, but she knew it was a bad word.

Just like this was a bad place.

“What are you doing here?” the little boy asked. “How did you get here?”

She looked around, started to shiver. She didn’t know where she was. Didn’t know how she’d gotten there. It had all happened so fast. The last thing she remembered was crawling into her bed, her daddy reading a story, saying their prayers together, then him kissing her on the cheek and turning off the pink poodle lamp Santa had brought her for Christmas.

Swallowing a sob, trying to match his bravery, she studied him more closely. She couldn’t understand why she felt as if she already knew him.

He chewed his lips, glancing across the small room to where light leaked in from under the door. “We gotta get out of here.”

She knew that. She may have been only two, but she knew she had to help the little boy get out of there. He was scared, and he was in trouble, and even though she was scared, too, and just a girl, she was the only one who could help him.

But she didn’t know how.

The only thing she knew how to do was draw. Her mommy said she was the best. Her daddy called her a prodigy, whatever that was.

“I’ll try,” she promised bravely, then spotted the table and the crayons scattered on top. She didn’t want to move, didn’t want to walk across the room, but knew she had to. Biting her lip, she forced her legs to carry her, even though they felt all heavy. It didn’t matter how hard it was. It didn’t matter how scared she was.

All that mattered was the little boy named Alex and finding some way to get him back to his mommy and daddy.

So she could go back to her mommy and daddy. And her pink teddy bear.

“What are you doing?” Alex asked, peering queerly at her.

She wasn’t sure, just knew she had to draw. “Just wait,” she said, picking up a crayon and pushing it against a blank sheet of paper. “Maybe this will help.”




Chapter 4


The first pinkish rays of dawn stretched lazily against the horizon. The sky lightened, from a smeared, drab gray to streaks and swirls in a soft palette of pastels. The storm had moved on, unleashing its fury for a short time, then hurrying southeast, leaving an eerie calm in its place.

Through it all, Danielle had stood by the lake and waited.

But no one had ever come.

She looked at her watch now, saw the hour nearing seven, felt the scratch of inevitability against her throat.

Just a little longer, she told herself. She’d stand here, and she’d wait, by herself, and she’d prove to them that she had not intended to disobey. She’d done just as instructed, even though it grated at her. She’d never been one to follow instructions, no matter who issued them. Except her mother. She remembered so little of the exotic woman with wild dark hair and laughing green eyes, just bits and pieces. The smell of gardenia. And her voice. It had been a soft voice, gentle, filled with love. Even when she’d lost her patience with the triplets, she’d disciplined them lovingly.

And Danielle had always, always responded.

It had been a different story with her father. She remembered less about him, just his big, booming presence. He’d looked neat and tidy, and he’d smiled whenever they had company, but when no one else was around, he’d turned into a different person, a person none of them liked very much. He’d order them around, his face turning red, his eyes bulging. That was her first memory of being defiant. She’d known she should obey him, that the consequences of disobedience were bad, but even at a young age, her Gypsy blood had been strong, and she’d been unable to follow his rigid rules.

Sometimes she and Elizabeth had hidden from him to avoid the belt. Usually they wedged themselves under the bed, sometimes in a closet—like they’d done the night their mother died. She’d lost them both that night, her mother to violence, her father to a question mark. Benedict Payne had simply vanished.

That night marked a transition in her life, but patterns instilled by her parents remained. A wild child, one foster family had called her. A bad seed. A hellion. But if the names were supposed to wound, they never had. If anything, they’d encouraged her. She’d seen what happened to her mother when she bent to her father’s will like nothing more than a flimsy sapling in a gale-force wind. She remembered the arguments, the tears, and she’d resolved to never, never let anyone dominate her. To never blindly follow someone else’s rules. To follow her own path, her own calling.

And she had.

Until yesterday.

The breeze whipped off the lake, cooler now, no longer warmed by the lingering heat of the day. She turned toward the endless expanse of blue, stared at the lone red-and-yellow sail already visible in the distance. Her clothes were still wet from the rain, her hair sticky, but she wasn’t ready to leave yet. Wasn’t ready to give up.

The irony burned. For the first time in thirty-one years, she’d been willing to play by someone else’s rules. She’d been willing to go along with the request, do whatever was required to get her son back. With a stab to her throat she remembered the way she’d torn at her clothes, offering herself to Liam in exchange for Alex. She would have done whatever he wanted, gone down with him in the sand, let him have her, use her.

But he’d stopped her.

Frowning, she tried to focus on a lone gull dipping over the blue, blue waters of the lake. Instead she saw Liam, the way his eyes had darkened, not grimly, but like smoke. She remembered the feel of his hands grabbing hers, not cruelly or harshly, but tenderly. She felt the brush of his fingers along her breasts, the startling tingle of awareness. That was only physiological, she knew. A purely female response to the first male touch in more than two years.

“Danielle.”

The sound of her name on his voice, so low and hoarse, whispered through her like a caress. She closed her eyes to the feeling she didn’t want, didn’t trust, but her heart kicked up a notch, anyway.

His hands, big, strong, deceptively gentle, settled against her shoulders. “It’s time to go home, honey.”

She opened her eyes to the bright blue of early morning, the truth she didn’t want to see. “Not yet.”

“No one’s coming,” he said quietly. “You can wait all day, but I’m the only one who’s going to be here.”

She spun toward him, ready to lash out at him for ruining everything, for watching her at the hotel and showing up at her house, for following her to the beach and ruining her chances of getting Alex back. But when she saw him, the shadows beneath his eyes, the stubble at his jaw, the same damp clothes he’d worn the night before, words failed her. So did her breath.

“They’ll make contact again,” he promised in that low, raspy voice of his. “But you need to be home to get the call.”

She swallowed hard. “You didn’t leave.”

“Not with you here by yourself, no.”

She wanted to be angry at him. She wanted to blame him. But standing there in the hazy light of a storm-washed morning, she could find no anger, no blame. There was only the memory of the torrent of words he’d unleashed on her last night, the admissions that lingered in his gaze.

I know what terror tastes like and smells like.

Last night she’d been too lost in her private hell for the words to fully register, but they swirled through her now, dark, dangerous, unearthing the crazy desire to lift a hand to this man’s face and wipe away the shadows.

I know what it’s like to be willing to trade anything.

Even his soul. Because he had, she knew instinctively. It was there in his eyes, the aura of black that surrounded him like his own personal storm cloud.

The voice deep inside, the one that had finally started speaking to her after weeks and months of dormancy, whispered a little louder. What happened to this man? What had hurt him so? What had he lost?

But the voice of logic and reason, the one she’d forced herself to live by, refused to let the questions past her throat. Whatever had happened to this man didn’t matter. He didn’t matter. Only Alex did.

Behind him a snarl of traffic already inched its way down Lakeshore Drive, streaming south into the city, just like countless other days. Odd that life could march on in a cloud of normalcy, when with one simple phone call, her entire world had turned upside down.

“Come on,” he said, reaching for her hand. His fingers curled around hers, bringing with them a staggering infusion of warmth. “We need to get you out of these clothes—”

She couldn’t help it. Her eyes flared all by themselves.

“—and into some dry ones.”

Danielle the wild child, the hellion, the rebel, would have fought this man, his command. She would have dug in her heels and refused to go anywhere with him.

But the Danielle who’d stood on the deserted beach all night long, in the rain and the wind and the soul-shattering dark, waiting for a rendezvous that had never come, the woman who’d ripped at her blouse and offered herself to this man, who’d seen the pain hollow out his eyes, heard it drench his voice, the one who was so tired she could barely walk, that Danielle wanted nothing more than to be home again, in the small house she and Alex had picked out, where his picture sat square and center on the mantel, where the phone could ring, and she could find some way to convince his abductors that last night had been a mistake. That she really was willing to play by their rules.

Pay their price.

Whatever it was.

With one last look over the light chop of the lake, where a second sailboat had joined the first but the gull remained solitary, she let Liam lead her across the expanse of sand and rock, allowing herself to think only of Alex. She refused to think of the way the warmth of Liam’s hand seeped into her, beyond flesh and bone, to the core, where for the first time the chill didn’t pierce quite so deeply.



The little house, with its faded siding but bright window boxes brimming with petunias and impatiens, sat still and quiet, much too still and quiet. Liam eased his rental to a stop at the curb while Danielle pulled into the driveway. He didn’t know how much longer she could function without collapsing.

He’d walked away last night, even climbed into his car and driven away, but within minutes he’d been back. No way was he leaving her there alone during the long, dark hours of the night, waiting for Titan or one of his goons to arrive. Especially not after the way she’d thrown herself at Liam, willing to trade her body in exchange for her son.





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